Dear Brothers and Sisters, Fiat!
In today’s Gospel Jesus tells a parable on the need to pray always, never wearying. The main character is a widow whose insistent pleading with a dishonest judge succeeds in obtaining justice from him. Jesus concludes: if the widow succeeded in convincing that judge, do you think that God will not listen to us if we pray to him with insistence? Jesus' words are very strong: “And will not God vindicate his elect, who cry to him day and night?” (Lk 18:7).
“Crying day and night” to God! This image of prayer is striking, but let us ask ourselves: Why does God want this? Doesn’t he already know what we need? What does it mean to “insist” with God?
This is a good question that makes us examine an important aspect of the faith: God invites us to pray insistently not because he is unaware of our needs or because he is not listening to us. On the contrary, he is always listening and he knows everything about us lovingly. On our daily journey, especially in times of difficulty, in the battle against the evil that is outside and within us, the Lord is not far away, he is by our side. We battle with him beside us, and our weapon is prayer which makes us feel his presence beside us, his mercy and also his help. But the battle against evil is a long and hard one; it requires patience and endurance, like Moses who had to keep his arms outstretched for the people to prevail (cf Ex 17:8-13). This is how it is: there is a battle to be waged each day, but God is our ally, faith in him is our strength and prayer is the expression of this faith.
Persevering prayer is the expression of faith in a God who calls us to fight with him every day and at every moment in order to conquer evil with good.
“Oh, power of my Will, how great You are!
You alone unite the greatest and highest Being
with the littlest and lowest being, making them one.
You alone have the virtue of emptying the creature of all that does not belong to You,
to be able to form in her, with your reflections, that Eternal Sun which,
filling Heaven and earth with Its rays, goes to blend with the Sun of the Supreme Majesty.
You alone have this virtue of communicating the supreme strength,
in such a way that, with your strength, the creature can rise to that single act of God the Creator.
When the creature does not live in the unity of my Will, she loses the one strength
and remains as though disunited from that strength that fills Heaven and earth
and sustains the whole universe as if it were the littlest feather.
When the soul does not let herself be dominated by my Will,
she loses the one strength in all of her actions, therefore all her acts,
not coming out of the same single strength, remain divided among themselves:
love is divided, the action separated, the prayer disjointed.
Being divided, all the acts of the creature are poor, meager, without light;
and so patience is poor, charity is weak, obedience is crippled, humility is blind, prayer is mute,
sacrifice is without life, without vigor, because since my Will is missing, the one strength is missing
which, uniting everything, gives the same strength to each act of the creature.
Therefore, they are left not only divided among themselves, but adulterated by the human will,
and so each one is left with its own defect.
So it happened to Adam; by withdrawing from my Will, he lost the one single strength of his
Creator, and with it he lost his lordship, his dominion, nor did he feel the strength to show off in
good any more. The same happens for one who is not completely abandoned in the arms of my Will,
because with It the strength of good converts into one’s nature, and poverty does not exist.”
(Jesus to Luisa, August 8, 1926)