Not mine

Northern Europe. She's 48, with a grown daughter from a previous partner.
She wants a child with her current partner, who's the same age. They're having difficulties, and they seem to be helping each other with do-it-yourself insemination. She gets pregnant. From routine tests and checkups, it's quickly clear the baby has a serious problem. Subsequent visits: a second problem. Then a third is suspected. A fourth. All with dire predictions for the future.
Month after month, the pregnancy rolls toward the end. They're asked to decide, right there, whether to give birth to a living child or a dead one: if they decide not to let it live. The doctor himself, the doctors suggest, is telling you: you wanted me, but mine will be non-life, now decide to let me go.
And the two parents live with the weight of a sentence like a millstone.

How beautiful it is to be able to say: God's will be done. Thy will be done is the prayer on which European and Western culture was built: it speaks of a bread to be received and shared, of love for others to whom we give the forgiveness we have received, of a kingdom of justice to be established, in the freedom that Thy will be done provides. That is, the path of liberation that is the Gospel, and the liberation Jesus intends is from all attachment. He knows the drama of attachment to oneself, to the self, to "my will be done."

Over time, through the twists and turns of history, European and Western culture, born from God's will, has grown on the exclusive affirmation of my will.At the dawn of the modern age, in the sixteenth century, a time of the discovery of the individual and, at the same time, of Luther's sola fides revolution, Ignatius said: "Live as if everything depended on me, knowing that everything depends on God." He sought to mitigate the apparent dereliction of responsibility of fides alone with personal commitment, provided, however, that he attaches himself to nothing and entrusts his works to the will of God, with "holy indifference" to successes and failures. These do not concern believers.

Humanity becomes inhumanity when, as now, everything becomes an affirmation of one's own will, of one's own fulfillment, regardless of whether it is at the expense of others.
It is difficult to be a Christian when society, as Cardinal Martini said, is a "structure of sin." Clement, the great evangelizer of Alexandria, taught in the second century that being a Christian is "being a Gnostic," in the authentic and positive meaning of the word, that is, someone who, by faith, seeks the Logos in contemplation, in the service of others, and in teaching them to make them better.
The only struggle on the path of likeness to God is to strip ourselves of carnal aspects, of attachments to the self, which manifest themselves in a thousand ways and disguise themselves to deceive us.
Clement had created true "esoteric circles" for prayer and shared reading of the Scriptures because a small group of people can better attempt to build a rough outline of a "kingdom."

Current ecclesiology, which also tends to be influenced by the culture of efficiency and production, would benefit from a return to the simplicity of its origins and to the love without purpose spoken of in the First Letter of John. The boundless, mad love that seeks God alone in its totality, said Isaac of Nineveh, to the point of not hesitating to strip himself of his own life "for love of Him."

Flamina Morandi
NP November 2025