“May the Almighty Lord fill you with all his graces of love and peace during this Pascal time when we commemorate his supreme Sacrifice and Resurrection! “
In a world where you have to master everything, where everything is subject to competition in both social and professional life, becoming like children can seem paradoxical! Yet it is the teaching given by Jesus! But He does not speak of the sweet aspect of childhood that we would all like to find again, but of that spirit of littleness which reveals the greatness of God in our life. This is the teaching given to us by Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart Bernaud for this month!
The spirit of childhood
“If you do not become like this little child, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Math.18,3) said Jesus to the crowd around him. This is an affirmation that must have surprised those who heard it! To become a child by the spirit and by the heart, to imitate this innocent person in our thoughts, our words, our desires, our affections, to appease us instead of to grow, to strip us of our personality instead of to live in it, to undergo the will of and, not to impose ours, in a word, to bring down life instead of reassemble it, is this not an idea contrary to the spirit of the world in general? Yet Jesus repeatedly states that “everyone who rises will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be lifted up” (Luke 13:11) “Blessed are they who are gentle, they will possess the earth. Blessed are the pure, for they will see God. (Maths 5.4 and 8)
Thus he who works to make himself gentle, flexible, manageable as a child, who foresees nothing, attaches himself to nothing and abandons himself to the care of Providence, not only that one will own the earth but if in addition it remain the pure heart, he will see God!
Who had suspected that the highest Christian perfection was locked up in these teachings? The saints understood it all, so they all put it into practice. The more they advanced in perfection, the more they became like little children, sweet and humble of heart, fading more and more to leave room for the divine will. This is what is proposed to our thinking: to discover all the mysteries of the greatness hidden in smallness! Let’s become the children Jesus wants us to be, surely it’s the only doorway to the Kingdom! (Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart Bernaud)