Читать книгу In God’s Hands: The Spiritual Diaries of Pope St John Paul II - Литагент HarperCollins USD, F. M. L. Thompson - Страница 7

‘I leave no possessions of which it will be necessary to dispose. As for the things I use every day, I ask that they be distributed as seems appropriate. Let my personal notes be burned. I ask that Fr Stanisław see to this, and I thank him for his kind help and collaboration over the years. I leave all my other “thank yous” in my heart before God Himself, because it is difficult to put them in words’ (John Paul II, Testament, 6 March 1979).

This is the instruction that the Holy Father John Paul II left in his Testament. After his death in 2005, I faithfully fulfilled the Holy Father’s will, giving away all his possessions, especially the personal memorabilia. I did not dare to burn the personal notes and notebooks that he had left behind because they contain significant information about his life. I saw them on the Holy Father’s desk, but I never looked into them. When I saw his Testament, I was moved that John Paul II, whom I had accompanied for almost forty years, had entrusted me with his personal affairs.

I did not burn John Paul II’s notes because they are a key to understanding his spirituality, that is, what is innermost in a person: his relationship to God, to other men and to himself. They reveal, so to speak, another side of the person whom we knew as the Bishop of Kraków and Rome, the Peter of our times, the Shepherd of the universal Church. They show his early life, in the years when he was ordained a bishop and installed in the Diocese of Kraków. They allow us to get a glimpse of the intimate, personal relationship of faith with God the Creator, the Giver of life, the Master and Teacher. At the same time, they present the sources of his spirituality – his inner strength and his determined will to serve Christ until the last breath of life.

When I return to John Paul II’s notes, I can see the figure of the Holy Father in the home chapel at Franciszkańska Street,¹ as he prays immersed in God, before the Blessed Sacrament, and I hear his sighs coming from the little chapel at the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. His radiant face never revealed his inner experiences. He always looked at the cross and the icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa with courage. He learnt from her to surrender himself to God entirely, repeating the words of Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort: Totus Tuus ego sum, o Maria, et omnia mea Tua sunt – ‘I am entirely Yours, O Mary, and all that is mine is Yours’. Complete surrender to God in Mary’s likeness and the fulfilling of God’s will until the end were the characteristic traits of this man of prayer, who discovered the abundant world of the spirit in his relationship with God.

May reading the spiritual notebooks of John Paul II help everyone discover the spiritual depth of the people of the twenty-first century, and may it lead everyone to a greater love of God and other people.

Stanisław Cardinal Dziwisz, Metropolitan Archbishop of Kraków

On the Feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Patron Saint of the Parish in Wadowice² Kraków, 21 November 2013