ENRICHING VOCATION AND BUILDING COMMUNITY OF FAITH IN THE HEART OF MARY

St. Maximilian Kolbe

We do not have the benefit of having a child in our midst today, but at least we have been a little child a decade or few decades or even many decades ago.

So we will have to use our imaginations. Do not imagine an older child, already too much like an adult. Imagine a 3 year old.  A child who is not in his selfishness, but in his sincerity, in the complete trust he places in his parents. These values of unselfishness, sincerity and trust can be considered as requirements to preserve harmonious relationships among members of a certain community or the building up of a Christian community.

But as we grow older along the way we learn to mistrust others maybe through our experience of betrayal of a friend or unfaithfulness of a loved one.  Negative experiences (shall we say?) may have taught us how to protect the self, to preserve the self, or to advance the self even to the point that other people have already suffered from the consequences of our selfish and misguided actions.

These things break our hearts, they make us frown and they draw wrinkles on our faces and make us old.

Jesus said to his disciples “...become like children.”

The Lord doesn’t want of us to think that we are too old, too wounded, too limited, too whatever.

Our father has great plans for us. He has a future full of hope laid out for us.   Now it’s up to us to run into that future with all the confidence of a little child.

This childlike trust and confidence may have moved St. Maximilian Kolbe to offer his life in exchange for the release of a married man with children.  St. Maximilian a Franciscan Conv. was the founder of the Militia Immaculata (Army of the Immaculate).  His devotion to Mary and deep faith in God could be the strong foundation that moved him not to look only for the self but to make the self an offering for the love of God and fellow human beings.

 
As priests and seminarians formed in this heart of the diocese dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, may we always keep a heart full of trust in God and offer ourselves that others may live.  May God bless us all!