My God and My All

As I generally do when I can't sleep, last night I was thinking about things, and somehow I started thinking about the phrase "my God and my All."  As you probably know, this is an ejaculation which one can say throughout the day and also which one should offer to God at the Elevation of the Host during the Mass.  I say it each time I go to Mass, but I never really think about what it means.  "My God and my All."  It may sound a bit exaggerated to some, but if one is truly living as one ought, God truly is his or her all - everything, the only thing, all things in One.  He created everything, He sustains everything, without Him there is nothing.  And he possesses, in a sense, every relationship to us as well.  I made a list.  And I made it into a graphic, because that's just a thing I do.

Made with this, use it if you like.  No credit necessary, it took like five minutes.

Aren't we lucky? No matter how lonely we are in a worldly sense, we have everyone we could possibly need in God.  (And Mary.  And that's not even mentioning the saints and angels....) 

God is also our All in the sense that He is all that matters - everything else can and must, if we want to be holy, be sacrificed to Him, even if it's our life.  We're not really losing anything because God is our Everything, so all we're losing is Nothing.  When one reads the great mystical saints like Teresa of Avila (highly recommended), one sees that a soul closely united to God doesn't really care even about whether its body is dead or alive, because the life of the body matters little compared to the life of the soul, and often even hinders it.  (Since people like to misinterpret everything, let me just say that this is by no means an excuse for suicide, which is a mortal sin and so kills the soul as well as the body.  Obviously.  And we still have an obligation to care for our bodies, no matter how burdensome it is - and since most of us enjoy caring for our bodies much more than caring for our souls anyway, that shouldn't be a problem.)

I could keep going on, but I'm in a hurry and I'm not sure anyone will care about this topic anyway.  But next time you say the aspiration "my God and my All," really think about and mean it with all your heart.  God will give you the grace to really make Him your all, if you truly desire it and ask Him humbly and perseveringly.