It is with real pleasure that I can enter and extend my cordial greetings to the listeners of Radio Mater who have allowed me to enter the house and share with me this time of prayer, reflection and spirituality in honor of Saint Joseph. The house of Nazareth is an obligatory stop on our journey to discover the face of God.
Depriving ourselves of the breath that weaved the affectionate relationship between Joseph and Mary, between Joseph and Jesus and condemning ourselves not to understand the depth of the affection that Jesus experiences in his earthly life from the Father, the Creator of the universe.
Jesus first in Nazareth, and then in his public life, did not limit himself to describing in words a model to imitate, but with his baptism Jesus was grafted into the depths of our fibers and the energy of his own life as a risen man opens constantly new horizons and gives rise to the desire to be able to realize them not through our skill but our willingness to let ourselves be shaped by his own life.
I like to feel in the hands of Jesus like a docile clay in his hands that shapes my feelings more and more similar to his.
So let's begin this moment of spirituality by invoking the light of the Spirit to soften our resistance.
Prayer Day of Resurrection
Our prayer and our praise to God today crosses the many Italian regions brought to their knees by the irrepressible powers of nature.
Prayer is an act of love. The Florentine poet Mario Luzzi wrote that prayer as an invocation is not only in man, «but in everything that is present in the world, a breath, an aspiration, prayer, in fact, begins where poetry ends, when word is no longer useful and another language is needed."
The manner is drawn as an upward question. It is the question that is addressed to God and prayer has this function: to question God and ask that he illuminate every cell of our life to be an adequate response to the gift received.
Let us not forget that Jesus used living nature: a field of blonde wheat, the vine, the fig tree. The age-old tradition of a trunk that produces novelty every spring and tells us that novelty arises from tradition. Nature becomes a constant source of vitality from which we can extract secret teachings.
In recent days the news was flooded with tears of people crying for young lives cut short by the unforeseeable.
Hidden by tears, even painful events can be transformed into therapies to support the evils of human life.
In recent days on Avvenire, in the column edited at this time by the journalist Marina Corradi, I read a quote from one of the most touching and moving pages written by Alessandro Manzoni in The Betrothed.
«A woman came down from the threshold of one of those doors and was coming towards the convoy...»,
We are in the period of 1600 when the plague was killing human lives in Milan. «She was carrying a dead girl of perhaps nine years old; but she was all well arranged, with her hair parted on her forehead, with a very white dress, as if those hands of hers had adorned her for a party promised for a long time, and given as a reward. Nor did she keep her lying, but supported, sitting on one of her arms, with his chest resting on her chest, as if she had been alive; except that a little white hand, like wax, dangled on one side of her, with a certain inanimate gravity, and her head rested on her mother's shoulder, with an abandonment stronger than sleep."
And when, in the end, the Manzonian mother urged the monatto to return in the evening to pick up her and her other daughter.
It is a page from which transpires courage, nobility of feelings of a mother who delivers her creatures, almost in advance, so that they can confidently await her arrival to continue life in another world, the definitive and eternal one.
This image brought back to my mind Psalm 130, a psalm in which the tenderness of the mother and the charm of the little son who, although weaned, is wrapped in the warmth of his mother's arms is sung.
The psalm says: "My soul is relaxed and calm: like a weaned child in its mother's arms, my soul is within me like a weaned child."
It has been written that "this psalm of trust - little known and used - is a wonderful, intimate and delicate poem of clear religiosity and deserves to be considered among the most beautiful psalms".
Commenting on this psalm, Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity wrote: «God has placed in my heart an infinite thirst and a great need to love that only he can satisfy. So I go to him, as the child goes to his mother, so that God fills me and invades me completely and takes me into his arms. We need to be simple like this with the good Lord."
This is a comment from a mystic, but there is also a person very involved in social work who held high institutional positions and who wanted to possess and cultivate these feelings, where he wrote: «Do not let my heart be proud, Lord. I don't want to be a millionaire, nor a leader, nor a prime minister. I don't aspire to public office, nor do I run after honors, I have no property, no checkbooks and I live without life insurance, however, I am completely safe. Like a baby sleeping in its mother's arms."
In this psalm the adjective "weaned" is important; in ancient times children were breastfed until they were two or three years old; for the child, weaning was a painful stage in his life.
At that stage the child had to resign himself, he had to understand that his mother continued to love him as before.
Now he had to feel calm and serene because his mother continues to love him and wants him to grow, progress and nourish himself with solid foods that he himself must put in his mouth.
These maternal arms, which envelop him, want him to begin to have a physical relationship with his mother in a different way: now he must begin to love her as a person and not just as a source of food and physical well-being.
With this detachment, even if painful, the child begins to have a relationship of authentic love which will serve him in the future in his relationship of faith also towards God.
Just as the child must be aware and sure of his mother's love, so the Christian must be sure of God's love, a love that invites us to move on to an ever deeper, more authentic and disinterested way of loving.
Now let's pray with this beautiful prayer:
O Mary, Mother of God, preserve for me a child's heart, pure and clear like spring water. Obtain for me a simple heart, which does not taste sadness; a heart big in giving of itself and tender in compassion; a faithful and generous heart that does not forget any benefit and does not hold a grudge for evil.
