Welcome to our daily Rosary meditation. Let's begin in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Let's call to mind all those we've promised to pray for.

So we're traveling through systematically the essential teachings of Teresa of

Avalon and John of the Cross here at the beginning of Lent because they are the

great masters of friendship with Jesus.

One of the most important themes for John and Theresa is the desire for God. If only we long for God, we will seek

him, we will find him. So desire for God is the engine of salvation. We have to

desire the Lord. That's why St Augustine says that the whole life of a good Christian is a holy desire.

But what if you just don't feel a desire for God? If desire for God is supposed to be the engine that drives your spiritual life,

how do you get that desire? Well this is precisely why God has given us an imagination.

Our desires are stimulated by our imagination.

That means what we see or hear or imagine to ourselves we desire. And fortunately for us,

God became man and shown himself to us.

Now we know what God looks like.

He looks like Jesus Christ.

And thinking about Jesus in his humanity, as we see it in the gospel,

is a crucial method to growing in desire for Christ.

But that also means if we never read or think about

and imagine Jesus in the Gospels,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then we probably won't desire or seek him.

So how much time do you spend reading, thinking, and imagining about Jesus from the Gospel?

Not very much.

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