Work out your salvation with fear and trembling

Our purpose is to love and serve the Lord, God of all creation.

The ultimate demonstration of love is sacrifice. Sacrificing this shadow of a world (since heaven is our goal and more real than this world but invisible to those who do not seek God with all their heart). 

The mass is the pinnacle of love for God. In the mass, heaven touches earth. You can't see it, but when you appreciate it for what it is, that grace sometimes pours into you in an experience that can't be described.

The mass is our giving of ourselves to God. The church is the bride of Christ, the bridegroom. Love is the giving of one spouse to the other. In Holy Communion, we receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ into us in a way that is very intimate spiritually. It is healing and transformative to our souls and unites us to God in the Eucharist (thanksgiving).

God is waiting, never impatient and never forcing us to love Him. Only in the Catholic mass can one experience true unity with Jesus in this world and draw back the veil to see the reality that awaits us in eternity.

I was given the grace at mass this weekend to fully comprehend the love that we share with God, as we will in heaven (but much more intensely so that we will want of nothing else). I now understand what Paul was attempting to convey but which one cannot without that grace:

Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. - 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

And also

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself." - Matthew 22:37-39

Words are insufficient without the grace to understand them. But if you love God with so much desire, or desire such a love, as to seek Him out where He can be found on this earth, He will in His time respond so beautifully that it will sustain you, because God wants us to want him so much that we are willing to sacrifice the temporal pleasures of this world for the greater pleasure of such love that you cannot imagine.

Sacrifice all the pleasures of this world for the pearl of great price. When you begin to understand the meaning of this, you will not want to be away from Him through the least sin.

This is what it means to work out one's salvation in fear and trembling--we fear losing the only love that can satisfy us.