Form in me a sweet and humble heart, a big and indomitable heart that no ingratitude can close and no indifference can tire; a heart tormented by the glory of Jesus Christ, wounded by his love with a wound
that you do not heal except in Heaven. Amen.
Musical break
After having navigated in a soft climate of tenderness, we now also remember a way of affections deposited as capital in the future. In recent days we have pilgrimaged in the cathedrals of hope which are cemeteries. I like to imagine the cemetery as a fertile womb of luminous dawns, of skies open to light and of constantly renewed realities.
The pilgrimage to the cemeteries is a courtesy visit where our relatives await the call to new life. Visiting our dearly departed is like navigating the rivers of the past, whose banks are populated with familiar faces, fragments of a story with which we have built our lives.
These visits echo the memory and joy of the grandparents' compliance with our wishes as grandchildren, who in their eyes were enthusiastic bearers of the flag of the future.
In the panorama of memories stand out uncles, childhood companions and, for many of us elderly people, the unforgettable faces of fathers and mothers.
On those paths, festively covered with the colors of fresh flowers, memories emerge bathed in tears, sacrifices, hardships, but also smiles illuminated by gratitude to God, the giver of life for the joy of living.
Immortalized in the photos, yellowed by time, the eyes of relatives and acquaintances accompany us in our slow pilgrimage down the lane of memories. Those eyes are already enjoying the luminous embrace of that God who, having to create the world, first of all, created light as the cradle of that cosmic reality that He dreamed of.
In our pilgrimage, our steps had in our hearts and flourished on our lips prayer as a bond of communion, it should make the words of the apostle Paul echo in our soul, when he writes that "none of us lives for himself", but we are all cells of a living organism that feels the heartbeat of the risen Christ pulsating through life. Those who preceded us on the path of life did not live alongside us by chance, but formed irreplaceable links in the passing of the years.
Every human existence is always a gift, a thread summoned to weave a network of relationships as a mutual gift.
All evangelical grammar, in fact, is nothing other than an invitation to write luminous pages for a story that becomes the salvation and joy of a life built and lived together.
This journey along the paths of hope is also an examination of conscience, a journey through the basement of memory to remember pardons given and received, the alternation of coalitions with evil and the battles against evil to help grow the joyful dawn of peace . In the first week of November we can enjoy a positive image of the Church on its way towards the cathedrals of hope, which are the cemeteries. The Church concretely is the people of God on a journey, in a great communion. The sky inhabited by the saints and by our brothers and sisters unites in a chorus of prayers where the saints of heaven pray for us and our deceased enjoy our prayer.
In the cemetery, the shrine in which with faith we have placed a seed pregnant with immortality, our deceased rest awaiting the universal spring, when Christ, obeying the saving will of the Father, will call to a new flowering the life that will not know the autumn season , but will live in constant spring novelty. We all want to hope in prayer in solidarity with each other that the power of the Holy Spirit will give us in this month of November, which has just begun, a supplement of spiritual light and warmth that we constantly need to continue with a light but constant step. , towards the place of bliss and peace.
Prayer and musical break
It is never pleasant and attractive to talk about death, in fact, it seems that thinking about death is of no use until you find out about the death of someone you love.
Death is a sacred theme, it is a category of thought that serves to give an answer to a mystery. Our society, bent on the concreteness of life, on health, on earnings, on personal success and on the culture of one's image, has put the thought of death under lock and key.
Some time ago our Pious Union of the Transit of Saint Joseph organized a conference to try to offer an answer to the drama of death. Among the speakers at the conference there was also the psychiatrist Vittorino Andreoli, who, as a doctor, said he was fascinated by the theories that make human civilization begin from the first funeral and, humanly, the professor regretted our modern society which has expelled the idea of death and even the experience of dying.
Today's man forgets the past as if it did not help modern society, which is so accelerated, not understand the future, because everything happens in the present, in the fleeting moment. He lives in a "hit and run" society, where there is no time to meditate, to think about the final goal and there is not even time to dedicate to those who die.
«It is a society of emotions that live for a moment» and are incapable of building solid feelings capable of lasting relationships.
An ancient thinker that we find in school books, the philosopher Plato, taught that "those who love wisdom correctly study death constantly".
Another thinker of our times wrote that «What distinguishes man from all the living beings that nature has produced is the fact that he buries his dead and dedicates his feelings, thoughts, forms and to the grave. the images of his art".
Don Guanella, called "the father of the poor" for having helped so many people in poverty during his life, before dying wanted to create a choir of people of good will who, at least with prayer and through the intercession of Saint Joseph, would fill courage and faith the passage from the earthly shore to that of eternity. And he created The Pious Union of the Transit of Saint Joseph, from which I speak to you.
This association, spread across the five continents, has hundreds of thousands of members already in heaven and hundreds of thousands of members who every day pledge to invoke Saint Joseph's help and protection for the sick and dying. It is truly a multitude of people who form a "crusade" in the sense of bringing together prayers from different origins, from the four cardinal points and thus involving Saint Joseph in being next to the dying as he had the consolation of having next to him at moment of death be his bride, Mary, and his "adopted" son Jesus who accompanied him from an earthly home to the house of the kingdom.