Good and Faithful Servant
June 16, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? Yesterday, at around 10:00 we were in the company of a member of the family in her last minutes. Peacefully she surrendered herself in the arms of her Father God. Since her last birthday in April 14, we were already preparing for her departure from this earth. Most of her siblings and family members came over to celebrate her birthday. It was a celebration indeed! She was very happy. From then on we were all aware she will be leaving any time God wills and she accepts.
When I was leaving for my retreat and I bade her goodbye, I asked her for prayers, she answered back and said: “Pray for a miracle”. “Yes I replied I will pray for God’s will.” Last Thursday, June 11, after dinner, I had the inspiration to whisper in her ears a message I was convinced can only come from the Holy Spirit. I was able to do that at 7:10 when the last visitor had left and she was just about to go to sleep according to the nurse. I approached her and close to her ears I whispered the following:
Nora, I have a message from the Holy Spirit. With my hand gently on her left arm, I bent to her left ear and I said. He wants me to whisper the following in your ears. “God loves you. Domine, Tu omnia nosti Tu chis quia amo Te.” “Yes.”
“Domine Iesu, Filii Dei, miserere
mei peccatoris.” “Yes.”
“Lord, have mercy. Christ,
have mercy.” “Yes.”
“You know all things, You
know that I love You.” “Yes.”
“Wash away my iniquities
and cleanse me of my sins.” “Yes.” She
sulked.
“Remember me, Lord, when You come to your
Kingdom.” “Yes.”
“I am a sinner. I trust in Your mercy and love.” “Yes.”
“Do not consider what I
truly deserve but grant me Your forgiveness.” “Yes.”
“My Lord and My God! Grant me your merciful heart and transform me
into your Body and Blood like you transform bread and wine into Your Body and
Blood. Increase my faith, hope, and
charity. I wish to receive You, Lord,
with the purity, humility and devotion with which Your most holy mother received
You with the spirit and fervor of the saints.
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.” “Okay,
until I receive another message from the Holy Spirit.”
Then I went back. Nora,
pray for vocations, vocations of priests, she nods, assistant numeraries,
numeraries, associates, supernumeraries, a lot of cooperators and a lot of St.
Raphael girls. She kept nodding. Then I
tapped her arm gently several times. Sige you rest na.”
I was so happy and thankful to the Holy Spirit! It was He who did it. He just inspired me to go and say exactly those words I whispered to her ear. She responded to every sentence I whispered. I did not expect she would. I paused not for her to respond but because I had to think of the whole message carefully.
The next day Loudette came and tapped me on the shoulder. I was surprised because she was just around the other day. She said of course she came to visit Nora again. Then I told her about what I was able to relay to Nora. She said, “Oh you should be able to say the same to her every day.”
I was able to do that this morning while she was, according to the nurse, in coma; this time on her right ear.
God is truly wonderful. He gives you time to do penance and He is the only One who knows well when you are ready to go with Him. Nora is a fighter. She fought a good fight, she finished the race and she kept the faith.
I would dare say that the above episode fittingly allows us to continue with the second word of Christ on the Cross (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
A Word to the
Sinners
There are two ways of coming to God: through the
preservation of innocence and through the loss of it. Some have come to God
because they were good, like Mary, who was “full of grace”; like Joseph, the
“just man”; like Nathanael, “in whom there was no guile”; or like John the
Baptist, “the greatest man ever born of woman” (Luke 1:28; Matt. 1:19; John
1:47; see Matt. 11:11).
But others have come to God who were bad, such as the young man of the Gerasenes, possessed of devils; like Magdalen, out of whose corrupt soul the Lord cast seven devils; and like the thief at the right, who spoke the second word to the Cross.
The world loves the mediocre. The world hates the very good and the very bad. The good are a reproach to the mediocre, and the evil are a disturbance. That is why Christ was crucified with thieves. Seven hundred years before, Isaiah had prophesied that He would be “reputed with the wicked” (Isa. 53:12). Luke verified it: “And with the wicked was he reckoned” (Luke 22:37).
So it was willed by God. This is His true position: Jesus among the worthless ones. During His life He was accused of eating and drinking with sinners; now they can accuse Him of dying with them. And these companions on their crosses were not political prisoners, nor castoff capitalists from a proletarian revolution; they were just plain bandits — pure and simple.
Here is a supreme instance of the Right Man in
the right place: Christ among the bandits; the Redeemer in the midst of the
unredeemed; the Physician among the lepers — for God does not work through
culture but through grace. He does not ask men to be refined; He asks them to
be penitent. Thus does God show that we become great not because of what we
are, but because of what He gives.
God in His infinite wisdom had reached deep into the lower layers of humanity and picked out of its dregs two worthless derelicts, and He used one of them as the escort of His Eternal Son.
