Called to look up

May 4 is a year since Mary's departure for Heaven. When a loved one moves away from the earthly dimension, the days without her are endless, they never seem to pass. At the same time, looking back, this year has flown away very quickly, despite the pains and trials that have followed and despite these last months of pandemic. I believe that Mary was urgently summoned to Heaven and, after her, other dear mothers, friends, women of great faith: Maria, Valeria, Piera, Maria ... I believe they were called to help us "look up", to to quickly undertake the change of mentality that the Word of God asks of everyone: "My people are hard to convert: called to look up, no one knows how to look up" (Hos 11: 7).

The Lord asks us to look up, to trust him to make us "a new people". Our Rule also asks us for it, in one of the pages dedicated to the priests of the Fraternity but also to all of us: a new people, capable of making "God known through his witness" because every person, child, young, adult, elderly, in every moment of his life, he can return to God, feel loved, love him again or have the opportunity to start a relationship with him. The witness to which we are called is not improvised, it is prepared, first of all by living every moment with God in the heart, living in his Presence, absorbing the experience of those who preceded us and treasuring it.

How did Mary help us in this "permanent preparation", she who has always chosen silence and discretion? Maria always spoke with daily life: she worked for a more just world, for life and for peace, she did good for good, she was never "against" anyone, she never imposed herself with arrogance, she lived righteousness as normality, he loved everyone, he had compassion for the weak, he helped people to hope. These are just some of the behaviors that the Rule of Yes indicates to the priests of the fraternity and that Mary lived naturally but many other nuances of a lived Gospel could be attributed to her, because she was an integral person and all of her, from character to interior life, had long been in harmony.

In the months of her last illness, the Lord put his seal on the silent testimony of Mary's life and allowed her to unequivocally hand over the precious inheritance of her being, with Ernesto, founder of Sermig: the inner strength, the prayer, the spirituality of the Presence, the love that the Holy Spirit had imprinted on her. We have thus seen realized in a person, whether alive or dead, what the Holy Spirit can work in those who believe, in those who trust him, in those who abandon themselves. It is written in the Rule, Mary lived it and in these days she reminds us: "Without the grace of the Spirit, good cannot be attached to the soul. Without the Holy Spirit there is no new man, new humanity, transparent to Love, grateful to God for his goodness ". During the months of her illness, Maria gathered us all around her and now we fully understand the meaning of those one hundred and thirteen days: she made us take a journey that prepared us to enter a new season of Sermig.

In the last interview, she was asked what she hoped for the future of the Arsenale. Looking far away, she replied: «I hope it will become a place of prayer or at least of reflection for many ... Where so many people find serenity, peace». Who knows if he has seen it before us. What is certain is that it has led us to feel this desire ours and in these times of isolation, of great uncertainty and fear of the future, to want to respond with our lives to the need of people to rediscover the meaning of things, to rediscover God. It is the new times of the barefoot Church that the Holy Spirit is teaching us to live.

Rosanna Tabasso
NP may 2020