The Venerable Sister Mary of Jesus of Ágreda: describes the Presentation at the Temple of the Infant Jesus. The Blessed Virgin Mary explains to us that we need to accept both blessing and adversity saying, "My daughter, the doctrine and example contained in the foregoing chapter will teach you to strive after the constancy and expansion of heart, by which you may prepare yourself to accept blessings and adversity, the sweet and the bitter with equanimity. O dearest soul! How narrow and unwilling is the human heart toward that which is contrary and distasteful to its earthly inclinations! How it chafes in labors! How impatiently it meets them! How insufferable it deems all that is contrary to its desires! How persistently it forgets, that its Teacher and Master has first accepted sufferings, and has honored and sanctified them in his own Person! It is a great shame, yea a great boldness, on the part of the faithful, that they should abhor suffering, even after my most holy Son did suffer for them and when so many of the just before his Death were led to embrace the cross solely by the hope that Christ would once suffer upon it, although they would never live to see it. And if this want of correspondence is so base in others, consider well, my dearest, how vile it would be in you, who are so anxious to obtain the grace and the friendship of the Most High; who desires to merit the name of a spouse and friend of God, who wishes to belong entirely to Him and that He belong entirely to you, who wishes to be my disciple and that I be your Teacher, who aspire to follow and imitate me, as a faithful daughter her mother (Matthew 7:21). All this must not result in mere sentiment and in empty words, or oft-repeated exclamations of: Lord, Lord; and, when the occasion of tasting the chalice and the cross of suffering is at hand, you must not turn away in sorrow and affliction from the sufferings, by which the sincerity of a loving and affectionate heart is to be tried."
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