Surrender

 

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked I will return.

The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord!”

(Job 1:21)

Poverty must never be confused with misery. One can be poor even while possessing goods and, on the contrary, one can be rich even without owning anything.

There are also those who, though having many possessions, have chosen to become poor, leaving behind everything that hindered their journey toward Christ. First of all, they have made their own ego extremely poor: the craving for power, careerism, and social climbing.

It is very easy to declare oneself poor and humble while, at the same time, feeding one’s human and spiritual pride every day, in every moment, in every action.

What is more disastrous than a false poor person? What is more false than someone who is never content with what life has given him?

Always looking ahead, toward a goal that is always married to success, to that craving to appear, to show off, in order to prove oneself always and in every way better than anyone else. Making everyone see that one is the Best, the rising star, the one we were waiting for in that specific field in this poor land populated by incompetents.

No, my brothers, it does not work that way. Being true Christians is not this: this is not the narrow path traced by Jesus; this is the wide road that leads to the eternal precipice and to spiritual perdition.

Since these words make many people turn up their noses, it is good to speak them openly in today’s consumer society, where everything is governed by the law “I want everything and I want it now.” In the service of this new law, introduced by men in recent decades, every action is justified and every means is considered legitimate in order to reach the designated finish line.

Yet we lose sight of the ultimate purpose of our existence: we confuse true values with false ones, we exchange gold for copper, we create confusion.

There are not only material goods; there are also spiritual goods, of which almost no one speaks or seeks anymore, especially those who, like me, should do so.

The most precious good is our soul and its salvation, to which each of us should aspire. If we lose sight of this goal, we have lost our very existence and our eternity.

To love God above all things and to place nothing between God and ourselves. The examples of the lives of the saints—men like us—who understood this vision of life and this mission entrusted to each of us by God on the day of our Baptism.

In this perspective, or rather in this logic, we all came naked from our mother’s womb and, at the end of our life, we shall return to God just as we came into this life: with nothing, without possessions, without pride or noble titles, without cups, medals, or recognitions.

We are nothing, only a breath of wind…

Therefore it is of no use to toil for anything: as Jesus said, this is the way of the pagans and not of the children of God.

We shall take Love with us if we have loved God. We shall take smoke if we have loved what the world and the life of those who live as pagans have offered us during this existence.

We shall be up there what we have been here.

Father Ambrogio