Abandonment

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We are told in the Gospel, “Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? Yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing” (Matt. 10:29).

Our Lord uses this curious analogy of us with sparrows. It’s curious that He would want to compare us to sparrows, but yet there is a very important message there.

We look at a sparrow, and you blow at a sparrow, it could fall over; very fragile, very timid, not very strong. And yet God tells us that this sparrow can't do a single thing “without your Father knowing” about it and we are “of much more value than any sparrow” (Matt. 10:31).

Our Lord is inviting us in our spiritual life to have a great sense of trust and abandonment. This trust and abandonment, to a large extent, flows from the fact that we are children of God.

We celebrated a few days ago, at the beginning of the month, the Baptism of Our Lord, the institution of the Sacrament of Baptism. Through that sacrament and through all the other sacraments we get divine grace into our soul.

Divine grace is the presence of the Blessed Trinity within us.

Our Lord said we will “come and make our abode in him” (cf. John 14:23), and so when we are in the state of grace, God is in our soul. Therefore, all the fruits of God can be present in our life, in our words, in our actions.

Hopefully, people can somehow detect that this person is trying to lead a holy life, that they're in a state of grace, and therefore God is in control.

If we are not in the state of grace, if God is not in our soul in grace, then the devil may be there. Then all the fruits of the devil can be present in our life, in our works, in our actions, in the atmosphere we carry with us.

Because God is there within us in our soul in grace, we're told in Scripture that we become “children of God” (1 John 3:1). We're told that we're carried in the palm of the hand of a God who loves us.

Therefore, everything that happens to us in our life, we can try to see from a supernatural perspective, and see that God is somehow in control, or He has permitted this particular thing—this joy, or sometimes this sorrow, or this contradiction, or this difficulty, or this challenge.

Or sometimes God can sweep the feet from under us and leave us hanging there. And when that happens it’s because He wants us to learn how to trust in Him, to have a great sense of abandonment like the sparrows.

In another place in Scripture, Our Lord says: “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap or gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matt. 6:26).

Our Lord invites us in our spiritual life to have a great sense of abandonment and trust and leave things in His hands. On the one hand, He wants us to use all the human initiative that we have to solve problems.

When He sent the apostles out, He said: “Go ye therefore, teach all nations” (Matt. 28:19). He didn't build chapels. He didn't build schools or hospitals. He didn't give them technology or money or all the other means to fulfill their mission.

He just sent them out with a few ideas. Those ideas were very important ideas, and He wanted them to convert the world with those ideas. He wanted them to be very clear that He would be acting in them and through them.

What He wanted was their faith, their trust, and their abandonment, that He would be at work through them.

Shortly after I was ordained, I was giving a retreat in the south of Spain. (I was ordained there.) There was a number of men on the retreat.

On the first day of the retreat, an 80-year-old man came to chat with me. Usually, people wait a few hours or a few days before they talk to the priest about their resolutions or what they've got from the retreat.

This man came first thing that morning and told me, “You know, I've been attending recollections of Opus Dei for a number of years, and the person in charge of the recollection asked me if I would come to this retreat. I said no, and I had three very good reasons for saying no.

“One is that I train a certain type of horse. There are some people coming these days to buy some of my horses from another country. I want to be there when they come.

“Secondly, there are some people coming to put drains on my house and I've been waiting for two years for them to come to put drains on my house. I want to be there also when they come.

“Thirdly, it's the weekend of the local fiesta, which is a big thing in Spain. Ever since I was seven, I have never missed this local feast. All my friends will be there. It’s a time to catch up. We meet, we talk, we set ourselves up for the next year. It's just unthinkable that I wouldn't be at the local fiesta.

“So I had three very good reasons for telling this man who was in charge of this recollection that I would not go on the retreat. And he asked me again a few weeks later, and again, I said no; and he asked me a third time, and again, I said no.”

