Prayer of the heart Friday of the sixth week of Easter. Come Holy Spirit
and help me to put in your presence everything that worries me, everything that
worries me, everything that disturbs my peace. You know what my deepest concerns
are, but today I want to tell you, because it' s better
to share them with you than to pretend to face them with my few human
forces. Listen to me, sir, because I cry to you with all
my soul, and I raise my arms to you. I beg you to
help me. Today we celebrate Saint John of Avila, patron of Spanish clergy,
and Father Saint Damian of Molocay, patron of the Bae, priest and
martyr of lepers. The Gospel is from St John, chapter sixteen verses twenty
to twenty- three. At that time he said you use his disciples.
Really. Verily I say unto you, Ye shall weep and mourn while the
world shall be always joyful, ye shall be sad. But your sadness will
become joy to the woman when she will give light, being sadness because her
hour has come. But as soon as he gives light to the child and
remembers the trouble for joy that the world will be made a man, you
also now if you feel sadness. But he will see you again and your
heart will be made and no one will take your joy away from you.
On that day you will ask me nothing, but I saw you again and
your heart will rejoice. I' ll see you again. What comforting words
in the midst of pain and tribulation and how they fill us with the hope
we so much need. We could say with some boldness that hope is necessary.
Whoever lives it travels in a climate of trust, of abandonment, being
able to say with the psalmist, Lord You are, my rock, my
shield, my fortress, my refuge look to my shepherd, my salvation.
Even if I was confronted by an entire army, I wouldn' t be
afraid of my heart. And if a battle rises against me that I will
then still be, then I will be trusted. But it is possible that
the psalmist has always done well for all things, surely they would not do
well. He always knows too and says that the bad ones are many times
more fortunate and the good despised. He even regretted it once the lord even
came to say why he sleeps, sir, why you keep quiet wake up
listen to me, sir, but he kept the hope and to him and
to all those who wait can be applied what You Abraham said, what Abran
said to you. Paul believed that he was waiting against all hope. We
can still think about how he gave that up, how we can believe and
live against all hope happens because we cling to three ideas that are true.
God is omnipotent. God loves me immensely. God is faithful to the promises.
He is the God of mercy, who kindles my trust. Thanks to
him. I do not feel alone, useless or abandoned, but committed to
a destiny of salvation that will one day lead to paradise. We have alluded
to the psalms the same confident living in the wrath of Saint Augustine. One
Easter day he preached about the Luya and said more or less the true Hallelujah.
We' ll sing it in paradise. That will be the age of
full love. This one down here is the hallelujah of hungry love. This
is of hope. Maybe we' ll think. But if I am a
poor sinner, I will respond as I was told to advise an old Sans
Dondo, an unknown lady who went to confess with him. I was disheartened
because I said I had had a morally obnoxious life. I can ask you,
he said, if you don' t mind, how old he is.
Thirty- five. The lady answered thirty- five, but you can
still live about forty or fifty years and do a lot of good things.
Then repentant, as he is, instead of thinking about the past, think
about the future and renew with God' s help his life and God hates
faults, but because they are faults. But, on the other hand,
he loves in a certain sense the faults in that they give occasion to him
to show his mercy and to us to remain humble and also to understand and
sympathize with the faults of the Projimo, as I read some time ago in
a picture of Christ of the great power he uses that a priest had in
the cocesionary. Putting that phrase on the Lord' s lips this phrase I
rejoice in your sins because you give me the opportunity to forgive you and show
you my mercy. Not everyone understands that. The mitche hope, for example,
the so- called virtue of the weak would make a Christian a useless
being, a segregated one, a resigned one, a stranger to the progress
of the world. Others will know about alienation that kept Christians out of the
struggle for human proportion. But the Christian message has said the council, far
from contributing, of turning men away from the task edifice from the world,
rather commit them to it with a more demanding obligation. It says on gaudinet
spés. It is a joy to see how the saints are cheerful and active,
understand Christian humanism and explain a comprehensive theology. Tomas of aquino, for
example, includes among the virtues the yucunditas, that is, the ability to
turn into a cheerful smile in the measure and convenient way. Things heard and
seen. Funny in this regard, it was that the Irish mason, Irish
who fell off the scaffold and broke his legs, taken to the hospital,
came to him the doctor and the religious nurse. The poor nun said you
have done a lot of leo warden to, what he answered. He answered.
The wounded not mother. It has not been when falling, It has
been when I arrived to earth when I have hurt myself, declaring virtue to
joke and make smile if Thomas placed himself in the line of the joyful new
preached by Christ, of the Hilaritas, recommended by St John Augustine Defeat pessimism
dressed with joy Christian life encouraged us to encourage us with the healthy and pure
joys that we find on our way. Andre Andrade Cornishen a Scotch who marched
with his parents America, where he gradually became one of the richest men in
the world. He was not a Catholic, but he spoke insistently of the
healthy and authentic joys of life. I was born in misery, but I
would not change the memories of my childhood, for those of the children,
of the millionaires who know them, of the family joys, of the sweet
figure of the mother who gathers in herself the functions of nanny, the cook
flag, Master Angel and Santa. My young man had been employed in a
spinnery in Pittsburgh with a stipend of six fifty- six miserable monthly iras.
One afternoon, instead of paying him the cashier right away, he told him
to wait for Rieger to tremble. Now you fire me and you think.
On the contrary, after paying the others, the cashier told Andyun I have
followed closely in his work and I have come to the conclusion that it is
worth more than the others. I' ll raise you to sixty- seven
lire. Carrige ran home, where the mother wept happily for the promotion of
the son. You talk about millionaires, Camis said. Many years later,
all my millions together have never given the joy of those eleven liras of increase.
In conclusion, I would like to refer to a hope that some proclaim
as a Christian, but that is only Christian to a certain extent. It
is a mistake to say that political, economic and social liberation coincides with the
salvation of Jesus Christ and that the Dai kingnum who identifies himself in the Hominis
king, because then he would end up affirming that Ubilenin and Villerusalén, presenting
this liberation as the true Christian hope where Levin is the ay comonism is in
Jerusalem, says the phrase. I believe that the Magisterium of the Church will
never insist enough on presenting and recommending solutions to the great problems of freedom,
justice and peace and development, and Catholics will never fight enough to solve those
problems. But always from the Christian perfection of the liberation from sin, as
true and authentic freedom in Hostia on the seashore, in a famous colloquium,
Augustine and his mother Monica, forgotten from the past and looking towards the future,
wondered what eternal life would be, this is Christian hope. That hope
refers to Pope John 23rd and to her we mean when the Egecism prays.
My God, I hope in your goodness, the eternal life and the graces
necessary to deserve it with the good works that I must and want to do,
my God, that I never cd ever confused for all eternity, all
blessing. May the Lord be in your heart so that you may know how
to love with all of him, that he may be on your lips so
that you may speak with strength and faith of his resurrection, that he may
be in your arms to work tirelessly for his sake and possess his kingdom,
that it may be on your feet that you may walk the paths of peace.
May the Lord show you that he is in your clean gaze, so
that your eyes may see Jesus in others who are in your joy, so
that you will never lose him, even if he is tribes you have and
can give him to others in the name of the father and son and of
the Holy Spirit Amen.