XXIV — CORRESPONDENCE TO GRACE

IX Sunday after Pentecost

Presence of God. — O Lord, grant that in me your grace may not be in vain.

Meditation

1 — Today the liturgy invites us to reflect on the problem of our correspondence to grace, presenting us with the sad picture of the vicissitudes of Israel, the chosen people whom God had filled with his benefits, surrounded with graces, protected with loving care, and who nevertheless, by their unfaithfulness, were lost. In the Epistle, St. Paul, after touching on some points of Israel’s prevarication, concludes: “These things happened to them as an example, and were written for our admonition.... Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” It is a strong call to vigilance and humility. If God has anticipated us with his graces, if He has called us to a more intense interior life, to greater intimacy with Him, all this, far from making us presumptuous, must dig in our heart a deeper humility: God’s gifts are to be kept under the ashes of humble mistrust of self. Woe to us if we were to think ourselves by now freed from those weaknesses we notice, and perhaps condemn, in others! Let us rather repeat humbly: Lord, help me, otherwise I could do even worse. Yet while exhorting us to humility, St. Paul also urges us to confidence, because “God is faithful and will not permit you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, so that you may be able to bear it.” The Apostle too teaches us that awareness of our weakness must not discourage us, because God is always ready to sustain us with his grace. God knows our weaknesses, knows the struggles we must sustain, knows the temptations that trouble us, and for each of them He gives us that measure of grace necessary to triumph. It is indeed true that when the storm rages we feel only the impact of the struggle, while the grace with which God helps us remains entirely hidden; yet this grace is there, and we must be certain of it, because “God is faithful.” “God has always helped me,” said St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. “I count on Him. Suffering may reach its height, but I am sure He will not abandon me” (St. 12).

2 — The Gospel, taking up the same theme as the Epistle, presents Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. The Creator, the Lord, the Savior weeps over the ruin of his creatures, of the people He had loved to the point of choosing them as companions of his earthly life and whom He would have wanted to save at all costs.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem... how often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!” (Mt. 23:37). This was Jesus’ constant attitude toward the holy city, but it always remained blind to every light, deaf to every invitation; and the Savior, a few days before going to his Passion, casts to it his last heartfelt appeal: “Oh, if you had known, even you, especially in this day, the things that make for your peace!” But once again the city resists, and Jesus, after having loved her so much, after having wept over her as a mother weeps over a wayward child, foretells her ruin: “your enemies... will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time when you were visited.”

And do you know how to recognize the moments in which the Lord visits your soul? A good word, read or heard perhaps even by chance, an edifying example, an interior inspiration, a new light that makes you see your defects more deeply and opens before you new horizons of virtue and good, are so many visits of Jesus. And you, how do you correspond? Is your soul sensitive to these lights, to these calls? Do you not sometimes catch yourself turning your gaze elsewhere for fear that the light glimpsed may ask sacrifices too hard for your self-love?

Oh, if you had always recognized the moment in which the Lord visited you! If you had always opened yourself wide to his action! Seek then to begin again today, resolved to begin again each time it happens that you yield to nature. “What makes for your peace,” for your good, for your sanctification, lies precisely here, in this continual adherence to the impulses of grace.

Colloquy

“As I have already confessed to You, O glory of my lowliness, O Lord my God, strength of my salvation, I had thought myself to be my own strength, which however was no strength. And when I wanted to run, just when I thought myself standing, then I fell more swiftly and went backward instead of advancing; and what I thought to attain withdrew farther from me. Thus, O Lord, in many ways You put my strength to the test. Now that You have enlightened me, I know that what I believed I could do most certainly I could not do of myself. I said to myself: I will do this, I will finish that, and I did neither. There was the will, not the power; and if there was power, there was not will, because I trusted in my own strength. Sustain me, then, O Lord, for by myself I can do nothing; for when my stability is You, then it is true stability; but when my stability is myself, then it is weakness” (St. Augustine).

“O Lord, teach me to be always docile to your grace, always to say yes to You. Always to say yes to your will signified in your commandments. Always to say yes to the intimate inspirations by which You solicit me, invite me to a more intense union, to a more generous self-giving, to a more total detachment. Grant that I may always be ready to open the door of my will, indeed to keep it always wide open so that You may enter, and thus I may lose none of these visits of yours, these delicate touches, these inspirations.

“Make me understand well that true peace does not consist, nor should I seek it, in exemption from difficulties, but in total adherence to your will, in docility to the inspirations of grace” (cf. Sr. Carmela d. Spirito S.).