March 25, 1946prev home
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In Nomine Domini
And I finally take you up again, sweet Gospel, the holy following of my Master along the ways of Palestine! After performing all the acts of obedience, I resume you - or, rather, you resume me.
I don’t know if there is anyone reflecting on the unspoken, but very instructive lesson the Lord provides with his silences, caused by three different motives.
1. Mercy towards the weakness of the sick - and at times utterly dying - spokesman.
2. The punishment of silence for those behaving badly as regards his gift.
3. The lesson He is giving me - and this is what I want to talk about - on the duty of obeying always, even if it is an act of obedience which may strike us as inferior to the work we are suspending on that account. Oh, it is not easy to be “voices”! One always lives in the continual exercise of vigilance and obedience. And Jesus, Master as He is of the world, does not allow the act of obedience being performed by his instrument to be contravened when the act has been indicated by someone with the authority to indicate it.
In these days I had to obey in doing the things which Father Migliorini had told me to do. They were rather bureaucratic and thus rather bothersome. But Jesus never intervened because I had to obey. And exactly, totally, as Azariah said in his explanation of Holy Mass.217
But now, having done everything, I can contemplate You, O my Lord.... 218
217 Contained in The Book of Azariah.
218 We omit about thirty-four handwritten pages containing the episode “Simon of Jonah in His Struggle and Spiritual Victory” and two other episodes (dated March 27 and 28, 1946) from The Third Year of the Public Life. Three notebooks following thereafter are also omitted in this volume because they contain only additional episodes in the same sequence (dated March 23-May 16, 1946).