The freedom of love

April is the month in which we celebrate the feast of Easter, a feast of great joy, preceded by great suffering and an apparent triumph of evil. The existence of evil is one of the greatest questions that has always troubled humanity: since evil is never absent from creation, which is a good thing, it seems that things don't add up. How can creation be good if evil lurks in every corner of creation? Are we perhaps perverting creative power, reducing it to a source of pain?

I am too young to confront this mystery, but also too old to say that evil does not exist. Sometimes, it even seems to emerge from our own hands, often against our own will. Our finiteness forces us to confront this contradiction of our will: we desire good and risk doing evil. Before being a moral or ethical problem, this mystery poses a question: where does evil come from and where does it want to lead us? The Word of God speaks to us of an enemy who sows evil where the Creator sows good: the parable of the weeds is a significant example. Jesus speaks of an enemy. This does not mean that he is not a creature of God, but it makes us understand that creatures have the freedom to create or boycott good creation. The source can only be the necessary freedom of love: I can always choose not to love and therefore boycott the beauty of creative love. To heal this horrendous wound, which pervades all human history, the Creator himself became a creature capable of bringing to fullness the beauty of saving love by allowing himself to be disfigured and taking on all the traces of evil. In this way, he conquers it. It's Easter.

Looking at the cross, and upon it all those crucified throughout history, of all races, cultures, regions, and religions, we understand that He who shaped the world with love has left his creatures a dramatic freedom. Man continues to ask himself why? But no one would want to be imprisoned in a dynamic of love in which he would lose his freedom. It would be a parody of love, devoid of flavor, joy, and life. Jesus speaks of a downhill road, which proceeds by itself, generating its own trajectory, or of an uphill road, which requires us to laboriously choose how to proceed and weigh the consequences. Since the beginning of time, ever since the mythical Paradise in Eden, the choices of men and women have arisen either from an automatic gesture driven by capricious will, or from a difficult decision like that of Joseph, son of Jacob, who, thinking of his Father's love, decides to save those brothers who wanted to kill him and, betraying him, sold him into slavery. These are the beginning and the end of Genesis, which, with vividly painted images, tell the entire story of humanity and will never lose their meaning. The struggle between good and evil is ever-present, constantly accompanied by fear and the call to trust, by the desire to overwhelm the humble and the meek, by the adoration of the one Name that illuminates and gives strength to every little corner of the earth, or by the desire to make a name for oneself that echoes throughout the earth, trampling everything.

Finally, we must note that, in the book of life, evil appears early, but the end sees Good triumph: so too in the great finale of the Apocalypse, after all the horrors of evil, the sigh of love of the Groom and the Bride triumphs.


Cesare Falletti
NP April 2025