Novena Day 2 - Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Prayer:  I come trembling to adore Your Divine Majesty, O Immense, Eternal God, Infinite Source of all good, of all truth! You are my Creator, my Beginning and my Last End. I humbly come to ask You to help me comprehend, to make me relish and love this first and most important of all truths: that You have created me for Yourself, and that my supreme interest consists in uniting myself to You by grace in this life, and by glory in the next.

If with the aid of Your grace, I succeed in profoundly engraving in my heart, this fundamental truth. I will have acquired the principle, the basis of my salvation and of my sanctification. I ask You, O my Creator, to grant me the grace to be touched and convinced in a lively manner with this truth. I acknowledge with confusion and sorrow that my sins and numberless infidelities render me unworthy to obtain this favor, but I hope for it from the infinite love which You have for all Your creatures.
 
Meditation:  God exists: evident truth, eternal truth, necessary truth, because from it all others flow. The heavens and the earth proclaim it, the most savage of people have recognized it, while they disfigured it. Pagan philosophers have declared it. It is true that they did not draw from it the necessary consequence; they have believed that God exists, but that sufficed not for their salvation. It is necessary to believe with the Church in God, that is to say, we must recognize Him as our Last End, and direct to Him all the faculties and all the powers of our soul, “Because God has made all things for Himself.”

Formerly, God said to Moses: “I am Who am”, that is to say, “I alone have being, I alone live from Eternity; all other creatures live but by Me, and for Me”. Thus all creatures who have been gifted by Him with intelligence and liberty, and to whom He has been pleased to make Himself known, are obliged to live for Him alone, and to refer to Him, not only in general but even in particular, all their actions, their thoughts, and their words, without voluntarily withdrawing any from Him. It will not suffice them to believe that there is a God. It is necessary to believe that there is only one God, who alone has Being, who alone lives of Himself, and that I should live but for Him, and regard all things else as nothingness. This is a necessity, it is a law which creatures cannot violate without outraging their Creator, and doing themselves an infinite wrong. In this consists their interests, their glory, and their sovereign happiness in this world and in the next. It is the end of Man, it is the term of his creation. “Fear God and keep His Commandments”, says the Holy Spirit, “because this is all man”. Yes, it is the whole man, it is his perfection and his beatitude, since the excellence of any creature consists in attaining the end for which it was made. Admirable thought, astonishing thought, but most true, for it is the foundation of all Religion. This good God, Who is love itself, this great God, Father of all being, source of all good, of all joy, and of all glory, sovereign Bounty, ineffable Beauty, infinite Spirit, possessing in His simplicity all imaginable perfections, infinite in number and in grandeur – wishes to be the End of man, that is to say, He has created man to make him a sharer in His eternal felicity. “I, Myself will be thy recompense”, said He to Abraham, “a recompense too great for the capacity of thy heart”, because God is infinite.
 
O my God, what is man that Thou has thus glorified him, and raised him to the equal of the angels? O beautiful truth, glorious truth, but terrible truth if I conform not my life to it! God has placed me upon earth, giving me His Commandments (a perfect expression of His infinite sanctity) in order to render me conformable to Himself, that by their faithful accomplishment I may unite myself to Him, in this world by grace and in the other by glory, thus securing for myself a happiness which will never end. But if unfortunately, I quit this world without having accomplished this condition, I shall be justly and eternally separated from God, my Last End, and precipitate myself into hell, there to receive forever the terrible chastisement of my ingratitude and my injustice. To be united to God, behold the end of the creature, behold my end! To work for it with fervor and without relaxing is then my essential affair, my only affair, my first and last affair.

Holy Mother Mary pray for me to seek God with my whole heart, mind and soul!