God's family

For three months now, Covid-19 has forced parishes and communities to close, with every form of community life and activity. We also lived Easter without community, connected with TV or the web. Many who attended our churches, especially the elderly, died alone and many experienced the death of a loved one without the human and spiritual support of the community. Wounds that will heal with difficulty and that will challenge us for a long time. And then the children, young people, young people who had our communities as a reference. Families have not always been able to make up for it, they have not always had the means to do so and now we ask ourselves how to let them breathe the community air, necessary for their formation.

A few days ago we were allowed to reopen but we immediately realized that many things have changed and not only due to the use of thermometers, masks and disinfectants, but above all due to the numerical limit imposed by the spacing. Eucharistic celebrations are limited in number, with the penalty of leaving someone out and not being able to reach them anymore. We are planning the reopening of our services for the children and young people of the neighborhood and for young people in general and we are aware of the complexity and the numerical and organizational limits. Everything makes us think that as long as the virus is among us we will not be able to completely return to our community habits and the amount of people and services we were offering before. In each service we are forced to organize ourselves in small groups, to create shifts, to calculate spaces. What sign to read in this situation? The community cannot restart from quantity and services as they were. But it starts from single people, from one plus one plus one, from the face to face relationship, from proximity, from the dimension of "family". Let's meet again but in small groups trying not to forget the people entrusted to us, trying to reach the most distant in different ways and to be for everyone "a fountain of fresh water on the street corner where every traveler, poor and rich , stranger and native, young and old, may he quench his thirst, find shelter, refreshments, comfort, meaning of life "(from the Rule).

To be like this we need creativity, open heart, fidelity, love for people, we need gifts that are not only our human attitudes. They are gifts that the Holy Spirit arouses if he finds people available in certain moments of need.

But the sign of this time is to understand that we are not enough for ourselves. It is not a question of a little or a lot that we are called to do, of small or large numbers, it is a question of understanding that in the work of God we cannot focus in the first place on our strengths, organizational abilities, human means to do this. that we are capable or to restore what we did before. Working for the Father, like Jesus and with him, means entrusting ourselves to the Holy Spirit and asking him to work with his gifts through us so that the good we can do reaches those who need us, him. For me this is the occasion for everyone to start again from the being of Christ, to remain attached to him, to bear witness to him with charity, with the credibility of the good lived.

The “family of the children of God” community also starts from this profound belonging, kept alive in the months of isolation. The community starts again more aware that even today we are immersed in the work of the Father who continues through us by Jesus, we are guided by the Holy Spirit in this time and with the people of this time. It seems obvious, but how many times in our doing we lose sight of the "for whom and why" we do it. Now that we experience our human limits and the limits of our actions, we can recover the humility of those who know they can do nothing without God, but that they can do everything with him.

Rosanna Tabasso
NP june - july 2020