In the name of the Son

I carry it inside, it is planted in every moment of my life. Every day I contemplate him and every day I seem to know him better. Every day I retrace the steps of his earthly life, every day I enter the scenes of his journey, every day I imagine being there, with him, present at all the events narrated by the Gospels. Within the last days of him.
I witness his terrible death. I'm there too, close to his mother. I experience the horror of fear, the intensity of unbearable pain. I contemplate the greatness of Mary, who never abandons her Son with her gaze, never. She remains firm, steadfast, faithful next to him. Here it is.
They carry the inanimate body of Jesus to the sepulcher that was given to him.

The Gospel does not say anything about what happened from then on until after the resurrection, nor can we know it.
But I like to think that Mary followed her Son with the gaze of her heart, that she never left him in her heart. I imagine that she remained with the memory of that Son in her arms, in total silence. I guess she kept looking for her gaze and he returned her.
The eyes of the Son in the eyes of the mother, in her arms, in silence, to give thanks for the goodness of God the Father, who draws joy from pain, who gives birth from death to life that can no longer die.
Let us make Mary's gaze our own.
She does not see Jesus dead, she already sees him transfigured in the resurrection. And we, with her, get used to looking at our history, our life, the life of our family, of fraternity, the life of the whole of society and of the whole world with this gaze.

Mary's gaze on Jesus, who died for the world, but alive in her heart as a woman of faith, is the gaze we want to learn to have on this world. Everything seems dead around us, but there is the life of God flowing under the ashes. This is a time in which we believers can go back to looking there, to find in God the vision of a new world, to rediscover the strength to give back ourselves, our abilities, our skills for the common good.
Where we live, where we operate, we can make a difference, as sentinels of a new world.
Mary believed in life that overcomes death, she helped the disciples to believe, she became the soul of the first community.
In our today too, the key to the new world is the community, it is to educate ourselves to pass from I to us, in the concreteness of daily choices.

Ernesto Olivero
Editorial
NP May 2021