Journeying with the Founder Day #177

Jesus is the Cornerstone for us. If we have a spiritual life, the first point we need to verify is this: on what is my spiritual life grounded? Is it grounded on Christ? We have to ask ourselves if Christo-centricity is only a word or if it is real. Is Christ really the Cornerstone of our life? The great danger is that we speak much of Christ and do not subsist on Him. Yes, we speak much of Christ, but perhaps we do not have Him as our center. We are not founded or rooted in Christ; we do not become a new creature in Christ. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #177

Journeying with the Founder Day #176

When we contemplate God’s plan of love, His choosing us poor creatures, what thoughts come to our mind? How do we face the reality of God’s choice and our own poverty? Are we really poor and humble? Don’t you believe that we are too rich interiorly, that we feel secure and are not humble enough? I do not speak here of a cerebral humility, but of a humility of the heart that has a profound perception of one’s own littleness and nothingness; of one who knows he has received everything from God and consequently behaves in accordance with this poor choice as one who has nothing, as a poor wanderer, as a beggar of God: a beggar before God, a beggar before His brothers. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #176

Journeying with the Founder Day #175

We are, indeed, children of God; we call ourselves children of God because we are really His children. Why are we His children? Because God has loved us infinitely. The emptying of the Eternal Word of God does not have as a goal emptying for the sake of emptying, but His emptying has our enrichment as a goal: He became like us to make us like He is. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #175

Journeying with the Founder Day #184

I know with certainty that God has thought of me since eternity. I was in the mind of God before there were the stars, the sun, the moon, all these marvelous things and the earth. The Lord has known me—He has known me before I was, and He has loved me. He has predestined me to be since eternity…To use an expression that I have used many times, "We have been cradled in the Heart of God since eternity." (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #184

Journeying with the Founder Day #174

God does not simply tell us: empty yourselves from yourselves. No, He gives us the example of this emptying through the Servant of Yahweh, through Jesus Who emptied Himself and became a man like us. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #174

Journeying with the Founder Day #173

God does not hate those who are proud. He hates pride; He hates harshness; He hates what impedes Him from fully attaining His plan of love among mankind…The Infinitely Great, the Almighty, made Himself poor to come to our level, asking us to empty ourselves so that He can fill us completely with Himself. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #173

Journeying with the Founder Day #172

In order for God to come within us, He must find us empty. It is the mystery of love that wants to fill us. And we should, in reality, lose ourselves when faced with this reflection. It is the mystery of love that wants to give itself completely to us. God is not a powerful being that wants to crush us; He is the powerful God who wants to give of Himself to us, who wants to reach us, who wants to communicate the totality of His being to us. Therefore nothingness, emptiness, and choosing poverty are conditions that allow God to give Himself to us. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #172

Journeying with the Founder Day #171

The infinite has become finite, has become poverty, and He wants us to choose poverty, too. Let us reach a synthesis: God, who is infinite, wants to give Himself but can only give Himself to one who is empty, that is to one who is capable of receiving God. Poverty or emptiness is the condition for the Infinite—God—to fill this emptiness. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #171

Journeying with the Founde Day #170

We want to know Christ so we can imitate Him, so we can follow His footsteps—as St. Peter says—and ask ourselves: how would Christ act in my place? Not an imaginary Christ that we invent as we wish, but the real Christ of the Gospel. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founde Day #170

Journeying with the Founder Day #169

The Stone Rejected. Christ is the stone rejected. We have to configure ourselves to Him. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #169

Journeying with the Founder Day #168

Christ the Cornerstone. Do you know what it means to be a cornerstone? It is the stone that has the courage to support in humility, in hiddenness, and without official recognition: the cornerstone is at the foundation and is hidden. (The Rock)

Journeying with the Founder Day #168

Journeying with the Founder Day #167

Christ is risen from the dead. We cannot imagine the joy of His mother Mary, of Mary Magdalene, and then of the Apostles. But just as Jesus died for us, He has also risen for us so that our life would be like His glorious life. How many of our brothers and sisters live as if Jesus were not risen! Surely we feel compelled to go to them, to rouse them, to remind them again and again that, because of Easter, we must begin a new life. (Racemi)

