ADVENT MEDITATION:
IN ORDER TO BE HAPPY, WE MUST FORGET OURSELF
- Union with God: strive to have God in our soul always;
- Interior struggle to overcome and forget one’s self for the love of God and of others;
- And, giving ourselves to serve the people around us.
Below you have the text.
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AV SUMMARY
FULL TEXT
- “Make straight the way of the Lord!”
- To forget about one’s self is a sign of humility. The manifestations of thinking too much about our self and its undesirable consequences.
- To be happy we need to forget our self, give our self to others and serve them for love of God.
1. “Make straight the way of the Lord!”
We have read in last Sunday’s Gospel how St. John the Baptist, the Precursor cries out: Make straight the way of the Lord. His message never grows old. After more than 2000 years, there are still a lot of people who do not know Christ. Aside from that, our own lives are still not sufficiently identified with his. We have not yet fully become ipse Christus, Christ himself: on this depends our happiness in this life and in the next.
We need to make Christ our very life. Only then will there be no room for personal problems, nor for sterile thoughts that only waste time and reduce the effectiveness of our dedication. For this, however, we have to necessarily struggle daily to forget ourselves, for only then, God will have a room in our heart, soul and life and his grace would work in us and through us.
2. To forget oneself is a sign of humility. The manifestations of thinking too much about ourself and its undesirable consequences.
Forgetting oneself is a clear manifestation of humility, which consists in emptying ourselves so the God could fill us with His grace. The art of happiness is the art of holiness, which in turn, is the art of humility, the basis of all virtues, especially of charity.
Pride, however, leads us to alienate ourselves from God and from others, preventing them to enter into our life. Thinking excessively about one’s self has many manifestations, among which are:
- Letting our imagination dominate us. If we do not control our imagination, which according to St. Teresa de Avila, is the “insane or fool in the house,” this would lead us to enclose ourselves within our own world.
- We find ourselves immersed exclusively in our own concerns, problems, our health, our rest…
- We complicate ourselves on what others think or say about us…ruminating with the same thoughts in an obsessive manner.
- This frequent tendency which we all have leads to low self-esteem, selfishness and egoism, self-enclosure and a tremendous waste of time.
- Indifference to the people around us, to their needs;
- Selfish search and fulfillment of one’s desires: ambition, pleasure, work, rest, material things, at the expense of one’s obligations to God, to his family, and to his
These manifestations, as we have seen in the earlier post, have a lot of undesirable consequences:
- Sadness;
- the individualistic search for compensations to fill in the void which one has in his life;
- broken marriages;
- Discord, disunion, conflicts, tension in our family and/or work environment;
- addiction, injustices, corruption, among other things.
3. To be happy we need to forget our self, give our self to others and serve them for love of God.
If we really want to be happy in this life and in the next; and make joy and peace reign in us, in our home, our workplace and in our social dealings, we must learn how to forget about ourselves, and give ourselves to others to serve them for love of God, without expecting nothing in return.
As St. Josemaria told his spiritual children:
“We have to learn to be rid of ourselves, to destroy ourselves, to forget about ourselves. And learn to be on fire before God – out of love for other people and love for God – burning away like the candles beside the altar, giving off light until they are completely consumed. My children, I am leading you by loftier ways, because they are ways that endure. And what I want for my children, as penance, is that they learn to give themselves. We will only learn to give ourselves to God if we forget about ourselves and serve others. Ours will truly be a divine way, because it rests on humility. And God rewards it.”
Lord, through Our Lady’s intercession, help us to forget about ourselves many times during the day, to trample our ego and pride so that Christ may live in us. Only then, with Christ in us, wanting what He wants, we will identify ourselves with Him and will have no other desire than to give You greater glory and to serve Your Church and all souls.
This is what makes the path straight and cheerful: it is a path we travel along in peace and happiness, as God’s children in Our Lord Jesus Christ.
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