Blessed are those who are poor in spirit… because they are rich! This is what one of the participants said during his charismatic touch and what we all felt as we deepened the 1st beatitude during the Motus Christi in Cameroon.
On the basis of the teachings of Mª del Carmen García Viyuela, Superior General of the Identess Missionary (Sisters), and Fr. Jesús Fernández Hernández, our President, on the 5th July we organized the first Motus Christi online, from Cameroon. The interventions of the participants, coming from Cameroon, Benin, and even Mauritius, were very profound.
Poverty, characteristic of children, is to rejoice in our smallness and to understand that our misery attracts God. If in a natural way we reject this misery, we have all experienced that “we have a weakness” for the most unhappy, ungrateful or less gifted beings. We are attracted by the weakness of the other, and in this we resemble our heavenly Father.
The ethic of good taste, proper to Christ, of which Fernando Rielo speaks, was underlined by several participants. This delicacy that he has towards each one of us when he does not reproach us, or when he steps forward to perform a miracle even if it has not been asked for, as in the pool of Siloé. Our Father Founder’s proverb: “Do not approach your neighbor with the usual routine. Surprise him. You will see his eyes filled with happiness. Then, away from you… He will proclaim your name,” resounded for many of us, arousing the desire to be inventive in love.
Poverty is not about material things, but about our thoughts, feelings, negative reactions, which we have to abandon on the first step of the staircase of the beatitudes that leads to the Father. All those burdens like pride, envy, egoism, hypocrisy… By living this beatitude, we are freed from the tensions, anxiety and stress, which come from society, but also and above all from our ego, from our will to get out of it by our own strength. It is so sweet to accept to be poor, limited, with our defects, without giving up overcoming them, but in this attitude of trust, ultimately that of the children, who know that the Lord fights for them.
Yes, blessed are those who feel loved in spite of their misery, because the Kingdom of God is theirs! And we can say that this Kingdom was palpable during this Motus Christi.