Eucharist IV – Participation in Jesus' Groans
Lourdes Pinto, 7/27/17
1. Form My Hidden Martyrs, #52 Diary of a MOC (p. 165)
You must form My hidden martyrs of love, for God the Father is using them to fulfill His plan of salvation during these decisive times. Live your hidden life as ONE with Me in My hidden life in the Eucharist, and you will grow in the power of God, which is LOVE. This is the HIDDEN FORCE that will sweep through the face of the world to conquer Satan’s darkness. The Eucharist is the power of God in the world, and God desires to make you living Hosts.
a. Live your hidden life as ONE with Me in My hidden life in the Eucharist.
i. We have learned that in each moment of our lives, through our situations, problems, places, and people, we can participate in Jesus’ hidden life in the Eucharist by trusting and abandoning ourselves to His Will.
ii. In section 4-D of The Path, Participation in the Groans of the Sacred Heart, Jesus invites us to enter the intimacy of His groans.
2. Listen to My Groans, #77, Diary of a MOC (p. 225)
Can you hear My groans that come forth from the depth of My Crucified Heart?
The groans of My agony of love. Listen to My groans of love.
a. This question is an invitation from the Lord to bring us deeper into His Sacred Heart. Jesus asks us to listen to His groans. What are those groans? How can we hear them? Are they audible?
3. Mt 13:13 ‘they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand.
a. Entering the groans of our Lord is a process. First, the Lord taught us in the Path to unite our wounds to His, our pain to His, our tears to His… to suffer ALL with Him as one in His sacrifice of love. This SIMPLE process brings us to know the pain of our Lord, and through His pain, to know His love personally. You can compare this process to the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly. The caterpillar is constrained to seeing life around him to just the tiny space it lives in. He can’t see very far nor hear much either. That is how we are when we live constrained in our wounds. Inside the dark pit of our wound, our sight is clouded and our hearing limited. We can’t seem to see beyond ourselves. Our world is all centered on self. When we enter Jesus’ wounds, it is as the caterpillar entering the cocoon. Through His wounds, we are immersed into the cocoon of His Sacred Heart, and just as the caterpillar is not conscious of the transformation taking place, we cannot fully perceive the subtle work of the Spirit transforming our minds, sight, hearing, and heart.
b. This process of suffering with Christ gradually and unperceivably begins to transform our entire being. We start to hear and see our own hearts with the eyes of God through the gift of self-knowledge. We begin to perceive our own groans as we WAIT, like the caterpillar, with PATIENCE, TRUST, and HOPE, for our redemption—our transformation into Love. We see our weakness, woundedness, sins, misery… It’s the groans of our souls that desire to be holy —redeemed in the image and likeness of God to participate in the glory of God here on earth— no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me. Yet, daily we are confronted with our pride, vanity, and lack of trust in God who has loved us to the extreme of the Cross.
These inner groans that express our deepest desire to know God and to know ourselves are a grace of God’s infinite love for us.
4. Romans 18-23: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”
a. As we unite our groans with the groans of the Holy Spirit, a powerful prayer rises from our hearts. The Spirit groans as one with the Father & the Son. He, as our Advocate, helps us by interceding for us with the groans of God.
5. Romans 8:26-27: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express”.
a. How does the Spirit’s groan help us in our process of transformation?
i. He gives us the GIFT of self-knowledge by bringing to the light of our conscience our sin.
b. From the book, The Holy Spirit Fire of Divine Love, Fr Wilfred Stinissen:
i. P.39 “The way the Spirit chooses when he wishes to lead us into all truth is through sin. He makes us conscious of our sin. “And when he comes, he will convince the world of sin and of righteousness and judgement: of sin, because they do not believe in me…” (Jn 16:8-9).
ii. P.40 “When the Spirit shows us our sin, it is a work of mercy. Jesus’ definition of sin is: not to believe in him. It is something completely different from what we usually mean by “sin.” One confesses things that one has done wrong… But for the most part, we do not think of the basic sin, which is not trusting in Jesus.”
