WITH A PURE HEART, LET US INVOKE THE GIFTS OF GOD.
Dear friends of Gethsemane, may the Lord grant you his Peace!
In this time so full of suffering and conflict, we feel more urgent than ever to intensify our prayer. We also do so at the nursery school of Mary Most Holy, in the month of May, so that she may intercede with her Son for our wounded and needy humanity. Let us ask for peace by living peacefully. Let us invoke mercy and salvation by living as saved! In this regard, I asked myself: with what heart do we ask for such heavenly gifts?
"God saves you but does not save you without you!" This is a very well known phrase of Saint Augustine. On the one hand it affirms the divine initiative, on the other our correspondence. If on the one hand the seed has its strength and all the fertility that is proper to it, it is also true that the conditions of the soil facilitate or not the growth of the bud. Jesus explains this very well in the Gospel (Mk 4:1-41). In the same way it works also in our spiritual life: divine Grace works as much as one is worthy to receive it. It is by exercising the constant will that one dominates the human instinct turned to the flesh and returns the primordial lordship to the spirit, overcoming lusts, bending the being to the virtues, tending it as a bow towards the perfection of virtues and above all charity.
So should our relationship with the Lord be to fulfill His will! Simply if we think about it this way: when one loves, he tends to make happy those who love. If the Grace of our Salvation, a gift received through the Redeemer, is helped by our active will, tirelessly, we remain in God and He will dwell in us! (cf. Jn 14:23). Not only that: with our active participation, Grace grows together with the virtues that we have 'achieved'... with solicitude, vigilance and the expectation of living and 'being' in the presence of the Lord, living communion with him and fulfilling his will. In short: we are called to a Holy life full of Grace: two sure wings to fly to God! If we live a life as 'children' and as children of God, this allows us to have that confidence and that evangelical certainty: "because whatever you ask of the Father in my name, be granted to you" (Jn 15:16). Consoled by this certainty we invoke the gift of the Holy Spirit as a new Pentecost, we invoke with him the gift of Peace, not as the world gives it, but as a gift of belonging to Jesus Christ, the King of our souls and our bodies, the King of the universe.
The Lord bless you!
