Mass for The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Hope
May 02, 2020 12:00 pm · Sergio Muñoz Fita
FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA: A PRAYER IN THREE WORDS
As we said earlier this week, our new parish motto summarizes absolutely everything we can want and ask of God. These three words are very special because they have their origin in the Lord himself. It is he who has given them to us in the prayer that he himself taught us. If the Our Father is the most perfect prayer and contains, as Saint Augustine said, everything that we can ask of God, then these three words - "thy will be done" - are without a doubt the heart of all prayer.
There is something special about them. It’s not just that Jesus has given these words to us so that we can pray with them, it is that he himself used them in his personal prayer.
I want to recall here a fact that I will repeat later on. During the Lord's agony in Gethsemane, Christ moans these same three words. Let us listen to the narration of Saint Matthew: “My Father, if it is not possible that this cup pass without my drinking it, YOUR WILL BE DONE!” (Mt 26:42)
Dear brothers and sisters, these are exactly the same words that the Lord teaches us in the Our Father, even in the original Greek text. It is as if we enter into the Lord's very own prayer every time we repeat these three words with devotion. We do not pray, so to speak, "from outside" of the Mystery of Christ, but we speak these words from the depths of the Heart of Jesus to which we are united by the Sacrament of Baptism. They acquire all their strength because they are not only words spoken by Jesus, but words that even now spring from his human heart.
When we say them in faith, Christ prays in us and we join in Jesus' prayer. The Father, then, listens to them in us as an echo of those that the Lord spoke in the Mount of Olives. The Father sees his Son in us and hears him on our lips and in our hearts.
They are words of deepest intimacy because they introduce us to the relationship between the Father and the Son in the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Lord has brought them to light so that we can share in them. In the Holy Spirit, united to the divine Sonship that makes Jesus the only Son of the eternal Father, we can say them with Him: "FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA", Thy Will Be Done.
The motto of Saint Anne is a prayer of three words. It is prayer because it is addressed to the Father: the word "You". “Thy Will” is already a turning to God. So it is not a “horizontal” affirmation, but words that we speak to God. They are words that lift us up when we say them and that also lift all who hear them.
They are the words of a son who in his most difficult moment, like Jesus in Gethsemane, places himself in the hands of his Father. Not my will, but yours. These are words filled with anointing and love, confidence and humility, light and hope, suffering and surrender.
In the current situation in which so many of you are suffering because of your powerlessness to receive Holy Communion or those of you who suffer for any cause, how beautiful it would be to repeat many times, with love and trust, united to Christ in his Passion: FIAT VOLUNTAS TUA, “Thy Will be Done”!
As I have said so many times, we could dedicate a whole life to the contemplation of these three words and we would never exhaust them.
These are Christological words: because they come from Jesus because we say them united to him, because He says them in us, because they express his filial relationship and because they teach us to be children like him and with him.