Dear Friends,
What pleases God most? The question is not irrelevant. When we love, we want to please the person we love. If we love God, we naturally want to please him.
Perhaps our sacrifices are most pleasing to God?
Our sacrifices—if motivated by love—are important, but they’re not what pleases God the most.
Then maybe our fulfillment of the Ten Commandments and Church teaching is what pleases God the most?
Obviously the Ten Commandments and Church teaching are highly significant, and their observance—again, if moved by love—is pleasing to God, but there’s something that pleases God even more.
Thérèse of Lisieux—saint and Doctor of the Church, whose feast we celebrate every October—gives us an unexpected answer.
Her sister Marie, anguished by her own sinfulness, told Thérèse: “I do not love Jesus as you do [because I do not feel the same passion you express].” And St. Thérèse responded: “How can you say that my desires are the sign of my love?… it is not this at all that pleases God in my little soul.” She continued: “What pleases Him is that he sees me loving my littleness and my poverty, the blind hope I have in His mercy” (Letter of St. Thérèse, September 17, 1896).
How much can I trust in the Lord’s mercy?
On my worst days, how much can I trust in his mercy?
When I bitterly feel the lash of my own selfishness, how much can I trust in his mercy?
When I painfully recognize that I am not the person I’d like to be, how much can I trust in his mercy?
In those moments might I, like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, like all the friends of God, renew my trust in his endless mercy? And perhaps I can pray the words of Israel in the Book of Lamentations: “The steadfast love of the Lord is not exhausted, his mercies are not spent. He renews them each morning, so great is his faithfulness” (Lam 3:22–23). And “I will trust in your goodness, O Lord, forever and ever” (Psalm 52).
That, more than anything else, brings joy to God’s heart, and opens the floodgates to grace and growth in our own lives.
God bless you,
Fr. John Pietropaoli
