Prayer leads to faith
Faith leads to hope
Hope leads to love
Love leads to service
Service leads to peace
THE SIMPLE PATH
The Catholic Faith is an extraordinary gift from God, so utterly comprehensive, covering all human existance, yet it can be lived so simply. We have that facet of the Faith which includes Theology and Philosophy and is a tool for learning and growing in the Faith, and teaching the Faith to others etc. This has been an extraordinary gift to the Church, since it is in this realm that we have the great Saints and minds of the Church who have continuosly defended the Church against the heretics, schisms and error. It is these great minds that made singificant advances into marian Theology in the early centuries of the Church.
There is also that facet of the Faith which is the faith as we live it in our day to day lives, and it is this which obtains the gift of Grace for sinners and for the world, as Our Lady asked for so strenuously at Fatima in 1917, and is the same path that St Therese of Lisieux passed on to us. Although, please remember that the faith is a single entity, all parts of the faith making the whole. Using the term facet above, is simply to explain that one doesn't have to be a theologian to be a Saint. You can be a saint, literally, by living the faith, simply and obediently in your day to day lives. Obedience first! God, through the Blessed Virgin, is calling for many more secular saints and it is up to us to answer the call.
Our Lady's twin requests of prayer and sacrifice is the foundation of the simple path, and the fulfillment of our daily duty is of the utmost importance.
DAILY DUTY
The faithful fulfillment of one’s daily duty is an essential ingredient of Our Lady’s Fatima message. In noting the incredible penances and sacrifices the children made, it should be remembered that they received extraordinary graces which enabled them to live on such a high spiritual plane.
In 1946 Sister Lucia explained to a Blue Army (WAF) leader: “By sacrifice, Our Lady said that she meant the faithful fulfillment of one’s daily duty. The rosary is important if we are to fulfil our daily duty. The First Five Saturdays’ devotion is important because if people make them they will purge themselves of sin once a month.”
“All that God wishes in the way of mortification is the simple performance of one’s daily tasks and the acceptance of their difficulty and tedium. Many people imagine that penitence means the performance of great austerities and as they have neither the strength nor generosity to undertake such austerities, they become discouraged and fall into a life of indifference and sin. Our Lord has said to me: ‘The sacrifice that each one can make is to do his duty and obey my law. That is the form of penance I now demand’.”
The more authentically we live the simple path, the more powerful we become in the war against satan. The problem is though that our pride gets in the way, and reduces the effectiveness of our efforts. As Jesus says in the Gospels, we must become like little children. If you imagine the personal and intellectual distance between a father and mother and their 3 year old son or daughter and how much the children totally rely on their parents for everything with their childlike trust. If we are God's children, in real terms, (remembering that Abba, Jesus' name for His Father, means something like Dadda, Daddy, Papa) what must be the distance between God and us, and as His children, shouldn't we rely absolutely on Abba for everything, with the same childlike trust? As Jesus said to St Faustina: "The children hold up the world", and this is because of their simple trust and obedience. But what an incredable statement. The children are the most powerful! Is it any wonder satan has made such a war against the children!
To live this way we must have as our starting point, the love of truth, which is simply the love of God. The fruit of a genuine love of God is the desire for total obedience, since this love means we trust God completely, and desire to obey Him because this will bring the fullest flow of Grace in our lives and can only lead to Heaven.
What satan tries to do is to get those on this path to weaken, or give up altogether. If he fails in these attempts, he tempts souls with subtle forms of disobedience, which nuetralises the souls, making them next to useless in their spiritual life. They are shooting with blanks. So, it is extremely obvious that obedience, preceeded by love of truth, is the first gift of God for which we must ask, pray and suffer for, since without it we are utterly useless, no matter how many Rosaries we say.
To understand the simple path, a comparison can be made using a tap and water pipes.
The water tank is God, the flow of water is the flow of grace, the tap is our prayers and sacrifices. The effort to turn on the tap is so small, yet so much water (grace) flows because of this small effort (prayer and sacrifice) on our part.The water doesn't flow through us, but flows BECAUSE we turned on the tap. We don't decide the AMOUNT of water (grace) that flows and we can have a small input to where (which souls) the grace flows, although God always decides the best recipient for all graces, without ignoring our requests.
Ongoing disobedience in our lives, slows or totally stops this flow of grace. As St Faustina said about obedience: "A disobedient soul will win no victory, even if the Lord Jesus Himself, in person, were to hear his confession. The most experienced confessor will be of no help whatsoever to such a soul. The disobedient soul exposes itself to great misfortunes; it will make no progress toward perfection, nor will it succeed in the spiritual life. God lavishes His graces most generously upon the soul, but it must be an obedient soul." (notebook 1. 113 )
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