“Contemporary man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, or if he listens to teachers he does so because they are witnesses”. (Saint Paul VI)
They also exist in religion fundamentalisms And fanaticisms, of the pious and devoted people who feel right with their conscience, to the point of despising others, feeling superior and closer to God. What God do we believe in? When we pray, within prayer, do we see with the eyes of compassionate God? Which God do we talk to others about? If this parable is not to be trivialized, easy answers must be avoided.
The atheist prayer
He spoke only in parables Jesus, so as to offer the truth of God and man through images of ordinary life. Climb towards the Temple, not together but distant, a dichotomous paradigm represented by a Pharisee it’s a publish who go to pray, two distant lives, attitudes different, and different prayers. The presumption in orderwhose he does the accounts of good works, of a proud heart, which vainly contemplates itself and despises the other. Then there is the prayer of those who cannot look up, fall into the arms of God, a short and essential prayer. Easy for us contemporary listeners to choose the humble publisher!
The prayer towards himself is that of one who makes himself God, exalts his own self, it is the drama of Narcissus who drowns in the image he contemplated, of one who escapes to make truth in himself. The life of faith instead asks to enter the abyss of oneself, the humble prayer of those who recognize their sin, a short prayer, of those who lower themselves, not me but God.
God justifies
By dint of self-certification, we put ourselves in God’s place, to the point of looking at others as if we were in the place that belongs only toVery high. This is the risk of those who bare a religiosity of merits and rewards, of those who try to appease their anxieties with rites and chains of uninterrupted prayers. Jesus remembers that everyone can do the experience of being justified only to the extent that he recognizes that he is not right, but that he is loved and forgiven, of those who opt for one spirituality of everyday lifeof the fragment, the beauty of the feral nature of the encounter with God.
The fire of charity
There our prayer reflects the life we lead, in fragments of our days and of our poor flesh. If it is sincere and authentic, prayer is also consistent, and God creates an opening for himself, not in the heart of those who presume to be righteous. “In reality, the Christian is already living his own spirituality every time, in everything he thinks, says and works, he always discovers himself beyond himself and at the same time fascinated by the question of the greater mystery that reaches him in anonymous and silent form in the daily life of his activity and which we call God. (..) It is a spiritual experience of openness to God ”(FC).
If you want to find one difference in the two attitudes, it is the lack of one in one relationship of othernessand in the other one emerges vulnerability that questions itself and does not close itself to the possibility of conversion.
LORD YOU CAN MAKE ME RIGHT
- Which side is God on? And you? Do you despise others?
- Does prayer kindle the fire of charity? Do we open ourselves to God in prayer?
We are wayfarers who walk in the night, we are sentinels who scan the dawn, we are vigilant and vigilant awaiting the Bridegroom. We are the lantern of life and faith, and each day is a step towards Heaven. We are the impossible that becomes possible, so that hatred can be transformed into love, darkness into light, war into peace, sadness into joy, weeping into a smile. We are all things, we are the colors of the rainbow.
Link to his blog article
Don Vincenzo was born on 7 June 1973 in Taurianova. After graduating in Banking, Financial and Insurance Economics at the State University of Messina in 1999, he attended the Capranica College in Rome from 2001 to 2006. He studied philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University of Rome from 2001 to 2006 run by his fathers Jesuits of the Society of Jesus. […]
Don Vincenzo Leonardo Manuli – Commentary on the Gospel of 23 October 2022 –