6. Example: Exodus 16:2-3 “The whole Israelite community grumbled against Moses and Aaron” (because they had nothing to eat. They go as far as to say:) “If only we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our kettles of meat and ate our fill of bread! But you have led us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of famine!”
a. We see their sin of complaining, but the root of their complaining is their lack of trust in God. In that difficult situation in the desert, which God was permitting, they forgot all the ways God had been taking care of them and didn’t trust that He would continue providing for them.
b. We behave in the exact way as the Israelite community; when hardships and tribulations come, we too forget the many ways God has been with us and taking care of us, and we also complain because we too don’t fully trust in God’s love for us in EVERY situation.
c. To acknowledge the sinful tendency of our fallen humanity leads to the groans of our hearts. These groans are pleasing to God because they reveal our repentance and our desire to love God. This deep inner groan due to the knowledge of our sin is a gift of the Spirit that ultimately brings us to become Love.
d. Mt 13:15
Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I heal them.’
e. The story in Exodus also reveals the immensity of God’s mercy and His eternal waiting and groaning for us. God asked Moses to say to the people, “Approach the Lord, for he has heard your grumbling.” (Ex16:9).
f. Abba shows compassion even when we grumble!
7. Can you hear My groans that come forth from the depth of My Crucified Heart?
a. Mark 8:12 Jesus lamented for the hardened hearts, and “He sighed from the depth of his spirit.”
b. His groans express the deepest desire of God’s Heart for the transformation of each of us into Love. His groans express God’s passionate love for us, a love so infinite that it can never be expressed in wordsbut only with tears; groans that pour forth compassion and mercy upon every soul; groans that express the martyrdom of Christ’s Heart. The groans are the depth of Jesus’ most hidden sufferings in the Eucharist.
c. Mt 13:16-17 “But blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear. Amen, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”
8. Jesus longs for each of us to hear His groans of love, yet that is not enough to quench the thirst of our Lord. He desires for us to enter the intimacy of participating in His groans by drinking from His chalice:
a. Living Tabernacle of God, #78 Diary of a MOC (p.226)
To be one with Me means that you become the living tabernacle of God. My loving, pulsating Heart lives in you as one with you. You feel My sorrows and
participate in My groans for the fulfillment of humanity’s transformation into LOVE.
The martyrdom of the human heart is the intimate union of love in My Sacred Heart. You live
the sorrows of the Heart that is love in as much as you allow Me to share My chalice with you. It is usually only a sip of one drop until your being acquires the taste of My Blood, and it loses its bitterness in the Divine sweetness of My love.
My daughter, My Heart overflows with the sorrows of rejection. Share in My rejection as you share My words and are not ashamed (of it).
9. We have been chosen, called, by God to enter the most hidden life of Christ. This hidden life is in the depth of His Most Sacred Heart. This hidden life of Christ IS the continuation of His agony for souls. The deep suffering of the Heart of God cannot be expressed with words but only in groans. Just as the Lord taught us that we can enter His wounds through our wounds, we can enter His groans through our groans. The shattered and broken lives of those we love the most causes in our hearts a pain so deep that we too cannot express it in words but only in groans. It is in these moments of our lives that God permits, that the Holy Spirit comes to draw us into the groans of Christ. It is then that we can perceive the groans of Love, and we are given the opportunity to participate in His groans for the transformation of humanity into Love. This MUST become the work of the MC and MOC. This work of participating in God’s suffering of love is the work that produces a hundredfold because it is the work of Divine Love! (Cf. Mt 13:9)
a. Testimony:
i. Before the Blessed Sacrament today, I felt I had nothing but groans within me. What “seems” like the never-changing self-absorption of those I love this week was taking a toll on me. Do they think of anything else but worldly things? I had to beg the Lord to forgive me for bringing this stuff before Him. I felt as if I was wasting His valuable time, our valuable time, with this. But not only had I brought it with me in my heart, but I also was receiving a barrage of texts from a family group that seemed to confirm it.
