Making all talents pay off

Our fight against illness and weakness is based very little on an enthusiastic adherence to life, which is the only truly fundamental reason for this battle, because it is capable of overcoming defeats and the inevitable limitations in successes. On the contrary, it rests rather and only on the attempt to increase our well-being, our well-being, on the removal of suffering, in any case and at any cost.

Let me be clear: suffering, like misery, are rightly and must be vigorously fought. But if this struggle does not firmly believe in the value of life, it becomes fragile, exposed to the most dramatic and easy temptations: the euthanasia, abortion, marginalization. Where there is no respect for life, no ability to face suffering in positive terms, if this cannot be avoided, why not eliminate it or, at least, marginalize it? And so, a time like ours, which could rightly be called the "time of life", could become, schizophrenically, the "time of death".

Here too the problem of the profound meaning of life emerges, that is to make all the talents, whether few or many, that each man has received, to be given. And then it is right that even the sick, the weak, have the opportunity to make them bear fruit, and it is right that you try to feel better in order to make them bear fruit better.
The strongly constructive face of a Christian anthropology emerges which has its foundations in love and life. It tries to reduce man's imperfections, but where he cannot, he accepts them as an expression of his finitude: in every situation of existence each man remains potentially capable of expressing a fullness of life.
It is a question of discovering richness of life where only poverty seems to lurk, depth of human experience where there seems to be only desert, positivity where there seems to be only negativity.


Giorgio Ceragioli
from "Progetto" (now "NP"), 1988, n. 2