Since the pandemic, the fear of illness and death have been presented to us as anxiety-provoking, almost abnormal events. We hide, we distance ourselves from each other, but illness and death are totally inherent in each life, nobody escapes! Not a single one of our hair falls out without the Lord’s knowledge. He is the Master of all life, from its conception to its very last end. Why dread what we have no control over? “Who of you, by his worries, can add a cubit to the length of his life? If then you can’t even do the slightest thing, why worry about the rest?” (Luke 12:25).
Whatever the age, social status or all the precautions taken, when the time has come, nothing helps, nor anyone. God reminds when He wants! He is the master of the harvest and we have probably forgotten him too much. To not be caught “off guard”, remains to die every day a little more of our “ourselves” always quite enough! This is all the teaching offered this month dedicated to the Precious Blood of our Lord!
Die every day!
“Wherever the tree falls, it remains. Said Wisdom. In fact, if we fall laden with good fruit, we will enter eternal life. If we have only produced bad fruit, we will be thrown into this dark night of hell. God did not kill, because Himself is the source of life. All life, angelic or human, moral or physical, flows freely from her womb. Everything that lives and breathes, lives and breathes through Him, which made St Paul say “It is in Him that we have life, movement and being. “(Acts 17, 28)
Death is the consequence of sin. Sin is therefore absolute evil, it is the evil of God, his antagonist, his enemy, his persecutor. At the same time, it is the sanction, the punishment perpetuated in all life since Adam. The fatal judgment is executed mercilessly, without exception, it is universal law, no one escapes it.
Frivolous souls are dizzy and seek to forget in distractions of all kinds the dreaded term that will tear them away from these deceptive pleasures. But the faithful, sensible and vigilant soul cautiously repeats: “I die every day, to conquer real life! To do this, she practices first dying to herself and then to the world passing by, to her false joys, her false hopes, her deceptive mirages. She remains indifferent to things so that she is always ready to respond to the Lord’s last call.
Even if it is difficult for everyone to live thus detached from everything to think only of heaven, what a joy to say that if we die like the just, it is basically only the jump of a child in the father’s arm! Faithfully living our hour of presence by putting Jesus at the center of our activities, not only allows us to produce good fruit but also prepares us to take this great leap! (Sister Marie du Sacré Coeur Bernaud)