At the beginning of the Crucifixion, they both cursed and blasphemed the Savior. But suddenly the soul of one, lighted by fires from that central Cross, turned to a King who was being mocked and asked to be one of His subjects: “Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom” (Luke 23:42).
Lord: He called Him Lord! A real King is so easy
to approach! Remember me: There was a touch of humor in asking God to remember.
God had remembered him before he was born. That is why He is immortal. God had
been following his soul down the corridors of time, and now the pursued asks
the Pursuer to remember.
When thou shalt come into thy kingdom: How did the thief know He had a kingdom? Maybe the crown of thorns spoke of a diadem, the Crucifixion of a coronation, the nails of a scepter, and the blood of royal purple. We can never judge people by the way they are dressed!
This day: Evil has its hour, but God has His
day.
Thou: “And he calleth his own sheep by name (John 10:3). This was the foundation of Christian democracy. The soul of an outcast is of such value that the Eternal Word addresses him in the second person singular: “Thou.”
Shalt be with me in paradise: I wonder why He said “in paradise”? To be with Him is paradise.
The mob on Calvary asked Him to come down from the Cross; the thief asked to be taken up! The masses would have believed if He preached a religion without a Cross; the thief found his faith by hanging on a cross. This is the supreme instance of one bringing good out of evil. It is doubtful if the thief would have found goodness otherwise!
Why is it that this thief found salvation? Why, on the other hand, did Our Lord say to the chief priests and the ancients: “Amen I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before you” (Matt. 21:31)? Why did He lash out with whips at the merchants, and with His tongue scourge the so-called good people, calling them a “brood of vipers” and “whited sepulchres” (see Matt. 3:7; 23:27)? And while speaking harshly to this group, why did he speak so kindly to the woman with five husbands, so gently to the publican Matthew, and so courteously to the good thief?
It can only be because the capacity for conversion is greater in the really wicked than in the self-satisfied and complacent. The very emptiness of soul of the sinners is in itself an occasion for receiving the compassion of God. Self-disgust is the beginning of conversion, for it marks the death of pride.
The prodigal began to be converted only when he
was hungry: “There was a famine.” He had left the Father’s house saying: “Give
me,” but he came back saying: “Father, make me one of thy hired servants” (Luke
15:19). As the Mother of Our Lord had said of her Son: “He hath filled the
hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away” (Luke 1:53).
May it not be that the conversion of the good thief is the key to the conversion of the modern world? Men will return to God, not because they are good, but because they recognize that they are evil. They will come to God through evil rather than through goodness. Or shall we say they will come to God through the devil.
Countless are the instances mentioned in the
Gospel of those who came to God after Satan was driven from their souls. The
French Revolutionist Georges Sorel predicted that the basic problem of the
twentieth century would be the problem of evil.
The nineteenth century foreshadowed this in two of its most outstanding writers: Dostoyevsky, the Russian, and Nietzsche, the German. Nietzsche, representing one side of the problem of evil, believed that the world must pass from Christ to antichrist; Dostoyevsky, representing The other side, believed that the world would be saved by passing from antichrist to Christ.
Most typical of the latter approach is Professor C.E.M. Joad of the University of London, who explains the fanaticism for such creeds of Nazism, fascism, and communism as the yearning of irreligious minds to fill up the moral vacuum in their souls by an object of absolute adoration — an evil god. The universality of evil throughout the world frightened Joad, and “so pervasive and insistent have these evils become that it is at times difficult to avoid concluding that the Devil has been given a longer rope than usual for the tempting and corrupting of men.”
None of the explanations given by his contemporaries concerning evil are satisfactory. The socialist explanation of evil in terms of economic inequality and injustice, Joad rejects; for if poverty is the root of all evil, then money must be the source of all virtue.
The psychological explanation of evil attributes evil to suppressed desires, thwarted sex libidos, and mother libidos, all of which could be abolished by popularizing aesthetics, by extending the blessings of the machine and the ballot.
These he rejected after asking himself: “Was no rich man ever cruel, was no unrepressed man ever tyrannical,” “Was no self-expressive child selfish”?
With the posing of the question, there begins to file before the mind’s eye that long line of absolute rulers, the sultans, the caliphs, the emperors and the kings, with the smaller fry, the schoolmasters and the workhouse superintendents, and the slave overseers, the Squeerses and Brooklehursts, and Bumbles and Murdestones, bringing up the rear of the melancholy procession, who had money enough to be exempt from the cramping effects of poverty and power enough to be free from the repressive effects of authority.
