VII — THE GRACE OF BAPTISM

XI Sunday after Pentecost

Presence of God. — O Lord, may the grace of holy Baptism come in me to full maturity.

Meditation

1 — The healing of the deaf-mute spoken of in today’s Gospel is a living image of baptismal grace. We too one day were brought before Jesus in conditions similar to those of that poor man of Galilee, that is, deaf and mute in the life of the spirit; and Jesus, in the person of his minister, received us with great love at the baptismal font. The priest repeated over us the same gesture of the divine Master and pronounced his same word: “Ephphatha!” From that moment, as it were, the hearing of our soul opened to faith and speech opened to the praises of God. We became capable of hearing the voices of faith: the external ecclesial voices of the Church, the interior voices of the Holy Spirit urging us to good. From that moment our lips became capable of opening to prayer, to accents of praise, adoration, supplication. But then the noises of the world have deafened us, distracted us, and together with the clamor of passions have dulled our capacity to listen to God’s voices. Likewise, vain speech about earthly things, being too occupied and anxious over human affairs, has often made us incapable of sincere and deep prayer. And behold, today Jesus wishes to renew in us baptismal grace, wishes to repeat over us the omnipotent word: “Ephphatha!” How much we need Him to awaken our ears to his voice, how much we need Him to make us more attentive, more sensitive to his calls! “The Lord awakens my ear, that I may hear Him as a teacher,” says Isaiah, and immediately adds: “and I do not resist; I have never turned back” (50:4-5). This is the grace we must ask of the Lord today: not only to listen, but always to follow his voice, never opposing it. And the more faithful we are in following it, the more capable we shall become of perceiving its least whispers. At the same time let us ask the grace that our lips may always be open to praise the Lord, to invoke his mercy, to ask humbly pardon, accusing with sincerity and repentance our faults.

2 — Those who were witnesses of Jesus’ miracle admired Him, repeating: “He has done all things well: He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” Yes, Jesus has done all things well; He has disposed all things excellently for our sanctification, prepared for us all necessary graces, and not only in sufficient measure but in abundance. Yet unfortunately we do not always correspond, and often pride, selfishness, and all our other unmortified passions turn to evil what the Lord disposed for our good. If we had accepted with love and resignation those difficulties, those trials, those contradictions that God permitted precisely to exercise us in virtue, we would have made great progress; but instead, with our impatience, our protests and complaints, we have accumulated only failings and infidelities. We need greater correspondence to grace, greater fineness of interior hearing to perceive all the invitations to good that the Lord continually sends us through the various circumstances of life.

Today’s Mass, and precisely the Epistle, presents us with a magnificent model of correspondence to grace. It is the Apostle Paul who, though in his humility he declares himself “the least of the Apostles,” nevertheless exclaims with all sincerity: “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.” Paul recognizes that if from persecutor of the Church he has become an apostle, it is not by his merit but solely by the merit of grace: he attributes nothing to himself, but all to God. At the same time, however, he is conscious of his correspondence, correspondence that is always fruit of grace, but that includes also, as an indispensable element, our free adherence. Therefore, at the basis of our correspondence to grace we must place an attitude of humility, that is, we must sincerely acknowledge that if anything good is in us it is due solely to God; and to this attitude we must unite the free and constant assent of our will to divine invitations. Without grace we would not be capable of giving such assent, and yet it depends on us, it is in our hands. Therefore, like Paul, we cannot ascribe anything to our merit, but with him we must repeat: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Yet our free adhesion to grace should give us the right to add: “and his grace in me has not been in vain.” But we shall have this right only if our adhesion is constant, faithful, generous.

Colloquy

“O Lord, now I love You alone, follow You alone, seek You alone; to You alone I want to serve. You alone have the right to command, and to You alone I desire to be subject. Command, I beg You; impose all You wish. Heal and open my ears, that I may hear your commands; heal and open my eyes, that I may see the signs of your will. Remove from me thoughtlessness, that I may contemplate You, and thus I hope to fulfill faithfully what You command me.

“Receive, I beg You, this fugitive of yours, O Lord and most merciful Father. Enough now of what I have gone through; enough of having been up to now the plaything of deceiving vanities. Now that I flee from these tyrannies, receive me as your servant, as they received me when I fled from You into their power. I feel the need to return to You; behold, I knock at your door: open to me, teach me how one arrives at You. I possess nothing other than my will; I know nothing except that one must despise passing and perishable things in order to seek the immutable and eternal.

“My desire is directed to You, and from You I ask the means to follow this desire. If You abandon us, we are lost; but You do not abandon us, because You are the supreme good, and no one has ever sought You with uprightness without finding You.... You know, O Lord, I have the willing but not the power; and I cannot even will the good without You; nor can I do what I will unless your power helps me; and what I can do, at times I do not will, unless You make your will triumph on earth as in heaven. One thing only, then, do I invoke from your supreme clemency: that You convert me entirely to You, preventing me from resisting the grace that leads me toward You” (St. Augustine).