18 November 2022 · 2022-11 newsletter
One focus from an October 2022 Pope Francis general audience was inspired by St Augustine and Book 10 from his ‘Confessions’. The books of Augustine’s Confessions speak about this fourth-century bishop’s spiritual conversion from his restless youth to finding peace in Christ. Pope Francis recommends that everyone can benefit from a similar personal examination of their own life story. “Re-reading one’s life” he says, “allows us to notice the little miracles that the good Lord works for us every day”.
How many of us think of our own life as the most precious book given to us? How many of us understand that for ourselves it is precisely in our own book, not someone else’s that we find what we mostly pointlessly seek elsewhere. The Pope quotes from Book 10: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you. You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you”.
These words of St. Augustine are an invitation to “cultivate an interior life in order to find what we are looking for,” and the Pope adds, recognizing the presence of “toxic elements” in one’s past and learning how to avoid repeating mistakes’.
In Schoenstatt ‘personal discernment’ is considered under the banner of “Everyday Sanctity’. See Gaudium et spes 33-34; CCC 1513 and 2013 for vocation to holiness. We Schoenstatters are happiest when we are living up to our Personal Ideal, personal because it is only known to us and God. We get there by examining the things that hinder this feeling of fulfilment (Particular examination) and promise in our freedom to do better the next day. (See 200 Questions: Q88 Everyday Sanctity). Fr Kentenich called this relationship the way to an ‘harmonious’ one, because of our whole hearted attachment to God, work and our fellow man in every circumstance of our life.
Pope Francis adds “Discernment is the narrative reading of the good times and the dark times, of the consolations and desolations that we experience in the course of our life. In discernment, it is the heart that speaks to us about God, and we must learn to understand its language,” he said. Quoted, from CNN Rome Newsroom, Oct 19, 2022.
Tied to ‘Everyday Sanctity’ and personal discernment we can also touch on the role that ‘being childlike’ has within this harmony. If we are childlike in our trust and dependence on God; we have faith in Divine Providence, we desire to make God happy from a childlike perspective; and if we reflect on our childhood and childlikeness in terms of the natural and the spiritual we can find harmony in life. Pope Francis in the aforementioned article suggests we have much to learn from studying the saints. Fr Kentenich often spoke of St Therese of Lisieux as an example of genuine childlikeness and his understanding of Mary as one who responded totally to God’s will, in trusting God even when it involved great darkness and suffering over the death of her Son Jesus. (200 Questions, Q89).
Turning finally to St Ignatius of Loyola regarding discernment, we read:
“The goal of our life is to live with God forever. God who loves us gave us life. Our own response of love allows God’s life to flow into us without limit…. Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to the deepening of God’s life in me."
So with Mary holding my hand let my prayer be “I want to: ‘Walk like you through life, mirror you forever; be strong and noble, meek and mild, with peace and love as my endeavour. Help me walk with you through this world to make it ready for the Lord.’ Amen. (“Heavenwards”- adapted from alternate 4th verse of “Hymn of the Instruments” p.171)
Angela
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