Our piety must be filial, full of love, and how could we serve God with love, if we do not begin by recognizing Him as a Father full of love for His children? Perhaps many Christians live far from God, or with relationships hindered by the immaturity of whims or marked by rigidity and coldness, because they have not discovered in their lives the sense of divine filiation and the path of spiritual childhood, which for so many souls has been the definitive beginning of a true interior life. Give us, Lord, the sense of divine filiation, help us to consider it frequently.
Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the Kingdom of God as a child will not enter it10. "Why is it said," asks St. Ambrose, "that children are fit for the Kingdom of Heaven? Perhaps because they do not ordinarily have malice, nor know how to deceive, nor dare to deceive themselves; they do not know lust, they do not crave riches, and they do not know ambition. But the virtue of all this does not consist in the ignorance of evil, but in its repulsion; it does not consist in the impossibility of sinning, but in not consenting to sin. Therefore, the Lord does not refer to childhood as such, but to the innocence that children have in their simplicity ".
In the Christian life, maturity occurs precisely when we become children before God, his children who trust and abandon themselves to him like a little child in the arms of his father. Then we see the events of the world as they are, at their true value, and we have no other concern than to please our Father and Lord.
Becoming like children, the life of childhood, is a spiritual path that demands the supernatural virtue of fortitude to overcome the tendency to pride and self-sufficiency, which prevents us from behaving as children of God and leads, seeing again and again our own failures, to discouragement, dryness and loneliness. Filial piety, on the contrary, strengthens hope, the certainty of reaching the goal, and gives peace and joy in this life. In the face of life's difficulties we will never feel alone, no matter how great they may be. The Lord does not abandon us, and this confidence will be for us like water for the traveler in the desert. Without it we could not go on.
Let us ask the Virgin, our Mother, to always take us by the hand like little children, with greater care the greater the maturity that the years and experience give us.