Time to dream

The emblematic joke that cannot fail to leave its mark: «They stole our hope and we didn’t even think about reporting it». Yes, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi threw it out there, in a conference promoted by the Catholic University to grasp the current, complex, youth situation that we must take charge of or deal with.

And the annotation is there to testify that the path of the Jubilee almost upon us, Pilgrims of Hope, has a strong reason to be in which to involve the new generations in a gamble that can show the taste of risk but that cannot be snubbed. Nor should it be missed: it would be like failing to pay a debt to those who are growing up and have life ahead of them to orient and spend. A baton to pass in a relay that asks for reasons from those who have already lived and therefore should have something to transmit. What hope have we cultivated, we who have gray hair or have already lost it completely? In short, a step a little without discounts, to call into question responsibilities that are perhaps flattened, forgotten, diluted, lost… Who knows? In the somewhat narrow horizons of our time that nevertheless breathes a certain globality, it is often difficult to recover long and deep gazes, remaining stranded in narrow surfaces. Where hope loses more than one connotation. Of course, the grayness around does not help. From the rooftops down – as Cardinal Zuppi also noted – the air that blows is that of the search for small certainties to hold on to. And even on this shore we are struggling, despite the so-called longed-for or regretted well-being and despite the invasion of technologies that should guarantee the unimaginable...

But the sensation that one gets is that of so much persistent and insinuating friability. Folded down, one realizes that it is not a solution, that it is not enough, that something else would be needed, that one must not settle for the bare minimum. And, along the way, a card of humanity to play that also opens to the beyond, with the courage to seek, to go out, to cross, to find. And here then is the verb that peeps out and to make room for. It is time to dream, even a little, or rather even a little more. Cardinal Zuppi has relaunched in this sense again. Because there is a need, because it is increasingly urgent, because one cannot remain at ground level with no escape. Dreaming is getting back into the game, it is having a gaze that goes upwards as "pilgrims of hope" precisely, as the Jubilee that is around the corner pushes us to be. Dreaming is believing. Dreaming is unloading ballast, weights and rust. Dreaming is hooking on the Gospel that changes things, it is investing in it, it is doing it together... on the roads of the world as "pilgrims" who are supported by the "hope" that goes further and fills life, between earth and sky.


Corrado Avagnina
NP October 2024