Journeying with the Founder Day #167

Journeying with the Founder Day #166

Holy Saturday becomes for us a Saturday of Resurrection, a Saturday of transformation, a Saturday of joy, a Saturday when newness of life begins. We, too, will arise like Christ and with Christ; and as it is very likely that the Risen Christ’s first contact as a new man was with His mother Mary, let us, too, at the conclusion of this new resurrection, go to Mary and say, “Mamma, I have become a new man!” (Homily, Holy Saturday, 1988)

Journeying with the Founder Day #166

Journeying with the Founder Day #165

We become united and in communion through Christ’s Cross …so that on the Cross of Jesus all people in Christ can reach unity with the Father. The Cross is a source of union; it demolishes the walls of division; it creates communion…In the Pauline vision Christ, dying on the Cross, defeats death, defeats Satan, and gives life to us. Thus He unites us to Himself through grace. Here the Johannine concept is inserted: dying on the Cross, Christ gives us grace; He opens the way to life through His pierced side from which flow water and blood, that is, the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist—the sacraments of life.

Therefore Christ dead on the Cross is the source of life and of union not only because He defeated death and saved us from condemnation, but because, climbing on the Cross, He gives us the sacraments which are the force through which we enter into life… This is the marvelous vision that shows us the Cross as salvation, certainly, but also as the source of communion with the Father. Christ not only conveys to us His divine reality, His Hypostatic union, but He unites us to the Father through His death on the Cross. Then we understand those mysterious words—“I thirst” or “Sitio”—not only in connection with the mystery of the Cross but also as a source of union, of communion. Christ thirsts for our souls; Christ wants us to go to Him. (Communio)

Journeying with the Founder Day #165

Journeying with the Founder Day #164

In the Gospel Jesus says to us, “I have greatly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15). Therefore, if we enter into the Heart of Christ, we find this intense desire. John explains it to us. “Having loved His own in this world, He would show His love for them to the end” … to the end – in finem (Jn. 13:1). We enter into a Cenacle in which there is a heart burning with love, the Heart of Christ…We enter into the Cenacle, and find the manifestation of the call to holiness most suitable for us—we see how
Jesus speaks to us of the Father’s love, from which the call to holiness springs. What is the attitude and what are the words that spring from the Heart of Jesus that is burning with love in the Cenacle? We know well Jesus’ first gesture: He washes His disciples’ feet, a function reserved for slaves. “You address me as teacher and Lord, and fittingly enough, for that is what I am…” ( Jn. 13:13) but in this moment I am your slave, your servant, and if I wash your feet, you too must wash one another’s feet…

Jesus promises the Holy Spirit and repeatedly returns to the promise of this Gift, the reality and greatness of which we will only understand when, after the tragedy of Golgotha, the Cenacle again comes alive as the Spirit descends upon the Apostles forming the charismatic and missionary Church. At that moment the Apostles do not understand it, but in Jesus’ Heart and thought it is clear: the Cenacle becomes the place of the promise of the Church, the charismatic and missionary Church.

And then there is the central point in which Christ’s love bursts forth: the Eucharist. Because of His love we have the ineffable, incomprehensible, unfathomable and unspeakable mystery of bread that becomes Christ; Christ Who gives us His Blood to drink and His Body to eat…See what a wealth there is in the Cenacle and how we can indeed say that the Cenacle is the Sanctuary of Divine Exaggerations. (Communio)

Journeying with the Founder Day #164

Journeying with the Founder Day #163

Interior life and prayer are not realities that can be improvised. They presuppose a long and patient work of training and collaboration of the intellect, heart, will, passions, memory, fantasy, and feelings. The most profound interior intuitions and the moments of greater intimacy and fusion with the Lord have always grown in a climate of quiet and peace. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #163

Journeying with the Founder Day #162

Silence, in the first place, is the “emptiness” of what can disturb or impede our union with God in prayer and our remaining in prayer in a habitual state of recollection. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #162

