On the road between two homelands

We often risk losing the contemplative dimension of life, other times we forget the need for commitment. It is precisely this balance that must continually guide us and help us, on the one hand, to bring hope into history and, on the other, to be stretched out towards the Hope of history, that which validates every hope circumscribed in history.

On the other hand, we must not forget that on earth we are exiles, pilgrims, we live in a paroikia (from which the term parish derives), that is, a tenantry, people who do not have a stable home.

The sense of paroikia is typical of the Christian who has two homelands: the definitive homeland is that of heaven, but he is a guest on this earth. The mystery of the relationship between time and the Eternal is also contained in the passage of Peter that takes up a text of Isaiah: "With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2Pt 3:8).

So we already live in God's today, because this eternal today of God - in which a thousand years are consumed in an instant - gives significance to every moment, gives fullness to every moment.
Man's time is therefore the intermediate time, between the Eternal from whom time comes - because time is created by God with creation itself - and the Eternal who will consume time on the day in which all things will be transfigured into new heavens and a new earth.
We live tending towards the last things. We already live in a definitive dimension, but not yet because it is not fully definitive (see 1Jn 3:1-3).

God is in a fullness that we do not know today, with his grace he has already sown in us the signs of this fullness; we are already transfigured, but when we are with him we will live in the fulfillment of his transfiguration, because "all the old things will have passed away" (cf. Rev 21,5-6) and everything will be redeemed. Our life is already hidden with Christ in God" (cf. Col 3,3). It is already possible to live in this Love through faith, in hope and in charity.


p. Mario Airoldi
Np February 2025
from Progetto (now NP) March 1994