Forgive me, Father. My love is shallow, self-motivated, and carnal. If the innate human inclination is to love what is beautiful and what is better, then I stand in full acknowledgement that my sense of aesthetics and that which constitutes beauty is depraved. Deep within, I know you are the embodiment of beauty par excellence and that you deserve nothing less than the highest measure of loving devotion I can afford. But my sense of beauty is tainted...it is married to a confusing myriad of contradictions and a shameless blend of lust, self-ambition, and temporal gratification. The perverted distortions of my perceptive senses often hide the power of your beauty from me.

Your love compels me to exist in the tension between forcing myself to dutifully reciprocate and to lovingly reciprocate out of the depths of my heart. Each instance of my inability to express the latter love - the true and divinely appointed love - causes me to agonise over my incapacity. Perhaps this explains the occasional secret wish within me that you wouldn't love me so much.

And yet with each confession of guilt and inability, I find you confronting me with grace. It is a grace that lovingly accepts the best of my worst and embraces me in my entire imperfection. It is a grace that offers a love as compelling and intense as a divine Lover could afford.

But it is also this grace that consistently haunts me in grave reminder that I am yet to love you as I should. Why you would choose to love me so, I will never understand. But I know that it is more a reflection of the worthy Lover than the one unworthily loved.

Perhaps in consistently offering this love to my neighbours to the best of my ability and witnesing their inability to reciprocate (in the same way that I am unable to reciprocate your love), I am beginning to experience a glimpse of how my state of existence must hurt you. And perhaps this will provoke within me a genuine desire to love you from the heart. And I truly do want to.

Change my heart, Lord, won't you please?