The art of meeting

Many people come to the monastery, of all ages and from many different cultures: everyone arrives with a large baggage of questions, anxieties, suffering and even anger. There is also no shortage of joy and thanks, affection and the life of families in which we love each other: welcoming in silence and without prejudice is what the Gospel teaches us and what we try to do. From silence a word is born and this word has weight; Not the other. The silence after the word, if it is not a truly welcoming listening, risks harboring dissent, criticism, judgement. People return other times, generally with the same baggage, but perhaps lightened by the memory of having listened to them. This is how the monastery becomes a place of friendship, a friendship that is not only on two points of a straight line, but which becomes a wave whose circles widen, becoming without borders, gently and silently. It is a way to live, not with artificial methods, calculations and complicated stratagems, that splendid reality described by a twelfth century Cistercian: "God is friendship". The monastery is the house of God and the house of God is without borders, without hosts to dictate style, with a heart whose arms extend until they find someone who needs to be loved and embraced. It is not the island of Thomas More's Utopia, it is a place of conversion that becomes or must become a sign for a new humanity: if this is possible among fifteen or twenty people it can be possible for billions of men and women who populate the world.

Friendship is not an easy thing, it is not a river that flows calmly between two banks, without overflowing or creating shallows. We need bridles that slow down the force of the currents, dams that collect the richness of the water from the melting snow to better distribute and must be conserved for the long periods of thirst of the fields and of everything that the water moves and it makes you live; we need embankments that channel and that open up to other channels that carry that good away. A river flows, the springs are rich and those who exploit them must think of those who live thanks to the water that reaches thirsty and arid plains. Let's think of the Nile, the Jordan, the Euphrates, biblical rivers, which should remind us of the goodness of God, who does not make preferences between people, and which, despite this, give rise to many struggles, disagreements and wars .

There is an art of living: what knowing how to live indicates is not always consistent with the word itself. A poem by Vinicius de Moraes, cited by Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti reads: «Life is the art of encounter, even if there are many clashes in life». The art of meeting, while it can become the art of exclusion, the art of looking each other in the face to start a friendship, while it is often the art of looking to terrify. It is not just a question of enemy peoples, this drama exists in families, in schools, in gyms and in many places where one must educate, while un-educating oneself by upholding the law of the strongest.

The experience of evangelical welcome never ends. It must be started again every time, because a person is not always the same as himself and is never the same as another. If this discussion can be valid for people who carry great responsibilities, we must not forget that every child must already be educated in this social feeling, in respect, in acceptance, in the acceptance of what is different, in patience and in free friendship offer.

Cesare Falletti
NP April 2024