In our journey towards the Lord we will not always win
Many defeats will be insignificant; others will be important, but reparation and contrition will bring us closer to God. And we will start again, with the Lord's help, without discouragement or pessimism, which are the fruit of pride, but with patience and humility to begin once more even if we see no fruit.
On many occasions we will hear the Holy Spirit say: Start again... be constant, no matter the recent failure, no matter all the previous negative experiences together... start again with more humility, asking for more help from your Lord.
In human terms, genius is usually the result of prolonged patience, of incessant effort and constant improvement. "The wise man repeats his calculations and renews his experiences, modifying them until he finds the object of his research. The writer revises his work twenty times. The sculptor breaks one attempt after another until they express his inner creation... All human creations are the fruit of a perpetual starting over."6 In the supernatural realm, our love for the Lord is manifested not so much in the successes we believe we have achieved as in our ability to start again, to renew the inner struggle.
Spiritual mediocrity, lukewarmness, is, on the contrary, abandonment and neglect of our inner life purposes and goals. On the path that leads to God, “to sleep is to die.” Discouragement, which always carries with it a touch of pride and excessive self-confidence, leads to the abandonment of the purposes and goals that the Holy Spirit once suggested in the intimacy of our hearts.
Often, progress in the interior life comes after failures, perhaps unexpected ones, to which we react with humility and a stronger desire to follow the Lord. It has been rightly said that perseverance does not consist in never falling, but in always getting up. “When a soldier who is fighting receives a wound or retreats a little, no one is so demanding or so ignorant of the ways of war as to think that this is a crime. The only ones who do not receive wounds are those who do not fight; those who throw themselves most ardently against the enemy are the ones who receive the blows.”
Let us ask Our Lady for the grace never to abandon our inner struggle, even if our previous experience has been sad and catastrophic, and for the grace and humility to always start again.
Let us also ask Our Lady today to be constant in our apostolate, even if we do not see any apparent fruit. One day, perhaps when we are already in his presence, the Lord will make us contemplate the fruits of an apostolate that at times seemed sterile to us, but which was always effective. The seed that is sown always bears fruit: one, a hundred; another, sixty; another, thirty...9. A lot of fruit for a single seed.
HCD