Refueling for Charity (Rebroadcast)

In today’s podcast, Fr. Peter Armenio reflects on the charity of God as “fuel” that enables us to seek holiness in the ordinary moments of everyday life. Our receptivity to God’s grace increases as we continue to strengthen our relationship with him through prayer and the sacraments. The grace we receive fills our life and will overflow into our relationships with one another, leading those we encounter closer to Christ.

As St. Josemaria explains: “Charity is not something we ourselves build up. It invades us along with God’s grace, ‘because he has loved us first’. We would do well to fill, to saturate ourselves with this most beautiful truth: ‘If we are able to love God, it is because we have been loved by God.’ Ask God boldly for this treasure, for the supernatural virtue of charity, so that you may practice it even in the smallest details” (Friends of God, no. 229).

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and the grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. It's important that humility come before charity, because humility creates the staging area of love. All the good intentions in the world cannot enable us to love if there is too much self-love. We all have self-love, but we need to keep ridding ourselves of that self-love. And I probably as we keep at this game of centering our lives around Christ, we understand Saint Teresa of Avola, who says, not to be taken verbatim or literally, that bearing humiliation willingly is worth more than days of fasting. That doesn't give us a pass from fasting. But Therese of Avala says that it's that humility. And seeing in the life of the saints and special focus on Saint Jose Maria, I've been fortunate to meet people who know him, knew him. And they all say something similar. Tremendous amount of warmth. Tremendous amount of affection. Joy. In fact, he was naturally, I'd say tough. Given the situation of his country. But he'd break down into tears. If someone of the work or in touch with the work suffered a serious illness or passed away. And he would kind of boast that, you know, I love you like your mom does. And he said, I the reason I can do that, he says, is that I see the blood of our Lord in you. And he said that we should never, I'm paraphrasing in informal American, that we should never write ourselves off. Because we could write ourselves off. Well, I'm not a very loving person, or I'm not a very giving person, or I'm not a very friendly person, or I'm not a very affectionate person. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. It is a question, though, of refueling in love. He says that love for others and charity for others and joy are intimately linked to how much we deal with the fountain of love, the well of love, which is the heart of Jesus. So much emphasizing the truth in the church. This by Francis and especially Saint John Paul, this mercy of our Lord. Let's look at what our Lord wants of you and me. The gospel is directed to all of us personally. He's ready to cut the apostles loose into a hostile world. Where speaking about Christianity is like speaking Chinese to a group of Italians or Spaniards or Greeks. And our Lord is not stalling. Why don't you just teach us what to do? If you were an American Lord, you would talk about diet, you would talk about learning new languages, you would talk about getting in shape. You know, there were no cars or planes or trains, so you had to be in decent shape to climb those mountains and submit yourself to the harsh climates of those different parts of the empire. Just warn us what's gonna happen, too. We're gonna be severely butchered. No, I want just you gotta get have you have to have one thing clear. You live this counsel, this commandment, it's gonna work. That's what you gotta do. It's not easy. You have to give people habitually and perfectly, but nevertheless, truly, an experience of the heart of our Lord on some level. That's why he washed feet. I'm sure that set the apostles on edge. Here's your last night. And you're doing this. What's the point? We're incredulous. We're befuddled. When he washed their feet and taken his garments and resumed his place, he said to them, Do you know what I have done to you? Yeah. We're very uncomfortable about what you've done. You've gone too far. This is way off. You call me teacher and lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then your Lord and teacher have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. Well, I have to ask you, Lord, because it sounds great as long as I don't have to do it. I can do it symbolically on Holy Thursday. But I have to translate that footwashing disposition and actions into my daily, ordinary life, like Jesus did in Nazareth, like Joseph did, like Mary did. You translate this. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. I do know these things. But what does that mean? And he resumes it, he summarizes it. The new commandment I give to you that you love one another even as I have loved you. That you also love one another. By this, all men and women will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. Okay. That's what worked, boys. Maybe I could illustrate this with an anecdote because, you know, I like like you, we have our favorite saints. I, you know, St. Maximilian Colby, I love him, St. Therese, Ida Stein, Padre Pio, of course, St. Jose Maria. So we, you know, Mother Teresa. But I I don't know, I'm the Lord has not called me with extraordinary charisms to found anything or lead the charge like that. I'm grateful that he hasn't. But I read this, and then I guess the Lord wants me to share this with you. I'm plagiarizing another priest, but I had read it before about a woman who ran a pizza parlor in Boston or on the outskirts of Boston. She was a widow. I don't think she made all that much money. She made enough to be comfortable. And died in her early 80s. And so there's an article about her. She would bake the pizza and waitress and receptionist, she was everything. I mean, she had other people working there. And the narrative goes that people loved her because, in spite of all the customers, all her clientele, you felt extremely special. And you got the sensation that she didn't have anything to do but hang out with you. And you know, you're waiting for your food and wants to know how you're doing, and maybe she could give you, you know, a special topping and easy engaging conversation with kids and playing with little babies, and she just would do that with people. Everybody felt very special with her. And everybody thought, well, I have a special relationship with whatever her name was, Mrs. Donato, I think. And the Lord called her out of this life, like all of us will be called out. And for her wake, now the moral of the story is, listen, you know, what you don't want is just five people coming to your wake. That's totally irrelevant. That's not the point, how many people come to our wake, and it's not a reflection of how holy we are or how unholy we are. But in her case, being working there for almost 60 years, or that you had to wait two and a half hours to pay respects at the wake. The line was just out way outside the door. And the funeral mass was bursting at the seeds. The priest loved her too. She was just a one, and you know, there's an article about her being a wonderful human being, didn't write speeches. She was not an Uber woman, she wasn't terribly beautiful, she wasn't that well educated. She ran a pizza parlor. East Coast pizza's pretty good, though. So she ran that. And she touched so many lives. That was the point of the article. You know, the it's just a woman running a pizza parlor, the impact she had on people just by being very human, very affectionate, and making a fuss out of each person coming. Now I gotta be who I am. I'm not running a pizza parlor. But I do want to be, that's what Jesus is commanding me, and that is kind of tailored to Americans. Let's evaluate ourselves. That's not a question of a guilt trip or getting discouraged with ourselves, but this is what he says. I need to be known by my charity, by my love. What's step number one in doing that? It's not magic, but it's it's it's completely indispensable. You could do the same thing. Some people think I have preternatural powers of reading a heart. I don't, just for the record. And you could do the same thing. People see, they want some direction. And I said, You've been praying this week. How do you know? I just know you've been doing that meditation that I've been badgering you about. And sometimes I say, I have a feeling you were not. Pray, you haven't been meditating. I have a feeling that you haven't. Oh my gosh, I said, You're correct. How do you know? I said, I just know. So I scare people a little bit. And I eventually say, Well, listen, I mean, there's that that sparkle is not there, the joy is not there. And this is compatible with suffering. You just got, you need to talk to our Lord more. And the more you talk to him, the kinder you're gonna be, the more charitable you're gonna be. Perfect? No. Do we have to work at it? Yes. Because Paul, who's always talking about charity in all his epistles, says something very enlightening. We've heard this, we've read this. Uh Romans 5.5. He talks about charity as if it were fuel, as if it were, you know, some liquid poured into the receptacle of your heart. Let me just recite it. The love of God has been poured into your hearts by the Holy Spirit. That's what Paul means when he says, put on Jesus Christ, put him on, put on his love. And you can't love with his heart unless you speak with him and draw that love out of him. And I would say charity is symbolized by the crucifix, by a cross. And you build a cross in in order. There are two necessary steps. One step comes before the first one. You can't place the horizontal bar before you place the vertical one. The vertical bar is a symbol of raising your mind to our Lord. That has to come first, otherwise, you can't hang the horizontal. The horizontal beam signifies loving one another. Traditionally, I can't love one another unless I have that vertical thing beam first. The horizontal hangs on the vertical. If the vertical is a toothpick, it doesn't hang. And so don't write yourself off. Peter, don't write yourself off. You just gotta draw more out of our Lord. One more point.

