A certain man who was a landowner planted a vineyard, surrounded it with a fence and dug a winepress.... He surrounded it with a fence, that is," says St. Ambrose, "he defended it with the wall of divine protection, so that it would not suffer easily from the incursions of spiritual vermin..., and he dug a winepress where the fruit of the divine grape would flow spiritually". There have been many divine cares that we have received. The fence, the winepress and the tower signify that God has spared nothing to cultivate and beautify his vineyard. How could he have expected it to yield grapes and produce sour grapes?
Sin is the sour fruit of our lives. The experience of one's own weaknesses is evident in the history of mankind and in the history of every man. "No one is entirely free from weakness, loneliness and servitude, but all need Christ, model, teacher, savior and life-giver". Our sins are intimately related to that death of the beloved Son, of Jesus: And seizing him, they cast him out of the vineyard and killed him.
In order to produce the fruits of life that God expects every day from each one of us (fruits of charity, of the apostolate, of work well done...), we need, first of all, to ask the Lord and foster a holy abhorrence of all faults, even venial ones, that offend God. Carelessness in charity, negative judgments of others, impatience, guarded grievances, dispersion of the internal and external senses, work badly done..., "do great harm to the soul. -Therefore, "capite nobis vulpes parvulas, quae demolluntur vineas", says the Lord in the "Song of Songs": "hunt the little foxes that destroy the vineyard". It is necessary that time and time again we strive to reject everything that is not pleasing to the Lord. The soul that abhors deliberate venial sin, little by little gains in delicacy and refinement in its dealings with the Master.
Our weaknesses should help us to foster acts of reparation and atonement, and sincere contrition for these faults. Just as we ask forgiveness for an offense against a loved one and try to compensate for it with some good act, so much greater should be our desire for reparation when the offended one is Jesus, the true Friend. Then He smiles on us and restores peace to our souls. We thus convert into splendid fruits what was lost. "Ask the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and your Mother, to make you know yourself and weep for that heap of dirty things that have passed through you, leaving - alas - so much dregs? -And at the same time, without wanting to turn away from this consideration, tell her: give me, Jesus, a Love as a bonfire of purification, where my poor flesh, my poor heart, my poor soul, my poor body will be consumed, cleansed of all the earthly miseries... And, now that my whole self is empty, fill it with You: may I be attached to nothing here below; may Love always sustain me".
Hablar con Dios