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Question

Dear Father Angelo,

I am a 16-year-old girl and I have been following a path of faith for about eight years.

I have never lost my faith, I have always been proud and grateful for it.

This has been a very difficult year.

I state that I had health problems that have weakened me, creating problems at home and at school.

At school I was made fun of all year, because I was the only Catholic Christian, and this caused me a lot of pain as I thought “Faith is the best thing in my life, why does it hurt so much though?”.

I fought for a whole year and kept quiet.

Do you think I did well? Do you think I should have reacted differently? How can I react with external people in the future?

I know I’m still young, I was with a guy for about a year and a half, after which we broke up.

He is still a fixed idea and I try to forget him every day.

Unfortunately, it is difficult and tiring for me.

Some advice?

Thanks for everything.

I pray for you.

E.C.D

Answer

Dear daughter,

Only today did I get to the email you sent me last July.

I apologize.

1. I am happy for the faith that accompanies you.

Faith is a supernatural light that illuminates everything.

Above all it is a presence that is felt beside, indeed, inside.

It is a presence that satiates the heart.

2. This presence is not just a state of mind that gives a certain basic satisfaction, but it is a Person with whom you live in perennial communion.

He is a Person who speaks to you through all things and all people.

It is a Person with whom you stay, with whom you are in company.

It is a Person with whom you talk and converse.

Above all, he is a Person who fills your heart with his presence. He is a Person who gives himself to you and to whom you give yourself.

For us Christians this person is God who dwells in our hearts with the face of Jesus Christ, who is the invisible God who made himself visible to show us his love.

3. There is nothing more lovable than this presence and this Person.

He never gives  bitterness.

On the contrary, his presence is sweet, penetrating. It makes everything bright.

It never annoys or is intrusive.

If it is not felt, it is wanted, it is invoked.

Without this presence one feels empty and lost, at the mercy of chance.

4. Those who do not have faith in Jesus Christ and especially those who do not live in the grace of God, do not know what those who believe in Jesus, love him and follow him feel.

They only grasp the outside and seeing a certain fidelity and consistency in some practices, they easily confuse it with fanaticism or some mental illness.

5. This was what André Frossard’s family had thought. They had brought up their son in the most rigid atheism.

When he suddenly felt God breaking into his heart and changed his life by becoming a fervent Christian, his parents took that change as a symptom of an inner disease.

They put a psychologist after him so that he could tell them what illness their son had been affected by.

Except that after some time that psychologist said to the parents: your child is fine, he is calm, he has no inner discomfort. There is only this: what you call disease, Christians call it grace.

André Frossard wrote about his experience in a book that sold like hotcakes in the late 1970s. The title is God exists: I have met him.

6. That young man had found in Christ the treasure hidden in the field. He had taken possession of that treasure. He felt inwardly satisfied.

And precisely those who did not even know about this treasure and who lived as beggars for a few crumbs of happiness in the search for the pleasures or successes of life, precisely those who had grown up in the inner emptiness mistaken for a disease the presence of He who gives full satiety, inner peace, joy and enthusiasm.

7. Something like that has been manifested by your classmates towards you.

They mistook for sickness, even if they may not have used that word, the dearest and most precious thing in your life.

One day, when they too will be touched by grace (we wish it and pray for it to happen as soon as possible) they will open their eyes.

They will understand that they were blind when they thought they saw, that they were empty when they thought they were full, that they were poor and miserable while they thought they were smart and crafty.

8. Christians are subjected to persecution because their persecutors did not know the Lord of glory (1 Cor 2: 8).

If they knew him, they would understand that it is worth living just to seek him, to love him, to enjoy his friendship and his company.

9. In the meantime they crucified you, but they failed to deprive you of your treasure which, unbeknownst to them, is also their treasure.

By the presence of Christ in you they are freed from many evils.

How much can a soul in grace do merely by being present!

Such a soul brings along Jesus Christ, who is the source of all good, and Our Lady, for whom God from the beginning has established a perfect enmity with our adversary.

Saint Therese of Lisieux remembered a dream she had had and which had helped her to understand how “a soul in the state of grace need never be afraid of the devil, who is such a coward that even the gaze of a child will frighten him away” (Story of a soul, 38).

Be sure: your presence among them drives out many demons.

10. In the meantime, I also like to remind you that the sorrows you felt for the mockery and the taunts attracted abundant grace and increased your treasure for the future life.

The Lord also says to you at this moment: “It is you who have stood by me in my trials; and I confer a kingdom on you, just as my Father has conferred one on me, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom; and you will sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Lk 22: 28-30).

The advice I give you is to persevere with Jesus in his trials, because before they are yours, those trials belong to him.

It is for him that you suffer them.

From inside your heart keep saying to the Lord: “For it is on your account I bear insult, that disgrace covers my face” (Ps 69,8).

Love for Jesus will be your strength in everything, even in the deprivation of the boy you counted on for your life.

For my part, I gladly remind you to the Lord and I bless you.

Father Angelo

Translated by Chiara P.