To love life

Pray or act? How many times do we ask ourselves whether to privilege the life of prayer or to dedicate ourselves to the actions that make our lives better and the lives of many ... We dedicate ourselves to works by leaving out prayer or we give time to prayer and we feel guilty for not having acted. We think about whether one or the other is better, we try to justify ourselves with God for the choices made and we end up considering him an accountant who does the percentages between work and prayer and acts with us on the basis of our merits. By dint of reasoning in this way, we pushed God out of our life, from our thinking, from our actions, we found ourselves doing, operating without him. We have forgotten that our God wanted to make us similar to him since creation and it was not enough. He wanted to be with us to bring us back to initial harmony and love prompted him to make his Son God a man like us: Jesus, totally God, totally man.

The incarnation of the Son of God revealed to us the great love of the Father, such as to make us loved children. Finally, Jesus revealed to us God's plan of salvation and gave us his Spirit, the Spirit of the Father to always be in us. We are saved because the love of Jesus and the Father has made us sons and brothers among us, inhabited by the Holy Spirit. We live within this history of salvation. This is our identity as Christians and we must continually relocate ourselves within this plan of love to truly make peace with God and restore integrity to our human-divine life! Because if God in incarnation has restored full confidence to man, to his work as guardian of life and creation, it is time for man to return to trusting God and to live, act and work with him. Starting with us, who have chosen to be Christians, but then we do not know where to put God in our concrete life and we doubt that he can really guide our daily choices.

The first thing to do is to recover the mentality of those who know they have been saved: it's never just me, it's me and God in me, together. If we recover the certainty of being one with God, inhabited by his Spirit, we recover the secret of Jesus: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work" (Jn 4:34) and ours. thinking and our actions become once again with God. We rediscover the unity of our person and the unity between praying and acting, thinking and praying

It is a method with which to face life: always starting from Sacred Scripture, listened to, meditated on, which the Holy Spirit helps us to understand, to translate into the today we live. A Word that gives us the right direction, shows us the priorities, directs our best energies towards the good. A Word that acts in us and then, through us, where we are called and sent. The Spirit who inspired Scripture helps us to understand that the Word of God is alive and effective in our today, as he created everything from nothing, so he continually and progressively re-creates us, re-orientates us towards God, because everything what we do reflects the harmony of creation. The Scripture we feed on every day does not magically solve all our problems, but offers us the keys to face the complexities of our time and read the signs of the times starting from God. With him we become protagonists of a new creation, which involves everything. our person, our choices, our actions, our works. It is not just a personal journey. It is the method by which a community living in the world is called to face the challenges of the time, to orient itself in the social and political life of the time it lives and to help restore the harmony of creation into the chaos of an organized life without God.

God became man so that man would once again remember that he has God with him. Prayer, listening to the Word are essential to act like Jesus, always in communion with the Father and to let our works descend from him. Let us dream, think, plan the future together, but let us make it descend from God, starting over and over again from him: "In truth, truly, I say to you: whoever believes in me, he too will do the works that I do and will do greater ones of these, because I am going to the Father "(Jn 14:12). It does not ask us to choose whether to pray or act. He asks us to pray and act. Just like Jesus.
 

Rosanna Tabasso
NP april 2021