V. To Perform All Our Actions from the Motive of Pure Love

From the Series: Beneath the Standard of Mary – The Heart and Voice of an Auxiliary Member

I want to start with an honest reaction to one word in this phrase.

Perform.

When I first sit with these words, to perform all our actions from the motive of pure love, something in me resists that word. Because performers are on a stage, and performers have an audience. They also take a bow when it is finished and wait to see if people applaud. And if there is one thing that pure love is not, it is a performance.

So let us set the theatrical meaning aside completely and hear what this prayer is actually asking. It is asking that everything we do, every single action of our lives, flows from one place and one place only. It’s not an obligation, or a habit, and it is absolutely not the desire to be seen or recognized or compensated or applauded. Pure love of God. That is the only motive this prayer will accept. And it is the most demanding standard imaginable.

Because here is the uncomfortable truth. It is very easy to do good things for reasons that are not entirely pure. The world has made it extraordinarily easy. You can transform almost any act of faith into a platform to self-enrich you. You can build a following from your ministry, and then you can monetize your devotion. You can put your generosity on a website and watch the numbers climb while your pockets fill and tell yourself you are spreading the Gospel while something much smaller and much more self-serving is quietly running the engine underneath.

I am not here judging anyone. I am just being honest about how deceiving this world can be. And how tricky the human heart is. Because we are very good at convincing ourselves that our motives are pure when they are actually quite mixed.

So how do you know when the motive is truly pure?

I think the answer is simpler than we make it. You know it is pure when you do not want anything back. No recognition, no financial gain at all and not even gratitude. When you hand something to a stranger and walk away and genuinely do not need to know what happened next, that is pure love in action. When you work in the background, quietly, unknown, gaining nothing from everything you pour out, and that is not a sacrifice that costs you something but actually the place where you feel most right, most yourself, most at peace, that is pure love.

I feel best in my heart when I am doing the most for nothing. When I am quietly busy in the background and nobody is watching and there is no scoreboard and no reward coming in this life. That is when something in your heart and soul settles into exactly the right place. Not because I am trying to be holy. But because that is what love actually feels like when it is not mixed up with anything else.

Pure love does not keep records. It does not calculate return on investment. It does not wonder whether this particular act of generosity is going to be acknowledged or whether this particular sacrifice is going to be noticed by the right people. It simply gives and gives and gives. Again, and again and again. Because the giving itself is the point. Because the One we are giving to is worth everything we have and everything, we are, and everything we will ever do.

This is what God is asking of us in this phrase. Not perfection of action but purity of intention. He is not asking us to never make mistakes or to always get it right. He is asking us to always come from the right place. To check the interior before we engage the exterior. To ask ourselves honestly, why am I doing this? Is this for Him? Or is this for me, looking like it is for Jesus?

Saint Bridget of Sweden understood this with a piercing clarity. God looks at the inside not the outside. The exterior action means almost nothing without the interior motive. A thousand acts of apparent generosity performed for the wrong reasons add up to very little before God. But one small quiet act done purely out of love, one rosary slipped into a stranger’s hand with no name attached and no expectation of anything in return, that carries a weight in heaven that the world cannot measure.

I pray for nothing in return, I ask for nothing in return. I only seek God’s will to be done in my life, whatever that looks like and whatever it costs. Only that He loves me for who I am, a sinner, imperfect, still trying, and that He sees the depths of my heart even when my actions fall short of what my heart intends.

That is all any of us can offer really. A heart that is genuinely turned toward Him. Actions that flow from that heart as naturally as water flows downhill. A life that is not a performance for any audience, not the world, not the Church, not even ourselves, but a continuous quiet act of love directed at the One who loved us first and loved us most and loves us still.

The world will tell you that this kind of life is naive. That you cannot sustain a ministry without building a brand. That you cannot spread the Gospel without monetizing the message. That invisibility is waste and anonymity is failure.

Do not believe it.

The most powerful forces in the Kingdom of God have always been the hidden ones. The ones nobody wrote articles about. The ones who showed up every week prayed and worked and gave and went home and did it again the following week without once wondering whether they were getting enough credit for it. The ones whose names we will never know this side of eternity, but whose pure love moved mountains that the famous and the celebrated never touched.

Perform all your actions from the motive of pure love of Him.

Not for the applause, or for a platform, and not for anything this world has to offer.

Just for love.

It is enough, it has always been enough.

And He sees every single bit of it.