But then he said, “I began to feel very uncomfortable, and the only way that I could find any peace was to finally say yes, and so here I am on this retreat very reluctantly. I came thinking about all the things I'm missing, but you know, I've only been here a couple of hours, and already I'm very glad I came.

“Because you see, I've been attending recollections of Opus Dei for the last couple of years, and I keep hearing this idea of divine filiation—that we are all children of God because God lives in our soul in grace. They talk about the life of childhood and spiritual childhood, and I've been trying to figure out what this means.

“Here I am, 80 years of age, and they're telling me I have to become like a child. What does that mean? Does it mean I have to put on short pants or what?

“Now I've come to realize what it means. I have to abandon myself into the arms of my Father God. I've got to let Him call the shots.I've got to let Him make the decisions.

“I've got to try and let myself be like a little child in the arms of his Father, with one hand in the hand of his Father, let God lead me and go where He leads me, irrespective of all the other human or material considerations. I've got to try and do His Will and do His thing, in fact, my Christian vocation.”

In those days, it was as though that man discovered “the pearl of great price” (Matt. 13:45-46).

There are treasures in the Gospel, great spiritual treasures. At certain stages of our life, God may reveal those treasures to us, and those treasures can be worth far more than all sorts of material things, because it's there that we can find our peace and our joy. A peace and joy that this world cannot give.

Therefore, there is great importance in living in the state of grace, of being close to the sacraments, of learning how to savor these great treasures that God gives us.

I heard of a kid once who was walking along the beach and his foot hit against a pouch of stones. He picked up the pouch of stones, and he began to take a stone, and he flung it as far as he could into the sea. He said at the same time, ‘When I grow rich, I'm going to get myself a big house.’

He flung another stone and said, ‘When I get rich, I'm going to buy myself a fine car’; and another stone, ‘When I get rich, I'm going to buy fine clothes’; and another stone, ‘I'm going to have great food.’

One by one, he threw all the stones as far as he could into the sea. When he got down to the last stone, suddenly a little sunbeam or something hit the stone and it glistened. So, he looked again. It was a diamond!

He'd been throwing diamonds far out into the sea, dreaming about treasures that he might never have, but he'd been throwing away the treasures that he had in his hand.

With this story, we have to come to try and realize that maybe we have great treasures in our lives, in our spiritual life in particular, things that we are perhaps not as aware of as we could be. We don't realize the treasures.

One great way of trying to get to know the treasures that we have in our life is through acts of thanksgiving.

If you thank God from the moment you get up in the morning until the moment you get to bed at night, for the fact that you can see, the fact that you can hear, the fact that you can walk around the place and have two arms and two legs—these are all wonderful treasures that can lead us to appreciate all the other treasures that are present every day of our life: the air that we breathe, the things that we see, the health of the people around us.

There are so many wonderful things to be grateful for. So we need to learn how to abandon ourselves into the arms of Our Father God.

I got a haircut last week in Nairobi, and when I came out of the place where I got it, I was driving up the street and saw a young girl crawling on all fours with a little cup, begging. Not something you often see: a young girl crawling on all fours, she had no wheelchair, she had nothing.

The following day, with a friend of mine, we decided to go and look for this girl and try and see if we could do something for her. We found her in a completely different place, purely by accident, crawling across a busy street with several crossings.

So my friend got out of the car and went to talk to her. She had no English and I don't have Swahili. They talked and she explained that she was from Migori. She was 22, she had come to Nairobi two years previously, she lived with two other people with disabilities, and somehow, she had managed to survive.

When she moved around Nairobi, she would hop onto a matatu. She got to different places from which she could beg, and she managed to carry on like this: a very cheerful lady and very happy to talk.

Then she came with us and we got her a wheelchair. Hopefully, she's now using that wheelchair.

But thinking about how that girl has survived in an unknown city far away from her home territory, and not having English, and not knowing the place, and managing to move around like that—there must be a tremendous abandonment in her, in her life, in her spirit. She went away from her own home to a strange place.

