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Dear sisters and brothers, welcome to tune in to the waves of Radio Mater to spend a time of prayer together in the house of Nazareth in the company of Joseph to recover the link between praying and acting on this particular day dedicated to praying and fasting to push the dawn of peace to appear on the horizon and there with the church we pray: the Pope on Sunday pronounced heavy words: saying. «Whoever wages war forgets humanity, he is not with the people, he is interested in the concrete lives of people, but only in the interests of power. It relies on the diabolical and perverse logic of weapons and in every conflict the suffering of the poor is far from the will of God. And it distances itself from ordinary people who in every conflict are the real victims. I think of the elderly, of those seeking refuge, of mothers fleeing with their children.
They are brothers and sisters for whom it is urgent to open humanitarian corridors and who must be welcomed. With a broken heart I repeat, let the weapons be silent. God is with peacemakers, not with those who use violence. Because those who love peace, as stated in the Italian Constitution, repudiate war as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes"... Those who wage war forget humanity, he is not with the people, he is not interested in the concrete lives of the people, but he puts the interests of those in power before all else. I think of the elderly, of those seeking refuge, I think of the mothers fleeing with their children. They are brothers and sisters for whom it is urgent to open humanitarian corridors and who must be welcomed. With a broken heart I repeat, let the weapons be silent" - God is with peacemakers, not with those who use violence. Because those who love peace, as stated in the Italian Constitution, repudiate war as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes."
Last Sunday we prayed at mass; «God, who entrusted the work of creation to man and placed the immense energies of the cosmos at his service, grant that today we collaborate in a more just and fraternal world to the praise of your glory. By our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who is God, and lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, forever and ever."
The Pope, appearing in St. Peter's Square, said: «Those who wage war forget humanity, are not with the people, are not interested in the concrete lives of people, but put the interests of part of power before all else. He relies on the diabolical and perverse logic of weapons and in every conflict he distances human life from the will of God. Every conflict tramples many innocent people. I think of the elderly - said the Pope -, of those seeking refuge, of the mothers fleeing with their children. They are brothers and sisters for whom it is urgent to open humanitarian corridors and who must be welcomed. With a broken heart I repeat, let the weapons be silent. God is always with peacemakers, with those who do not use violence. Because those who love peace - as stated in the Italian Constitution - repudiate war as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes".
We have always known that Lent is a time dedicated to conversion; it is a spring time in which the ardent desire for a spiritual life full of hope and animated by responsibility for the future that God entrusts to our hands flourishes.
In this time, symbolically enclosed in 40 days, the church invites us to till the soil so that God, the Almighty, can find plowed ground and thus infiltrate these cracks opened in the wall of the soul where the wise and creative hands of the Almighty can build his nest.
In that work, the hand of the farmer, who sows the seed, already tastes the flavor of the bread in his heart even before the grain is crushed by the mill and cooked by the flames of the oven.
The triangle of the Lenten terrain glimpses its destination at dawn on Easter morning.
This period of Lenten time marks its pace by walking along three lanes: that of fasting, prayer and a hard-working life building good works.
For us Christians, in the memory of the water of baptism, it is like opening the sails to the wind of the Spirit and pushing the sailing ship of our life and landing at the port of a more intimate communion with God, always sailing the ocean of love.
This interior attitude is nothing other than the usual style of every syllable of prayer cultivated and lived in the mysterious fruitfulness of silence.
Every liturgical action, in fact, always begins with a penitential act, which is indeed a request for forgiveness, but is, above all, preparing our spirit to open the door of the soul to be able to welcome Jesus as a guest at the table of life, master in directing the melody of prayer.
We can perceive the meaning of Lent effectively and daily, trying to grasp a fraction of time and thus carve out a few minutes to dedicate to reading the Bible and feel the pulsation in the soul of a reality that we perceive as a beneficial intuition of this passage. Indeed, all human existence is exposed to the sun, just as all creation is kept alive by the sun of God's love. All human existence has an existential relationship with God. With baptism, the Christian has a relationship with the divine that pervades our entire personality.
