Him for the joy of your heart or him for its torment! — Adolphe Monod

“The heart of man is made in such a way—thanks be to the one who formed it!—that it cannot leave its attachment anywhere, if it conceives of the possibility of carrying it higher. Though you may well have climbed the ladder of creatures, moving always to those more worthy, something will always urge you to climb higher. As long as there is a God in the universe, nothing less will be able to satisfy your heart. Him or no one! Him or a frightful void and a bitter disgust!

I will go further. Him for the joy of your heart or him for its torment! His love can allow you no rest apart from him. Your drunkenness? He will dissipate it. Your attractions? He will chill them. Your cup of delights? He will poison it. Your idolatrous attachments? He will bring separation, sickness and death against them until the day when, deprived of the creature, you will at last throw yourself onto his fatherly bosom, even if it be through weariness, thirst, and despair. His desire is that you might learn to cry out with the psalmist, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:25-26 marginal reading). He is my portion because he is the rock of my heart; a rock on which this heart can lean all of its weight without fear of ever seeing it give way!”

— Adolphe Monod, An undivided Love: Loving and living for Christ, sermon entitled “give me your heart”

www.tunl.duke.edu/~cwalker/AULchap1.pdf

http://www.solid-ground-books.com/detail_1179.asp