I open up to #78 in the Path, Living Tabernacle of God. It says, “My loving, pulsating Heart lives in you as one with you. You feel My sorrows and participate in My groans for the fulfillment of humanity’s transformation into Love.”
So I thought, is this why I am feeling this discouragement, sadness, groaning in my heart? Is this Lord, Your chalice being shared with me? The Path further reads: “You live the sorrows of the Heart that is love in as much as you allow Me to share My chalice with you. It is usually only a sip of one drop until your being acquires the taste of My Blood and it loses its bitterness in the Divine sweetness of My Love” (p226).
Perhaps this IS the work of the Lord. It appears as my own groan to me, but it is a share of the groan in the heart of my Beloved AND a means of transforming their hearts into Love. How did I lose sight of this! Sometimes because we are so close to our families and their hearts are so well known by us, that we fail to see Jesus in our everyday, very familiar dealings with them. This is such blindness. Here I realize that I was in danger of being the wrong kind of victim. How easily I can forget all, we’ve learned if I am not attentive to my own heart at every moment. It’s not that I wasn’t taking this to the Lord but that I had more hidden sorrow for myself than for the Lord. My emphasis became too much on me.
10. “My daughter, My Heart overflows with the sorrows of rejection. Share in My rejection as you share My words and are not ashamed.”
a) Rejection! This is the reason for the groans within me for those I love. If I were to put a name to what is making me so distraught this week, it would be that they are constantly making plans and yet have no room for God. Yet, in this awareness about the condition of THEIR hearts, I allowed myself to lose the necessary gaze into the Heart of Jesus.
b) (Here, if we are not careful, we will fall into criticism and judgment. We must pray for the grace to see souls through the groans of Jesus. If we have come to hear the groans of God’s love for us, we then can see others through God’s groans, and this allows us to see and hear with God’s eyes and His understanding, which ALWAYS moves us to compassion & love.)
c) THIS is what brings me joy in the midst of these battles: The fact that the Lord reveals to me what is happening, that He takes the time simply because I am searching to clarify what is transpiring. Unless I take my eyes off the world and gaze up at Him, I would remain frustrated with what I see. Why? Because I would see as the caterpillar, through my broken glasses, and in my very limited humanity.
d) We must ask for the grace to SEE ALL SOULS, especially those that are most repulsive to us, through the groans of the Sacred Heart. The only way to live God’s compassion & mercy for every soul is to look at everyone through the groans of God’s Heart. The groans of God see our misery, woundedness, weakness, and He loves us in the depth of His groan. The groans of the Sacred Heart are not critical nor judgmental.
i) When we see the disorders, brokenness, the sin of others, those we find repulsive, do we enter God’s groans, or do we criticize, judge vocally or in our hearts?
e) “it is important to stay in the presence of the Lord so that He can find us available and introduce us into the great silence within that enables Him to become incarnate in us, to transform us into himself. And in this silence, which is not emptiness but is filled with the Holy Spirit, the soul will be able to hear rising from His heart, like a murmur: “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15). Prayer is successfully being quiet, listening to God, and being able to hear the ineffable moaning of the Holy Spirit, who dwells in us and cries out silently.” The Power of Silence, Robert Cardinal Sarah.
11. We have been called by God to become “Living Hosts” – one with the sufferings of Jesus’ Eucharistic life. Every Mother & Missionary of the Cross has given their “fiat”. Therefore, we voluntarily, for love of Christ, choose to participate in His hidden life of suffering with souls and for souls.
a) This requires one thing: TRUST – a trust rooted in BELIEVING God’s love for me, that He is walking with me through the desert of my life – providing, guiding, blessing, and protecting me. A trust that more and more moves me to COMPLETE ABANDONMENT. A trust that I can live the difficult storms of life REMEMBERING God’s providence for me in the past, and living the present difficult situation with hope and love, knowing that God is with me and working to glorify me in Him!
b) “knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them, it has not been granted. To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” (Mt 13: 12-12)
