taken from Life in the Spirit, reflections, meditations, prayers
often you see small and big wires, new and old..they alone are useless and until the current passes through them there will be on light. the wire is you and me. the current is god. we have the power to let the current pass through us and use us to produce the light of the world or we can refuse to be used and allow the darkness to spread. ..put your heart into being a bright light..we find Jesus the Word incarnate, is like a living flame; the drier the fuel, the brighter it burns-that is our hearts must be separated from earthly motives and united to the will of God
today, once more when Jesus comes amongst His own, His own don't know Him! He comes in the rotten bodies of our poor: He comes even in the rich choked by their own riches. He comes in the loneliness of their hearts and when there is no one to love them. Jesus comes to you and me and often, very, very often, we pass Him by.
after working many years among the dying, the sick, the crippled, the handicapped and mentally deficient men, women and children, i have come to the understanding of what Jesus felt when He came amongst His own and they didn't want Him.
today Christ is in people who are unwanted, unemployed, uncared for, hungry, naked and homeless. they seem useless to the state or to society and nobody has time for them. it is you and i as christians, worthy of the love of Christ if our love is true, who must find them and help them. they are there for the finding.
everywhere we find lonely people who are at times only known by the number of their room. where are we? do we really know that these persons exist at all? maybe next door to us there is a blind man who would be happy if we would be ready to read the newspaper for him; maybe there is a rich person who has no one to visit him. he has plenty of things, he is really drowned in them but there is no human touch and he needs that touch.
some time back a very rich man came and told me: 'this i give you for somebody to come to my house. i am nearly half blind, my wife is nearly mental, our children have all gone abroad and we are dying of loneliness'.
they are people longing for the loving sound of a human voice.
these are people that we must know. this is Jesus yesterday and today and tomorrow that you and i must know who they are. that knowledge will lead us to love them and love to be of service to them. let us not be satisfied with just giving money. money is not enough. they need our hands to serve them, they need our hearts to love them. the religion of Christ is love, the spreading of love and to be able to love we must pray.
don't search for God in far lands-He is not there. He is close to you...watch and pray. keep kindling the lamp and you will see His love and you will see how sweet is the Lord you love.
God has identified Himself with the hungry, the sick, the naked, the homeless; hunger not for bread, but for love, for care, to be somebody to someone; nakedness, not of clothing only, but nakedness of that compassion that very few people give to the unknown; homelessness, not only just for a shelter made of stone but that homelessness that comes from having no one to call your own.
...the spiritual poverty of the western world is much greater than the physical poverty of our people. you in the west have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness. they feel unloved and unwanted.
these people are not hungry in the physical sense but they are in another way. they know they need something more than money, yet they don't know what it is. what they are missing really is a living relationship with God.
today, the poor are hungry for bread and rice-and for love and the living word of god.
the poor are thirsty-for water and for peace, truth and justice.
the poor are homeless0for a shelter made of bricks and for a joyful heart that understands, covers, loves.
the poor are naked-for clothes, for human dignity and compassion for the naked sinner.
they are sick-for medical car and for that gentle touch and a warm smile.
the 'shut-in', the unwanted, the unloved, the alcoholics, the dying destitutes, the abandoned and the lonely, the outcasts and the untouchables, the leprosy sufferers-all those who are a burden to human society-who have forgotten how to smile-who have lost the sensibility or the warm hand-touch of love and friendship- they look to us for comfort. if we turn our back on them, we turn it on Christ and at the hour of our death we shall be judged if we have recognized Christ in them and on what we have done for and to them. there will only be two ways, 'come' or 'go'.
therefore, i appeal to every one of you-poor and rich, young and old -to give your own hands to serve Christ in His poor and your hearts to love Him in them...
it is not possible to engage in the direct apostolate (an organization of the laity devoted to the mission of the roman catholic church) without being a soul at prayer. we must be aware of oneness with Christ, as He was aware of oneness with His Father. our activity is truly apostolic only in so far as we permit Him to work in us and through us, with His power, with His desire, with His love. we must e holy, not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live His life fully in us. we are to be all love, all faith, all purity, for the sake of the poor we serve and once we have learned to seek god ad His will, our contact with the poor will become the means of greater sanctity to ourselves and to others.
