In God’s Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope St John Paul II. Литагент HarperCollins USD

      The relationship between creation and fulfilment is different for beings endowed with transcendence. This is man in the visible world (and, apart from it, the world of pure spirits). The fulfilment of man is immanently linked to judgement. For judgement is an act of transcendence. It is realised in the voices of conscience, and there has to be finally a kind of synthesising judgement. In this judgement, man–conscience meets God–Just Judge. The judgement equates transcendence ‘towards truth’. However, it consists in arriving at the truth about love (‘in the evening of your life you will be judged by your love’) and the truth for love.

      For man is called to fulfilment through participation in God, who is love. God–Trinity is the self-contained fullness, above all fulfilment of the world and the human heart. At the same time, this fullness outlines the horizon of fulfilment for all creation in the human being. At the end of his life, man will be judged by the ways in which he served the fulfilment of the world, whose transcendent end is God as fullness. This fulfilment finds its realisation in the partaking of God, which will lead to God being all in everything. The foundation of this fulfilment is not personal transcendence, but grace, which ingrains the participation in God’s life, which is fullness, in this transcendence.

      (Many themes are still to be developed here).

      The Way of the Cross; Terce; Sext; None

      In the afternoon we enter the final stage of the retreat (rest, reading)

      Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament: Joyful conviction that Christ is, and giving thanks for that, and a fervent petition for Him to be with me in everything that I wish to root in Him and develop with Him – despite all my weakness and even though ‘conscientia metuit’ [‘the conscience is anxious’]: so that He Himself develops properly good things beyond my weakness and clumsiness.

      Meditation 9: Reference to specific issues – and once again to 1 John on the triple concupiscence, which is ‘of the world’. The lust of the eyes may take the form of not only desire for material goods, but also for any visible success achieved to fulfil one’s self-love in any area. Hence, one needs to look at facts critically.

      The triple concupiscence impedes creation’s way to fulfilment. If we follow different impulses, reactions, feelings, sometimes it is difficult to discern and draw boundaries. Christ the Lord gave us one method and taught us one attitude, which seems to constitute the simplest remedy for the triple concupiscence. It is the attitude and method of service. One has to follow it, cutting across the entire complicated field of inner tensions, which are born of the lust of the eyes, the flesh and the pride of life.

      Anticipated Matins of the following day (Feast of St Elisabeth); Reading and letters; Penitential psalms; Litany of the Saints; Rosary

      Concluding meditation [Meditation 10]: Mary took the path from creation to fulfilment in the simplest and quickest way. This is how Her response at the Annunciation can be translated: I am the handmaid of the Lord. The attitude of service emerges spontaneously, surpassing the area of the triple concupiscence so common to man. Therefore She is – as Vatican II reminds us – the fulfilment of what the entire people of God in the Church strive for. One needs to learn from her the simplest – and at the same time most deeply grounded – resolution.

      Compline; Reading

       8 July

      The conclusion of the retreat takes place at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska.¹⁵

      The Little Ways of Our Lady;¹⁶ Rosary

      Meditation 11: On these paths the people of God often reflect on the mystery of the creation and fulfilment, bringing together Christ and Mary in their hearts.

      I also come here to bring my retreat intentions to their hearts and ask for the grace of little fulfilments on the way to the highest fulfilment.

      Holy Mass in the Sacred Chapel before the Miraculous Image

      (In the afternoon: the funeral of Prelate Stanisław Słonka in Żywiec-Zabłocie)