Above all, I want to thank the Lord, the giver of all good things, for allowing me to share his work in my life. Many times I heard those words of Pablo; "Everything happens for the good of those who love God . " However, these words, although simple, contain a profound teaching. God has a plan for our lives, and although we try many times to change it, in the end, in His mercy, God carries it out, with the sole purpose of making us happy and bringing us back to Him.
I was born into a Catholic family and my entire childhood was spent in the Church. In 1987, when Pope John Paul II was visiting our country, I participated in the World Youth Day in Buenos Aires. This event had a profound impact on me. Since I was a child I wanted to serve God and consecrate myself to Him. I didn't know much about it but I wanted it deeply. I entered the Colegio San Pedro, in the city of Pedro Luro, province of Buenos Aires, belonging to the Salesian Fathers. From there, I would go to the Aspirancy near General Roca, and thus I could begin my ecclesiastical studies to become a priest.
Along with my training my search began. The doubts began to occur one after another.
I had given myself to the Lord in a Christian Church from which I separated myself because I was not able to renounce everything that the Lord showed me clearly. And I decided to restart the path that I had abandoned. When I entered the Major Seminary for higher studies, the dilemma began within me. Reach out to God. Become holy. What God said, and what men said. The gratuity of Salvation, and everything I had to do to achieve it. The contradiction between what he had to do and what he saw being done. Human traditions and divine mandates. Obsessive preoccupation with form and neglect of substance.
Everything got worse when I did the Spiritual Exercises according to the method of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, at the beginning of the third year of the Seminary. One phrase was the one that unleashed that sea of doubts in me; Saint Ignatius used to say: "If the Church says that something is white, even if you see it black, the Church must admit that it is white, so to speak . ("Spiritual Exercises", Rules for feeling with the Church, 365: 1)
That seemed horrible to me.
He used to meditate on the words of Scripture, and there he discovered a loving and merciful Lord, who had nothing to do with this torture that would begin to live from then on.
The idea of being a saint terrified me, because I looked at everything I had to do to get there, I confronted it with my own human weakness and I knew it was impossible. He read: "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith; and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not by works, so that no one can boast" (Ephesians 2: 8-9), and he could not understand that I should do so much to get a gift. Because that understood that it was Salvation, a gift, not a prize. The interminable meditations began with their 16 steps, reciting long prayers, the rites empty of content for me, which, rather than getting closer to God and Father, seemed to me enormous obstacles that stood between us.
The idea of losing a Salvation that God had bought at the price of the blood of His only Son seemed incongruous with such a sacrifice. That Jesus Christ had suffered so much pain and torment for me and that I had to do extreme penances to achieve that Salvation I did not understand. I wore the sackcloth strictly on my legs to punish my flesh; I spent long hours on my knees with my arms crossed and macerated my flesh with the disciplines to repress the weakness of my flesh and preserve its purity. Everything was little to obtain the grace of Final Perseverance.
Every time we had Retreats or I read the writings of the saints, the " Imitation of Christ " by Tomás de Kempis, the " Exercise in Perfection " by Alonso Rodríguez, the " Compendium of Theology, Asceticism and Mysticism " by Tanquerey, it would move away By leaps and bounds the idea of reaching God and slowly day after day, I was falling into the most terrible despair. God was not for me. I was not able to reach it. The road to Him was impassable. Those words of Christ to the Pharisees came to my mind: ... "You place enormous burdens on the shoulders of others and you do not move them even with a finger . "
The Sacramental Confession was for me something terrifying, and the place where I suffered the most. How can I confess all my sins without forgetting anything? It is true that involuntary forgetting was not a sin, but when I later recalled what I had not confessed, the ghost of guilt and scruples drove me crazy. Why would God choose this traumatic means to forgive me? That place of confession became the most conducive source for lies, hypocrisy and many other ways of keeping an image before the superiors with whom one had to live every day.
The General Confessions , or "of all life", whenever there were spiritual exercises. If I did not remember what I had done a week before, how would I remember the sins of my life? Why confess again what, theoretically, God had already forgiven me?
The Virgin Mary . How much guilt did not have devotion to him. Only she was the sure way to reach Christ. Read Saint Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort in his " Treatise on true devotion to the Blessed Virgin ", or the writings of Saint Bernard, or Saint Thomas Aquinas when he said that ... "one of the clearest signs that a soul has been predestined to salvation, it is devotion to the Virgin Mary ... " , they did nothing but generate guilt and more guilt ... and finish confirming that God was not for me and that I could not achieve salvation eternal.
