Listen, now!
Dear listeners,
as always, a special greeting to sick people, suffering in body and spirit. We have always known that not all illnesses are curable, but all illnesses are curable and this spiritual meeting of ours is intended to be a medicine to cure the disease of loneliness, discouragement and distrust. These are the heaviest illnesses that no medicine other than company and tender love can heal.
For just over a year, Pope Francis has given us the wonderful gift of having the name of Saint Joseph mentioned alongside that of Mary in all Eucharistic celebrations. It's an extra lifeboat for our lonely shipwrecks.
Every day, throughout the world, in all the ecclesial communities where the Eucharist is celebrated, the fate of the Church and our personal intentions are entrusted to the paternal hands of Saint Joseph.
This evening, we too approach this source of grace with great trust and place our prayers at the heart of this hour of spirituality and prayers.
Ideally we want to entrust to the sturdy arms of Saint Joseph all the children of the world, with particular attention to your children, grandchildren, the children who attend the "grest" in the weekday oratories of the parishes throughout Italy and let us not forget, on the contrary, them we hold close to our chests the children suffering from physical and moral illnesses, caused by parental separation, abandonment, violence suffered and bathed in tears shed in the silence of solitude.
Our prayer wants to be, as always, the breath of the world: that is, to breathe the reasons for joy for happy events and to shoulder the suffering, hardships and tears of the world's poor. In particular we want to entrust to Saint Joseph the world of youth, young people looking for work, those who are taking their final exams, but also young people on holiday.
To Saint Joseph, patron of the universal church, we also entrust the protection of our brothers and sisters persecuted because of their faith in Jesus in many parts of the world.
Thomas Merton wrote that "No man is an island", and above all our prayer is never a solitary island, but is always populated with faces, affections, tears and smiles.
For this reason, I who speak to you, when I start to pray, after having asked God for light and strength, and sometimes, we repeat distractedly: «O God, come save me. Lord, come quickly to my aid", I ask myself whether I enter into prayer alone with my problems, my anxieties, my projects or I place myself in the company of Jesus to dialogue with him about my problems, my anxieties, my projects, my contradictions and the difficulties of my brothers and sisters.
Our prayer should always share the compassion of Jesus, his desire to participate, to "suffer together", to have "compassion" before the tired and disheartened crowds, and, thus, concretely manifest his desire to participate in raising our a somewhat anemic life, swaddled by tiredness and, sometimes by boredom, in enduring this hard job of human life.
Our life also wants to be lived in company.
The little house in Nazareth was not a bunker, but an open house. Giuseppe was a man of relationships both for his work as a carpenter and for his religious and human sensitivity.
Being in relationship with others is a need rooted in the human soul. Man is not only an intelligent being, which he knows, a person who lives on emotions.
On the page of creation, narrated by the book of Genesis, the Creator invites Adam to give a name to all the reality that surrounds him. Having finished the review of the animal world, the Creator, almost in a whisper, reflects and says: "It is not good for man to be alone."
Man needs both food for the stomach and a relationship of friendship and love.
With this need for friendship and love man approaches the very source of life. God did not create the world to populate it with solitude, but to fill it with joy and friendship. «It is not good for man to be alone, because he needs a mirror in which to compare himself and so he created woman from the same flesh as Adam».