The introductory hymn of the Third Hour expresses this intimate relationship when praying:
O Spirit Paraclete,
one with the Father and the Son,
come down to us kindly
in the depths of hearts.
Voice and mind come together
in the rhythm of praise,
may your fire unite us
in one soul.
O light of wisdom
reveal the mystery to us
of the triune and unique God,
source of eternal Love. Amen
Among the writings of Saint Luigi Guanella there is an expression that is at the foundation of his multiple charitable actions, where he states: it is "God who does".
We are simple and obedient laborers. Insiders to build a peaceful society.
The word peace runs through all the words of the Bible as a musical background; it is a word that constitutes the pillar that supports the scaffolding of God's interventions. Peace is the summary of all the biblical words that have their summit in Jesus in the wake of the evangelical beatitudes.
La Lent as a time of conversion, of personal and community renewal, above all an image of the fabric of the entire earthly existencea.
In the Message for the time that prepares for Easter, the Pope in his message for Lent compares human existence to a field to be sown and made to bear fruit with good works of peace and mutual love.
The slogan of the message is inspired by Saint Paul's exhortation in the letter to the Galatians: «Let us not get tired of doing good; in fact, if we do not desist in time for him we will reap." Therefore, since we have the opportunity, let us do good to all" (Gal 6,9:10-XNUMXa).
The starting point in doing good is connatural to our birth into earthly life. The first farmer, at the dawn of life, is God himself. This announcement, leaven of the season of Lent, invites us to adopt the mentality, the one that teaches us to find truth and beauty "not so much in worrying about having a lot in giving, but in sowing goodness and sharing it". If we commit ourselves in this way, if we spread seeds of good, the fruits can only be abundant, starting with ourselves and our "daily relationships".
"In God", in fact, "no act of love, however small, and no generous effort are wasted". And it is a positive contagion that concerns the entire community, because - observes the Pope - serving the Father, "free from selfishness, allows the fruits of sanctification and peace to ripen for the salvation of all".
A path also of personal purification, which makes us participants in the magnanimity of the Lord. «Sowing goodness in others frees us from the narrow logic of a personal gain and gives our actions the broad scope of gratuitousness, inserting us into the wonderful horizon of benevolent divine plans». No one is saved alone, above all, no one is saved without God.
Prayer to Saint Joseph, humble craftsman pg. 58
At the school of the Word, we are therefore called to place our faith and our hope in the Lord.
Even «when faced with the bitter disappointment of so many broken dreams, with the concern for the challenges that loom over us to the point of discouragement due to the poverty of our means», «the temptation to close ourselves in our own individualistic selfishness and take refuge in indifference can arise to the suffering of others." Instead, it is about taking away from ourselves and placing ourselves at the service of the love of God and the community.
To achieve this we must commit ourselves to an itinerary interwoven with reciprocated invitations not to get tired: "to pray so as to eradicate evil from our lives, to do good in active charity towards others".
One of the challenges of this Lent is to «seek, and not ignore, those who wish to hear a good word; in enjoying a visit, for those who suffer from loneliness a bitter page of indifference".
Aware that "good, as well as love, justice and solidarity, cannot be achieved once and for all but must be achieved every day", we therefore ask the Lord for the patient perseverance of the farmer so as not to give up doing good.
It is an appeal of constant relevance, last Sunday, the meeting of the bishops of the dioceses and the mayors whose territories overlook the Mediteremo Sea ended in Florence. It was a meeting planned for some time and unfortunately the clock of history has marked a chasm of mourning, death, destruction and suffering due to a fratricidal war that broke out in Ukraine.
For this reason the Pope has called Ash Wednesday a day today of fasting and prayer. Our thoughts of participation in the hardship go towards all those people who are now in underground shelters and to those who are fleeing".
The Bishops have sent the Christian community, pilgrims in Italy, the invitation to plan our Lent in the name of conversion which means recovering the awareness of the presence of God in our daily lives.
