Pope Francis warned about believing oneself to be self-sufficient and thinking that you don't need anyone, not even God.
POPE FRANCIS
'At the beginning of Lent, it will be good for all of us to ask for the grace to guard our memory. To guard the memory of all that the Lord, of all the Lord has done in my life. How He has cared for me; how He loved me. With that memory, go forward.'
Pope Francis seriously reflected on the danger of forgetting the good parts of the faith journey and the pride that calls us back instead of traveling along the path to Christ.
EXTRACTS OF PAPAL HOMILY
(Source: Vatican Radio)
When your heart is turned away, when you take the road that is not right – either going the wrong way or taking a different road, but not going along the right road – you lose your sense of direction, you lose your compass, with which you should go forward. And a heart without a compass is a public danger: it’s a danger for the person himself, and for others. And a heart takes this wrong path when it does not listen, when it allows itself to go astray, carried away by [other] gods, when it becomes an idolater.
Well-being, even spiritual well-being, has this danger: the danger of a certain amnesia, a lack of memory. I feel good like that, and I forget what the Lord has done in my life, all the graces He has given us, and I believe that it is my own merit, and I go on like that. And then the heart begins to turn away, because it doesn’t listen to the voice of the heart itself: memory. The grace of memory.
Idolatry is an attitude of the heart, when you prefer to do something because it is more comfortable for me, instead of the Lord – precisely because we have forgotten the Lord. At the beginning of Lent, it would be good for all of us to ask for the grace to preserve memory, to preserve the memory of everything the Lord has done in my life: how he loved me so much, how he loved me. And from that memory, to go forward. And it would also do us good continually to repeat the advice of Paul to Timothy, his beloved disciple: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead”. I repeat: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead”. Remember Jesus, Jesus who has accompanied me up to now, and will accompany me until the moment when I must appear before Him in glory. May the Lord give us the grace to preserve memory”.
