Towards Priesthood

Courtesy of Fides News Agency
by Rev. Massimo Camisasca

The freedom of God and the freedom of man affect the history of humanity since they are its constitutive components. God’s freedom is His continual initiative with which He never tires in His concern for our humanity. “Innocentiae restitutor et amator”, we find in a prayer in the liturgy (Roman Missal, Collect Thursday 2nd Week of Lent): “you who never cease to generate our innocence, our truth”. God regenerates our life freely in a thousand ways, in the thousands of circumstances of the personal story of each one of us. The freedom of the human person, freedom in our personal story, is to accept to run the same risk that God runs, to enter into the risk of God made man, in a word, to espouse the reality of the Incarnation God.

The form which is proper to life is not , never making a mistake; the fulfilling of our human history lies not in perfection, but in our own personal initiative to acknowledge and accept God’s initiative in our life and allow precisely this initiative to give it form and fulfilment.

The encounter of these two freedoms is not always painless and peaceful. It can give rise to astonishment, push us to vertiginous heights or completely disorient us. Humanly, we can feel a temptation to “come to an agreement”, with God in a paroxcism of personalism. Hence, in view of this danger, in the years of formation to the priesthood, we must educate ourselves to the immeasurability of God’s free initiative, to the fact that it is impossible to measure God’s intentions and interventions. This will help us gradually, step by step, to distance ourselves from the injustice of passing judgement on others, from the injustice of judging ourselves and the injustice of passing judgement on God. “I do not even pass judgment on myself.” (cfr. 1 Cor 4, 3).

However there is another fundamental and amazing aspect of the encounter between the freedom of God and the freedom of man in our earthly life. The intervention of human freedom is not destined to last forever. Precisely in the encounter with the freedom of God, who intervenes in our life, our work becomes work of men chosen by God, called by God; the work of the Holy Spirit. Only if we espouse the initiative of God who comes down to us, will our work hold within it the spark of eternity, the characteristic of the Holy Spirit.