“Nothing is worthwhile if we are not close to Our Lord.” (Saint Josemaría).
When I was a little girl, my late grandfather used to take me and my siblings down to his garden on a Sunday afternoon and allow us to pick fruit from his trees.
And I remember loving nothing more than those Sunday afternoons, because picking the fruit from those trees was simply wonderful. We would go and chose whatever we wanted and we would sort through the wonderful fruit…
There was just one problem with all of this. In those days on a Sunday, we wore our special Sunday clothes. Now, these were the sort of clothes that we were supposed to keep clean and tidy. We were not supposed to roll around in the dirt while wearing these clothes and we were not supposed to stain them or ruin them. And the easiest way to ruin these clothes was to climb a ladder or a tree and pick a pomegranate or mulberry and slobber right into it. Or worse – to fall over under the tree and end up with mud on our knees.
And I have been reflecting on that memory of my childhood, because it occurs to me that as Saint Josemaría said, “Nothing is worthwhile if we are not close to Our Lord.”
And yet – even despite known and believing in this – it is impossible to get close to Our Lord on my own merit... There is nothing that I could do in relying on my own strength to take me close to the Creator of the world. And so I have been thinking about all the times that I fall down and fail to reach my Beloved. And then – covered in mud – I am unable to proceed. I become bogged down in the weakness of sin and I cannot move forward in my journey to God.
On my own, I fall over and I am covered in mud. But with the Blessed Virgin to help and guide me, I can be brought forward, guided and led, to the place where Her Son suffers and dies on the Cross. And being brought to that place, I can consume of the fruit of that suffering. And the fruit of that suffering is HOPE.
And it occurs to me today that I am able to trust in my Heavenly Mother – the soul who resisted sin in a sinful world, where Eve failed to resist sin in a sinless one. For my Heavenly Mother knows how to move towards God without falling in the mud. And knowing that she is able to show me the way.
For at the end of the day, the only thing that I desire is to know the Lord my God and to Love Him with all my heart and all my mind. For if I fail to do that , I fail to do everything. For nothing else matters other than that!
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.