The Wisdom of St. Francis de Sales
On this great teacher's feastday, I thought I would share one of his prayers:
“The Everlasting God has in His wisdom foreseen from
eternity the cross that He now presents to you as a gift from His innermost
heart. This cross He now sends you is considered with His all-knowing eyes,
understood with His divine mind, tested with His wise justice, warmed with
loving arms and weighed with His own hands, to see that it be not one inch too
large and not one ounce too heavy for you. He has blessed it with His Holy
Name, anointed it with His grace, perfumed it with His consolation, taken one last
look at you and your courage, and then sent it to you from heaven, a special
greeting from God to you, an alms of the all-merciful love of God.”
This is just beautiful and exactly how I view the cross He has given me.
ReplyDeleteBarb:
DeleteKnow that I will keep you in prayer.
Let me share another favorite quotation on suffering:
The greatest tragedy in the world, Cardinal Cushing once said, was not pain, but wasting pain. We all suffer, everyone of us, the youngest to oldest. We suffer loneliness, cancer, the loss of a wife, a husband, a child; we suffer misunderstandings, family conflicts, ruptured friendships, cosmetic disfigurement, mental, emotional, physical incapacities. We suffer a sense of utter powerlessness, an empty feeling of futility. The world is awash in pain. How tragic if that pain is wasted; that pain can be united with the suffering of Christ on the cross to achieve enormous good.
The Cardinal knew that Christ did not make possible the salvation of the world through his teaching, his preaching, his miracles, but by his suffering and death on the cross. When He appeared to be utterly powerless, He was radiating the greatest power unleashed in the world. When He was crying out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” He was filling billions of hearts yet to come with comfort, with peace. I unite a headache, a backache, a heartache with Christ on the cross, and wondrous graces flow into the heart of a widow who has lost her only son in Nigeria, a lonely teenager contemplating suicide in San Francisco, a woman ravaged with cancer in New York. My pain, trifling or overwhelming, has not gone wasted. – John Cardinal O'Connor, Servant of God
Know that I will support you in prayer.
God bless.
Mike