"My soul thirsts for God" a thirst that every person cannot erase from the wall of his soul.
The believer in this Lenten period not only wants to know more than reason can grant him, but wants to know "a little more" to be able to hear the passage of the Almighty who wants to walk together with us like Jesus on the road to Emmaus on Easter evening: illustrating to the two pilgrims the message contained in the events of the resurrection. Jesus, on that occasion, reinvigorated with light those resigned shadows that dragged the two disciples of Emmaus.
Pause for prayer and music
“We thought we were healthy in a sick world.” With these words Pope Francis addressed the world that sad evening of March 27th two years ago, when the pandemic kept us prisoners at home.
A world increasingly sick of selfishness, full of foolishness, of personal, family and community pride which in recent days has been brought up into the trenches of a crazy war. Prayer, today and always, is first of all the welcoming of a benevolent Word of God.
For this reason, in every attempt to connect to Jesus, the prince of peace, we must make room for the Spirit who is within us, and we must be calm like a child in its mother's arms, and we must not entrench ourselves as prisoners of our instinctive and divisive logic.
Lent helps us inoculate ourselves from the temptation to feel like we are masters of the time of our existence.
At last Sunday's festive mass, the Word of God showed us the way to scrutinize life with the same gaze of God which is not limited to a superficial gaze, but to look with benevolence as he looked at creation: «God He looked and saw that everything was very good" (Gen 1,31:XNUMX).
The biblical God is a happy God, who not only sees good, but emanates it, because he has a heart of light and his good eye is like a lamp which spreads light wherever it rests (Mt 6,22). A bad eye, on the other hand, emanates darkness, multiplies specks, spreads love with the heaviness of shadow. To prevent the contagion of good, raise a beam in front of the sun.
Jesus says that there is no good tree that bears bad fruit. Evangelical morality is an ethic of fruitfulness, of good fruits, of sterility overcome.
God does not look for trees without defects, with no branches broken by storm or twisted or damaged by rodents or moths.
The tree fully developed, reached to perfection, is not the one without defects, but the one weighed down by the weight of many fruits, swollen with the colors of the sun and tasty juices.
Thus, on the last day, that of the truth of every heart (Mt 25), the Lord's gaze will not rest on evil but on good; not on clean hands, but on the fruits with which they will be laden, ears of corn and bread, bunches of grapes, of smiles given and tears dried.
The law of life is to give. All this is written in the heart of the trees that grow between earth and sky for decades for themselves, simply to reproduce: for the oak and the chestnut an acorn and a chestnut would be enough a few times over the years, instead every autumn they offer the spectacle of a waste of fruit, a waste of seeds, an excess of harvest, much higher than the need for reproduction. All fruits are at the service of life, of the birds of the sky, of the gods, children of man, and of mother earth. The laws of physical reality and those of the spirit mutually coincide.
Even the person, to feel good, must donate: it is the law of life: the child must donate for the parent, the husband for the wife, the mother for her child, the elderly person with his memories.
Every good man, in fact, brings good out of the treasure of his heart.
We all have a treasure, it is a heart to cultivate like the Garden of Eden; a gift to be spent like bread, to be looked after with care because it is the source of life as the book of proverbs says. So, don't be stingy: give it as the book of Proverbs suggests, also through prayer.
Pause and prayer To you, O blessed Joseph (p. 55) music
Prayer is always a humble exercise of trust and is the only reality that has the strength to change civil and religious history in mysterious ways that escape our calculations. The prayer in which God elaborates his masterpieces made of the intertwining of the blood of humanity and the spirit of heaven.
After so much suffering brought upon us in abundance by an invisible and bad virus, we had hoped to have become better, more humble, more brothers. It would have been, in truth, the only sensible thing to do. The pandemic, taking us away - at least for some time - from that everyday life that we were unable to appreciate and instead managed to make it boring, repetitive, dull.
The danger of the virus has not yet passed, we have fallen into the absurd vortex of the madness of a war.