So sometimes with people we meet we can learn an awful lot about the spirit of abandonment, trust, of having faith in God, because we know that God has a plan for us.

He wants us to live out that plan. He has a mission for us. There's nothing in our life that He has not foreseen.

And so, as we start a new year we could try to ask Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament that we might have a greater spirit of faith and trust and abandonment to live out those consequences of being a child of God, so that we may leave the future in His hands.

And if we see, as we can probably do, that when we look back, God has really taken care of so many things in our life: our primary education, our secondary education, perhaps our tertiary education, our work, our family, our children, our health—so many things that God has looked after in all sorts of special ways. We have every reason to grow in faith and trust in Him.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux says, “When…we feel no courage, no energy, for the practice of virtue, this is grace” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Letters of Soeur Thérèse to Céline, October 20, 1888). This is the moment to depend solely on Jesus.

There might be moments in our life when Our Lord precisely sweeps the feet from under us and leaves us hanging there. In those situations, He wants us to look up.

He wants us to trust completely in Him, to leave things in His hands, to learn what real hope is, what real abandonment is.

A farmer told me how one time he was going through his farm, and there’d been a fire on the farm. He came across all sorts of things that had been very burnt.

At one moment he came across a chicken that was very badly burnt, totally dead, and he gave it a good kick—this chicken that was totally dead, burnt black—but out from underneath the chicken ran four or five little chicks.

He said, “I suddenly remembered that phrase from Scripture: ‘I will gather you under my wing as a hen gathers her chicks’” (Matt. 23:27).

He said this hen saw the danger, the fire coming, she gathered her chicks. So he was very aware of the fact that Our Father God looks after us in all sorts of ways, takes care of us, preserves us from danger.

Sometimes we might wonder, Why? Why did this happen to my family, to my parents, to my siblings, to my children, to my work? Why do all these things specifically happen to me?

In certain moments, we may not appreciate that. But when time passes, sometimes we can discover there's some great divine plan behind the cross. God is at work. He has other plans that He's working out.

A man in another country told me once how he had a primary school education. He began to be a salesman selling pots and pans.

He knocked one day on the door of the president of the Ford Corporation who didn't want any pots and pans. He thought he would get his wife, but he got the husband.

But the husband was impressed with his sales pitch. He said, “Young man, how would you like to try selling cars? OK? So come along on Monday morning, we'll start you out selling cars.”

So he sold a lot of cars. He graduated to Mercedes-Benzes. He ended up importing Rolls Royces from London. He could tell you the mileage on the clock of every Rolls Royce in Asia. He made a lot of money.

Then he gave a present of a watch to some man in government, which is something you cannot do in that particular country. The government turned around and bankrupted him.

So he lost everything. He lost all his money. He lost his house. He lost his business. His wife left him. At the age of 49, he developed stage 4 cancer.

That's when I got to know him. He used to go to a support group in his parish for people who were recovering from cancer. This was a fairly well-to-do parish with a lot of wealthy people, and they would get together and talk week by week.

Then they heard of a new drug that had been made in Houston, Texas, a new cancer drug which was very expensive. One by one all these very wealthy people flew off to Houston, Texas to try out this new drug.

He came to me and he said, “You know, it's not fair. There’s no justice in this world. The wealthy can do all these things, and here I am, I’m bankrupt, they’ve taken away my passport, I can't leave the country, I couldn't have any money to fly, and so poor me, I can't try out this new drug.”

And he said, “I was complaining to God for weeks and months about how unfair this life is. Then, you know, the first one died; and then after three months, the next one died; and after six months, another one died; and now they're nearly all dead and I'm still here. So I'm saying thank you, Lord, thank you, Lord.”

So sometimes all the injustices of this world are the things that we find we can do. When time passes and you look back, sometimes you can see, maybe the hand of God was working in funny ways here.

Maybe God has me in the palm of His hand, looking after me in special ways or looking after my family.

