August 10, 2011
St. Lawrence is crowned by Baby Jesus. Image via Wikipedia
Saint Lawrence
Dear Family of Mary!
"Dear children! Today I call you to be born anew in prayer and through the Holy Spirit, to become a new people with my Son; a people who knows that if they have lost God, they have lost themselves; a people who knows that, with God, despite all sufferings and trials, they are secure and saved. I call you to gather into God's family and to be strengthened with the Father's strength. As individuals, my children, you cannot stop the evil that wants to begin to rule in this world and to destroy it. But, according to God's will, all together, with my Son, you can change everything and heal the world. I call you to pray with all your heart for your shepherds, because my Son chose them. Thank you."
(August 2, 2011)
Our Lady speaks eloquently about the "new" people we are called to be. She says that we will be "a people who knows that if they have lost God, they have lost themselves; a people who knows that, with God, despite all sufferings and trials, they are secure and saved." We will be a new people. And each one of us will know that we are given our entire identity, our entire existence, and our entire past, present and future by God the Creator. Through Jesus, we will know who we are. We will know that we are children of God, created in His image, called to be with Him in heaven for all eternity. Our dignity comes from God and only through separation from Him, will we lose that dignity. Our life comes from God and only through separation from Him will we lose it. Therefore, no suffering, no trial, no difficulty will be able to affect us because we are in God's hands, no matter what.
Fr. Jacques Philippe says it so well:
"The other great obstacle to abandoning oneself to Divine Providence is the presence of suffering, in our own lives as in the world around us. Even for those who abandon themselves to Him, God permits suffering; He leaves them wanting for certain things, in a manner sometimes painful. Think of the poverty in which the family of young Bernadette of Lourdes lived. Isn't this a contradiction of the words of the Gospel? No, because the Lord can leave us wanting relative to certain things (sometimes judged indispensable in the eyes of the world), but He never leaves us deprived of what is essential: His presence, His peace and all that is necessary for the complete fulfillment of our lives, according to His plans for us. If he permits suffering, then it is our strength to believe, as Therese of Lisieux says, that 'God does not permit unnecessary suffering.'
"In the domain of our personal lives, as in that of the history of the world, we must be convinced, if we want to go to the limits of our Christian faith, that God is sufficiently good and powerful to use whatever evil there may be, as well as any suffering however absurd and unnecessary it may appear to be, in our favor. We cannot have any mathematical or philosophical certitude of this; it can only be an act of faith. But it is precisely to this act of faith that we are invited by the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus, understood and received as the definitive victory of God over evil.
"Evil is a mystery, a scandal and it will always be so. It is necessary to do what one can to eliminate it, to relieve suffering, but it always remains present in our personal lives, as well as in the world. Its place in the economy of redemption reveals the wisdom of God, which is not the wisdom of man; it always retains something incomprehensible... 'For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are My ways above your ways and My thoughts above your thoughts' (Isaiah 55: 8-9).
"At certain moments in life, a Christian is necessarily invited to believe in the contradiction of appearances and to 'hope against all hope' (Romans 4:18). There are inevitably circumstances where we cannot understand the 'why' of God's activity because it is no longer the wisdom of man, a wisdom within our capacity to understand and explain by human intelligence. Rather it is divine Wisdom, mysterious and incomprehensible, that thus intervenes.
"And happily we cannot always understand! Otherwise, how would it be possible to allow the Wisdom of God to freely work according to His designs? It is true that for many things we would not act as God would act! We would not have chosen the folly of the cross as a means of redemption! But fortunately it is the Wisdom of God and not ours that rules all things, because it is infinitely more powerful and more loving and, above all, more merciful than ours.
"While the Wisdom of God is incomprehensible in its ways, in the sometimes baffling manner in which it acts in us, then let us say that the Wisdom of God will also be incomprehensible in those things that it prepares for those who put their hope in it. For that which it prepares surpasses infinitely in glory and beauty that which we can imagine or conceive: 'What eye has not seen nor ear heard, what the human heart has not conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him, this God has revealed to us through His Spirit' (1 Corinthians 2:9).
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