Creation and Faith

Enjoy everything around us. Everything teaches us and brings us to God. Everything around is a drop of God’s love. The animate, the inanimate, plants and animals, birds and mountains, the sea, the sunset and the starry sky. They’re little loves, through which we come to the great love, Christ. Flowers, for example, have their own grace; they teach us through their fragrance, through their magnificence. They speak to us of God’s love. They bestow their fragrance, their beauty on sinners and on the righteous alike. If you want to be a Christian, you have to have a poetic soul, you have to become a poet… Prayer is approaching every one of God’s creatures with love and living in harmony with all of them, even the wild ones.

I thank God who’s given me so many illnesses. I often say to him: ‘Christ, your love knows no bounds’. It’s a miracle that I’m alive at all. Amongst my other illnesses, I’ve got cancer in the pituitary gland. There’s a tumor there that’s growing and putting pressure on the optic nerve. This is why I can’t see any more. I’m in terrible pain. But I pray, taking up the Cross of Christ with patience. […] I’m in a lot of pain, I’m suffering, but my illness is a very good thing. I feel it as Christ’s love…

My illness is a special favor from God, who’s inviting me to enter into the mystery of his love, and, through his grace, to try and respond. But I’m not worthy. You’ll say: ‘God’s revealed so much to you and you’re not worthy?’. But that’s what condemns me. Because all of it is God’s grace. I’ve got nothing of my own. God gave me many gifts, but I’ve fallen short. I’ve shown myself to be unworthy. But I never stopped trying even for a moment… This is why I don’t pray for God to make me well. I pray for him to make me good… Death’s a bridge that’ll take us to Christ. As soon as we close our eyes, we’ll open them in eternity. We’ll stand before Christ. In the next life we’ll experience God’s grace ‘more markedly’.