This excerpt is from Brother Alois’ message at this past Thursday’s meeting at Taizé. It is characteristically simple yet profound, seemingly obvious but challenging:
In the Gospel to be read on Sunday morning, Christ appeals to us in a way that goes right to the essential. Our relationship with God is lived not only with words or external observances; it involves our entire being; Jesus says: our heart.
We have confidence that the Holy Spirit wants to give us day by day a heart that listens, that is receptive, that allows itself be touched and transformed by God: a heart that is not far from God but very close to him.
Seeking in prayer to let God come close to our heart, we place ourselves in front of him. Our prayer always remains poor; we turn towards God just as we are, with what is good and also with what is obscure in us, our inner contradictions and even our faults.
Each of us finds how to renew an intimate relation with God, an intimacy where sometimes there is more emptiness than profound feeling. We are not necessarily called to have long moments of prayer. But in one way or another, we are seeking to turn towards God.
And the more our heart gets closer God, the more it gets closer to other people.
Week by week, we brothers welcome so many young people. Many are preoccupied by the question: shall we be among those who overcome the barriers of hatred and indifference? These barriers exit between peoples and continents, but also quite near to each of us, and even in the human heart.
The greatest changes in the world are prepared first of all within each person, through a change of heart. So it is important to make a choice: to choose hope, to choose to love.
On this way, we go from one beginning to another. And as we persevere we discover that, before we ourselves do anything, God has chosen us, each one of us. He says, “Do not be afraid. I have called you by your name, you are mine. I am your God, you count greatly in my sight and I love you.”
Catholic Sensibility 