These words are taken from a talk Catherine Doherty gave to the Madonna House community on March 22, 1956. Fifty years later, they still ring with a power and conviction that challenges the one who reads them.

They make present to us a glimpse of what it means to be on fire with the Holy Spirit.

Here are three questions I can ask myself about this: Do I have that fire? Do I want it? What price am I willing to pay to receive such a gift?

First, do I have that fire? Fire in this instance is another word for zeal. It means that the very memory of my God fills me with such a joy and delight that I cannot contain it. It spills over in praise, gratitude, and gladness on the one hand, and in service to my neighbour on the other.

Fire in the natural order arises from a still point, where a spark touches flammable matter. In the supernatural order, this spark is the Spirit of God communicating to a place of receptive stillness within me the fact that Jesus gave his all for my sake.

In one sense, all of the spiritual life is an effort, an asceticism, to bring me back to that point of stillness where God speaks the truth of his Son’s Cross and Resurrection to my being—that he did this for me, to raise me from the dead.

There is no true fire without this graced communication. We in Madonna House were taught by Catherine Doherty that our whole effort in welcoming and serving others is to help pass on this truth to them: see how much he loves you!

What a joy to believe that even our simplest efforts at neighbourly service and love are anointed to help pass on this greatest of truths: Jesus loves you! Jesus saves you! Jesus gave his life for you!

But then another question arises: Do I want that fire?

Our Lord never forces himself upon us.

Once that fire is kindled within me, it has a life of its own. It will reach out to warm whomever it pleases. Sometimes it will burn in the night when I would rather take my rest. And it flares up as prayer and anguish for others!

At other times it will turn itself treacherously (!) upon me, as it seeks to purge away resistances to God previously hidden from my view.

The Eucharist only stokes that fire still more. It is, as one seminary professor liked to repeat to us, "a dangerous sacrament."

It has a life of its own, because it is really Jesus himself come to dwell within. And he is Fire and Spirit when he enters. He shares his pain over the brokenness of the Church, his righteous anger over the suffering of the innocents, his anguish over the lost state of many. He burns in you like a fire with a meaning all its own.

At times you’d like to get away from it, but it seldom leaves you much respite—as long as you do not take back your "yes" to his indwelling.

Again and again, you face the question, the temptation: do I want this fire? Do I want to be taken over in this way? Do I want to live in such a way that it is not I who live so much as it is Christ living in me, doing as he pleases?

Yes, I will have to decide more than once if I want to live like this! This choice will be mine till the end of my earthly life.

Finally, the third question: What price am I willing to pay to receive such a gift?

That price is, by every known standard of measurement, rather high: it is no less than one’s very self, at least the self I was familiar with at one time.

For example, I used to have plans of my own. (How about you?) I used to imagine what my future would look like next year, next month, next week, tomorrow morning! No more. That has mostly died, or at least it is in the process of dying.

Such thinking now gets in the way of things. Something inside wants to jump and dance and sing as some inner jubilation compels it.

This is not the sort of flame that likes to be controlled and boxed in by too careful human thinking. And the only way to retain it is to give my life away, to "lose it," as the Lord told his disciples.

For example, you learn to let people "eat you up," not because it is you they are hungry for, but in order to give them some small taste of Christ’s reality.

They might be friends, they might be relatives, they might be perfect strangers, they might even be enemies—but you give yourself over to serve in some kind of a way, because his love has seduced you and led you away from the boredom of your old self to the promise of a new one, made in the image of your Redeemer.

It was he who attained the perfection of becoming a selfless offering for his brethren. No price seems too much to retain such a treasure!

Yes, this is what is happening at Madonna House! This is our program. This is our life’s goal. This is what happens to people who stay with us.

Would you like to "come and see?" Maybe there is a hunger in you that only a radical gift will assuage.