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Wise Words from Pope Francis!

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Pope Francis wrote these words in 2020 when the Covid pandemic was still very much with us. Pope Francis gives us much to reflect upon even today:

Sometimes when I think about the challenges before us, I feel overwhelmed. But I’m not hopeless. We are accompanied. We are being sifted, yes, but it is painful; many of us feel powerless and even afraid. But there is an opportunity in this crisis to come out better. 

What the Lord asks of us today is a culture of service, not a throwaway culture. But we can’t serve others unless we let their reality speak to us.

To go there you have to open your eyes and let the suffering around you touch you, so that you hear the Spirit of God speaking to you from the margins. That’s why I need to warn you about three disastrous ways of escaping reality that block growth and the connection with reality, and especially the action of the Holy Spirit. I’m thinking of narcissism, discouragement, and pessimism. 

Narcissism takes you to the mirror to look at yourself, to center everything on you so that’s all you see. You end up so in love with the image you’ve created that you end up drowning in it. Then news is only good if it’s good for you personally; and if the news is bad, it’s because you are its chief victim. 

Discouragement leads you to lament and complain about everything so that you no longer see what is around you nor what others offer you, only what you think you’ve lost. Discouragement leads to sadness in the spiritual life, which is a worm that gnaws away at you from the inside. Eventually it closes you in on yourself and you can’t see anything beyond yourself. 

And there’s pessimism, which is like a door you shut on the future and the new things it can hold; a door you refuse to open in case one day there’ll be something new on your doorstep. 

These are three ways that block you, paralyze you, and cause you to focus on those things that stop you from moving ahead. They are all in the end about preferring the illusions that mark reality rather than discovering all we might be able to achieve. They are siren voices that make you a stranger to yourself. To act against them, you have to commit to the small, concrete, positive actions you can take, whether you’re sowing hope or working for justice. 

One of my hopes for this crisis we are living is that we come back to contact with reality. We need to move from the virtual to the real, from the abstract to the concrete, from the adjective to the noun. There are so many real, “flesh-and-blood” brothers and sisters, people with names and faces, deprived in ways that we have not been able to see, listen to, or recognize because we have been so focused on ourselves. But now some of these blindfolds have fallen away, and we have a chance to see with new eyes.

By Pope Francis, from Let Us Dream, The Path to a Better Future

Do YOU sometimes feel powerless and afraid with what is happening in our world? Do YOU at times fall victim to the narcissism, the discouragement and the pessimism that Pope Francis describes in detail? How has the Covid pandemic given YOU the chance to see with new eyes?

IT’S AMAZING WHEN GOD HELPS US TO SMILE DURING OUR TIMES OF GREAT DIFFICULTY!!  

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