VATICAN CITY, MARCH 17, 2006 (Zenit.org).- The preacher of the Pontifical Household urged listeners at a Lenten meditation to be close to those who suffer "the pain of the heart."
Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa, speaking in the presence of Benedict XVI and officials of the Roman Curia in the Mater Redemptoris chapel of the Apostolic Palace, said that "the word 'Gethsemane' has become the symbol of all moral pain."
The preacher thus began his review of the various aspects of Jesus' passion. The Capuchin Franciscan focused today on Our Lord's experience in the Garden of Olives, in Gethsemane, where "being in an agony he prayed more earnestly."
"But the cause of his agony is even more profound," the priest said. "[Jesus] feels himself burdened with all the evil and indignities of the world."
In Gethsemane, "he does not pray only to exhort us to do so," but "because, being true man, in everything like us, except sin, he experiences our own struggle in the face of what human nature loathes," said Father Cantalamessa.
Struggle
Prayer becomes "struggle with God … when God asks us to do something that our nature is not ready to give him and when God's action becomes incomprehensible and disconcerting," the preacher said.
"We are like Jesus if, even amid groans and the flesh sweating blood, we seek to abandon ourselves to the will of the Father," he contended. "Persevering in this kind of prayer ... at times the roles are inverted. God becomes the one who prays and one becomes him to whom one prays.
"The most sublime case of this inversion of roles is precisely Jesus' prayer in Gethsemane. He prays that the Father remove the cup from him, and the Father asks him to drink it for the salvation of the world. … He compensates him, constituting him Lord, also as man."
"Many little nights of Gethsemane" happen in human life for very different reasons, Father Cantalamessa said.
Among the most profound are "the loss of the meaning of God, the overwhelming awareness of one's sin and unworthiness, the impression of having lost the faith," in short, what the saints have called "the dark night of the soul," he continued.
"Jesus teaches the first thing to be done in these cases: to turn to God in prayer"; he himself began his prayer in Gethsemane acknowledging: "Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee."
"And if one has already prayed without success, one must pray again, with greater earnestness," exhorted Father Cantalamessa.
Till the end
In fact, in Gethsemane "Jesus was heard because of his piety" -- "an angel appeared to him from heaven who comforted him" -- but "the Father's great hearing was the resurrection," the priest said.
Nevertheless, the Pontifical Household preacher reminded his listeners that Jesus is "in agony until the end of the world."
In the Spirit, he continued, "Jesus is also in Gethsemane now, in the praetorium, on the cross, … in a way which we cannot explain, also in his person, … because of the resurrection which has made the Crucified alive in the centuries."
The "privileged place" where we can find this Jesus is the Eucharist, stressed Father Cantalamessa, asking that one not forget "the other way in which Christ is in agony until the end of the world: … in the members of his Mystical Body."
"The word 'Gethsemane' has become the symbol of all moral pain," he said; because it is there, without yet having suffered in the flesh, that Jesus' pain "is altogether interior" and he sweats blood "when it is his heart, not yet his flesh, which is crushed."
"The world is very sensitive to bodily pains, it is easily moved by them; it is much less so in the face of moral pains, which it sometimes ridicules, interpreting them as hypersensitivity, autosuggestions, whims," the Capuchin lamented.
Hidden
But "God takes very seriously the pain of the heart, and so should we," he continued. "I think of those who see severed the strongest bond they had in life and are alone -- women more frequently; those who are betrayed in their affections, are anguished before something that threatens their lives, or that of a loved one .…"
"How many hidden Gethsemanes there are in the world, perhaps even under our own roofs, next door, or in the next working desk," added Father Cantalamessa. "It is our task to single out someone this Lent and to become close to the one who is there.
"May Jesus not have to say to us, his members: 'I looked for compassion, and found none; for consolers and there were none,' but, on the contrary, may he be able to make us feel in our hearts the word that recompenses all: 'You did it to me.'"
ZE06031702 - 2006-03-17
Permalink: http://www.zenit.org/article-15558?l=english
On Pain and Hidden Gethsemanes
Father Cantalamessa Delivers Lenten Sermon at Vatican
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