Do not underestimate your life nor yourself, for that would be slighting God and you would be doing yourself the greatest possible harm. God does not do things on a small scale. In Him all things are great. He has created you according to His image and likeness and has given you the power to become His child and, as such, to become God by participation in His own divinity. You will therefore be divine if you will but act divinely.
Do not mark your misery and lowliness and say: "I am a poor mortal born for the things of earth; heaven is too high for me and I am not able to mount to it." Do not underestimate yourself this way nor underestimate the work of God. For if you are part earth, you also have a spark of divinity that makes you greater than the universe.
It is not external things that make you great, but you must magnify or make great all things. The smallest thing, the most insignificant action, will become great if you will perform it with a magnanimous spirit. Before God what is great and what is small in the material order? To Him there is but one greatness in man: greatness of heart. Just as God is equally great when He creates an ant as when He creates the universe, for in each case He operates with the same power, so also the man who acts in virtue of his interior greatness elevates all things to his own greatness.
Wherefore, do not mark the external lowliness of your life; do not mark the servility and insignificance of your occupations and believe yourself bereft of the right to true greatness, which is to become like God. Did He not spend thirty years in a carpenter's shop? He did it in order to consecrate your life. Thenceforth there would be no vile or base occupations. Everything is great, everything is holy, everything is divine if we but do it in the spirit of the children of God. What does it matter, then, if my actions and occupations are lowly, if in them I accomplish the will of God and through them I ravish His heart? For nothing pleases Him more than humility of heart!
Sing, then, O soul, sing with jubilation to your God while your hands sow the seed or carve the stone, for thus you sow seeds of eternal life and fashion your eternal crown.
---
Source: Fr. Victorino Osende, Fruits of Contemplation, trans. by a Dominican Sister of the Perpetual Rosary (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1963), 104-105.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments ad hominem or deemed offensive by the moderator will be subject to immediate deletion.