Real love at the very heart of our life (1 Samuel 13; ‘ Peter 1,1-21) / Monday after First Sunday After Trinity, Matins, Book of Common Prayer)

That the trial of your faith might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’
 
Developing this personal love for Jesus counteracts all the uncertainties of a restless external history. This love is not a fictitious one. This is real love: this real communication is offered at the very heart of our life. It is a genuinely felt presence of a real person.
 
This encounter (personal love) is the revelation of heaven in a special sense. Our love for Jesus ‘whom we having not seen’, reveals our truer self. This ‘having not seen’ insinuates that we are on a journey. Our discipleship, our person is still in ‘fermentation’, our self is still growing and being shaped by this ‘invisible’ but real encounter.
 
‘God wills us and all humanity to have a place there (cf 1 Tim 2:4) and, by our Baptism, we have expressed our desire to be numbered in that company [of saints]. To encounter Christ in that heavenly assembly is also to encounter myself as he wills me to be, my true self, my best self, my real self.’ (Paul McPartlan, Sacrament of Salvation, An Introduction to Eucharistic Ecclesiology. p.7.)