Automatic translation from Italian, under review.
Meditation proposed by the Mother as the Point of Light of the month of November 2014.
Palermo, 31 October 2014
Dearest all,
if we want to make progress on the path of holiness, we have no choice but to make, and make again, the choice of Jesus Forsaken, present both in the wounds of the Church and of today’s society, and in our personal limitations and in our very infidelities to him. This is what article 71 of the Constitutions states.
Whoever wishes to walk on the path of Love can only “let themselves be lived” by Mary, who did not leave Jesus alone on Calvary; we too, in communion with her, do not want to be scandalized by the presence of Jesus in the sufferings of the Church and of today’s society. Let us love with a motherly heart the members of the Mystical Body of Christ, beginning with the most suffering; let us love those who live in the various existential “peripheries,” as Pope Francis urges us to do.
Jesus crucified, who cries out his forsakenness on the cross, feels almost divided from the Father; the unity of the Trinity, in that supreme moment, seems to break apart in order to bring all of us, children in the Son, into the very mystery of trinitarian life. Jesus’ extreme suffering shows him to us completely emptied: on the cross he no longer seems to be God, it is the “death of love” of the Crucified One, the nothingness that is love, because it is not, the nothingness that is fullness, that is the mystery of death-life.
In Jesus Forsaken is the supreme manifestation of the Love that is God; it is abandonment to the point of experiencing the most tragic night of nothingness, which becomes trusting abandonment into the hands of the Father: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (cf. Lk 23:46), Jesus will say before dying; the experience of being abandoned by the Father thus becomes abandonment to the Father. Let us, then, allow ourselves to be guided by him on the paths of true love, which is gift of self even to the death of love, emptying of one’s own self in order to live the other, the neighbor we meet, in order to let Jesus live in us.
As long as we do not learn to lose our point of view, our ideas, our views, even good ones, in order to love Jesus present in the neighbor we meet and to recognize him present in our personal and communal sufferings, where his passion continues; as long as we do not learn to recognize Jesus who takes upon himself the sins of all and of each one and cries out his forsakenness in the sufferings of the Church and of humanity; as long as we do not love without useless considerations and reasonings, we will never understand what Love is: it is Jesus crucified and forsaken who makes himself “nothing,” the supreme gift of himself to open for us the passage to the Trinity.
O wondrous mystery, may it be given to us to understand it with our lives!
This is what I hope for myself and for you.
Blessing you from my heart,
Yours, Sr. Nunziella