The cult of the Eucharist or the real and substantial presence of Christ in the consecrated host. It was the center of our faith. Christ there. And I couldn't see it even with the eyes of faith. I couldn't hear His voice speaking to me from there. I could not imagine the Lord imprisoned in a bread disk with "His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity" , surrounded by candles, incense and a lot of prayers to which he responded mechanically. I did not see the Majesty of God, His power, His omnipotence ... I did not feel the transforming Work of God in my life. I wanted to live with him every moment, I wanted a God who would walk with me, a person who was present in each and every moment of my life ... I wanted Jesus ... not behind any veil. The veil was broken. I wanted to be with Him and not have to go to the Tabernacle every time I needed to speak to Him. I wanted it in me.
I don't want to detail what I saw during those six years. But if I want to declare the reality of those words: "Do what I say but not what I do . " The emotional imbalances to which such impiety leads, the hypocrisy that the dissociation produced by a double life engenders in the soul, the disorders of all kinds that those walls concealed and of which God is witness, the loneliness, the lack of affection , of Christian charity that is lived when one begins to fall into an indifference that turns the soul into a desert, but not a fertile desert, as is the one to which the Lord leads us to make us grow, to love us and to seduce us.
It is not my purpose to take away or undermine anyone's fame. God save me from this! But I am telling the truth and I am not lying. All this spiritual path proposed by Catholic doctrine leads to two ports: either indifference, understand yourself, accustoming, lukewarmness (and remember what God says about the lukewarm), or despair, a terrible sin against the Holy Spirit. God, in his eternal design, allowed me to fall into the first. The indifference. It was no longer possible to reach it. Then ... let's live as best we can.
That year, the last I spent in that place, was the hardest I can remember in my life. I began to get sick, I suffered from insomnia, I had left everything that had to do with God. I feared the worst, because I felt that I was going crazy, my nerves were altered to such a point that I had to be taken to a psychiatric institution. The diagnosis is long to transcribe, but is available to anyone who wants it. When everything was diagnosed and I was no longer fit to be a priest, I was completely abandoned by everyone. The solution was to go home and have my family take care of what was left of me. He had lost eleven kilos, he didn't sleep, he cried about everything ... he was useless. But the saddest thing is that he no longer wanted to know anything about God. He had destroyed me. By wanting to reach Him, I lost everything.
In this situation, I began to accuse him and recriminate what he had done to me. That day I said to him: And now who's helping me! The answer was immediate. I remember one night, one of those long nights that I didn't sleep, I turned on the radio and heard a hymn on a Christian station that said:
Wonderful is the great love
that Christ my Lord poured into me;
being a rebel and a sinner,
I was the cause of His death.
Great, sublime, immeasurable love
for me, the Savior died.
Then I remembered that night when I said yes to the Lord. I started crying but now not from suffering. I felt joy in myself. That joy that I had experienced 10 years before, and I asked the Lord to enlighten me, to guide me, to remove all confusion from me. The Lord's response was a book: " Healing the Wounded Soul " by Arline de Westmeier. I pray to God to be able to meet her one day to thank her for being a docile instrument in the hands of the Potter and for having written that book that led me to the reencounter with the Word and through it to reconciliation with God.
God began to work in my soul and to heal the wrong image I had of Him. God began to restore my life in an incredible way.
In this I want to be grateful. There are three people that I do not want to fail to mention: Hugo Ramírez and his wife Rosana , who since that distant day when I gave my soul to the Lord, did not stop praying for me, and gave me an impeccable witness of Christian life. And Angélica Cervera , a sister with whom I have a deep friendship and who also trusted in the Lord. Their lives, their testimonies and their prayers obtained from God the miracle of my conversion. Precisely this sister (Angelica) gave me the address of this website on the internet ( www.conocereislaverdad.org ). God was working a total healing through the teachings of Daniel Sapia. I also thank him. God works when there are generous souls who say yes to him and dedicate their time, their lives and even their goods to the propagation of the Kingdom of God.
To the brothers who read this testimony I want to say from the bottom of my heart: God is the best choice you can make in your life. To depart from Him is to condemn oneself to the dark and gloomy night of anguish and pain. In Christ, only in Him, will we find love, joy and peace. Where will we go if only He has the words of eternal life?
To friends who share this testimony, I invite you to come to Jesus. Nothing has meaning in life without Him. Everything you desire and yearn for, you will find in Christ. Don't look at men, look at God. Remember that scene in the Gospel, when Peter asked the Lord to walk on water. He stood firm as he looked at the Lord. As soon as she took her eyes off Him, she sank. "Come friend to the Lord, for He died for you."
Beloved Catholic : I suffer from thinking of you. I suffer knowing that a Sacrifice as great as the Lord's may be in vain. I suffer from thinking that you are wasting your time in practices and rites that hinder your walk towards God. There is a path that will undoubtedly lead you to complete happiness: Jesus Christ .
"I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, nobody comes to the Father except through me" (John 14, 6)
GOD BLESS ALL WHO READ THIS TESTIMONY
Alejandro Maria Matos
alesteve@infovia.com.ar
[Source: https://www.conocereislaverdad.org/testi_Ale_Matos.htm]
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