love to pray-feel the need to pray often during the day and take the trouble to pray. if you want to pray better, you must pray more. prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable to containing God's gift of Himself. ask and seek and your heart will grow big enough to receive Him and keep Him as your own.
pray-pray for grace, pray that you may understand how Jesus has loved you so that you may love others, and pray for us that we may not spoil God's work.
prayer to be fruitful must come from the heart and must be able to touch the heart of god. see how Jesus taught His disciples to pray. call god your Father, praise and glorify His name. do His will, ask for daily bread, spiritual and temporal, ask for forgiveness of your own sins and that we may forgive others-and also for the grace to be delivered form evil with is in us and around us.
if we really want to pry we must first learn to listen, for in the silence of the heart God speaks. and to be able to see that silence, to be able to hear God, we need a clean heart, for a clean heart can see god, can hear god, can listen to God.
when it is difficult to pray we must help ourselves to do so. the first means to use is silence, for souls of prayer are souls of great silence. we cannot put ourselves directly in the presence of God if we do not practise internal and external silence.
God is the friend of silence.
let us adore Jesus in our hearts, who spent thirty years out of thirty three in silence, who began his public life by spending forty days in silence, who often retired alone to spend the night on a mountain in silence. he who spoke with authority, now spends his earthy life in silence...
we need to find god and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. see how nature, the trees, the flowers, the grass grow in perfect silence-see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. is not our mission to give God to the poor in the slums? not a dead God but a living, loving God. the more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life.
silence gives us a new outlook on everything. we need silence to be able to touch souls. the essential thing is not what we say but what God says to us and through us. Jesus is always waiting for us in silence. in that silence He will listen to us, there He will speak to our soul and there we will hear His voice. interior silence is very difficult but we must make the effort. in silence we will find new energy and true unity. the energy of god will be ours to do all things well. the unity of our thoughts with his thoughts, the unity of our actions with His actions, of our life with His life. all our words will be useless, unless they come from within-words which do not give the light of Christ increase they darkness...
..give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness.
st. augustine says: 'fill yourselves first and then only will you be able to give to others'...
..the life of the soul is the life of Jesus Christ Himself. Jesus with the Father and the Holy Spirit is the efficient cause of sanctifying grace in our souls...
i kept the Lord ever before my eyes because He is ever at my right hand that i may not slip' says the psalmist. god is within me with a more intimate presence than that whereby i am in myself: in Him we live and move and have our being...
the true interior life makes the active life burn forth and consume everything. it makes us find Jesus in the dark holes of the slums in the most pitiful miseries of the poor-the god-man naked on the cross.
thoughtfulness is the beginning of great sanctity. if you learn this art of being thoughtful, you will become more and more Christlike, for His hear was meek and he always thought of the needs of others-our lives to be beautiful must be full of thought for others. Jesus went about doing good....
the quickest and the surest way is the 'tongue'-use it for the good of others. if you think well of others, you will also speak well of others and to others. from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. if your heart is full of love, you will speak of love...
..we must all fill our hearts with great love. don't imagine that love, to be true and burning, must be extraordinary. No-what we need in our love is the continuity to love the One who loved the world so much He gave His Son. God is still love, He is still loving the world. today God loves the world so much that He gives you and He gives me to love the world, to be His love and compassion...
..in one of the places in melbourne i visited an old man and nobody ever knew that he existed. i saw his room in a terrible state and i wanted to clean his house and he kept on saying: 'i'm all right!' but i repeated the same words: 'you will be more all right if you will allow me to clean your place', and in the end he allowed me. there in that room there was a beautiful lamp covered with the dirt of many years and i asked him, 'why do you not light your lamp?' then i asked him, 'will you light the lamp if the sisters come to see you?' and the other day he sent me word: 'tell my friend the light she has lit in my life is still burning'.
simple acts of love and care keep the light of Christ burning...
we can do not great things-only small things with great love. the sisters are doing small things: helping the children, visiting the lonely, the sick the unwanted. in one of the houses the sisters visit a woman living alone who was dead many days before she was found-and she was found because her body had begun to decompose. the people around her did not even know her name.
when someone told me that the sisters had not started any big work, that they were quietly doing small things, i said that even if they helped one person, that was enough. Jesus would have died for one person, for one sinner.
you can do what i can't do. i can do what you can't do. together we can do something beautiful for god.
