“Everything that is given to us in this life is only for our use and is given to us on loan.” (St. Catherine of Siena)
This sentence is of great significance because it reminds us that we receive everything from our Father, to whom our lives and everything that constitutes them belong. Yet as human beings, we are easily tempted to take ownership of things as if they originated from us. The result is that God is pushed into the background, while our achievements—or even our peculiarities—move to the forefront. They can even become our supposed “treasure.” This happens when we are not sufficiently transparent to His presence in our lives, thereby weakening our witness, whose primary task is to glorify Him.
How different everything becomes when we put the above sentence into practice. We grow grateful to God for all that we have received. He helps us practice selflessness so that we do not fall into self-admiration or “self-realization.” In this way, awareness of this sentence becomes a school of true humility. It submits itself to the truth, for things are exactly as St. Catherine of Siena says.
The sentence also leads us into the true freedom of the children of God, because what matters to them is that our Heavenly Father realizes Himself in our lives. If we regard our life as a loan and live it with the utmost vigilance in this awareness, then we will gladly hand it back to our Father and will not cling to it for ourselves. Every day then becomes a step of surrender to God, in which our freedom consists.
As our Father invites us to say in the Message to Sister Eugenia Ravasio: “I come from God, my Father; to Him I return, to Him alone I belong.”