The Lord is not satisfied with a lukewarm interior life and a half-hearted self-giving. He prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it will bear more fruit. This is why the Master purifies His own, by permitting trials and contradictions. "If the goldsmith repeatedly hammers the gold, it is to remove the dross from it; if the metal is rubbed time and again with the file, it is to increase its brilliance. The furnace tests the potter’s vessel, and man is tested in tribulation". Every pain—whether physical or moral—that God allows, serves to purify the soul and to make us bear greater fruit. We must always see it this way, as a grace from Heaven.
Every era is a good time to enter into the deep paths of holiness, and all circumstances are opportunities to love God more. This is because the interior life, with the constant help of the Holy Spirit, feeds on the events that happen around us, much like plants do. They do not choose the place or the environment; instead, the sower drops the seeds on a piece of land, and there they grow, converting the useful elements they find in the soil into their own substance, with the help of the water that comes down from heaven. In this way, they move forward and grow strong.
With much greater reason will we come out strengthened, since it is God our Father who has chosen the terrain and gives us the graces to bear fruit. The land where the Lord has placed us is the specific family of which we are a part, and no other, with the traits, virtues, defects, and ways of being of the people who compose it. The land is our work, which we must love so that it may sanctify us; it is our colleagues in the same company or classmates in the same classroom, our neighbors... The land where we must bear fruits of holiness is our country, our region, the prevailing social or political system, our own way of being... and no other. It is there, in that environment, in the midst of the world, where the Lord tells us that we can and must live all the Christian virtues, without cutting them short, with all their demands. God calls us to holiness in every circumstance: in war and in peace, in sickness and in health, when we seem to have triumphed and when unexpected failure presents itself, when we have time in abundance and when we barely manage to carry out the essentials. The Lord wants us to be saints at all times. Those who do not count on grace and see things through a purely human vision are constantly saying: this present time is not a time for holiness.
Let us not think that in another place or another situation we would follow the Lord more closely and carry out a more fruitful apostolate. Let us put aside the "if-only" mysticism. The fruits of holiness that the Lord expects are those produced by the land where we are, here and now: tiredness, illness, family, work, coworkers, or fellow students... "Leave behind, then, dreams, false idealisms, fantasies, what I usually call 'if-only' mysticism—if only I hadn't married, if only I didn't have this profession, if only I had better health, if only I were young, if only I were old!...—and stick instead, soberly, to the most material and immediate reality, which is where the Lord is (...)". That is the environment in which our love for God must grow and develop, using precisely those opportunities. Let us not let them pass by; Jesus is waiting for us there.
HCD