Solidarity of the Solitary … praying for others is sharing in God’s desire to draw them to himself; it is also being in communion with those who in their suffering are calling out to God and asking for help. … what matters is that we should stand before God with a pure heart, and with boundless trust in his tender love for his children. This attitude is no easy way out; it is far more reassuring to rely on our words or our activity than to have complete and blind trust in the love of the Father, known in faith. We should be the bearers of the poverty of mankind not by spelling it out, but by experiencing it, in the vivid awareness that we are in the presence of God with empty hands and that we must count totally on Him. Our prayer is the prayer of the Church recollecting herself in silence and coming together in the presence of God. We bear within us the needs of the world. Our own weakness is the sign, only too visible, alas, of the weakness of all humanity; our own sins make it easy for us to be in solidarity with the sins of the whole world; our confidence in God’s love cannot be limited to what concerns us personally, for our faith teaches us that in Christ we are all one in our journey to the Father. This realization should exorcise every temptation to esteem ourselves superior to anyone else; our cry to God, and the grace we receive from him, have the dimensions of the Body of Christ in which all humanity is gathered into one, from Adam to the last of the redeemed. in this way we share in the grace of the Church herself. She who is the perfect communion of the children of God entrusts us with the mission of speaking in her name, on condition that we agree to give up our individual boundaries. That is the meaning of our solitude; it allows us to reach out in Christ beyond the narrow limits of a group to all those, known and unknown, who, in their different ways, are seeking the face of God. A Carthusian
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 12:20:18 +0000