We have often meditated on the mercy of God, who willed to become man so that man could in a certain way become God, become divinized and participate in a real way in the very life of God. Sanctifying grace, which we receive in the sacraments and through good works, identifies us with Christ and makes us sons in the Son, since God the Father has only one Son, and we can only accede to divine filiation in Christ, united and identified with him, as members of his Mystical Body: I live; but it is no longer I who live, it is Christ who lives in me (St. Paul to the Galatians).
For this reason, if we turn to the Father, it is Christ who prays in us; when we renounce something for him, it is he who is behind this spirit of detachment; when we want to bring someone closer to the sacraments, our apostolic zeal is nothing more than a reflection of the zeal of Jesus for souls. By divine benevolence, our labors and our pains complete the labors and the pains that the Lord suffered for his Mystical Body, which is the Church. What immense value the work, the pain, the difficulties of ordinary days acquire then!
This ascetical effort which, with the help of grace, leads us to identify ourselves more and more with the Lord, should move us to have the same sentiments as Christ Jesus ; and as we identify ourselves with him, we grow in the sense of divine filiation, we are - so to speak - more children of God. In human life, it is not possible to be "more or less a son" of a father on earth, but all are equally so: it is only possible to be good or bad sons. In the supernatural life, the more holy we are, the more we are children of God; as we enter more and more into the divine intimacy, we become not only better children, but more children. That should be the great goal of a Christian's life: a continuous growth in his divine filiation.
Our Mother, Holy Mary, is the perfect model of this sublime greatness to which divine grace can attain when it meets with total correspondence. No one has ever been, apart from Christ in his Most Holy Humanity, closer to God; nor can any creature become, in the fullness of sense in which the Blessed Virgin was, Daughter of God the Father.
Let us ask him to put into our souls the restlessness to seek those teachings of the Holy Spirit that impel us to imitate Jesus: under his influence we will have the urgency, the burning need to turn to the Father at all times, but especially at Mass: we will invoke him Most Merciful Father , uniting ourselves to the sacrifice of his Son; we will dare to see him as Father and call him Abba, precisely because we are anointed by the Spirit of his Son, who cries Abba, Father. He is the one who makes us hunger and thirst for God and for his glory, so evident in his Incarnate Son. And the Father is glorified by our growing likeness to his only begotten Son: the One who is able above all things to do far more than we can ask or think.