Category: love/mercy of God

Armando

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

This is a story of hope for each one of us.

Armando is an amazing eight-year-old boy . . . .

Armando cannot walk or talk and is very small for his age.  He came to us from an orphanage where he had been abandoned.  He no longer wanted to eat because he no longer wanted to live cast off from his mother.  He was desperately thin and was dying of lack of food.  After a while in our community where he found people who held him, loved him, and wanted him to live, he gradually began to eat again and to develop in a remarkable way.  He still cannot walk or talk or eat by himself, his body is twisted and broken, and he has a severe mental disability, but when you pick him up, his eyes and his whole body quiver with joy and excitement and say: “I love you.”  He has a deep therapeutic influence on people. . . .

What [many people] do not always know is that they have a well deep inside of them.  If that well is tapped, springs of life and of tenderness flow forth.  It has to be revealed to each person that these waters are there and that they can rise up from each one of us and flow over people, giving them life and a new hope.

That is the power of Armando.  In some mysterious way, in all his brokenness, he reveals to us our own brokenness, our difficulties in loving, our barriers and hardness of heart.  If he is so broken and so hurt and yet is still such a source of life, then I too am allowed to look at my own brokenness, and to trust that I too can give life to others.  I do not have to pretend that I am better than others and that I have to win in all the competitions.  It’s O.K. to be myself, just as I am, in my uniqueness.  That, of course, is a very healing and liberating experience.  I am allowed to be myself, with all my psychological and physical wounds, with all my limitations but with all my gifts too.  And I can trust that I am loved just as I am, and that I too can love and grow.

(Jean Vanier)

Look at yourself through His eyes

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

This is for all of you who struggle with a positive image of yourselves, finding it hard to believe that God could love you.

When you have an inferiority complex–and who of us hasn’t–you say things like, “I just don’t believe that what God made is good.  Look at me.  I’m a louse.”  Don’t dare to challenge God like this.  Everything he made is good, including yourself.  Don’t listen to that serpent who is giving you apples that look red on the outside and are full of inferiority complexes on the inside.  Don’t eat that apple, or else you are going to go down into a pit prepared by Satan for you for your whole life.

How can you have a wrong image of something or someone that God touched?  God touched you and he created you.  You passed through his mind and you were begotten.  Anyone of us that passes through God’s mind, anyone of us that God touched, cannot be this horrible person we think we are.  No!  Each one of us is beautiful–we’re beautiful because he touched us.

Sometimes this is very difficult for us to accept.  We look at ourselves and say, “He made us in his image, equal to himself in a manner of speaking, heir to his Son?  This just can’t be.  He hasn’t looked into my heart.  he doesn’t know what I’m made of!”  We say those silly things because our evaluation of ourselves is very poor.  We haven’t looked at ourselves with the merciful, tender, compassionate eyes of God.  So we walk in despair half the time.  As a result, the ability to realize that God is both in our midst and in us–a realization that is the fruit of faith–fades and disappears.

This is the main reason, it seems to me, why the Father sent his Son to us, why the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us as one of us.  The Father, having given us the fantastic gift of faith, wanted to help us accept this awesome gift.  He sent his Son Jesus Christ so that we, unbelieving, might believe.  We are like children; we need to touch.

Every human being is a mystery.  The mystery of man enters into the mystery of God, and bursting forth with great joy, comes faith and understanding.  When faith is there, all is clear, and a love relation with God enters into your heart.  When you have faith, it is such a simple thing to accept his love, even if you do not understand why he loves you.  (Catherine de Hueck Doherty)

Praying for you that you have faith in His love for you.

He sits by the door

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“Just as human affection, when it abounds, overpowers those who love and causes them to be beside themselves, so God’s love for men emptied God (Phil 2.7).  He does not stay in His own place and call the slave, He seeks him in person by coming down to him.  He who is rich reaches the pauper’s hovel, and He displays His love by approaching in person.  He seeks love in return and does not withdraw when He is treated with disdain.  He is not angry over ill treatment, but even when He has been repulsed He sits by the door (cf. Rev 3.20) and does everything to show us that He loves, even enduring suffering and death to prove it.”  (Nicholas Cabasilas)

All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross . . .

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

All of you who feel heavily the weight of the cross, you who are poor and abandoned, you who weep, you who are persecuted for justice, you who are ignored, you the unknown victims of suffering, take courage.  You are the preferred children of the Kingdom of God, the kingdom of hope, happiness and life.  You are the brothers of the suffering Christ, and with Him, if you wish, you are saving the world.

This is the Christian science of suffering, the only one which gives peace.  Know that you are not alone, separated, abandoned or useless.  You have been called by Christ and are His living and transparent image.

Sound like something from Pope Francis?  Wrong.  This is an excerpt from the Second Vatican Council closing speeches.  There are some things in the Church that just do not change.