Like before

We see various colors circling in front of our eyes: red zone, orange zone, yellow zone anxiously awaiting the white zone to be able to start living with more freedom, find the way to relate as before, travel as before and many others things "as before". As if the weather a few months ago was a golden age. It seems to me that Providence is proposing to us to begin a new chapter in the history of our life, a personal, community, social history that involves everyone. Then I am reminded of a sentence that I have read, which said: you cannot start a new chapter in your life if you keep reading what you have just written. It is the difference between memory and nostalgia: memory is the fuel of our engine that makes us run forward, nostalgia is the reverse that eventually makes us hit a wall. It is also the difference between the poor and the rich evangelicals; the first, having nothing, seeks and finds the "bosom of Abraham", that is, true life, the life in which happiness is communion with God and with our fellow men, while the rich is the one who accumulates not to have a future, but to plaster the present in certainties that risk being disappointing. We hear: there is no more future, we cannot say: tomorrow I will do this or that. St. James already warned us to be humble in making plans, to take into account that we are in God's hands. If we have lived it with regret, we will throw ourselves into projects as in a pool of fresh water in the middle of summer, but we will have to go out and find the weight of the heat. Instead, we can make the future meet us, as a bearer of wealth, of newness, of a world remodeled, like human nature from the resurrection of Christ. The memory will be wisdom and experience useful for building an ever new world; nostalgia will no longer anchor us to a past that can give us nothing, except a bitter taste for which nothing is worth living.

Starting a new chapter in our life: certainly not the first time in history. Perhaps the horrible drama of the Second World War, with its annexes and connections, has truly opened the doors to a new world and the nostalgia has been relegated to a corner, where it has gradually faded. A man, a different world took shape, women saw their presence and their responsibility change face. It was certainly not the descent of Paradise on earth and today we see well that we need to welcome a new breath of life.

We have a vocation to write this new chapter of life and each of us must be aware of the brick that must lead to the endless construction of the world in which men and women become ever more capable of loving, freeing themselves from the anxiety of making and accumulating dry leaves that the first wind carries away. We have been living for many months a school of communion: to protect ourselves to protect others. If we have learned the lesson, the new chapter of the book of our life will be exciting and we will no longer need to go and reread what we have finished, if not to remind us that we are not masters of our future and this is more beautiful than all projects. that can cover our tables and computer screens. Because it opens us to the discovery of the beauty of life.


Cesare Falletti
NP May 2021