Confession

He knew people's hearts
and knew where they were
in Christ. 

Padre Pio's stigmata are an outward manifestation of the spiritual life of a man found suitable for Christ to impart life and suffering - His life and His suffering, and I can tell you, that if you desire to be anything consequential in the spiritual realm, there are parameters that must define your life and being, for the man into whom Christ imparted His wounds in a visible, painful and humiliatingly obvious way was  making him one with His Spirit and His Body in a consequnetial union of Body and Spiirt.

A writer who dedicated himself to presenting Padre Pio spoke of the stigmata as something he wore like a coat, yet it was more; as I said, he was united to Christ. On Golgotha, where He was nailed to the cross, and where His side was lanced open in a brutal effort to kill him; if He were already dead, He certainly had been rendered incapable of returning, and if He were not already dead, then He had to embrace yet one more agony before it was enough, and was finished.

And yet, Padre Pio's life was testimony that it was not enough and could never be enough, except and only because Jesus extended Padre to be more than what ordinary human eyes could see.

It is said he could be in two different places simultaneously through "an extension of the personality" as Padre Pio once explained to someone who asked how he could be in two places at once. The simplest and most direct answer is because God wanted Padre Pio to be in two places at the same time, and we might wonder if he could be in different times as well.

If we try to form our soul into what He wants us to be, we may find ourselves confronted with our own weakness and inability to live up to the reality of what He desires.  

He must cause us to grow, and deepen our spirit to match His own being. 

The world and the depths of our own heart will challenge us to forsake our desires in order to thirst as Jesus thirsted. There were many times He said that He was thirsty or used our thirst in speaking allegories capable to illustrating His meaning to those around Him. Certainly He must have reached out to take the drink offered Him when those around found out He needed a drink. Certainly, y the end of the day, those who had heard Him also knew the depth of what He really meant, the unquenchable drought in the soul that longs well beyonf thirst for our selves and our lives, given in the most sacred love imaginable.

And yet, people yearn to participate in His cross all the time, but they do not participate in that manifestation He wills.

A few, like Padre Pio were spiritually and physically capable and disposed by love to desire nothing more than His love. One arrives at such a sublime moment by His sheer grace, and in an incomparable moment, suddenly find their soul and bdoy united to Christ and the wounds of His crucifixion, and so it comes to pass, that the conditions necessary for stigmatization are fulfilled, and from the wounds imparted, blood flows for as long as He wants, and until the souls for whom He longs to be united are indeed made one by an irresisitible impetus of wounds and bleeding and a disposition to be satsified only with Him, His love and His Will, crucified and made holy for our sake and to be spared rejection and eternal suffering resulting form sin.

Padre Pio scarcely thought nothing of the condition of His being, united to Christ and marked with shocking manifestations of the britality inflicted Jesus and His children.

Padre Pio particiapted in what Jesus was doing while He was alive - calling souls to Himself to be transformed to belong to Him forever configured in being and mind to be useful to Him in a saving act.

All of us are made useful to him; that is His gift to us in prayer. He wants to lift us up to Him matured and made more profound, so that whatever we might be engaged in expands us into greater potentialities.

There is no way to shrug off the "coat" we have worn; we wear our beign at His Will, and the conformity of our beings to His Will determines what He can do to us. The deeper our maturity the deeper we can enter in to Him on the cross. Some of us may suffer very little on that account and He knows it so that we accomplish more modest things. Some may suffer deep aridity and longing, to the point of being spiritually crucified, participating in that salvific thirst which penetrated the Father's Heart.

Blessed are all people who suffer and participate in His suffering in addition to their own. We owe them more than we are aware. I cannot help but wonder at this late hour of existence, if there will ever be another Padre Pio. Such men come in atraordianry times, to save countless souls who would otherwise be lost. They come to help us realize our responsibility, because he cannot save everyone he might want to because so many foolishly dismiss him and the Lord He served.

Those who enter into His passion are aware of His deepest longings because our participation contains the reason why made plainly painful beyond the ordinary.

In my humanity, I am capable of desiring many things, and of seeing much fulfilled because I look for any sign of Him. Little wonder then, that, in my own selfishness, I somehow thought it possible that the Lord could let my hands and feet and side bleed, but at that time, I was unaware how silly it might be considering the person I was then. Perhaps out of my embrassment I might be saved by being closer to Him and to His will so that I have become equipped to do things I could scarcely imagine. The stigmara of St. Padre Pio happened in time at a certain point; certainly I am closer to my own point of configuration in which His wish and my own might be fuffilled to His joy and mine when I can respond in an ordinary way with tears and hope to being closer to Him for a moment before the hdarkness descends again. Without the sublime uplifting of my soul, I can respond to the cries of the forgotten and forsaken who in despair and agony stand a chance of being lifted up to His presence to be with Him forever. Padre Pio was filled with deep joy and love that was constant and unwavering, and which were the unction Christ imparts to those He makes worthy as He made Padre Pio worthy and makes all of US WORTHY. May we bless His Name when that worthiness becomes union with Him, on the cross or otherwise.