Flame of Love Basics Series

The Flame of Love Basics Series, prepared by the International Flame of Love Director John Sullivan, is a collection of medium to lengthy videos which explore in depth the various elements of the Flame of Love Devotion and were recorded from a series of cenacles with an extended teaching section. They quote extensively from the Spiritual Diary of Elizabeth Kindelmann and demonstrate the devotion in the context of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers, Doctors, and Saints.

Flame of Love Basics – Getting Started

This first video in the Flame of Love Basics series briefly explains the why, what, how, when, where, and who of devotion to the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It provides just enough information to be able to participate in a Flame of Love Cenacle.

Flame of Love Basics – Blinding Satan

Blinding Satan by the great outpouring of grace for the salvation of souls is the purpose of the Flame of Love devotion. This presentation discusses what that means.

Flame of Love Basics – The Unity Prayer

This presentation explores the way Jesus expounds and explains the Unity Prayer throughout the Spiritual Diary. We see that it is not at all a pleasant prayer of “you and me, Jesus,” but rather a call to profound sacrifice in union with Him for the salvation of souls.

Flame of Love Basics – Fasts

This presentation focuses on the fasts associated with the Flame of Love devotion as well as the graces and promises attached to them.

Flame of Love Basics – Daily Intentions

This presentation focuses on Jesus’ weekly agenda, i.e., the intentions Jesus asked us to have for each of the days of the week.

Flame of Love Basics – Family

In this presentation, we explore the role and perspective on family in the Flame of Love devotion with a particular emphasis on mothers.

Flame of Love Basics – Blanding of Meals

This presentation introduces Jesus’ request to remove taste from our meals as a tangible expression of love for the salvation of souls.

Flame of Love Basics – Mass and Adoration

This presentation focuses on the role of Mass and Adoration in devotion to the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, their power over Satan, their power to bring about grace and divinity, and their ability to give joy to our Beloved. We also examine the great promises associated with Mass to those devoted to the Flame of Love.

Flame of Love Basics – Continuous Repentance

This presentation focuses on the need for continual repentance as part of devotion to the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We explore the danger of “good person” syndrome and Jesus’ rebuke of “pious” souls. We discuss the need to “up our game” against the great attack by Satan and why we sometimes hold back. We see how Jesus and Mary are concentrating the channels of grace in this devotion in order to produce great Saints not because we are great but because the need is great. We note that we are to repent of our own sins, repent in order to bring others to repentance, and repent for others. We examine how repentance brings grace and how repentance brings joy. We finally touch upon the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

Flame of Love Basics – Night Vigils

In this presentation, we introduce the night vigils Jesus requested as part of devotion to the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We see Mary’s extraordinary promise that our night vigils would save the dying from eternal damnation. We also see how difficult this was even for Elizabeth Kindelmann. We learn of how Jesus said He seeks souls in the quiet of the night and how those long stretches of prayer without interruption build our love for Him and bring about grace. We look at the early Church to see how this is nothing new and explore how to be practical about such a demanding request. In the beginning, we discussed a question about you and thee / thou when praying.

Flame of Love Basics – Complete Dedication to the Salvation of Souls

In this presentation, we discuss a spiritually challenging element of the Flame of Love devotion, the complete dedication of our lives to the salvation of souls. We spend some time exploring how to practically approach this topic and see how Jesus is offering us an opportunity to love. We see how this devotion calls all of us to live the life of the consecrated in the intensity of our commitment. We quote extensively from the Spiritual Diary to see how Jesus insists that this great grace only comes through complete renunciation of ourselves and how this dedication is the needed response to the grave danger we are in today. We see how this is the key to the sainthood to which Jesus calls us in the Flame of Love and how He insists this is attainable even in the context of family — indeed for all and especially the sick. We read many examples of Jesus insisting that the salvation of souls must be our only purpose in life and then view several practical illustrations of Jesus’ request in the life of Elizabeth Kindelmann.

Flame of Love Basics – Humility

This presentation addresses Humility as the “gateway” grace and the one attribute that makes possible our successful participation in the Flame of Love devotion. We discuss how the gifts of grace can be spiritually toxic without humility and how humility and love are two sides of the same coin. We describe the radical freedom of humility — the freedom from fear — the freedom to love. We examine some of the ways Jesus and Mary use to build humility in us using examples from The Spiritual Diary. We explore the idea of humiliation and note humility as the ultimate shield against Satan and the object of his attack.

