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As I have often told you, and I don't care who knows it, I have also used the words of popular songs, that almost always treat of love, to keep up my conversation with Our Lord. I like them, I really do. Our Lord has chosen me and some of you as well to belong totally to himself; so we translate the noble love expressed in human love songs into something that is divine. The Holy Spirit does this in the Song of Songs; and the great mystics of all ages have done the same.

Look at these verses of St Teresa of Avila:

'If you would have me idling

For love of you I will be idle;

But if you bid me work, my

Sole desire is to die working.

Tell me the when, the how, the where;

O sweetest love I beg of you

To say what you would have me do.'

Or that song of St John of the Cross, which begins so charmingly:

'A little shepherd boy

Is all alone and far from joy

Full of sorrow and distress

From thinking of his shepherdess

Love unrequited in his breast.'

Human love, when it is pure, fills me with immense respect and inexpressible veneration. How could we fail to appreciate the holy and noble love shared by our parents, to whom we owe a great part of our friendship with God? I bless such love with my two hands, and if anyone asks me why I say with my two hands, I reply at once: 'Because I don't have four.'

Blessed be human love! But Our Lord has asked something more of me. And, as Catholic theology clearly states, to give oneself out of love for the Kingdom of heaven to Jesus alone and, through Jesus, to all men, is a love more sublime than married love, even though marriage is a sacrament and indeed sacramentum magnum.

But, whatever the calling, the fact is that each person, in his own place, according to the vocation which God has inspired in his soul (be he single, married, widowed or priest) must strive to live chastity with great refinement, because it is a virtue for everyone. It calls on everyone to struggle, to be delicate, sensitive and strong. It calls for a degree of refinement which can only be fully appreciated when we come close to the loving Heart of Christ on the Cross. Don't worry if at times you feel threatened by temptation. One thing is to feel temptation, quite another to consent. Temptation can be rejected easily with God's help. What we must never do is to dialogue with temptation.

References to Holy Scripture
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