In the hope of helping you to persevere on the path of fidelity to Jesus Christ, I would like to offer two brief reflections.
The first concerns the spirit of gratitude. The
joy of men and women who love God attracts others to him; priests and
religious are called to find and radiate lasting satisfaction in their
vocation. Joy springs from a grateful heart. Truly, we have received
much, so many graces, so many blessings, and we rejoice in this. It will
do us good to think back on our lives with the grace of remembrance.
Remembrance of when we were first called, remembrance of the road
travelled, remembrance of graces received… and, above all, remembrance
of our encounter with Jesus Christ so often along the way. Remembrance
of the amazement which our encounter with Jesus Christ awakens in our
hearts. My brothers and sisters, men and women of consecrated life, and
priests! Let us seek the grace of remembrance so as to grow in the
spirit of gratitude. Let us ask ourselves: are we good at counting our
blessings, or have we forgotten them?
A second area is the spirit of hard work. A
grateful heart is spontaneously impelled to serve the Lord and to find
expression in a life of commitment to our work. Once we come to realize
how much God has given us, a life of self-sacrifice, of working for him
and for others, becomes a privileged way of responding to his great
love.
Yet, if we are honest, we know how easily this spirit of
generous self-sacrifice can be dampened. There are a couple of ways
that this can happen; both ways are examples of that “spiritual
worldliness” which weakens our commitment as men and women of
consecrated life to serve, and diminishes the wonder, the amazement, of
our first encounter with Christ.
We can get caught up measuring the value of our
apostolic works by the standards of efficiency, good management and
outward success which govern the business world. Not that these things
are unimportant! We have been entrusted with a great responsibility, and
God’s people rightly expect accountability from us. But the true worth
of our apostolate is measured by the value it has in God’s eyes. To see
and evaluate things from God’s perspective calls for constant conversion
in the first days and years of our vocation and, need I say, it calls
for great humility. The cross shows us a different way of measuring
success. Ours is to plant the seeds: God sees to the fruits of our
labors. And if at times our efforts and works seem to fail and produce
no fruit, we need to remember that we are followers of Jesus … and his
life, humanly speaking, ended in failure, in the failure of the cross.
The other danger comes when we become jealous of our
free time, when we think that surrounding ourselves with worldly
comforts will help us serve better. The problem with this reasoning is
that it can blunt the power of God’s daily call to conversion, to
encounter with him. Slowly but surely, it diminishes our spirit of
sacrifice, our spirit of renunciation and hard work. It also alienates
people who suffer material poverty and are forced to make greater
sacrifices than ourselves, without being consecrated. Rest is needed, as
are moments of leisure and self-enrichment, but we need to learn how to
rest in a way that deepens our desire to serve with generosity.
Closeness to the poor, the refugee, the immigrant, the sick, the
exploited, the elderly living alone, prisoners and all God’s other poor,
will teach us a different way of resting, one which is more Christian
and generous.
Gratitude and hard work: these are two pillars of the
spiritual life which I have wanted, this evening, to share with you
priests and religious. I thank you for prayers and work, and the daily
sacrifices you make in the various areas of your apostolate. Many of
these are known only to God, but they bear rich fruit for the life of
the Church.