Flame of Love Basics – Embracing Suffering – Part 1

This is the first of a multi-part presentation on the largest single topic in the Spiritual Diary, viz., Embracing Suffering. We take a quick look at just a few stunning statements in the Diary in this regard but realize we need to establish a foundation and context before this discussion on suffering will make sense. That foundation is a proper understanding of love. We look at ways we misunderstand love and contrast God’s love and human love to show how our human love is entirely inadequate for the eternity and forgiveness of Heaven. We examine the impossibility of living this way without the miracle of salvation and briefly explore how this miracle happens by the action of the Holy Spirit. We conclude this first portion with the statement that Love, Freedom, and Suffering are inseparable and that, for love to be perfect it must be perfectly free and the freedom of love is built in the crucible of suffering.

Flame of Love Basics – Embracing Suffering – Part 2

In this second presentation on Embracing Suffering as an element of devotion to the Flame of Love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we review the understanding of love and the difference between God’s love and human love we discussed last week. We then look at the stages of Christian growth and how we normally grow very slowly through them, e.g,. from Relational Christianity to Transformational Christianity then to Purgative Christianity followed Illuminative Christianity and note that the Flame of Love Devotion puts us on a rocket ride all the way to Purgative Christianity. We showed how the experience of purging our lives of all self, of completely pouring them out in practice, not knowledge, leads us to finally see as God sees.

Flame of Love Basics – Embracing Suffering – Part 3

In this presentation, we briefly reviewed the last two presentations on this topic of embracing suffering to set the context. We then proceeded to discuss the relationship between embracing suffering and grace. We explored how grace enables us to embrace our sufferings with joy. We discussed how a lack of humility blinds us to the value of suffering while love and humility unlock its meaning.

Flame of Love Basics – Embracing Suffering – Part 4

In this presentation, we review the relationship between grace, embracing suffering, humility, and love covered in our last presentation. We then discussed how we do not suffer as an end but as a means. We suffer in love:

• ​For the salvation of others
• To ease Jesus’ suffering
• To bring joy to God
• For our own good and the good of others

We mentioned how, if that seems strange, we are likely thinking as humans and not as God. Finally, we examined how and why suffering dramatically increases our growth in grace.

Flame of Love Basics – Embracing Suffering – Part 5

In this final presentation on embracing suffering as part of the Flame of Love Devotion, we quickly recap the previous sessions and continue by examining the value of sufferings as expressed by Jesus to Elizabeth Kindelmann in the Spiritual Diary. We see how it is not an optional part of the devotion but essential for achieving the goals of the devotion and is how we partake in Jesus’ work of redemption. We next explore the parallels between this message to Elizabeth and Saint John of the Cross’ Ascent to Mount Carmel and consider what this path to great grace looks like. This leads to the topic of Spiritual Detachment.

We then move to a description of what it is like when we arrive at a state of great grace, of how it becomes our nature to pour ourselves out for others in a living or white martyrdom. We see that the perfection of love through suffering becomes our desire. We see this from both the Diary and Saint Teresa of Avila’s description of such a state in The Interior Castle. We note that this must always be our free choice and see that this life of embracing suffering is our life from now on but that this leads not to morbidity but great joy. We conclude by reiterating that, for love to be perfect, it must be perfectly free, and the freedom of love is forged in the crucible of suffering — that we joyfully let Jesus live His redemptive life in us.

Flame of Love Basics – Satan’s Attacks

In this presentation, we note that we can expect to be attacked by Satan just as Elizabeth Kindelmann was and so examine their characteristics to see how they are manifested in the Diary. We note that his attacks are:

• Always about self
• Multi-faceted
• Subtle — often masking a more dangerous attack with a less dangerous but more blatant one

This leads to a brief treatment of how we overcome sin at its source, i.e., how we fight an offensive rather than defensive war against Satan and sin. We then walk through many accounts in the Diary to see these tactics at work. We conclude by emphasizing how we avoid Satan’s confusion by fixing on our eyes on God’s unending love for us — that God loves us, by grace, we love Him, and not much else matters.

Flame of Love Basics – Other Important Quotations

In this final presentation of our “bootstrapping” series, we examine several quotes from Elizabeth Kindelmann’s Spiritual Diary that did not fall cleanly into any of the previous presentations. These include:

• Jesus’ request to address Him as “My adored Jesus”
• Mary’s deliberately sending the Flame of Love to people who will doubt it
• The special importance of First Thursday and First Friday
• The exaltation of Mary through the Flame of Love
• God the Father’s charge to be responsible for the fate of all humanity

We conclude with a Prayer to Receive the Flame of Love.