May 2014 - God’s Will

This letter is explored in depth in the meetings promoted by the Institute of the Sisters of Beautiful Love and its Cenacles, as well as elsewhere.

 Meditation proposed by the Mother as the Point of Light for the month of May 2014.

Palermo, 3 May 2014

Dearest brothers and sisters,

let us resume our journey of exploring the themes of the first cycle of the “way of Love,” focusing in this Point of Light on “God’s will,” to be fulfilled fully and solemnly in every present moment of our life.

The words of Saint Thérèse: “You know, my God, that to love you on earth I have only today!”1 let them be the slogan to remember and keep in our hearts this month, or perhaps we can put it this way: “You know, Jesus, that to love you I have only this present moment.”

Let us live, then, God’s will here and now, let us do what we have to do with love.

Let us live the present moment.

Blessing you from the heart, in Jesus and Mary

your Sr. Nunziella Scopelliti

God’s Will

Choosing Love Means Loving

At the moment when we freely choose that very personal Love who is God, we intend thereby to attune our whole person - heart, soul, strength - to the Holy Spirit. In this way we love with our humanity, allowing divine charity to express itself, in time and space, with the unmistakable note of our personality and our very temperament. God does not mortify the creature he himself has fashioned, but empowers it, freeing it from limits and frailty.

Entrusting ourselves to Love, then, makes us experience the expansion of the heart, interior freedom, the effectiveness and power of meekness in our relationships with others. “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land” (Mt 5:5).

 

To Love Is God’s Will

God’s will is a will of love: God and his will are one and the same; they are Love.

When we want God’s will, we cannot want anything other than Love.

Jesus himself sums up in the two commandments of the love of God and neighbor the whole of God’s will expressed in the Old Testament: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments” (Mt 22:37, 39-40).

Jesus did not come “to abolish the law or the prophets... but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17), arriving at the wondrous synthesis of the new commandment: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13:34). He himself teaches us to pray to the Father, asking that his will be done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). Just as in heaven the Trinitarian communion is lived, so on earth it is God’s will that divine charity renew the Church and society, reigning in and among hearts. Creation too is not foreign to this plan of love: it also “awaits the revelation of the children of God” (Rom 8:19) in the hope of being set free “from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:21); yet creation is not alone, “but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:23).

Not for nothing, concerning God’s will, Paul says that the Father has made known to us “the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth” (Eph 1:9-10).

God’s will is, therefore, this mystery of love revealed in Christ the Lord.

In this light it is easy to understand why, in concrete life, fulfilling God’s will can make us experience the breaking of limits and a sense of rediscovered freedom.

 

Choosing, at Every Instant, Where and How to Love

Where, when and how is God’s will to be fulfilled? Since we are human persons, as long as we are on this earth we are bound to space and time. To enter into communion with God, which is the same as doing his will, we must therefore place ourselves where alone it is possible to meet him: in a particular place and time: here and now. For as long as we are alive, it is not possible to be in many places at once, nor to live more than one moment at a time: contact with reality asks us to avoid easy escapes into the past or the future. Of what we have lived, only what has been stored in our person and has become us remains. Nor is it in our power to anticipate what will come. What we hold in our hands is only this small fraction of time, which we call an instant.

In every present moment, we are called to give a free and responsible answer of love, while we are solicited by a thousand conflicting stimuli which, in various ways, can favor or hinder God’s will itself; these come from our ego, from God, and from the freedom of human creatures and, why not, of angelic ones too, not excluding the devil, the angel of light. At every instant, God’s will, with its loving providence, leads us to grow according to a plan of salvation, which is realized in this world made up of persons, animals and things, all of them, in one way or another, present in our experience and all destined to be recapitulated, with us, in Christ the Lord.

Perhaps we are not accustomed to unfolding the mystery of God’s will in this way, so as to read within it that wondrous dialogue between the Creator and the creature, the Redeemer and the redeemed, which leads each one to salvation without ever nullifying his or her free personal will.

We could say, more simply, that, moment by moment, we are called to discern where and in what ways we must act in order to give concrete form to God’s will, that is, to his Love. It is not so much a matter of discovering what the substance of God’s will is, which is always Love, but in what manner, in what place and at what time it is to be expressed, so that the Word, the Word of God, may become flesh in us too, so that Love may thus have a face and a form of its own.

To do God’s will, then, we must know how to discern it at every instant, so as to make our acting and our living a continual succession of small free and responsible choices, which unify our person, body and soul, in the line of the meaning given to our life: Love, God.

 

Being Whole in God’s Will of Every Instant

Our freedom plays a decisive role in fulfilling God’s will, not enduring it, but willing it.

Even before death, we can choose to die, abandoning ourselves to Love, unlike animals which, strictly speaking, cannot be said to die, because they have no awareness and no capacity for choice. Resignation is the opposite of the exercise of freedom, the foundation of an authentic love.

We understand at once that the value of a gesture or an action lies not in the act itself, but in the disposition with which we perform it. What counts is not what we do, even if it were the duty of our state of life, but how much love we put into doing it.

To live fully, it is important to perform each action as if it were the only one. Totally present to the present, we are called to focus at every moment on what seems to us God is asking of us.

One cannot love two persons at a time, nor do several things simultaneously, without in some way dispersing the energies of our person, without renouncing loving, in the present moment, with all our psychophysical strength, that is, with all our attention, our affectivity, our intelligence...

To withdraw, so to speak, a portion of ourselves from what we are doing in order to devote ourselves to something else inevitably leads us not to be whole for the person in front of us, or for the action we are performing.

At every instant of life, we should place ourselves as if we were at the point of death: the past is already past, it will never return; the future escapes our foresight; we have nothing but the present moment to do God’s will.

Instant after instant, if we love we are saved; if we do not love, we place ourselves outside the plan of redemption.

We could say that death does not substantially change our situation, but only removes the veil of faith from it: we will enter Paradise if from now on we are already in it, thanks to having loved.

Every moment of life flows swiftly by; our only occupation should be to seize it on the wing, to fix it in eternity, using it to love. Our time coincides with our life: “whoever does the will of God remains forever” (1 Jn 2:17b).

Many people often spend their time thinking about the past or about what is to come, and meanwhile they lose that one instant, that one possibility they would have had to do God’s will in the present: they thus accumulate so many empty spaces in their existence.

Let us train ourselves to be whole in the present, using all our faculties and energies to do what God asks of us “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5), without expectations or nostalgia, without divisions or fragmentation. If we do so, we will become like a clear mirror that reflects God, because he reveals himself only in the present.

Of Jesus it was said that “he has done all things well” (Mk 7:37). To do one thing at a time with wholeness and commitment, to love one person at a time, without withdrawing affection or attention from them to give it to others or to something else, is, then, the swift road to interior unification; it is the concrete possibility of loving God and his will wholeheartedly.

To love is to know how to concentrate on a single point: the present instant. God is not found in the past or in the future, but here and now; in the present is also the memory of the past and the hope of salvation, which opens us confidently toward the future.

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