In Earnest Search
October 20, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? No wonder, this post is delayed for a day. Firstly, I had to run errands for my outreach and I had to go to different outlets to get them all complete so I could prepare them without interruptions. Good decision because prices have gone up, and I had to decide on the spot for alternatives and live within the budget.
Secondly, I have the following to share with you.
From part of #15 and #16 of the pastoral letter of Father Fernando Ocariz, Prelate of Opus Dei on Contemplation October 16, 2026
Secondly, we need to cultivate an awareness of God’s presence throughout the day. As well as asking God for the gift of unceasing prayer, there are certain human means that prepare us for it and make it possible during the day: the active seeking of moments of silence, the strength to remain focused on a single activity, perseverance in constant work, the humility to listen, contact with nature, openness to sincere friendship, among many other ways. As our Lord tells us in the Gospel, it is up to us to prepare the soil of our heart to bear fruit from the grace that God is constantly offering us (cf. Mt 13:1–23). Pope Leo XIV recently urged us to promote “a genuinely healthy attitude, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised; "Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, no. 146) and, consequently, our capacity to pray.
16. Saint Josemaría warned us against the illusion of those who hope to attain spiritual maturity passively. The passage of time alone does not perfect a person: “Years alone don’t confer either wisdom or holiness” (In Dialogue with the Lord, no. 79). What brings wisdom and holiness is a humble and persevering response to God’s grace. We need to struggle every day, in little things, without growing weary, with the realization that holiness does not consist in being free from faults, but in always beginning again with humility, knowing we are guided by God. This daily struggle is not – nor should it be – a rigid tension, but rather the loving and trusting effort of a child who wants to let himself be found by his Father God, and who knows that he is pleasing to Him even when, despite his good will, he stumbles or makes a mistake.
Last October 10, I found delight in taking the following photo of a bird that was perched on a bedroom windowsill.
And then just this morning I passed by the same bedroom and --lo and behold-- I saw two birds perched on the same windowsill! What about that!
I just found it cute and delightful to see that this bird found a friend willing to perch with him on the windowsill even just for a moment? I called out to a person passing by to witness the scene but while she was approaching one of the birds flew away. I said ‘look at this bird who just did apostolate and the two of them chatted for a while’.
Indeed,
nature speaks about the love and goodness of the Creator as the song goes “I
will sing forever of your love O Lord…”
Moreover, my
sister in law shared the following:
I say: “Sow love in deeds, serve by spreading
the truth, the good and the beautiful. Do
what is right. Best of all do what God
wills of you to do at every moment of your ordinary daily life”.
Now we can continue with the elaboration on the fifth word. This time on the need for zeal (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
3The Need for Zeal
The fourth word is the suffering of the soul without God; the fifth word is the suffering of God without the soul. The cry “I thirst” refers not to physical thirst. It was Our Lord’s soul that was burning and His Heart that was on fire. He was thirsting for the souls of men. The Shepherd was lonely without His sheep; the Creator was yearning for His creatures; the Firstborn was looking for His brethren.
All during His life, He had been searching for souls. He left heaven to find them among the thorns; it mattered little if they made a crown of them for Him, so long as He could find the one that was lost.
He said He came “not to call the just, but sinners” (Mark 2:17), and His Heart thirsted for them now more than ever. He could not be happy until every sheep, and every lamb was in His sheepfold. “Other sheep I have, that are not of this fold: them also I must bring . . . and there shall be one fold and one shepherd” (John 10:16).
There was sorrow in His sad complaint
during life; “You will not come to me” (John 5:40); but there is tragedy in the
last cry: “I thirst” (John 19:28).
There was probably no moment during the three hours of redemption in which Our Lord suffered more than in this. Pains of the body are nothing compared to the agonies of the soul.
Taking His life did not mean so much to Him, for He was really laying it down of Himself. But for man to spurn His Love —that was enough to break His Heart.
It is difficult for us to grasp the intensity of this suffering, simply because none of us ever loves enough. We have not the capacity for love that He has. Therefore, we can never miss so much when it is denied.
But when our tiny little hearts are sometimes denied the love they crave, we do get some faint inkling of what must have gone on in Christ’s own great Heart.
The faithful loyal wife whose husband is snatched from her by death, the mother whose son refuses to visit her and bless her declining days with filial affection, the friend who has sacrificed all only to be betrayed by one for whom he gave all — all these experience the keenest and bitterest of all human sufferings: the pangs of unrequited love. Such victims can and really do die of a broken heart.