Journeying with the Founder Day #161

I believe that the time of isolation and individualism has already faded. We are social beings, open and available at all levels, and therefore also at the level of spirituality. Our prayer, in its poverty, is addressed to God to receive the gift from Him and to pass it on to all our brothers in humility. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #161

Journeying with the Founder Day #160

Let us abandon ourselves to the prayer of the Spirit Who repeats in us the word “Abba-Father”. Then let us acknowledge our nothingness before the all of God with an inner tension of humility but also with a matching external attitude. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #160

Journeying with the Founder Day #159

We experience within ourselves thirst for the strength and for the light of the Lord, and we abandon our whole false self-sufficiency, acknowledging with a humble heart the mercy and the power of God. At the foundation of all, let us make a radical and profound act of faith that puts us in a threefold state of interior poverty, acceptance of the Word in itself, and acceptance of the instrument that transmits the
Word to us. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #159

Journeying with the Founder Day #158

The first condition is to receive the word of God with interior poverty. We must become poor, little, and humble, clearing our poor soil of the stones and thorns that are its only vegetation. When we are rich in ourselves, there is no room to receive with simplicity the word of God that often presents itself to us in a poor and naked form. In reality it is always efficacious in itself and acts with the strength of a sacrament if we are able to enter into the substance without being distracted by forms and ways. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #158

Journeying with the Founder Day #157

In the Mystical Body we are a unity, and each one of us bears in himself responsibility for the others. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #157

Journeying with the Founder Day #156

The Lord can also speak to us through affections that strike our heart, and we must abandon ourselves to them without fear, without excessive logical thinking. All is grace and God’s love, and all helps lead us to a more intimate union with Him. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #156

Journeying with the Founder Day #155

I understand why I have to work hard, why I have to make reparation with my tiredness, with the crucified experience of delusion and of my sufferings, with the austere beauty of sacrifice. In this way I am closer to my Lord—Who rejoices in my offering and in my sacrifice—and for Him and with Him I can make reparation for the sin of many brothers and sisters. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #155

Journeying with the Founder Day #154

If the Father and Christ have asked for our love—and with words and gestures so moving and inviting that they exclude any doubt about that—it means that They rejoice in our love and suffer for our refusals. In this way our entire relationship with God becomes more immediate and spontaneous. It replicates that attitude of adherence that we have seen in Christ Jesus. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #154

Journeying with the Founder Day #153

The participation of God in our life is ongoing: God is always the same, yesterday, today and forever; therefore, His presence of participation is contemporary to our experience. Right now God not only has a relationship of knowledge, of thought, with us, but also a relationship of love that throbs and suffers for us, for our sins, and for our lack of response. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #153

Journeying with the Founder Day #154

Let us enter into the sacredness of our vulnerability and give it the consolation and support of prayer and understanding. Thus we, all together, can bear in ourselves the stigmata of Christ Jesus and enter into the night of redemption with Him. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #154

Journeying with the Founder Day #153

Let us not eliminate the litany as a component of our prayer; let us express ourselves with poor and simple prayer that tells God of our need for help and support, a prayer of supplication and invocation, and we will discover in it a most profound meaning, that is, how to be poor, waiting, and listening. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #153

Journeying with the Founder Day #152

If there is a time in which our prayer must become more intense, more prolonged, more abandoned, it is when we experience the harshest difficulties and temptations, and the most urgent moments of instability. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #152

Journeying with the Founder Day #151

It is exactly in understanding our woundedness, our state of being poor creatures who continuously stumble and fall, that we finally understand that we cannot boast of anything, and our only strength is Christ: “I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.” (2 Cor 12:9) (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #151

Journeying with the Founder Day #150

Jesus, like each of us, needed help, and He found it in prayer. If we contemplate His agony in Gethsemane, we are faced with a man who suffers, who cries, who loathes the fate that awaits Him; a man who, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, lifts loud cries up to God (cum clamore valido et lacrimis) and in prayer finds the strength to abandon His spirit to the Father and to accept the chalice of suffering. (Prayer)

Journeying with the Founder Day #150