let no one glory in their success but refer all to god in deepest thankfulness; on the other hand no failure should dishearten them as long as they have done their est. God sees only our love. God will not ask how many books we have read, how many miracles we have worked, but whether we have done our best for the love of Him. have we played well? slept well? eaten well? nothing is mall for god because He is almighty and therefore each one of our actions done with and for and through Jesus Christ is a great success.
it is beautiful to see the humility of Christ. this humility can be seen in the crib, in the exile in egypt, in the hidden life, in the inability to make people understand Him, in the desertion of His apostles, in the hatred of the jews and all the terrible sufferings and death of His passion and now in His permanent state of humility (Teresa says here that Christ has reduced Himself to a small particle of bread that the priest can hold between two fingers...i say, in His constant intercession...the groaning of the Spirit of God unutterable, unintelligible by man! and Jesus, beheld as a lamb standing as if slain...for me who often despises and forsakes Him..hide my face from and do often do not esteem Him for who He is...joined in this by countless other of His creatures.) the more we empty ourselves, the more room we give God to fill us. let there be no pride nor vanity in the work. the work is God's work; the poor are God's poor. work for Jesus and Jesus will work for you, pray with Jesus and Jesus will pray through you. the more you forget yourself, the more Jesus will think of you. the more you detach yourself from self, the more attached Jesus is to you.
do not think it is a wast of time to feed the hungry, to visit and take care of the sick and the dying, to open and receive the unwanted and the homeless, for this is our love of Christ in action. we must not drift away from the humble works, because these are the works nobody will do. it is never too small. we are so small we look at things in a small way. but God, being Almighty, sees everything great. therefore, even if you write a letter for a blind man or you just go and sit and listen or you take the mail for him or you visit somebody or bring a flower to somebody-small things- or wash clothes for somebody or clean the house. very humble work that is where you and i must be. for there are many people who can do big things. but there are very few people who will do the small things.
there may be times when we appear to be wasting our precious life and burying our talents. our lives are utterly wasted if we use only the light of reason. our life has no meaning unless we look at Christ in His poverty....
knowledge of God gives love and knowledge of self gives humility. humility is nothing but truth. what have we got that we have not received?..if i have received everything, what good have i of my own? if we are convinced of this we will never raise our head in pride. if you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are. if you are blamed you will not be discouraged. if they call you a saint you will not put yourself on a pedestal.
self knowledge puts us on our knees.
the poorest of the poor are free, happy and without the aggression of those who aspire or can aspire to many things. the poor of the third world can teach us contentment. that is something that the west does not have much of. i'll give you an example of what happened to me recently. i went out with my sisters in calcutta to seek out the sick and dying. we picked up about forty people that day. one woman, covered in a dirty cloth, was very ill and i could see it. so i just held her hand and tried to comfort her. she smiled weakly at me and said, 'thank you'. then she died. she was more concerned to give to me than to receive from me. i put myself in her place and i thought what i would have done. i am sure i would have said: 'i am dying, i am hungry, call a doctor call a Father, call somebody'. but what she did was so beautiful. that woman was more concerned with me than i was with her.
it is not a sin to be rich. there must be a reason why some people can afford to live well. thy must have worked for it. but i tell you this provokes avarice and there comes sin. richness is given by God and it is our duty to divide it with those less favoured.
some time ago, a hindu gentleman was asked: 'what is a christian?' and he gave a very simple and a very strange answer: 'a christian is giving'. and right from the beginning we find that it is really just giving. God loved the world so much that He gave His Son-the first great giving. being rich He became poor for you and me. He gave Himself totally. but that was not enough. he wanted to give something more-to give us the chance to give to Him. so He made himself the hungry one, the naked one so that we could give to Him.
let us not be satisfied with just giving money; money is not enough for money one can get. the poor need our hands to serve them, they need our hearts to love them. let us give, not from our abundance but until it hurts. let us make ourselves poor for Him.
