Mine in ours

We are, or have been, the generation that believed they possessed the future, and then, we know, Covid and what has been happening for too many months have overturned many certainties.
I too have taken it and I hope to be one of the last. In these days of isolation, I found in a report, whose Italian I had to correct, a sentence that, as often happens, challenged me.

It is a report on training which reads: «Everything lasts while it lasts and when the difficulty appears it is not faced, but avoided». Unfortunately we have the experience of it, but I dare say that, as a phrase, it is too pessimistic. The fact is, and the author recognizes it, that on the one hand true freedom is desired, and rightly so, which however is not always "true" and turns into a whim or egocentric demand, while freedom was given by the Lord because it is the climate of a common good.
On the other hand, the society or societies of the Christian tradition have lost the sense of the greatness of obedience, the backbone of behavior and as a search for the common good, and for several decades it has been affirmed, by way of challenge, «the obedience is no longer a virtue". Indeed, at the time one could not blame them, given the climate of the years before the 1968 revolution. Obedience was no longer a virtue, which is strength, but an adaptation, bending over, to be able to do what one wants. If in obedience there is no love, solidarity, mutual attention, we are astray and it disappears from the list of things that make the world beautiful. All beautiful things can be bent to selfish and self-centered ends and the world is veiled in gray.

Going back to our sentence, we must be able to distinguish between what concerns us personally and concerns us alone, and decide to abandon a direction, a job, an effort, but not a responsibility, because this takes us away from our own sphere and puts us in a world which is no longer ours. We cannot do according to our taste what relates us to someone, what gives us responsibility, and everything that involves a person other than us. The other has a dignity equal to ours, which we cannot hurt just because we follow what suits us or we like. The other person lets us enter the sphere of the common good, which is always more important than one's own good, because this cannot exist except in the sphere of the former.

With this discourse I want to give a critical light to that sentiment that I mentioned at the beginning: "Everything lasts as long as it lasts and when the difficulty appears it is not faced, but avoided". The difficulty must not be avoided, because in this way I not only harm others, but also myself. My good does not last if it is not anchored in the good of others. Sooner or later I would be left alone, but not with the "Blessed solitude, only bliss!", but with that bearer of boredom and anguish that devastates our society apparently filled with all possible goods. It is the experience of many adventures in search of freedom, pleasure, wealth, which are reflected in that of the Prodigal Son, reduced to the company of pigs, with whom he had to contend for a meager food, but which unfortunately do not or cannot finish all in happy ending like that of the evangelical parable. From the disasters of selfishness too often there is no turning back. The "all while it lasts" must not be said in choosing a gift of oneself, but of the illusion of taking back the promises and commitments for a life in which one is no longer capable of having real relationships, but only of sucking a some well-being from those who pass in front of us.
True good is not being released from the ties that unite us to others, but from the chains that make us slaves to ourselves.

Cesare Falletti
NP November 2022