The Pope to young people: God thirsts for you

dad Francisco

This book has been dear to you, my young researcher brother, and I want to present its reading to you by giving you words full of the great esteem and confidence that I place in you and in all young people.

Perhaps you have happened to open the Gospels and listen to what Jesus once said in the famous Sermon on the Mount: “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be to you. open.. seek, find, and to him who knocks it is open ”(Mt 7,7-8). These are strong words, full of great and demanding promises, but we may ask ourselves: should we take them Is it really true that if I ask the Lord he will listen to my request, if I seek him I will find him, if I call he will open to me? You could oppose me: is he not true that sometimes experience seems to deny this promise? That many ask and do not get, that they seek and do not find, that they knock on the doors of heaven and on the other side one hears only silence So can we trust these words or not? Are they not also, like so many others that I hear around me, a source of illusion and therefore of disappointment?

I understand your doubts and appreciate your questions, oh if you didn’t! – but they also challenge me and remind me of another passage of Scripture which, placed next to the words of Jesus, seems to me to enlighten them in all their depth. In the book of Jeremiah, the Lord says through the prophet: “You will seek me and you will find me, because you will seek me with all your heart; I will let myself be found by you” (Jer 29, 13 -14). God lets himself be found, yes, but only by the man who seeks him with all his heart.

Open the Gospels, read the encounters of Jesus with the people who came to him and you will see how for some of them his promises were fulfilled. It was they for whom finding an answer had become an essential question. The Lord allowed himself to be found by the insistence of the premature widow, by Nicodemus’ thirst for truth, by the faith of the centurion, by the cry of the widow of Nain, by the sincere repentance of the sinner, by the desire to leper health. , by Bartimaeus’ desire for light. Any of these figures could have rightly said the words of Psalm 63: “My soul thirsts for you. [Señor], my flesh yearns for you, like a desert land, arid, without water ”.

He who seeks finds if he seeks with all his heart, if for him the Lord becomes as vital as water for the desert, as the earth for a seed, as the sun for a flower. And that, if you think about it, is very beautiful and very respectful of our freedom: faith does not give itself automatically, as a gift indifferent to your participation, but rather asks you to get involved in the first person and with your whole being. . It is a gift that wants to be desired. It is, in essence, the Love that wants to be loved.

Perhaps you have sought the Lord and have not found Him, but let me also ask you a question: How strong was your desire for Him? Seek him with all the impulse of your heart, pray, ask, call upon, cry out, and he, as he has promised, will be found. The king of verse, whose story you will read in the following pages, loved life and, like all young people, wanted to live it to the full. He was one of the most famous singers of his time, and in his impetuous desire for fullness, he unwittingly sought out the One who alone can fill the heart of man. He searched and was found.

This shows us an even deeper truth: the Lord wants you to seek him so that he can find you. Deus sitit sitiri Saint Gregory of Nacianzo used to say, that is to say that God thirsts that we thirst for him, so that finding us thus ready, he can finally find us. The one who invites us to knock, in fact presents himself first at the door of our hearts: “Here I am at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come to him, I will dine with him. . and he with me ”(Rev 3:20).

What if today I knock on your door? The king of the verse once met Brother Francisco at the Colpersito monastery in San Severino Marche; he was transfixed by his word and a new spark was kindled in him. Perhaps the same thing happened to him as Saint Paul on the road to Damascus: may the light of God “shine in our hearts so that the knowledge of the glory of God may shine before Christ” (2 Cor 4: 6 ). He saw Francis in the splendor of his holiness and in him he saw the beauty of the face of God. What he had always sought, he found at last, and he found it thanks to a holy man. And, as happened to Saint Paul, the things which were gains for him, he considered them as a loss, a trash, before the sublimity of the knowledge of Christ Jesus (cf. Phil 3,7-9). He immediately broke all hesitation: “What is there to say more?” Back to the facts. Take me away from men and hand me over to the great Emperor!

When the Lord calls us to himself, he does not want any accommodation or hesitation from us, but rather a drastic response. Jesus said: “Follow me and let the dead bury their dead” (Mt 8,22). That day, a new man was born, no longer Guillermo de Lisciano, the king of verse, but Fray Pacifico, a man inhabited by a new peace hitherto unknown. From that day on, he became all God, entirely consecrated to him, one of the closest companions of Saint Francis, witness to the beauty of faith.

Therefore, dear young man, while thanking dear Father Raniero for the new gift he makes to the Church with the precious and wise pages of this book, with the certainty that they will do much good to those who will read, I wish you a useful reading, and remember: God has not stopped calling, in fact, perhaps today more than yesterday, he makes his voice heard. If all you do is lower more volumes and raise one of your greatest desires, you will hear it clearly and clearly within and around you. The Lord never tires of coming to meet us, of seeking us as the Shepherd seeks the lost sheep, as the woman of the house seeks the lost coin, as the Father seeks his children. He continues to call and patiently waits for us to answer as Mary did: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to your word” (Lk 1, 38). If you have the courage to leave your guarantees and open yourself to Him, a new world will open to you and you will in turn become a light for other men.

Thank you for your attention. I call on the Holy Spirit of God on you and you too, if you can, don’t forget to pray for me.

Your Pope Francis

The book:

Raniero Cantalamessa

Francis the Younger of God (Italian Franciscan editions)