December 2021 - Let's start again from love

Christmas is Jesus who is re-born, re-enters our life, our history, to tell us that we are loved, to teach us to love! Looking even only into our home, even in this time we hear criticisms and accusations against the Church, against us Christians. People think we are hypocrites and therefore don't listen to us anymore. I don't want to analyze the errors that led us to this judgment, some really serious like pedophilia. Instead, I want to think about how we can go back to being the salt of the earth, the light of the world and put ourselves at the service of the Kingdom of God in our midst.

In these days this Word of Jesus came to meet me: «No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is perfect in us. In this we know that we remain in him and he in us: he has given us his Spirit "(1 Jn 4:12). What is asked of us Christians is to love.
But how can we do it, if we continually deal with our instincts, with our individualism, with our aggression?

Jesus asks us to make an effort and the greatest effort is to leave behind the arrogance of those who feel perfect, the presumption of those who feel right and enter the humility of those who know they are a sinner, those who know they continually have need for mercy and forgiveness. The ability to love is God's gift to a heart free from arrogance and presumption, a truly humble heart. Dear friends, I wish with all my heart that we start again from humility, to make room for Jesus in our life and his desire to live among us. Jesus wants to be alive among us, he wants to participate in this rebirth. No one has ever seen God, if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is perfect in us.
We Christians are not better than others, but we have this promise of Jesus and on the Word of him we can believe that we can love one another.

It is not poetry or rhetoric, it is the daily choice of being brothers and sisters among ourselves and with everyone, even with all the effort. It is having every day, infinite times a day, this priority for every person we approach, with whom we work, with whom we live: the priority of making evident the love that God has poured into our hearts (cf. Rom 5: 5) with thoughts, words, gestures, actions that continually depart from me and reach people near and far, and bring understanding, peace, light, give strength, consolation ...

I have always accepted to work, to pray, with people with whom I struggle, because the mission entrusted to us is not carried out by individuals but together, accepting the effort of forming community. It is the promise that Jesus makes to us. Love thus passes from me to the other, from me to many others, one evangelizes one another, one communicates in a different way and the new mentality changes the way of life. If we love one another God remains in us. God needs us to remain among us and bring to the world the newness of brothers and sisters who live together. Not perfect, but people who respect and love each other. Let us not forget that every mission that God entrusts to us rests on a small or large community of people who esteem and love each other in the name of the Lord and who accept to be one another's evangelizers.
Merry Christmas!

Ernesto Olivero
Editorial
NP December 2021