For Those Who Love Him

"With one glorious exception, there is nothing that you or I can do for God which could not be done by somebody else . . . And that is to love Him with our whole heart."

God did not call you into religion chiefly to work for Him. He called you to love Him with your whole heart. That is the unsparing claim of these conferences, given to the Religious of the Sacred Heart and printed from the Sisters' own tapes.

Dom Eugene will not allow a clean split between "active" and "contemplative." Every religious must abide in Christ as a branch in the Vine. Schools, hospitals, even heroic apostolate can be done by another; unless they are acts of love they are waste. God prunes the successful, shelves the useful, and leaves imperfections so that Christ—not the religious—may increase.

What you will meet in these pages is the daily life of a Sister seen from that angle: why "caring religion" leaves the Sacred Heart unmoved; how to talk to Our Lord as you would talk to a friend; how an assigned, even badly assigned, duty can be a real union with Christ; and why holiness is not a collection of virtues you wrap and present, but Christ received in humility and obedience.

Dom Eugene Boylan (1904–1964) entered the Cistercians in 1931. His Difficulties in Mental Prayer and This Tremendous Lover made him known worldwide.