Jolts of conscience

According to the calendar, we have arrived in spring. Then the weather plays tricks and climate change adds worrying upheavals to the air that blows.
With unseasonal snow and rain that twists on territories already tormented by recent assorted floods. And, just to avoid getting used to anything, the earth also starts to shake.

But to obscure the horizon that should instead have the encouraging flavor of recovery in nature, the world panorama of our times becomes disturbing.
The news brings us home images of assorted wars on multiple fronts, with a subversion of positions on the international level capable of populating the imagination with unknowns that are difficult to unravel. What awaits us around the corner of the events designed, hypothesized, shouted and rethought, playing on multiple tables? Conflicts, weapons, bombs, destruction continue to occupy the scenarios.
The logic of force comes to the fore. The life of men, respect for the dignity of each person, the anxiety about the future of today's youth, the unmet expectations of peoples, the need for justice, the urgency of recognizing each other as brothers, the damage done to creation, people left on the margins because resources are lavished on the war apparatus, the humanitarian drifts that accumulate... in short, the shadows thicken, while the painful words of Pope Francis remain prophetic and indispensable: "Every war is a defeat.
Nothing is solved with war. Nothing. Everything is gained with peace, with dialogue".

Why don't we take these warnings? Why do we want to get stuck in wars? Why, even knowing that that is tragic darkness, do we continue to seek it and generate it? Why don't we learn anything from the history of barbarism that we have behind us? Questions that we shouldn't get used to.

Meanwhile, the media stages have been repopulated with over-the-top figures. Only the claims of domination are current (out of modesty we prefer to call them "areas of influence", to be expanded or strengthened, at all costs ... forgetting those on the margins), managing presumed superiorities with disconcerting logics on the exposed and painful nerves of migration, of endemic poverty left to its fate, of growing marginalization due to hunger, misery, degradation ... A climate that makes us suspicious of a risky return to the worst in the midst of a humanity that fears sinking into the black holes of bullying, of upheavals, of reckless operations of oppression. There remains - we believe and hope - a jolt of consciences to be nourished.
In the meantime, we must realize the critical hour we are living. And, as believers, we must also and above all pray about it.

Corrado Avagnina
NP April 2025