Ave Maria Meditations
All of us have seeds of hope. We desire a better future, healing, good health, peace, and serenity. We daily experience the reality that true hope is not only something, but Someone. Revealing His face through His Son, God the Father came to meet us, and it is in His Son that our hope takes root, in Jesus, born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago.
He died and rose for us and tells us that death does not have the final word. He is the hope to proclaim, to shout, and to cry out to everyone. The biggest sickness in our world is sadness, indifference, and loneliness. Like parched land waiting for water, so the world is waiting for those who will proclaim hope. God has freely chosen us to proclaim this hope. He has given us the strength to follow him and has put in our hearts the desire to embrace this wounded humanity.
In receiving mankind, the living hope in us must become love in gestures, in works, and in life. Jesus is telling us to give life, to give ourselves, not only a part of us or a few hours of work. If we do not give our life, spend our life for others, it will vanish from our hands. We want to be a living and an active Church, those who love humanity. In order to serve Christ in His members, in the poor, we must be in love with God, madly in love with Him! The vigor comes from this “being in love” with God more than any other person, more than the husband, the wife, the children, or the family. These are all gifts from God and become even more precious the more we respond to God with our heart and gaze upon Him.
The poor man, whatever garment he is wearing, is always Jesus Christ with open wounds, with blood flowing on humanity. He is there in that sick or desperate man. So then you, who are the living hope, are called to receive him and smile at him. You are called to get your faith moving and your love walking in the world. The Father is calling us to work together and to make this hope, who is the Risen Jesus, grow in the midst of wounded humanity that is waiting to find the light again. We ask the Child Jesus to grant us the gift to contemplate Him, His face and His heart, to contemplate Him who is in the eyes and the face of everyone we meet daily. May He give us a poor, free, and good heart, simple like His, because then whomever we meet will see Him shining through us.
Mother Elvira Petrozzi