But what is this love for another human being, compared with the love of God for man? The affection a human heart bears for another lessens as it multiplies the objects of its love, just as a river loses its fullness the more it divides itself into little streams. But with God, there is no decrease of love with the increase of objects loved, any more than a voice loses its strength because a thousand ears hear it.
Each human heart can break His Sacred Heart all over again; each soul has within itself the potentiality of another crucifixion. No one can love as much as Our Lord; no one, therefore, can suffer as much.
Added to this was the fact that His infinite mind saw, within that second, all the unfaithful hearts that would ever live until the end of time; all who would follow like Judas and then betray; all who would fall and refuse His helping hand; in a word, all who would pass by His Cross and only stop, with the executioners to shake dice for His garments, while within a stone’s throw of them would be the Prize so precious it was worth gambling their very lives away.
It was this picture of ungrateful men that renewed the agony in the garden and caused His death. He died of thirst in the desert of human hearts!
From this word we discover this great lesson: the necessity of our loving our fellow men as Our Lord loves us.
If Jesus Christ thirsted for souls, must
not a Christian also thirst? If He came to cast fire upon the earth, must not a
Christian be enkindled? If He came to bring us the seed of life, must not that
seed fructify and bear fruit? If He lit a light in our minds, must we not be
illumined? Has He not called us to be His apostles and His ambassadors, in
order that His Incarnation might be prolonged through the continued
dispensation of the divine through the human?
A Christian, then, is a man to whom Our Lord has given other men. He breaks bread to the poor through our hands, He consoles the sick through our lips, He visits the sorrowful upon our feet, He sees the fields of harvest through our eyes, and He gathers the bundles into His everlasting barns through our toil.
To be worthy of the name Christian,
then, means that we, too, must thirst for the spread of the divine love; and if
we do not thirst, then we shall never be invited to sit down at the banquet of
life.
Crowns shall be given only to the victors, and the chalice of everlasting wine only to those who thirst.
A Catholic who does not strive to spread his Faith is a parasite on the life of the Church; he who is not girding his loins for apostolate is abdicating his seat on the dais of Christianity; he who is not bearing fruit is like a tree cut down on the road, impeding the march of the army of God. He who is not a conquering spirit is a renegade.
The torch of faith has been given to us not to delight our eyes but to enkindle the torches of our fellow men. Unless we burn and are on fire for the divine cause, a glacial invasion will sweep the earth, which will be the end, for “The Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8).
The measure of our apostolate is the intensity of our love. A human heart loves to talk about the object of his love and loves to hear that object praised.
If we love Our Lord, then we will love to talk about His holy cause, for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matt. 12:34). To those who have such love, there is never the excuse of a want of opportunity. Our Lord has told us “the harvest indeed is great, but the laborers are few” (Matt. 9:37).
To the zealous Christian, every country is a mission country; every banquet room, a Simon’s house, where another Magdalen can be found; every ship, another bark of Peter, from which nets of salvation can be let down; every crowded city street, another Tyre and Sidon, where the whelps that eat the crumbs from the master’s table can be rewarded for their faith; and every cross is a throne where thieves become courtiers.
There are those who would destroy every mark of the Savior’s feet from the face of the earth. There are those who would renew the Crucifixion by hating those who preach Christ’s love. The wicked today hide not the shame of their sins but seek to find others and make others like unto themselves, in order to find consolation in their corporate decadence.
But these are not reasons why Christians should go into the catacombs and leave the earth to the race of Cain. While these enemies of divine love live, they are still purchasable by divine grace and are potential children of the kingdom of God. They are our opportunities.
Our Lord thirsted for them on the Cross, and we must thirst for them too and love them enough to try to save them. One thing is certain; we are not called to be Christians to damn them but to save them, in order that all men may be one great redeemed humanity and Christ its Sacred Heart.
Some will always resist, but there are no hopeless cases. Some time ago in Spain, 200 men were ordered shot when the Spanish people won over a city from the forces of anarchy. These 200 men had burned churches, murdered priests and nuns, ravaged virgins, and were now to expiate their crimes. The Carmelites who had suffered from their hands began a novena of prayer and fasting that they might be converted to God before their death. At the end of the novena, out of the 200, 198 received the sacraments and died in peace with their Savior.
Something we must never forget is that every man wants to be happy, but he cannot be happy without God. Below the surface of every heart, down deep in its secret gardens, is a craving for that for which it was made, as even the caged bird still retains its love of flying.
