Peace to you all from the Garden loved by the Lord!
In these days, the Lord has invited us many times to convert and become like children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (Mt 18, 3-6). Even the various liturgical celebrations of this last week also allude to the beauty and perhaps to the secret, of the little way (St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the Guardian Angels and St. Francis of Assisi). Everything speaks of the Gospel and the Gospel says it all.A small example: it is curious and striking how St. Francis discovers God in lepers, in humanity, in suffering and disfigured humanity. He himself recounts it in his Testament: “It seemed too bitter to me to see lepers, and the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And as I moved away from them, what seemed bitter to me was changed into sweetness of mind and body. And afterwards, I stayed a while and left the century”.
There are many episodes and examples in which St. Francis lives in loving the other concretely to the point of forgetting himself, and it is precisely there that he finds God in the human. Francis has the gift of keeping the human and the divine together within human life: history, reality. The Poor of Assisi loves the created life… and he finds God in it. This is perhaps its beauty and relevance. Paradoxically, it is a great provocation for all of us Franciscans.But if we succeed in understanding this shining mystery of St. Francis that he finds God in the human, how much greater is the love of the Lord that HERE, in this Garden, allows Himself to be found (John 18, 4-12)? The whole Gospel is like a "love letter" from the Most High Heavenly Father who through the Son tells us about the song and the poetry of God who seeks humanity by choosing to make himself understandable and human!
We contemplate, we thank, we give all praise to grace in our poor prayer and we ask the Lord to be able to be, where we are, with whom we are, his instruments in this humanity in need of God.
