Day 5 - Partake In The Redemption
Light a candle as a sign that in your home lives a pilgrim of Fatima by the heart. Our Lady watches over your way.
Prayer of the Angel of Peace: My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love You. I ask pardon of You for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love You.
- Fatima is a dialogue between man’s will and God’s will, a dialogue of freedom, between free wills, which has roots in the dialogue between Jesus and the Father during the night on the Mount of Olives: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done.”
- Like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Are you willing to offer yourselves to God? Who doesn’t want this, to offer themselves to God, at least on intent?
- Since time immemorial, people have related suffering to the will of God. Faced with what appears to be meaningless suffering, we’ve tried to find in the will of God a meaning for suffering that makes sense. We wonder; can the God of Jesus Christ be a God who inflicts suffering? On the contrary, doesn’t he appear, precisely there, as the God who freely accepts the suffering inflicted on Him, even to the point of death?
- Jesus’ suffering is the Father’s suffering, they are one God only! It is this suffering that the Father and the Son, each in his own way, assume and suffer, because love obliges even God’s freedom.
- And thus God inscribes in the core of suffering, in the core of death, the principle of His redemption: to freely transform suffering into the highest act of love - i.e., to offer one’s life until death. This excess of love which is freely offered is the reparation that Fatima asks for.
- Our blessed Mother is also the mother of Jesus crucified, who drank His words spoken from the cross, words which filled up her soul, words where the people’s suffering and the suffering of God meet, on the edge of death. These are words that shock and question; they host the yearning of the human heart for a source of light which appears in the darkness.
- This search for light in God, to illuminate the darkness of suffering, lives inside the shocking and paradoxal words of the second part of the question asked by the our Blessed Mother - i.e., “Are you willing to endure all the sufferings that He may be pleased to send you?” Wanting the will of God, and what God wanted was to be subject to our suffering, to our death.
- When in freedom we say “yes” to God’s will, especially in suffering, we become participants in the redemption when, as Mary before the cross, as Lucia and Francisco and Jacinta before the holm oak. Such is the meaning of Christian life - i.e., to willingly offering oneself to God, just as God willingly offered Himself.
- It is an offer to partake in Jesus’ redemption, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners. This is the Christian vocation at its uttermost truth: partaking in the redemption.
My God, You inhabit the innermost of my heart and You call me to become a pilgrim by the heart and to meet You there. Listen to my voice, and the voices of all those seeking your light.
Suffering humbles us like dust of the earth, children of Eve who in the night, drink the suffering and know the darkness of death. But you have made us the children of Mary, in Christ, the new Adam, children of redemption, called to freedom for love which unties us from the ground, making us pilgrims to heaven, Your home, which you make our home, which You want to be the home for all peoples.
Freely I want to offer myself to You in reparation our sins and to repair the breech between us. I do so especially for those who do not know love, do not know freedom. Yes, I am willing. Just like Francisco and Jacinta and Lucia, dedicating myself freely, I shall transform my suffering in the act of love which redeems it. Let the Holy Spirit, intimate voice of freedom and love, sound in the silence of my heart which is seeking You. I am a pilgrim by the heart; free for love and willing to partake in the redemption. I want to go on a pilgrimage by the heart into Your mother’s heart, mother of mine, Our Lady of Fatima. In Her heart You will be waiting for my heart. And today, as a pilgrim by the heart, I shall follow my heart and in our Mother’s immaculate heart I shall listen to the merciful beating of Your heart. Amen.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Mother of Heaven, be attentive to the supplications of a world facing tribulation. Answer the cry of the poor and the sick, give comfort and hope to all those who suffer, give strength and compassion to all those who work and care for those who are suffering. Bring peace to the world. In your immaculate heart, be for all your children a refuge and a way to God. Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us. Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto, pray for us.