(from the Blog of the Alphonsian Academy)
by A. Donato, C.Ss.R.
“I am Covid-19!”, a few days ago, among the many funny, desecrating, and sometimes worrying notifications and messages that continue to animate the mobile phone, some videos emerged in which the well-known (unfortunately) coronavirus “takes” even the “word”. The microorganism, needing to attach itself to a cell to be able to live and reproduce, is given “voice” and “identity” … the “power” to impose itself as an avenger in our lives, to be able to judge them, and to stand as a master to the point of threatening a possible and apocalyptic his return when humanity only tried to forget what he said he came to teach!
As a believer, it is rather difficult for me to give so much power to “something” knowing that I have met “Someone” who makes himself present daily with his life as the Risen One in my life called to fulfill himself in freedom (cf. ChV, 113; 122). God’s love “is a love “that does not overwhelm or oppress, cast aside, or reduce to silence, humiliate or domineer.” It is love “discreet and respectful love; a love that is free and freeing, a love that heals and raises up. The love of the Lord has to do more with raising up than knocking down, with reconciling than forbidding, with offering new changes than condemning, with the future than the past” (Ibid. 116).
Certainly, the situation that has arisen, even perhaps because of some naive and irresponsible gesture of ours, limits us in the exercise of some of our external freedoms… see that of not being able to leave. But inner freedom, as we know, is much greater than outer freedom… and in this time, perhaps, one should not so much “go out” as “from oneself” so as “to seek the good of others” (Ibid., 163); so as to “recognize in others their hidden beauty, their dignity and their grandeur as images of God and children of the Father” (Ibid., 164).
The “uprooting” and the “fall of basic certainties” which we are breaking down and which “today’s media culture” helps to foster are bringing to further maturity that “feeling of profound orphanity to which – we read in Christus vivit – we must respond by creating fraternal and attractive spaces where we live with meaning” (cf. Ibid., 216). This is the time in which we must commit ourselves to “making a home”… to learn to feel united with others beyond utilitarian or functional constraints. …To create a “home” … it is to learn to feel connected to others by more than merely utilitarian and practical bonds… To create a home is to let prophecy take flesh and make our hours and days less cold, less indifferent and anonymous. It is to create bonds by simple, everyday acts that all of us can perform… No one can be indifferent or stand apart since each is a stone needed to build the home. This also involves asking the Lord to grant us the grace to learn how to be patient, to forgive one another, to start over each day… And that is how the miracle takes place: we feel that here we are reborn, here we are all reborn, because we feel God’s caress that enables us to dream of a more human world, and therefore of a world more divine” (Ibid., 217).
Original source: In cammino con san Gerardo,
Il mensile della Famiglia Redentorista, May 2020
