Saturday, December 9 : Saint Charles de Foucauld

How good you are, O my God, and how devoted you are to restoring sinners, crying: “Take heart!” to those who are at fault. From the opening lines of the Gospel how well you show yourself to be the Good Shepherd, Father to the prodigal son, divine physician come for the sake of sick. It seems as though, from the first lines of the Gospel, you take it as your task to keep repeating to us: “Do I derive any pleasure from the death of the sinner? Do I not rather rejoice when he turns from his evil way that he may live?” (Ez 18,23). O God, Father of mercies, you long to tell us that there is grace and hope even for the guilty, even for those who have fallen furthest, who are the most soiled. Those who, to human eyes, are irremediably debased and fallen are still worthy and beautiful in your eyes. Let them only repent and say, as David did: “I have sinned” (2Sam 12,13). You open your heart so wide to those souls whom the world thinks lost but whom you have fully found again, raised up, purified, adorned; you open up so generously the treasure store of your gifts to them that no grace is refused, no greatness is beyond their reach. However low we fall, let us never despair. God’s goodness surpasses all possible evil. “Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as wool” (Is 1,18). There is no moment of our lives when we cannot begin a wholly new existence,… separated from our former infidelities as by a wall.
maronite readings – rosary,team