War. What is war? What were the wars? Who wants wars? Certainly war is the destruction of everything, not only of things, but of people. War tries to suffocate hope. Erasing centuries of thought, reflection, studies, patience, preventing us from seeking and finding the indispensable way of living together without hurting ourselves and making us orphans of beauty and the desire to live. The war manifests an inability to dialogue, an inability to feel like brothers born from a common Christian root which instead should have fertilized life in the name of brotherhood and not of death.
If Christians are unable to live brotherhood at least in spirit, to be traveling companions in this unique and precious adventure that is life. War will always and only be - as Pope Benedict XVI said - for the First World War: a "useless massacre".
Always, every war will land on the shores of a poisoned sea of hatred where "all is lost".
Peace must be pursued, sought, chased, grabbed, held on to like a precious treasure. Peace is the warm cradle of life. We educate ourselves on peace by cultivating all the positive qualities that life gives us.
Prayer In Your Hands (p.56)
The Christian communities, especially in recent days, have been invited to join that group of Florentine people, men and women of ardent spirits from the city of flowers, who in Florence have retraced the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea in the wake of Giorgio la Pira, the saintly mayor for bring the shores of the Mediterranean closer together. Putin, swollen with the memory of a great Russia past, sent tanks into Ukraine, invading the nation and sending women and children fleeing to places beyond the threat of an absurd occupation.
In the memory of La Pira who looked with predilection at Florence, his adopted city, just as the Jewish people looked at Jerusalem, the city of Peace, so the Servant of God Giorgio la Pira dreamed that the Church and the Municipality of Florence would become leaders on the paths of peace .
But while the civil and ecclesial communities met to peacefully plan the future and bring the shores of the Mediterranean closer, Russia lit fires of war in neighboring Ukraine.
War destroys the possibility of coexistence in the present and future. After over 60 years of peace we see a cornerstone of peace in a united Europe in vain.
We must have the courage to ask ourselves «with what courage will we continue to ask children, at their age, not to bully the weakest? Where will we find the strength to fight the abuse of murderous and bloody mafias when an overbearing State can usurp a right using the weapons of violence?
We believers of every religion, more than ever today united globally by the horror of war, all kneeling before the same God, we pray and fast.
We pray ed iwe implore the Father, who is in heaven and in every corner of the earth, to prevent people of any race and condition from ending up under the absurd, frightening and illogical yoke of atomic weapons.
Prayer
Receive, O Lord, all my freedom. Accept my memory, my intelligence and all my will. Everything I am and possess was given to me for you, here I come to put it back into your hands, to leave it entirely at the disposal of your will. Just give me your: love with your grace: I will be rich enough and I won't ask for anything anymore because I know that your love prevents my every need. Amen.
So we will never get tired of asking ourselves what does it mean to pray? It's just uno fallback? Is it only the weapon of the weak, of those who have no voice in society? Have I nothing else to turn to except asking the Almighty to intervene? Who is the man who prays?
Let us enter decisively into the mystery of God's action.
Jesus asked his disciples to pray. And they do it but the invitation is also for us on a personal level.
Jesus promised to lend an ear to their anguished cries. We believe that God's gaze watches over our affairs and we continue to believe it even when the powerful of this world, forgetting the mandate received to govern in peace. They cover their ears, indifferent to the cries of fear of the innocent and imprisoned by pride and economic interests, they no longer listen to the cry of the poor, who are dying, of the innocent children who pay for their madness with their young lives, in order to they exercise their power;
In this pause for community prayer, today marked by fasting and reflection to put out the fires of war, let us ask ourselves: do we really believe that prayer can stop war? Of course yes. We believe in it!
But how and in what way does prayer disarm this murderous madness? We don't know, nor are we interested in knowing the modality; We want to be certain of God's protection over innocent victims, children, the elderly, the sick and vulnerable people, yes we continue to trust God.
The power of love knows infinite paths unknown to us that only Jesus knows.
We love, passionately and confidently.