the very poor do not need words but actions and i cannot analyse systems, economic patterns and ideologies. i recognize that each person has a conscience and must respond to its calling. mine is this. so many times i have been told that i must not offer fishes to men but rods so that they can fish for themselves. Ah! my God! so often they do not have the strength to hold the rods. giving them fish i help them to recover the strength necessary for the fishing of tomorrow. there are in the world those who struggle for justice and for human rights and who try to change structures. we are not inattentive to this but our daily contact is with men who do not even have a piece of bread to eat. our mission is to look at the problem more individually and not collectively we care for a person and not a multitude. we seek the person with whom Jesus Christ identified Himself when He said, 'I was hungry, I was sick'.
to know the problem of poverty intellectually is not to understand it. it is not by reading, taking a walk in the slums, admiring and regretting that we come to understand it and to discover what it has of bad and good. we have to dive into it, live it, share it.
wherever there are two, they are not without God, and where there is one alone, i say i am with him. raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there i am. let not him who seeks cease until he finds and when he finds he shall be astonished. astonished he shall reach the kingdom and having reached the kingdom, he shall rest. the oxyrhynchus sayings of Jesus
for all kinds of diseases there are medicines and cures, but for being unwanted, except where there are willing hands to serve and there's a loving heart to love, i don't think this terrible disease can ever be cured.
...each time Jesus wanted to prove His love for us, He was rejected by mankind. before His birth, His parents asked for a simple dwelling place and there was none. at christmas Christ comes like a little child, so small, so helpless, so much in need of all that love can give. are we ready to receive Him?
if mary and joseph were looking for a place to make a home for Jesus, would they choose our house and all that it holds and is filed with?
today there is so much trouble in the world and i think that much of it begins at home. the world is suffering so much because there is no peace. there is no peace because there is no peace in the family and we have so many thousands and thousands of broken homes. we must make our homes centers of compassion and forgive endlessly and so bring peace.
make your house, your family another nazareth where love, peace, joy and unity reign, for love begins at home. you must start there and make your home the centre of burning love. you must be the hope of eternal happiness to your wife, your husband, your child, to your grandfather, grandmother, to whoever is connected with you.
do you know the poor of your own home first? maybe in your home there is somebody who is feeling very lonely, very unwanted, very handicapped. maybe your husband, your wife, your child is lonely. do you know that? where are the old people today? they are put into institutions. why? because they are unwanted, they are a burden. i remember some time ago i visited a very wonderful home for old people. there were about forty there and they had everything, but they were all looking towards the door. there was not a smile on their faces and i asked the sister in charge of them: 'sister, why are these people not smiling? why are they looking towards the door? and she, very beautifully, had to answer and give the truth: 'it's the same every day. they are longing for someone to come and visit them' this is great poverty.
i remember also, once i picked up a woman from a dustbin and i knew she was dying. i took her out and took her to the convent. she kept on repeating the same words: 'my son did this to me'. not once did she utter the words: 'i'm hungry, 'i'm dying, 'i'm suffering. she just kept on repeating: 'my son did this to me'. it took me a long time to help her to say: 'i forgive my son', before she died.
the home is where the mother is. once i picked up a child and took him to our children's home, ave him a bath, clean clothes. everything, but after a day the child ran away. he was found again by somebody else but again he ran away. then i said to the sisters: 'please follow that child. one of you stay with him and see where he goes when he runs away'. and the child ran away a third time. there under a tree was the mother. she had put two stones under a small earthenware vessel and was cooking something that she had picked up from the dustbins. the Sister asked the child: 'why did you run away from the home?' and the child said: 'but this is my home because this is where my mother is'.
mother was there. that was home. that the food was taken from the dustbins was all right because mother had cooked it. it was mother that hugged the child, mother who wanted the child and the child had its mother. between a wife and a husband it is the same.
smile at one another. it is not always easy. sometimes i find it hard to smile at my sisters but then we must pray. prayer begins at home and a family that prays together, stays together. we must give Jesus a home in our homes for only then can we give Him to others.
today we have no time even to look at each other, to talk to each other, to enjoy each other, and still less to be what our children expect from us, what the husband expects from the wife, what the wife expects from the husband. and so less and less we are in touch with each other. the world is lost for want of sweetness and kindness. people are starving for love because everybody is in such a great rush.
christian unity is very important because christians stand as a light for the world. if we are christian we must be christlike. ghandhi once said that if christians lived their christian life to the full there would be no hindus left in india. that is what people expect of us, that we live our christian life to the full.
the first christians died for Jesus and they were recognized because they loved one another, and the world has never needed more love than today.
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