There are times when there are things that maybe we'd like to have and we can't have them. God doesn't permit us to have them: luxuries or things that other people have. Maybe it's because God just wants us to trust in Him, to abandon ourselves. He has some other plan. Maybe that's not our mission.

When there are things in life that we find other people have, and we can't afford them and we can't have them, it may be that God is forming our soul at that moment more than at any other time.

Perhaps He's giving us spiritual treasures, teaching us what authentic detachment means, or teaching us authentic hope or authentic trust, which ultimately are the messages that Christ gives to us in Bethlehem.

Christ abandoned Himself in Bethlehem into the arms of Mary, into the arms of Joseph.

Sometimes that's what God wants us to do. If we were to hear tomorrow that we have some fatal disease, we can abandon ourselves into the arms of Our Father God. It can be totally peaceful.

I knew some men a couple of years ago who used to come to recollections like this. Both of them developed cancer, but they were leading very good spiritual lives.

They happened to find themselves in the same hospital room, and one said to the other: “Are you worried about anything? Do you feel bad about anything?” “No, I'm very peaceful.” “Me too, there’s nothing to worry about. I leave everything in the hands of God. It's a great way to live and a great way to die.”

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to look forward to our death because our souls are in the right state.

In the house where I lived, two people passed away in the last two or three months. One was 87, the other was 94. They were both looking forward to their death.

The 94-year-old priest in particular kept saying, “I want to die. I want to die.”

We brought him into the hospital at one stage, The Mater Hospital in Nairobi, and the nurse said to me, “You know, he keeps saying he wants to die, he wants to die, but everyone in this hospital wants to live. We’re wondering, is there something wrong? Is there something we should be doing?”

At one moment he refused all his medication and all of his food. I said to him, “Father, why don't you eat your food or take your medicine?”

“It's the only weapon I have to get out of this place.” So he had a great sense of humor. He died laughing. A great way to live and a great way to die. Abandonment in the moment of death, in the arms of God, because he lived a holy life.

Likewise, the other one, 87, saying his rosary every day, getting to Confession every week, receiving Holy Communion every day. I asked him in the last couple of days before he died, “Is there anything that you'd like?”

“Well, if you could find this dark chocolate, I'd be very happy.” I went to the supermarket and I found the dark chocolate. He liked a particular type of dark chocolate. So he went to heaven, enjoying himself! Great way to live, great way to die.

I have no worries, I’ve lived a good life, I abandon myself into the arms of my Father God, because we have tremendous things to look forward to.

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). If we live our lives focused on heaven, it's a great way to live.

We try to make our life on earth as heavenly as possible, but we realize that everything here is passing. It’s worth nothing, it’s fading away.

The things of the spirit, the things of the soul, the things that are worth having—these are the things worth acquiring, the treasures that God gives to us.

We look at little children, we see how they abandon themselves, and how they can get great joy out of little things.

Over the last few weeks, I was involved in a number of Christmas parties for poor kids. I have a friend who organizes these parties, and he gets big numbers. He brings lollipops and chapatis and sodas.

One time we were going to a place, and I said, Where are you going to get the children for the party? He said, You just watch.

So he gives two sodas to two kids. They go away. Fifty kids come within five minutes. So he gives them a lollipop, one by one.

Well, you see the faces of those kids light up with the lollipops and sometimes they have to struggle to get the tight wrapping off the lollipop, because it seems to be there with concrete or something. They fight to get it off. The joy on their faces, the happiness, the little things.

Sometimes God wants us with our childlike spirit to get great joy and happiness out of simple things. It's a great way to learn to be happy.

In the writings of St. Josemaría, you'll find in one place it says, “Be content with what enables you to live a simple and sober life (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 631).

Great advice. Who do you know in this world who is content—content with what they have, happy with what they have, thanking God for what they have.

A great way to live every day: Thank you, God, for the food we have on the table, for the air that I breathe, for the fact that my hands and legs work, that I can see, that I can hear. So many things that we take for granted too much.