As the Holy Father put it: “Beneath the ashes of these perverted lives there are to be found sparks which can be fanned into a flame.” Even those who hate religion have never really lost it; if they had, they would not hate it so much.
The intensity of their hate is the proof of the reality of that which they hate. If they really lost religion, they would not spend all their energy attempting to make everyone else lose theirs; a man who has lost a watch does not go about persuading others to lose their watches.
Thus, hate is but their vain attempt to
despise. That is why we are not to consider them beyond evangelization.
They can still be brought back even at the last moment, as the thief, or as Arthur Rimbaud. Here was a man who blasphemed Christ intensely in this life by his writings; a man whose greatest thrill was to intoxicate anyone who spoke to him of God and Our Lady, in order to berate and even physically abuse him.
He even delighted in breaking his mother’s heart, to whom he wrote: “Happily this life is the only one; which is obvious because one cannot imagine another life with more boredom in it than this one.”
Then came his end, which is described for us in the language of François Mauriac:
Now imagine a human being who has great
powers of resistance, who is much more masterful than I am, and who hates this
servitude.
Imagine a nature irritated and exasperated to distraction by this mysterious servitude and finally delivered over to an abandoned hatred of the cross.
He spits on this sign which he drags after him and assures himself that the bonds which attach him to it could never stand out against a methodical and planned degradation of his soul and spirit.
Thus he cultivates blasphemy and perfects it as an art and fortifies his hatred of sacred things with an armor of scornful contempt.
Then suddenly, above this stupendous defilement, a voice rises, complainingly, appealingly; it is hardly so much as a cry, and no sooner has the sky received it than the echo is smothered by frightful jeers and by the laugh of the devil.
As long as this man is strong enough, he will drag this cross as a prisoner his ball-chain, never accepting it. He will obstinately insist on wearing this wood along all the paths of the world. He will choose the lands of fire and ashes most suited to consume it.
However heavy the cross becomes, it will not exhaust his hatred until the fateful day, the turning-point in his destiny when he sinks down at last under the weight of the tree and under its agonizing embrace.
He still writhes, pulls himself together and then sinks down again, hurling out a last blasphemy. From his hospital bed, he brings abominable accusations against the nuns who are tending him; he treats the angelic sister as a fool and an idiot, and then, at last, he breaks off. This is the moment marked from all eternity.
The cross which has dragged him for thirty-seven years and which he has denied and covered with spittle offers its arms to him: the dying man throws himself upon it, presses it to him, clings to it, embraces; he is serenely sad, and heaven is in his eyes. His voice is heard: “Everything must be prepared in my room, everything must be arranged. The chaplain will come back with the Sacraments. You will see. They’re going to bring the candles and the lace. There must be white linen everywhere.”
No! Religion is not the opium of the people. Opium is the drug of deserters who are afraid to face the Cross — the opiate that gives momentary escape from the Hound of Heaven in pursuit of the human soul.
Religion, on the contrary, is the elixir
that spurs a soul on to the infinite goal for which it was made. Religion
supplies the profoundest desires.
The greatest thirst of all is the thirst of unrequited love — the hand reached out that never grasps; the arms outstretched that never embrace the hand knocking on a door that is never opened. It is these things religion satisfies by making man think less about his passing desires and more about his ultimate desire.
His passing desires are multiple and
fleeting — gold one minute, food another, pleasure another. But his ultimate
desire is unique and abiding — the perfect happiness of everlasting joy and
peace. It is our duty to lead men to the realization of this desire.
Those who hate religion are seeking religion; those who wrongly condemn are still seeking justice; those who overthrow order are seeking a new order; even those who blaspheme are adoring their own gods — but still adoring.
From certain points of view, they are all prisoners of divine love; they are confusing desires with the desire, passions with love.
They are all living in the shadow of the Cross; they are all thirsting for the fountain of divine life. Their lips were made to drink — and we must not refuse to reach them the cup.
— The Rainbow of Sorrow
I was
looking forward to mentoring my three Kabataan girls this afternoon but the
school announced asynchronous modular learning today. That means that the girls will not go to
school and if they don’t, they will not come for mentoring after.
We look forward
to paying respects to our departed relatives and friends, continuously praying
to and for our friends the Holy Souls in Purgatory as we continue to pray for
one another who are still on our way to be with Our Lord.
Once again I remind each one of us to bring the
above topic into our quiet moments of conversation with Jesus in prayer every
day throughout this week. Let us pray
for each other’s person, family and concerns.
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