We love without wasting time measuring the time and words of prayers. We are not afraid of suffering. This suffering promotes us as people.
We love and pray. The Lord, lover of life, will not allow, once again, this unique, precious and unrepeatable life of so many of his poor children to be humiliated, trampled upon and killed by a stupid, absurd and avoidable war.
In the face of the tragedies of war, which demonstrate our fragility, however, a cry of trust and hope comes from Pope Francis who for today has called believers to a day of fasting and prayer.
In difficult moments it is instinctive to turn to God, because only in him can we grasp that infinite resource that allows us to look beyond suffering and fear.
Words still have the power of prophecy. The second part offers suggestive evocations of that ineffable experience which is contemplative silence.
In recent times the pandemic has forced us into a forced silence even in human relationships.
Many times we have listened to the voices of experts who have highlighted how fallible science is, but also listening to the little ones and in particular children and adolescents who have suffered many deprivations due to Covid.
Furthermore, listening to the little ones, to the least, turns out to be particularly precious because it offers us exactly the style of Jesus.
The listening to which we are invited, however, must always be an empathic, participatory listening, which communicates a maximum level of attention towards the other, addressed firsthand every time a brother opens up to us.
In the Bible it is first and foremost God who listens to the cry of his suffering people and moves with compassion. But then listening is the imperative addressed to the believer, which also resonates on the lips of Jesus as the first and greatest of the commandments.
In fact, God often says to his people: "Listen, Israel."
We will find Jesus in prayer many times, especially in the most important moments. In fact, a religious life without prayer is not possible.
Prayer is the center of every relationship with God, it is the soul of every act of devotion. The breath of faith is united with the very breath of God. Praying is breathing with both lungs.
The act of believing and praying are identical. "Faith, in fact, is prayer that listens and prayer is faith that speaks."
It is necessary to convince ourselves that praying is not just talking, asking and knocking, but should first and foremost be listening and making the echo of listening sing in the words of prayer.
It is precisely from this listening that faith is born, which in turn becomes a word of invocation. We should try to ensure that faith and prayer join hands and walk together like twin sisters: tributaries of the one river of divine grace.
The famous book entitled "The Confessions" written by Saint Augustine is a widespread prayer. In this writing the holy bishop Augustine sails in the ocean of his experiences, photographing every moment of his life: the restless search for happiness far from God and the melody of the soul in visiting "the city of God" and "the city of man".
in Confessions it is depicted as "the highest example of how faith and prayer communicate so closely with each other that they are almost inseparable". In fact, Saint Augustine states verbatim: «All my hope is placed in the immense greatness of your mercy. […] O love, which always burns without ever dying out; O God of charity, inflame me."
It has been said of Saint Francis of Assisi: "he was not so much a man who prayed, as he himself had become a prayer".
We can never forget that charity towards others is nothing more than a recharge of spirituality that emerges: in fact, from the feelings cultivated in the soul it passes to the active energy in the hands.
Don Guanella wanted his disciples to be "contemplative in action"; as well as having called his religious men "Servants of Charity". In the coat of arms of his congregation he chose a motto from Saint Augustine: «In omnibus charitas», «In everything charity», because only love towards God generates charity towards others. In this way prayer becomes a womb that fertilizes the desires of the Holy Spirit in the flesh.
Saint Augustine further states that «in prayer the conversion of the heart and purification towards God who is always ready to give» renewed energies take place to satisfy the needs of our suffering neighbors.
Our frenetic society has stolen our interiority, the ability to listen to the soul. We no longer have a space where, as Jesus says: "to gather in secret" to speak and listen to God and thus feel the dew of divine reward descend on us. In our days, television eats up our time and nourishes us with light-heartedness and distracts attention from the values that offer the substance of life.
Today Lent has dull, faded colors and suffers from a spiritual anemia.
Giving an authentic face to prayer means being convinced that «prayer is a living relationship between man and God. Prayer puts man in direct contact with God, in a personal relationship with him.