Jesus loved us first.
by Rosanna Tabasso
One of the pages of the Rule that is dearest to us has the title Amati, we love and it is the synthesis of our going towards the other because God came to meet us: “God is love and we can be his reflection because they are inhabited by him ( ...). We kneel before the lonely, poor, suffering, oppressed man to love him with the fatherly and maternal heart of God and accompany him, if he wishes, towards the encounter with his love ".
If we experience personal love of God, we can love the other and thus bear witness to the Lord of our life. It is difficult to truly love the other who needs, who asks us for help, but to love the other who ignores us, who rejects us, who seems to be able to do without us, is humanly impossible. Impossible for us but not for God, who indicates us precisely these as the poorest to kneel before. Today many ask for help for their difficult living conditions - those who are unemployed, homeless, without care ... - but perhaps these are not even the greatest miseries. Ernesto Olivero wrote: "Man needs home, food, education, work, but it is not enough for him. Man needs to love and be loved, but even this is not enough for him. Man needs to discover the meaning of life. Man needs God. "
Today the poorest, unaware of it, are the people who have discarded God from their lives. They don't know it but they miss it and for them we can be a reflection of the God they seek without knowing it. Days ago we asked a group of young people who attend the Arsenale della Pace to help us advertise a book by Ernesto Olivero in an important fair. We created a beautiful, colorful leaflet that reproduced the cover of the book: an inverted clock and the title God does not look at the clock. At the end of each day all the young people told us with sadness that people cast a hasty look at the title and in front of the word God stopped smiling, shook his head, refused to reach out to take the flyer, when he didn't comment with angrily or sarcastically: "I don't care." I myself had this experience for an afternoon and in the evening, looking back on the hours I lived, I felt the same bewilderment. A pain that still accompanies me, because I have experienced that the Creator of life, the Lord of history, my Father has been exiled from his children, removed from the earth he had prepared for them. In the seventies we sang "God is dead" thinking of the death camps, the holocaust and the great injustices of that stretch of history. Today, made satiated by well-being, God has expelled, exiled, except considering it with suspicion or trying it.
The verse of a psalm resounds in me: “All of you are waiting for you to give them food at the right time. You provide it, they collect it; open your hand, they are satisfied with goods ”(Ps 104,27). Everyone is waiting for you ... But most people, perhaps even baptized, practitioners, observants do not expect anything from God! On the contrary, it cultivates the conviction of being able to do it alone, of being enough for itself. God is just a hindrance.
“If you knew the gift of God and who is the one who tells you Give me a drink! - Jesus replies to the Samaritan woman - you would have asked him and he would have given you living water "(Jn 4:10). I was thinking about this as people flowed in front of me, refusing not me or a Sermig book - I can understand this refusal - but the very idea of God. I kept telling myself that Jesus came for each of those people, loving first and foremost. unconditional way, loving even without being reciprocated. The heavy heart of someone who knows the love of God and knows he has the responsibility to bear witness to it remains to me. God is Love (1Jn 4), I know it and I remember it among the people. Beloved, we love.