Critical Mass

From Volume One: Directions for Our Times as given to Anne, a lay apostle: Thoughts on Spirituality:

Think of Jesus’ Passion as a big present. I mean the biggest you can imagine. As big as a house. It is wrapped in the most precious gold paper, with exquisite bows and garlands around it. The gift is so beautiful it takes eternity to walk around it, study it, and admire it. There are countless different facets of this gift. The study of it will indeed take your lifetime, and much longer.

Now say you want to emulate that gift. Do you have the power, the technology, the creativity to come close? Not on your best day, of course. You were not intended to create that glorious a gift. But this big gift is going to your dad, so you want to enclose some well wishes too. So you get a little gift and you wrap it up in the closest thing to the gold paper you can find. And you set your little gift at the foot of the big one. That is uniting your suffering’s to Christ’s. When your Father sees the gift, from His beloved child, does He say, “What a little gift. How puny it looks next to this big one?” Hardly. He smiles, like any father, and His heart is moved to all manner of generosity by your love and effort. His heart is gladdened. This is uniting your suffering to Christ [41-42].