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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20251224
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UID:14410-1766534400-1766620799@laycisterciansofgethsemani.org
SUMMARY:Vigils Reading
DESCRIPTION:GOD’S LOVING PATIENCE \nFrom “The Living God” by Fr Romano Guardini \n◊◊◊ \nGod is almighty and infinitely rich. His riches and His omnipotence are \nHis patience. How good it is that God’s patience is as great as His omnipotence! \nThat is why He is always able to forgive again\, always able to give us a fresh \nchance\, always able to begin His work again from the chaos of human freedom. \nLet us\, however\, come to the real point. We have been speaking about \n“the” world\, about men and women in general. But God’s patience is His \npatience with me. And I am to some extent able to judge what that means. I can \njudge because I know how difficult it is to be patient with myself… \nUnless we delude ourselves\, or have succeeded in reconciling ourselves to \nour own paltry and petty world\, we all know this kind of suffering even though it \nmay not have actually made us ill\, and…where is the border line between health \nand sickness? We all know the misery\, the bitter sterility\, when day after day \nand year after year passes and things never change. One tries for so long to \novercome this situation but it refuses to yield. One appears to have overcome it \nfor a time perhaps and then it suddenly returns. And sometimes it seems as \nthough after wearing oneself out trying to overcome it\, seven demons have \ntaken the place of the original one. \nIf God’s attitude to us is the same as our own attitude to ourselves\, then \nthe outlook is black indeed. If God takes as poor a view of me as I do myself\, if \nGod does not bear with my bungling\, my dishonesty\, my constant failures with \ngreater patience than I do myself\, then I am bound to give up in despair. But \nGod is love. And in Him my nature is truer than in myself. In me it is corrupt; in \nHim it is pure. In His most holy patience He holds in His love my nature which I \nmyself disfigure so terribly and squander so thoughtlessly. From this loving \npatience He sees and bears me. He has infinite confidence in me. He believes \nthat I am capable of making progress. \nWe sometimes feel that we must get away from ourselves\, that we must \nescape from the old into the new and the real\, that sometime or other there must \ncome what the Bible calls conversion\, a decisive turning to God. But it does not \ncome\, and meanwhile life wastes away. The older we get the faster it goes and \nthe more difficult we find it to believe that things can ever be any different. \nPerhaps the greatest thing about God’s patience is the infinite possibilities of \nlove and grace which He holds open to life as it hardens in its cowardice and \nruns on to its end. \nCan you take this in? This unspeakable\, impossible possibility of “hoping \nagainst all hope” which\, the more body and soul harden as life ebbs away\, must \ncome exclusively from the mind and spirit\, from the Holy Spirit of God? This is \nthe ultimate depth of God’s patience to which we can pray\, that He may keep \nopen for us the possibility of spiritual renewal when all other possibilities have \nceased.
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-reading-381/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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