Our hope is in God…He is our strength

Dearest daughters in Jesus Christ,  

Why do you cry over the slightest contradictions? Crying over an insignificant thing reveals a weak spirit deprived of that stability which is necessary for those souls who have consecrated themselves to God and are immolated on the altar of sacrifice.

Weep instead over yourselves, as Jesus told the holy women while He climbed the way to Calvary.   Yes, dearest daughters, let us weep over all our past sins, over our present miseries, over the uncertainty of reaching our eternal salvation, over the abuse of graces, over the little progress we are making in virtue.

God visits us every day with so many lights, with so many inspirations of His grace, with sound instructions, with good reading material, with examples of holiness, with good things and bad things. He sends us the former to let us feel His goodness and the latter to help us remember His justice. It is something worthy of tears not to be aware of these graces and to render them useless for ourselves.

O my daughters! How much we deserve compassion!   What an unfortunate thing for us to have so often not recognized our Lord’s visits! Let us weep, daughters, over ourselves as Jesus Christ wept over Jerusalem, and let us be converted to God once and for all.   The plan He has in making us see our miseries is to turn our soul to the practice of humility, to penance, to the total reform of our lives; and what great evil will be ours if we would not draw from this visit anything but annoyance, desolation, discouragement! Let us weep, then, because we are miserable; but may our tears always be accompanied by the firm proposal to change our life for the better by practicing humility and always trusting in His divine mercy.

Are you not aware, daughters, that in spite of the ordinary help of God, we are still weakness personified? Isn’t it perhaps true that with all the graces we receive from God, we so often fall and our life is full of deplorable weaknesses?   We, my daughters, resemble a paralytic, who cannot move except with the help of a friendly hand; and even when this hand presents itself, we often do not want to let it lead us. The slightest temptations afflict us; an imagination, a thought, a look, a bad example; a criticism makes us fall; the smallest passion drags us into sin; the slightest difficulty stops us along the road of virtue. See, then, daughters, how weak we are! With prayer we could receive a more powerful grace that would make us triumph over our weaknesses; but alas!   This is one of our greatest miseries: we pray so little, we pray so poorly! What are we to do then, if not confound ourselves before God in the light of our impotence, be diffident of ourselves and not render ourselves incapable of doing any good, abandoning ourselves to our own strength alone, capable of every evil if grace would not support us to be watchful over our senses, over our spirit and over our heart? 

Oh, let us flee, dear daughters, from the occasions of evil and place all our hopes in God because He alone is our strength, awaiting all things from Him. Let us pray to Him then to the fullest stretch of our souls to have pity on our miseries and to heal us completely. Let others trust purely in human means, but you, beloved daughters, strive always to place your unlimited and filial confidence in God alone!

I bless you maternally and with my whole heart, Your most affectionate Mother