WOUNDED BY LOVE
Peace be with you from the Garden beloved by the Lord!
In this month we also renew to all of you the invitation to pray so that the Lord may be known, welcomed and recognized as the author of peace.
It is very strange, we find ourselves living in the Holy Land, the most famous place in the world for the Man-God, and, paradoxically, it seems that Jesus Christ remains unknown. When there is no love, forgiveness or respect there is hatred, claim and contempt; not only in the actions of war but also in our common language. In this each of us is called to watch. And it is par excellence the appeal that even today the Lord makes to each of us: stay here with me, watch and pray! This month we want to offer you a Franciscan perspective of this sorrowful prayer of the Lord, a kind of twinning between the Mount of Olives and the Mount Verna, where Saint Francis receives the signs of the Redeemer: the sacred stigmata.
Jesus here, according to the Evangelists Matthew (26,39) and Mark (14,35), prostrates himself on the ground, or rather falls to the ground. The Lord, here, we could say that he chooses to "fall" into man’s caducity, and from the deepest abyss of loneliness and human need he prays to the Heavenly Father. He repeats several times: "Not my will be done, but your will" (Lk 22:42; Mk 36:36.39). In this his entering into the wounded humanity places his will in the will of the Father. It performs a gesture that might seem normal, but instead has an immense value: it puts the human will in the divine will. This is a redemptive gesture: through the mystery of the incarnation enters into the wound of man and takes away what does not belong to him (sin), assumes that which was given to him in endowment (humanity and belonging), gives him what is his own (divinity) through the Redemption.
The harmonization of human will to divine will is the very nerve of Redemption. This is what happens on the Verna mountain: Francis lives a moment of loneliness and suffering, after a long labor he gives himself up and asks to align his own will with the divine will! We know that Francis was born in Assisi, but at La Verna, returning the Order of the friars to the 'Owner', he gives birth to Franciscanism! The sources recount this deep and painful prayer of the Saint, which occurred 800 years ago (17 September 1224, near the Feast of the Exaltation of St. Cross):
"Oh my Lord Jesus Christ, two graces I pray that you make me before I die: the first, that in my life I feel in my soul and in my body as much as is possible, that pain which you, sweet Jesus, sustained in the hour of your very bitter passion; the second, that I feel in my heart, as much as is possible, that excessive love of which you, Son of God, were kindled to willingly sustain so much passion for us sinners" (Fioretti, FF: 1919). It is in this circumstance that a winged Seraph appeared to him in the form of a Crucifix and on Francis are imprinted the signs of the Crucified Lord. Saint Bonaventure thus sums up the experience of Francis: "The true love of Christ had transformed the lover into the very image of the Beloved" (Legenda Maggiore, FF: 1228).
What may seem to humanity a human defeat and a loss of prestige, for God is new and fruitful life. We pray that this mystery of Redemption may still take place with the help of the intercession of the Holy Virgin Mary.
In time we will send the link for the connection so that you can follow and live this beautiful moment of our Franciscan family.
The Lord bless you
