Rekindling the love that is dying out in the world

The sacrament of baptism contains what is needed for a rich and intense Christian life. But one has to pray often and deepen one's knowledge of the faith for the gifts to express themselves:

"We cease to believe when we cease to pray. Faith, hope and charity are given at baptism. We must cultivate this gift through prayer. It is the Blessed Virgin Mary who will teach us how to do this."

Baptism is a springboard to holiness and intimacy with God!

Marthe was baptised on 5 April 1902 in the small baptistery of the church of Saint Bonnet de Galaure. What she received on that day was an immense gift. When she reflected on her baptism, her first thought was one of gratitude:
"Such grace in our life: the grace of holy baptism, the grace of Christian education, of first communion, of conversion, of vocation and of perseverance.”

It calls every baptised person to the same praise:
"Sing of the extraordinary wonders performed in you: He created you as a daughter of his love, he adopted you at baptism, he forgave all your sins, he wanted you just for himself, he brought you back to life in his love, he gives himself to you in order to absorb you in him, that you may be his faithful copy, that you may disappear in him and become like him...”

For her, in the life of every Christian, baptism is the beginning of what she called the "intimate life with God":
"The intimate life of the creature with its Creator, with its Father, with God who never ceases to love it and bring it to life".

For her again, this "intimate life with God" is not reserved for a particular category of Christians; it is offered to all. To a priest who came to meet her, Marthe suggested how much everything would change if people accepted to live consciously with the Holy Trinity and to cultivate a simple, living and affectionate relationship with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

"He is with you, he is in you," she would often say.

Sometimes, when her "visitors" came to her to seek some insight for a particular decision they needed to take, she did not hesitate to refer them back to the presence of the Holy Spirit in them, whose purpose is to counsel and enlighten them:
"It is not my mission to replace the Holy Spirit," she once said to one of them, "but you must get used to searching for the solutions you need with the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the will of God.”

Another time, Marthe answered firmly, "It is not my advice that will help you, it is my prayer. If there is something better than prayer, our Lord would have taught us about it!"

As for those who say that they have lost the faith, Marthe encourages and spurs them on:

But this gift received at Baptism must be "activated", developed:
"We must nurture this inner life, the true life and increase it constantly, by cultivating and increasing in us the great life of faith and love."

She raises the question, "Do we think about developing our faith?" She herself constantly sought to better understand, deepen and develop the faith of her baptism. We know that, from a young age, she read a lot and that she had even taken out subscriptions to various magazines intended for the formation of priests...

As a simple country woman of the Galaure, she told us one of her life rules:

It is the opposite of a "pre-packaged" way of thinking! The Christian life is a treasure, for which we are the primary guardians...

Finally, Marthe knew that she was a daughter of God since her baptism: "God is my Father". She said it and tried to live it out, to believe it, even when the trials and the humiliations seemed to prove the contrary.

"I would like to be everywhere at once in order to proclaim over and over again how good is our God. How fatherly he is, a Father full of tenderness and mercy." This sentence is beautiful, but it takes on even more meaning when you know that Marthe said it when she had been curled up on her couch for almost a year, at the age of 28, when the disease was getting worse and her future was uncertain...

Marthe teaches us to live out this father-child relationship "not merely by fulfilling certain set actions and a few beautiful prayers to which we devote all our attention, but by nurturing a vigorous faith in our hearts, which is the basis and essential condition of a genuine life in God and which Jesus demanded of us continually throughout his Gospel."