Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple
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2 February 1988 Rome, Italy

Mother Duzan and my dear Sisters,

St. Luke has just told us how, forty days after Our Lord had been born, Our Lady and St. Joseph went up to the Temple in Jerusalem to present Him there. It was a sort of christening celebration. It was primarily a joyful occasion and then the old man Simeon comes along and spoils everything. He is like a ghost at the feast, for he foretells suffering for Our Lord and, turning to Our Lady he says: "And your own soul a sword shall pierce." (Lk 2:25). There was an Irish poet who wrote: "Lord, Thou art hard on mothers; they suffer in our coming and in our going." The Lord was certainly hard on His own mother. She suffered in His coming. To listen to that sad forecast about her Son forty days after His birth was hard. She suffered in His going: "There stood by the cross of Jesus, Mary, His Mother." (Lk 19:25).

Simeon spoke of one sword. In reality there were seven, and we can count at least seven occasions when sorrow entered Our Lady's soul. There was a possible eighth sorrow, and that was living with the fear of what was to come. That can be a heavy cross. It is often more painful to sit waiting in the dentist's waiting room than to sit in the dentist's chair. What I would like to think of as Our Lady's eighth sorrow was living with the sword, Simeon's sword, hanging over her. Yet, and this is what is most admirable, that did not deter Our Lady from going on with the business of living and caring for the home in Nazareth, from following Our Lord in His preaching journeys and from making her way to the spot where He was executed. She lived with fear, but was able with the strength of God to prevent it from immobilizing her. May Mary obtain for each of us the grace of surmounting those fears which occupy a place in the hearts of every one of us and sometimes paralyze us in showing love to God and to our neighbor.

With Our Lord and with His Mother this morning some of you are completing your annual spiritual exercises. Every retreat that we make is at once an end and a beginning. St. Vincent said on one occasion that a person is never the same after a retreat: one is either better or worse. At the end of a retreat we have closed one chapter in the book of our lives, and we are opening a new one. The end of a retreat is a new beginning to our lives. We may not be taking up a new appointment at the end of our retreat, but we do resolve to draw closer to Jesus Christ in prayer. We resolve to show more love and understanding to those with whom we live in Community. We resolve to give ourselves more fully to Christ in the person of the poor. All that is definitely a new beginning.

During your retreat, you have experienced in a new and intimate way "the goodness and tenderness" (Ti 3:4) of Our Lord for you personally. That experience is intended to be the beginning of a new manifestation on your part of goodness and tenderness to all whose lives you touch, both inside and outside the Community. "Goodness and tenderness" (Ibid.): St. Louise expressed that idea in one word, cordiality. In her writings to the first Sisters, it was a word that she loved to use. It is for that reason I pray for all of you that God may give you the grace of cordiality. To ask for the grace of cordiality is to ask God to enable us to externalize the love that He has poured into our hearts. So, I pray, as St. Vincent once did: "I beseech God with all my heart to animate you all with His true and holy love, to give us the infallible marks of it and to grant us the grace always to grow in it more and more so that, aided by this grace, we may be able to begin in this world what we shall do in the next, to which may the Father, Son and Holy Spirit conduct us." (Conf. Eng. ed., 19 Sept. 1649, p. 429).

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