We abandon every day, every hour, in our work, this project, the dreams we have for this coming year, in our workplace, in our family, in the problems we'd like to solve.

Maybe God has precisely given us those problems to work at solving them, not because He wants us to worry about it or be perturbed about it. He just wants us to work at them, but we know that things will work out.

“If you, evil as you are,” we’re told in Scripture, “know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11).

If you think back over the last few weeks, how many parents in the world did their best at Christmastime to give good things from Father Christmas to their children?

Maybe even if their children didn't deserve them, they still wanted to give them good things, the best they could find. Our Lord tells us, “How much more will your heavenly Father…” It's a great world for all of them.

Our Father God is waiting to give us all the best presents in the world, all the best treasures, but He wants us to trust in Him, to leave everything in His hands.

Every day of our life we can ask Our Lord for an increase in faith, an increase in hope, an increase in charity, an increase in that spirit of divine filiation, that God is my Father.

There may be twists and turns along the pathway of our life, but we know it will work out well in the end.

There was a little girl who asked Santa Claus for a thousand dolls for Christmas. Her father was an atheist.

She got one doll. Her father said to her, “Well, your God didn't listen to your prayer, did he?”

The little girl said, “Yes, He did. He said no. And that's okay. He's my Father, so it's okay for Him to say no from time to time. You're my father, you say ‘no’ pretty frequently also. That’s no big deal; that doesn't mean you don't exist.”

Wow, profound wisdom from a small child.

Sometimes, God might seem not to answer our prayer. Sometimes He says yes, sometimes He says no and sometimes He says, Wait, I’ll give that to you later. Or, Wait, because I have something better to give you, I have something greater off the line.

Or maybe, I don't want to give you that material thing, but I have some great spiritual thing to give you, which is worth far more than you realize, far more than a diamond. Abandonment!

There is a movie that came out about twenty or thirty years ago about a nun talking to a prisoner on death row. This nun is trying to convert this prisoner, helping him to repent and make his peace with God.

The movie is her conversation with this prisoner on death row, and at one stage she says to him: “Did you ever hear that you are a son of God?”

And he replied saying, “You know, in the course of my life I've been called a son of many things, but I have never been called a son of God.”

Well, this great reality can be something that can open our eyes, that we are truly sons of God, children of God.

God is my Father and therefore I can make this new beginning, this new year, with an awful lot of confidence and hope and trust that God is going to be there for me. He's going to work things out.

When we look back over the last year, possibly we can thank God for all the graces that He's given to us in the past year, all the things that are worked out.

A lady told me once how she was sitting in her garden, and she noticed there was a rose in the garden. Suddenly her attention began to focus on the rose, a beautiful rose.

She began to think how man has been able to put men on the moon, but no man can make a rose like that. That was the beginning of a profound spiritual conversion.

She began to focus on all the great spiritual things in her life. She’d led a very busy career woman life up to then. She became a very spiritual person.

In this coming year, God also wants some sort of spiritual conversion inside us, so that we live out that spiritual childhood, that abandonment, in so many ways.

Our Lord said to the apostles, “Do not be afraid.” On many occasions He said those words.

In the face of the supernatural, very often there was fear. There was the storm on the lake when He came walking to them: “Do not be afraid! It is I. Have courage, do not be afraid” (John 6:20).

We can turn to Our Lord and ask Him that we might also respond to those words. Remember that we're worth more than many sparrows and not a single sparrow falls to the ground without Our Father God knowing it.

We can ask Our Lord that we might have this greater spirit of trust and abandonment, the trust and abandonment that we see that Our Lady had throughout her life.

She didn't understand what was going to happen in Bethlehem. She didn't know that they were going to go to Egypt. She didn't know how long they were going to be there. She and St. Joseph were just totally, completely abandoned to the arms of Our Father God.

Mary, may you help me to live that spirit of abandonment in the same way that you did.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OLV