Yet they used their power to increase, and often deliberately to increase, the misery of human beings with such consistency as to provoke Lord Acton’s terrible verdict: “All power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
None of the modern explanations of evil, Joad
argues, explains the fact of evil. “Evil is not merely a by-product of
unfavorable circumstances; it is too wide-spread and too deep-seated to admit
of any such explanations; so wide-spread, so deep-seated that one can only
conclude that what the religions have taught is true, and that is endemic in
the heart of man.”
“Endemic in the heart of man!” That is it. It is in our blood! It flows through our veins! It gives life to the brain when it thinks evil; it energizes the will when it kills; it fires the muscle when it drops bombs, and it persecutes the prayerful.
In the face of that evil that is endemic in the
human heart, this truth emerges: it is one thing to be blind, and another thing
to know it.
There is hope for those who are deaf and who
want to hear and for the lame who want to walk, and there is hope for the
diseased who acknowledges the need of a physician and the sinner who feels the
need of a redeemer.
The thief at the right conquered evil that way: by admitting his emptiness of soul, he called upon God to save him! There is only one thing in the world worse than sin, and that is denying that we are sinners.
The tragedy of the modern world is that so many deny sin. Never before in the history of the world was there so much evil, and never before was there so little consciousness of it.
Talk to a modern man about reconciling his soul with God, and he will say: “What have I ever done to Him? I let Him alone. Why should He not leave me alone?”
Why does he say this? For the same reason, a healthy man would say to a surgeon who wanted to operate on him: “There is nothing wrong with me. Leave me alone.” In like manner, if you are your own law, if you set your own standards, and if you are your own god, then it is nonsense to ask to be reconciled to another god.
As a man gets more wicked, he understands his wickedness less and less, just as when a man’s fever climbs to a point of deliriousness, he understands his sickness less and less. He may even think himself so healthy that he wants to go to work. A moderately bad man always thinks he is good. We never know we were asleep until we wake up, and we never know what sin really is until we get out of it.
Only when you are sick do you ask for a physician; and only when you recognize yourself as a sinner do you ask for your Redeemer. Our Lord said: “They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill” (Matt. 9:12).
When, therefore, you reach a point where you cease calling yourself “idiotic” (and don’t mean it) — and begin to call yourself a “rotter” (and mean it) — you are on the pathway of the good bandit that leads to converse on. The perception of guilt is the condition of conversion, as the perception of disease is the condition of remedy. So long as we think we are good, we will never find God.
If, therefore, we think that we know it all, how can God teach us what we do not know?
We admit sometimes that we are ill-tempered, or that we are intemperate, but will we ever admit that we are proud? We condemn pride so vociferously in others, but we deny that we have ever been guilty. The more conceited we are, the more we hate conceit in others. The more we say, “I am not conceited,” the more we prove that we are conceited.
Our pride makes us look down on people so that we can never look up to God. In fact, because our pride admits no law and no authority other than ourselves, it is essentially anti-God.
All our other sins can be from ourselves; for example, avarice, lust, anger, and gluttony. But pride comes direct from hell. By that sin fell the angels. It destroys the very possibility of conversion.
If, therefore, we can humble ourselves as did the thief at the right, and admit we have done wrong, then out of our creative despair we can cry to the Lord to remember us in our misery! The very moment we stop strutting and posing and begin to see ourselves as we really are, then in our humility, we shall be exalted.
Let us examine our consciences. Let us ask
ourselves not how much we know, but how much we do not know; not how good we
are, but how bad we are. Let us judge ourselves not by the knowledge we
possess, but by our consciences; not by our education, but by our habits; not
by our politeness, but by our hearts.
As soon as we feel a great void in our souls, and realize that by our sinning we are no longer our own, and acknowledge that we are still thirsty at the border of a well, and admit that we have played the fool and that our follies of the years mount up in their dark arrears, then out of a dark and swampy soul, we cry out with the thief — as all Catholics do when we go to Confession — “Bless me Father, for I have sinned” — “I am a sinner.”
Such is the beginning of salvation. The thief died a thief, for he stole paradise. And if we win paradise, we will be thieves too, for we will never deserve what we got — the God of everlasting peace!
— Seven Words to the Cross
I am sure that the above considerations will help you and myself go deeper in our relationship with each of the persons of the Blessed Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. God the Father is truly a Father who loves each one of us like no other Father; God the Son is our brother who suffered and died on the Cross in order to redeem us from original sin that you and I may become adopted children of God in Him being the Son of God Himself, and God the Holy Spirit is our friend and sanctifier. He it is Who will make sure you and I go to Heaven through His gifts. Ask for each one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit and bear twelve fruits that will last.
Let us talk to each one of them about all the above thoughts in our quiet moments of conversation with them during the day. Listen to what each one says and do accordingly.
See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”
Affectionately,
Guadalupinky
Comments
Post a Comment