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St.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Jose Maria says this is sounds like Francis wrote it, but he didn't originally anyway. Long faces, coarse manners, a ridiculous appearance, a repelling air. Is that how you hope to inspire others to follow Christ? So, in this culture that is not inherently Christian right now, we need to really lead with Christ. We need to reveal Christ. Church is in difficult situations, case for 2,000 years, but right now we're in our own difficult situation. And there's a certain clarity that what the Vatican Council taught, what St. Jose Maria saw on October 2nd, the hope of the church is the laity. Doesn't mean we priests are off the hook. But we've got to bring our Lord into the workplace, into the society here, into the street, onto the sports field, into the party, into the political sector, every every capillary of society. And they have to make Christ real through prayer. We read one last point in quotation from St. Jose Maria 917, the way. If you are an apostle, these were these words of the disciples of Emmaus should rise spontaneously to the lips of your professional companions when they meet you along the way of their lives. Lord, may that happen. Help me make a resolution to speak with you because it's about others. It's not about me. And my prayer life is a service so that I'm empowered to love with your heart and have your joy with my temperament and personality and with my many flaws. And when I love with your heart, I'm giving my friends, my family, you. Mary, pray for me. Pray for all of us, so that we rise to the occasion and that we sincerely seek to love as he has loved. I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations you have communicated to me in this meditation. I ask your help and put them into effect. My Immaculate Mother St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.