“I will think that God is looking at me. I will think that God is talking to me with inspirations and dispositions… I will reply Him with short prayers. I will offer Him everything I do or that which I will abstain from. I will accept the chalice of the passion when it comes to me with some pains or works”. Intentions of the year 1859, in AEC p. 687
PERMANENT REFERENCE
The God of the Bible is a living God. He lives in relationship with humanity, speaks to His people, reveals His name to them, that is to say, His being, and He shares in their suffering (Ex 3, 7). He wants to live in dialogue with His people: “listen oh Isreal”, He is a tender God, who is called Father and has features of Mother (“heart”), a God who fixes His loving gaze on His people, and his people ask Him: “don’t hide your face from me” (Ps. 26,8).
From his infancy, Anthony Claret was gifted with a great capacity of reflection; he lived in dialogue with God. The first (and decisive) listening to God dated back to when he was five years old: from thinking about eternity he moved to hear the call to “save souls” (Aut 9), as he said then. His formation, in the family and in the school will teach him to look for the way God has prepared for him. (cf. Aut 26-28).
Religious formation leads us to be aware of how God’s “look” is a maternal accompaniment on our journey. A created look that makes us more beautiful: “you can now look at me and after looking at me I can feel the grace, the beauty you left for me” (St. John of the Cross). A look “of communion”, that puts us more in tune with God and with His directives, with his universal salvation Project.
If the way God looks at us is of love and providence, how is possible that the just person often feels defenceless? Why is there so much violence and so much pain in the world? Certainly we don’t have – nobody has- an adequate explanation to the problem of evil that seems to invite us to deny the existence of God himself. But the believer knows that nothing goes outside the project of God: Jesus on the cross complains of His apparent absence; but he ends up putting his spirit into God’s hands (cf. Lk 23,46). God never stops looking and listening to what we are. What matters is for us not to close our eyes on Him.
How do I feel the company of God and of Jesus on my way? Do I doubt sometimes that God “thinks” of me? Or am I the one who sometimes is blind to His presence?
