YOU ARE NEVER ALONE.
THE BLESSED TRINITY IS IN YOUR SOUL IN GRACE.
THE BLESSED TRINITY IS IN YOUR SOUL IN GRACE.
We are never alone. It’s a shame that we Christians forget we’re a throne for the Blessed Trinity. I advise you to develop the custom of seeking God in the depths of your heart. This is what it means to have interior life.
I would tell that child of mine: perhaps you’ve had little interior life, or perhaps you’ve had a lot, but now God wants to test you. Does your soul seem to be an empty cistern? Well, seek God’s love! Seek the Lord and his strength, seek his face continually. But do so with the same determination people put into winning a clean human love. Seek God like that, and be sure that everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.
Where there’s no water, what do people do? They build a cistern, and then carry water to it in buckets, emptying them one by one. When you find it impossible to recollect yourself for prayer, you have to prepare yourself by carrying water to the cistern: by acts of love and reparation, spiritual Communions, invocations to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to our Lady, St Joseph, and our holy Guardian Angels. All this is the water we bring by dint of our own effort.
We may have to keep doing so for a long time, but if we persevere, the moment will come when we won’t need to go in search of water, for a well will have formed. Perhaps at the beginning the water doesn’t rise easily, but it is a well of living water, present in the depths of your soul. You don’t know where the water comes from, nor how it collects there, nor when it’s going to flow… but you can always drink from it. And if you are persistent, the water in the well rises and rises, until it forms a spring of clear water where you can always quench your thirst, drinking with both hands, with your mouth wide open.
Do you understand, my children? There’s always water available. Each of you, with the help of the triune God hidden in your soul, can manage never to be an empty cistern, but a well of water that rises until it becomes a spring of marvellous, clear water, the water of love. But, my daughters and sons, you have to put your whole heart into this effort.
The path to the divine spring St. Josemaria speaks of lies in our heart, since we have God in the centre of our soul in grace. Should your springs be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? (Prov 5:5) Without becoming sanctimonious, you’ll come to find it easy to enter into prayer while you work, when you walk along the street, when you don’t look at what will separate you from God. You need to seek out our Lord in prayer and in the Eucharist, in the Bread and in the Word. But I insist, we have to be persistent: I would express it graphically by saying that, if necessary, we should carry on our shoulders whatever effort it involves.
As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God (Ps 41:2-3) ? The liturgy applies these words to our eagerness to be united with Christ in the holy Sacrament of the Altar. The Eucharist is the greatest divine gift, the height of Trinitarian self-giving to his creatures, and an inexhaustible source of interior life. Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:14).
We need to seek out our Lord eagerly in the Eucharist, not only when he is on the altar or in the priest’s hands during the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also when he remains reserved in the tabernacle. Jesus Christ is really present there, with his Body, with his Blood, with his Soul and with his Divinity … I like to repeat this truth time and time again, making acts of faith.
My daughters and sons, treat him well for me! Don’t leave him alone in the tabernacle. Keep him all the company physically possible; and then with your heart, when you’re working, go to the tabernacle and say loving things to him. May he see that you are dedicated, faithful, loving, with a sincere desire to be filled with God.
SOURCE: Excerpt from the Book of Meditations, vol. IV (private collection).
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