Question
Dear Father Angelo,
As a believer, I have always been impressed by Jesus’ extraordinary strength in relying on the Father in a situation of total anguish such as the one he was living in the Garden of Olives. Moreover, reading the Diary of Saint Faustina Kowalska, I was particularly struck by this passage:
“What disconcerts and hurts you is your reasoning, your thinking, your trepidation and will to provide by yourself for what afflicts you. I operate so many things when your soul, in its spiritual and material needs, turns to me, looks at me saying ‘MAY YOU TAKE CARE OF IT’, closes its eyes and rests! You get few graces when you become fixated on creating them; on the contrary, you get many of them if you pray fully relying on me[1]”.
These are very important and meaningful words. However, I wonder how a simple human being who feels anguish, fear, despair and anxiety for some reasons and maybe cannot confide in his loved ones, can find that lucidity, strength that makes you say: “Father, may your Will be done, not mine!” or “May you take care of it”. When a man is troubled, he often lacks the strength to address God because the situation causing him distress is so tough that it prevails over him and when this happens, you just live in despair, troubled and restless.
Instead, if he does, it happens exactly what Jesus told Saint Faustina: “You don’t just pray in your pain so that He will remove it; you actually pray Him to remove it the way you like… you address me but you want me to conform to your ideas; you are ill patients who suggest the treatment to the doctor instead of just requesting it. Do not behave like this! Pray as I taught you in the Pater…”.
Everything is right in God’s way of thinking but humanly it is really hard! How can you make it, Father Angelo? I also, for some specific reason, have lived in anguish for a long time. I continuously pray to the Lord begging Him to forgive my weakness and my inability to totally surrender to Him, like He would like me to do. I feel a huge peace descending upon me, especially when I open the Scriptures and read specifically the passage of the Garden. However, after a couple of days, that situation gets back to bothering me a lot. Therefore I think God would be very offended by my attitude, my lack of trust and this discourages me to the point that I end up giving up prayers and totally abandoning myself to sadness and tears. Father Angelo, what shall I do in a similar situation?
How can you leave behind an oppressing burden, a thorny situation that afflicts us?
Hopefully, your answer will provide some assistance not only to me but also to all those brothers and sisters who live in anguish and fear because of situations which surpass themselves and seem not to have a solution on a merely human level.
I send you my regardsI will offer a Hail Mary for you and all of your Order of Preachers.
Answer
Dear friend,
1. The abandonment to God is not acquired with one single act.
It would be too nice.
The Lord certainly infuses us with the theological virtue of Hope. But this alone is not enough.
2. Indeed, Grace does not replace nature, it actually presupposes it.
This means that Hope and trust in God have to be more and more ingrained in our life.
This happens through your good will by rolling up your sleeves and doing all your duties in the right way.
Surrendering to God does not mean to let Him solve our problems because God Himself has given us the intelligence and ability to solve them by ourselves.
Then, while we do our job, He helps us with His Grace.
3. However, there may be situations where our abilities are the lowest or even reduced to nil.
I think specifically of oppressive situations where you can do nothing if not aggravating already strenuous circumstances.
In this particular case we are asked to surrender completely to God in order to get out of it victoriously.
This is what spiritual authors refer to the bliss proclaimed by God: blessed are the poor in spirit.
4. What does it mean to be poor in spirit?
The biblicist F. Prat writes: “The poor man we are talking about is not the indigent, the miserable: the Bible uses other words to indicate misery, as we know it. The poor man in the Bible, especially in Psalms and Prophetic Books, is the helpless man, the victim and the mockery of rulers’ tyranny, the unarmed man who silently accepts his deplorable lot, and turns his gaze only to God and puts his hope only in Him.
And God protects the poor: He is my only shelter, my only support… The words “in spirit” are added by the evangelist or by his Greek translator to indicate these moral dispositions[2]”.
5. One of the first conditions to be poor in spirit does not depend on us because it is the result of misfortunes happening to us: you happen to be helpless, victim and mockery of rulers’ tyranny.
6. What makes us really poor in spirit is the second condition and definitely the most difficult.
Here it is necessary to undertake a big fight against the temptation to complain and confide in our language or in our affairs. We are instead asked to imitate the Lord, who in his Passion remained silent and continuously entrusted His life to His Father’s hands, who in the fullness of His humiliation (the tomb) lifted Him up by resuscitating Him as the Glorious, Immortal King of all ages and Lord of the universe.
7. As I said, this poverty in spirit is not acquired with a single act.
It is acquired through a repetition of acts which are necessary to root and make more and more profound and genuine our trustful abandonment to God, despite all temptations and obstacles.
8. One day the nuns, who were once novices of Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus, were asked what she would say to entertain them.They answered that she would often mention the trust in God, the trustful abandonment to God.
Here are some of her quotes:
“Now nothing but surrendering can guide me, I have no other compass!
I cannot ask anything fervently except for the perfect fulfilment of the Lord’s will on my soul preventing the creatures from putting obstacles[3]”.
9. Also:
Jesus enjoys showing me the only path leading to the divine furnace, that is the abandonment of the child who fearlessly falls asleep into his Father’s arms.
“If you are little. come to me” said the Holy Spirit through Salomon’s mouth and the same Spirit of Love also said “Mercy is granted to the little ones”.
In His name the prophet Isaiah reveals that on His last day “Like a shepherd He will tend His flock, In His arm He will gather the lambs And carry them in the fold of His robe”. As if all these promises were not enough, the same prophet, whose gaze could already plunge into the eternal depths, said in the name of the Lord “you will nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you”.
Oh dear Godmother! After such words you can only keep silent and cry out of recognition and love[4”.
10. I have not belonged to myself for a long time, I totally offered myself to Jesus, He is therefore free to do with me what he wants.
He offered me the attraction for a complete exile, He made me understand all sufferings I would find in it and asked me if I wanted to drain this cup to its dregs; I immediately accepted the cup Jesus presented me but He withdrew His hand and made me understand my acceptance was enough[5]”.
I wish you to reach these peaks of holiness.
I assure you of my prayers and bless you.
Father Angelo
PS: Thanks for reciting a Hail Mary for me and all the Order of Preachers. Keep on doing so. It brings good to us and it is meritorious for you as well!
Translated by Irene Visciano
[1] Translated by the Translator from Diary. Divine Mercy in my soul by Suor Faustina Kowalska.
[2] Translated by the translator from the original work Jesus Christ: His Life, His Teaching, And His Work by FERDINAND PRAT, Volume 1.
[3] Translated by the translator from Sory of a Soul 235.
[4] Ibid. 243.
[5] Ibid. 286.
