THE VALUE OF THE REQUEST: "STAY HERE WITH ME"
Peace to you all from the Garden of the Lord!
With the Lenten journey we enter into the sublime mystery of our salvation, a mystery of redemption for every man. Such awareness should give us a certain hope in the Lord, a gift to always beg with humility! In a figurative sense the Lord gives us a favorable time to be able to walk towards Him, a path that we are all called to carry out by placing ourselves at the side of the Lord Jesus, who is headed here to Jerusalem: place where He has redeemed the world! ("While the days in which he would be taken out of the world were being fullfilled, he went decisively towards Jerusalem..." Lk 9,51ff).
It is of fundamental importance, for us little ones, to pay attention to this reference of the Lord because it helps us to accept every request that the Lord makes us, as a consequence of the supreme gift of love that He will perform on the Cross. Every request on his part, which may appear overbearing and radical is motivated by this truth that He manifests: the gift of salvation, eternal life. Even the request that this sacred garden "tells us" is to be welcomed as a perennial invitation, I would say almost as an imperative of love that the Lord requires, because first loved us, because He is giving himself to all of us! In that "Stay here with me, pray and watch... " (Mt 26,38.41) , there is a power of love that is perpetuated in time and asks each one of us the urgency of conversion!
It is as if the Lord says to us: "If I ask for love, it is because I have given you Love... the reason for the gift of your closeness, the gift of your life, one day you will understand it, only by touching my glorious wounds". What to say, if not: "My God, my all!" together with Saint Thomas? (Jn 20,28). This is the favorable time in which we can love God: we become a living response to his desire to be loved, even for those who do not. It is the favorable time for a conversion, not as an apparent change of habits, but as the consequence of a decided and new orientation of our whole person to Him, leaving that it is the Lord with his Gospel, to interpret our life. My spiritual father says: "It is not true that one become converted when opening the Gospel... It happens instead the contrary, that by opening the Gospel, sometimes we are converted!"
The Lord still comes patiently to take us by the hand. We need you, Lord, our Savior; without you we can do nothing (cf Jn 15:5).
May the Prince of Peace reign in our hearts, He who is the Way, the Light and the Truth. Let us still pray tirelessly to the great King, together with Mary Most Holy Queen of Peace, for the salvation of the whole world.
Good journey of Lent
