Community of light and hope

The clock of life marks for everyone a time that our Rule calls "The time of fragility": physical, psychological, spiritual fragility that crosses everyone's life at different times, from the youngest tried by the complexity of life to the elderly weighed down by years. It is a time that must be taken into account, without losing faith because life always regenerates itself, it must almost be prepared to be ready when it arrives, it must be welcomed when it arrives because it contains something new to experience and to offer. But two years of pandemic, the war in the heart of Europe, the climate upheavals, the economic crisis, the energy crisis and much more have made us all more fragile, more precarious.
It is no longer just a time, it is life itself that has become more precarious.

Every aspect of our life is marked by precariousness and insecurity, even heating, electricity, water, not to mention work, food… The loss of these certainties makes us all more fragile. Even family and community ties are under pressure and risk suffering, like any other form of human coexistence. Our homes are increasingly faced by men and women with serious untreated psychiatric pathologies, fragile people at the mercy of themselves who have been exasperated by the isolation of recent years and whom the street, where many have found refuge, delivers to us.
In this widespread fragility, everyone's request, from the youngest to the elderly, is not to be left alone, to become part of a community of people who recognize them, welcome them, accompany them. Community of people who are a reference, where to give and offer help, get out of the shadows, stop being invisible.
Simple communities, not binding ties, but open spaces where to enter and leave, where to open up gradually, where to re-learn to live together.

It is a new beginning, which can be extended to a shared responsibility, necessary to rebuild a healthy fabric of society. A group of young people who find themselves sharing themselves can restart the community dimension of a town, of a neighborhood and every small community can become a point of light for many. These are not good intentions, they have already happened thanks to many friends and young people who have been attending the Arsenale della Pace for years: many volunteers who also come together to create community among themselves, adults and young people of the Global Village of Cumiana, the friends of Bonate , of Vicenza, of Mori. Small groups accompanied for years that are now communities in their area and a meeting point for hundreds of people. But also Genoa, Desenzano, Bari and countless small realities which, if they find the constancy and loyalty of a few friends, will be destined to grow. No one can deal with personal fragility and an entire system alone!
We have been experiencing all of this for some time and have been saying for some time that to face the fragility of this time there is a need for communities: not closed and referential realities, rigid and excessively structured, but inclusive realities, welcoming towards all, where everyone can feeling free to be as it is, a reality where one can also grow in responsibility, but with the joy of giving oneself.

Experience also tells us that all of this is still not enough to face the difficult times that await us.
The time of fragility is the time of God. The first to ask us to form community with us is He who defines himself as the One who stands at the door and knocks: «If someone hears my voice and opens the door for me, I will come to him I will dine with him, and he with me" (Rev 3:20). Our fragility moves him and pushes him even closer to everyone, he seeks us to enter our lives, to sit at the table with us, to be a family with us, to be a community in communion with him and with each other.
And he wants to be the strength of the weak: "When I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Cor 12:10), strong in him, strong in his Presence. We live with him the time of fragility.

Rosanna Tabasso
NP November 2022