A piece of heaven on earth

The most difficult challenge not only for those who want to experience Sermig, but also for those who want to live simply as Christians, is to create community. If we want to be a sign of hope for people, to make the Gospel recognizable to young people, to be a sign of welcome for the poor, we can only do it together, coming together with a common spirit, bringing together diversity, energy, resources. Alone, one is worth one, by joining forces, one is worth much more, more than the sum of the members: communion around the Lord Jesus multiplies forces, creates a new dough that emanates more vigor than individual people can think of having. It is truly the miracle of communion, it is the mystery of the Eucharist that extends into everyday life: in the Eucharist, the one Bread feeds everyone. In fraternity, that Bread regenerates the vigor of young and old and through them reaches many others, as many as it was unimaginable to think of reaching and something still remains. It is the equation of communion with God: by dividing, one multiplies.
Communion is the very life of fraternity. And it is the sap of the Spirit that little by little modifies our humanity of always and makes us people capable of overcoming ourselves, of having friendly relationships, of remaining united even if we are different from each other and sometimes with different ideas. Like a spring that gushes forth and never dries up. With the Gospel and the Eucharist, communion is the precious pearl to be guarded. In these times, the Church and the world need it to bring the Gospel closer to people, because the transmission of faith always takes place in a community.
Today there is little community, little brotherhood among us and in the Church because we have lost the preciousness of communion. When in the Acts of the Apostles we read that believers loved each other, we know that it is not a purely human feeling, it is a communion that pervades those who choose Jesus and the Gospel. They learned it from the direct testimony of Jesus' disciples: it was the heart of His life with His few friends. From them we also learn that there is no brotherhood without the awareness of being inhabited by the Holy Spirit, without the interior willingness to let ourselves be shaped by Him, without that bending to the demands of the Kingdom. We must believe in it, we must choose it, we must contemplate communion where it is: contemplate it in the unconditional unity between Jesus and the Father, between Mary and the Spirit. And contemplate it also in the toil of the disciples around Jesus. In that situation we also see many of our toils, but – precisely in the toils – we learn to come to hand over our person to God who works, to accept changing some of our convictions in order to remain united, with great humility: «My convictions, my ideas, You Lord, sift them well and use them only if they serve to make the communion between us grow, do not make me proud».
We must always let the sense of responsibility prevail because everything that has been given to us and that we live is our responsibility to maintain and make it grow. In all this there is no coercion, no imposition, no power games, no desire to prevail (if there ever were they should be addressed in the spirit of fraternal correction), there is no loss of identity or personal freedom because nothing is asked of us that is not in the freedom of each person to choose and offer. None of this is valid if there is no love to push us. Communion is love and it cannot be otherwise. And sometimes only a love greater than what we thought we were capable of can help us not to extinguish the flame of communion between us, because we are custodians of the greatest good which is a little piece of Heaven on earth.


Rosanna Tabasso
NP January 2025