Rome (Italy). The Servant of God, Mother Rosetta Marchese, loved to dialogue in prayer and Eucharistic adoration with Jesus, Her Crucified Spouse and Son obedient to the Father’s Will. She invoked him as the immolated Lamb who bears the sins of the world upon Himself in order to save it (cf. Jn 1:29). The comparison and conformation to Him took place through the sacrifice of life in the present moment, that is, moment by moment.
The term “immolate oneself”, for Mother Rosetta was the voice of the verb to love and was the golden road of her asceticism and sanctification. Jesus, who immolated himself on the cross and every day on the altar, asked her to join Him, to become another “Jesus who offers Himself and immolates Himself” to make the Salesian educational mission fruitful among the youth. Even her daily ascesis was ‘Christocentric’ marked by emptying herself, as Jesus the servant emptied Himself up to death on the cross (cf. Phil 2: 7-8), to be filled with true Love.
The means of this annihilation and conformation to the Crucified Spouse were not striking and extraordinary, but ordinary and daily, lived in the small crosses of every day, in the misunderstandings, within the limitations that, according to Mother Rosetta, created gaps only Jesus could fill.
She wrote to a Sister in the service of authority, we must “encourage ourselves to consider the mystery of the Cross more and more and to love it in our daily life without seeking extraordinary things, but giving the Lord generously moment by moment what He asks of us: tiredness, discomforts of the journey, patience in listening to the sisters, moments of agreement and joy, moments of misunderstanding and suffering. In short, everything that forms the fabric of our days”.
Very eloquent is a letter that the Servant of God wrote to a sick Sister at a time when her life was also marked by the disease that inexorably led her to the definitive encounter with the Lord:
“Yes, my dear …, even the suffering, the misunderstandings, the fatigue of a daily life carried out under the banner of the cross, are the manifestations of His Tenderness, of His Mercy, of His appeal to make of us ‘friends’ ever more intimate with His Son and this means redoing His journey to Calvary. It is your vocation, it is mine; we can say that it is ‘ours’ of everyone because no one has the privilege of suffering; sooner or later, in one way or another, we are called to live deeply this experience of Christ the Redeemer. It is up to us to respond fully with the help of His grace! So let us help each other to do it more every day, one after the other, with infinite patience, asking Him to be able to accept what He has arranged for us for the next day. He is a Father and He will always and only be able to give us ‘good’ things together with the strength to live them”.
At this time of Holy Week, Mother Rosetta reminds us that the goal is to become Jesus Crucified, to experience intimacy with Him. Everything else is a means to reach conformation. Even the smallest daily cross, however, has within itself the germ of the Resurrection and of light. We should really take advantage of all events, especially the most suffered ones, to convert ourselves to Love.
“Our only wealth is what we give to Jesus in the form of a cross”
(Material taken from the Archive of the Cause of Beatification and Canonization of the Servant of God Mother Rosetta Marchese).
