The secret of perfect joy
The stepped peaks of the Andes looked like snow-crowned heads. What a spectacle!
Without giving me any time to rest or subjecting me to a process of adjustment, just a few days after my arrival in Chile, I was already thrown headfirst into the current of apostolic life.
The popular missions were very peculiar: they took place on the estates or ranches. Naturally, it was the estate owners who invited the missionary priests, and they were also the ones who called the peasants and their families, who worked in their fields, to attend the missionary events.
Seeing that gathering of wage earners, waves of emotion rose up in my throat. In those moments, I imagined the figure of Jesus addressing those audiences of fishermen and peasants, declaring them the Father’s favorites and privileged members of the Kingdom. Putting myself also in the Master’s heart, and speaking to them from that platform, I repeated to them in a thousand ways that the Father’s most careful concern was for them; that at night the Father watches over their sleep and by day accompanies them wherever they go; that the Father is not a God dressed in lightning, but a vast sea of tenderness.
Consciously and stubbornly, I stayed away from the horror themes of popular missions, much to the surprise of my missionary companion. I always intertwined the beatitudes with the tenderness of the Father, and I never got tired of proclaiming and repeating to them that God Himself would be their celebration; that no one could take away the supreme wealth of the heart, which is peace; that the Father would take them onto His lap and, one by one, dry all their tears; that the Father is waiting for them at His house with a table prepared and decorated with flowers, and that on that day He will acknowledge them, shake their hand, seat them at the table, and start the feast, a feast that will never end, and that finally they will know where the secret of perfect joy lies.
And so I kept talking to them endlessly about eternal Love, and I never got tired of planting dreams and stars in the souls of all those poor peasants who, week after week, attended the mission events, often with tears in their eyes.
Taken from the book “The Rose and the Fire,” beginning of Chapter III, by Father Ignacio Larrañaga.
