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What prevents us from listening to God within us?

His love is infinite and He wants you to reach holiness, that is, to have a healthy spirit, where your body becomes a worthy tabernacle of the one who resides there. And who lives in this tabernacle that is your body? It is God. Christ came to show that to us.

To understand what it means to listen, one must understand man’s relationship to God. As I was telling you on Good Friday: Christ came to bring us a message not only of fraternity but of filiality. He came to bring us the message that He is our brother. We are His sister, we are His brother. We have the same Father and the same Mother. That is, He brings us closer to Him, He does not separate us, He wants us to belong to the same family. Moreover, through offering Himself up to death so that we could live, He has made us His body. We are part of His body, totally, in all His gestures, thoughts, sight, hearing; all Christ’s senses are integrated into us, we are one with Him. But, we can only be one with Him if we are in an action of love or a thought of love. If we are in the mind, how do you expect to merge with Christ? That is not possible. 

Therefore we have to go through the path of the heart. What is the heart? Everyone speaks about the soul. You more or less know what the soul is: that is, at your seminar, you listen to what I tell you. Of course, you think the soul is situated here, in the plexus. But what is it? Why is it eternal? Why does it have a memory that has surpassed us for thousands and thousands of years? Why is it in communion with the stars and with everything that happens in this universe and other universes? So this soul has a power, not what you would call a magical power, but a divine power. That is, you cannot control this soul, it is the only thing that man cannot do. It governs you, and not you who governs it. But for it to be able to direct you, to love you as you should be loved, you have to give it the space, and that means access to the capacity of directing your life. 

This soul is God. What does “a spark of God” mean? When we see the omnipotence of God, who could tell me today who God is? If I asked you “Who is God?”, could you answer me? 

“ It is the Source.
- But what source? 
- Of love, which sometimes goes fast and gives wings sometimes...

- But it is more than that.”

It is said: He is omnipresent, but can simultaneously be at the end of the world, or at the end of the galaxy. At the same time, He is in the infinitely small facets of our life on Earth. So it is impossible for man to conceive the reality of God who is without dimension. He is beyond all of our ways of thinking, He is outside of all forms that we may imagine. He has a power that no one will ever be able to measure. So, a spark of that power is in each one of us, otherwise there would not be life. But we are unaware of it; that is why we insultour bodies. 

We believe, we say: “Yes, my soul is here, God is here” but we don’t live it. If we experienced it, we would be the first to respect ourselves. But we do not respect ourselves; we massacre ourselves, we do not respect ourselves. So that means we have to learn to love ourselves. Yet it is written in the Talmud: “Love your God with all your body and all your strength” and “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Yes, but what does Christ add? “Love one another as I have loved you.” Because in fact, it is written in the Talmud: “Love your neighbour as yourself” but this love of our neighbour is not clarified in the Bible. That means that God gives us the generous freedom to understand who our neighbour may be.

Our neighbour is the one we don’t like, the one who hurts us, the one who betrayed us, the one who makes us suffer, but it can also be the one who hardly greets us, it can be the alcoholic or the drug addict in the hospital, or the dying aids patient... It is all of the sick people that are taken care of by nurses and doctors and others... it is all the people who surround us or those we meet around the corner, in a store, on a bus, in the subway, anywhere... It is the person who overtakes you in the car while gesturing his contempt. All these are “your neighbour”. 

So we are far from loving ourselves. If we loved ourselves, we would be able to love others. We do not listen to ourselves. Indeed, if we listened to the all-powerful God, the God of love, for God never judged anyone, He is Love, and we have made a judge out of Him... He does not judge, He does not break up families, He does not favor any being. He loves and He gives us the amazing freedom of following Him or not, of experiencing our wandering around, our intolerance, our impatience, our hypocrisy. He allows us this. 

What man, that is, what human being would tolerate such things? There isn`t anyone, and yet there is one: it is Christ who became Man in order for us to understand that if He was able to love, to tolerate, to attain all the virtues that the Father asked of Him, then we are also able to do so. It is not another, it is not your neighbour who is able, it is every one of us. You are able because He has chosen you to attain sainthood.

Holiness is not what you believe. To be a saint is not hiding away in a monastery. God did not ask that; some do it, others do not need to do it. We are in the world but we no longer belong to this world. And if we are no longer of this world, then let us act as people who are here to show the example to those who will come after us. 

And in this domain, we must understand who we are. Why did God choose you? He chose you to be here this morning, to be part of this mission, because He has been carrying out His design for a long time, from the beginning. Before your birth, He knew what you would do and He gave you that patience, that tolerance for months and years, so that you could gain access to His love and to the understanding towards which He was guiding you, step by step, day by day, year after year. He doesn’t count time; He gives. So His love is infinite and He wants you to reach this holiness, that is, to have a healthy spirit, where your body becomes a worthy tabernacle of He who resides there. And who resides in this tabernacle which is your body? It is God. Christ came to show us that. 

So that means that your mission is not simply to be present in a one-on-one listening: yes, yes, I pray, I am listening, and then as soon as the one-on-one is over: “Did you see her?....” That is not listening.

Understand that we are called to live differently. This means in conflicts, since every one of you has conflicts, whether with a partner, children, neighbours, or the whole family which is never quite united, not conforming to our expectations, nor reflecting our will. But what about us? Are we the reflection of what they are expecting? Are we truly a positive image for those who surround us? Are we worthy of that? When we look inside ourselves and we are nearly honest, once in a while anyway, we notice just how much we drift away, how far we are from the level God asks of us. Yet He gives you the means to do so, He gives you the strength, He gives you the capacity, the intelligence. He has given you all the talents to do so, so why don’t you?