A way of salvation

Often, and sometimes too willingly, we lament a fragility of life in general and of life in the Church in particular. We are forced to become aware of the decline of strength and the vulnerability of people and institutions which, until recently, experienced such intense strength and vitality that we cannot even imagine a change of scenario like the one we are experiencing or, rather, undergoing. In the past, the normal fragility of the elderly was experienced in a completely natural way due to the equally natural takeover of young people with new strengths and renewable energies.
At the moment it seems that everything is more fragile, more vulnerable, more uncertain. While the technical-scientific possibilities that now lean towards artificial intelligence grow, it seems that many people develop a sense of inadequacy that scares to the point of social withdrawal or a need not to be seen too much, so as not to be frustrated.

The mystery of the incarnation of the Word which, every year, presents itself in a strong way in the celebration of Christmas can truly enlighten and console our humanity which is sometimes so destabilised. The text of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux can enlighten our minds and warm our hearts. In his Sermons he meditates on the mystery of God's absolute fragility in the act of becoming similar to our poor humanity.

The incarnation of the Word made God himself "an expert in our weakness" as Isaac Siro states.
The experience of fragility and vulnerability can become an opportunity for humanization rather than an abyss of frustration. This does not depend on the difficult or unexpected situations that life presents us, but on that leap of humanity that allows us to live up to our call to be men and women capable of growing in freedom, awareness and responsibility.
A sign of this journey in which the experience of fragility - in all its forms - generates a leap of humanity is the ability to be increasingly true with oneself and with others.

Like the Samaritan woman, met by the Lord Jesus at Jacob's well, we can escape the sense of frustration and shame only by becoming capable of telling the "truth" (Jn 4, 18) about what we experience and suffer.

The real problem is not fragility, but the effort we have to take on it, failing in the double courage of recognizing and naming our own fears and limits without ceasing to want to continue to grow in freedom to put our lives at the service of everyone and especially the little ones. As in the past, but in a way suited to our anthropological context, the challenge is to testify how through complexity, ambiguity, tensions... one can be human and, at the same time and to the end, disciples of the Lord Jesus and witnesses of the Gospel, not in the form of heroism, but of serene sharing of the common condition of all our brothers and sisters in humanity.

If we think about it, in terms of evangelical compatibility, we are in a much better situation than we usually think. In fact, despite all the poverty of the present time, which was not lacking even in the past, there has never been - at least as a desire attitude - such an evangelical world as ours in the sense of attention to the truth and freedom of people . The Spirit inhabits our time no more than he inhabited the past, but no less. For this reason we can hope and we must sustain hope without forgetting that, as Carl Gustav Jung recalled, everyone's life is nothing other than "Learning to love and preparing to die". Dying is not only personal death and the end of institutions, of which one is a more or less vital part, but it is also the serene and generous acceptance of daily and epochal deaths - both on a personal and institutional level - without which there would be no real participation in the paschal mystery. Easter shows us the way to learn from what we suffer without becoming prisoners of regret which can turn into a true hell of despair.

As the title of Peter Ricardo's trilogy states, the challenge is for everyone: Honor your limit! Honoring the limit is a step of human and spiritual maturity that allows us to escape the original temptation to go beyond every limit at the instigation of the serpent.
The conclusion was much more miserable for our newborn humanity: fear and shame (Gen 3:10). On the contrary, knowing how to recognize our own weaknesses while serenely accepting those of those with whom we are called to fight and hope in life means becoming conspirators of hope.

For adults today, an obligatory duty is to initiate young people into the peaceful management of fragility and vulnerability, to prevent all those forms of dependence which are a way of escaping the reality of oneself and the world. The mystery of Christmas that we are about to celebrate, deafened by all the deafening consumerist Christmas noise, can be an opportunity to start again from weakness to recognize the place of salvation. Only those who have suffered will be a consoler, only those who have failed will be able to sustain the hope of still attempting happiness for themselves and for others. That "social chain" evoked by Leopardi in La Ginestra can and must become our urgent and unavoidable task.

Being disciples of that helpless child lying in a manger because there was no room for them anywhere means giving up the glory and privileges of the gods to embrace the truth of one's humanity.
The word itself refers us to the humus from which we are drawn to remind us that being human does not mean being extraordinary and heroic, but simple and true. If this happens in the depths of our hearts, next to us will find consolation and rest all the men and women treated like rejects who will finally no longer be ashamed of being who they are.
In the child of Bethlehem, God shows that he is on the side of our fragility and swaddles it with his compassionate and smiling love.

Michael David Semeraro osb
Focus
NP December 2023