The value of the gift

Publish date 23-01-2022

by Giorgio Ceragioli

Life is the immense wealth that God gave us with creation, even before conscience, intelligence, love. Wanting to reject it, putting it in danger in oneself and in others can be the great sin; but it can be the measure of how much we have understood its value, if we remember that there is nothing greater than giving one's life for a friend (who is any person, who is obviously also the enemy).
Only if there is the conviction of this absolute value of life, in fact, losing it has the meaning of supreme sacrifice.

Hence the values ​​to be realized in life: not an amorphous life, without purpose, but life to love, because life itself is loved and given as a sacrifice of love for others. Love your neighbor as yourself, because the measure of love for others is precisely the value of the gift you make to them.
Able, therefore, also to enjoy what is beautiful in it; able to give meaning to the search for truth, to do, to build, to plan, to live every day in every condition, with every kind of mood, constraints, limitations, potential.
Social commitment is no longer an escape but it is a rediscovery of the value of the gift you offer to others; it is not inhuman stoicism, but hope and deeper certainty.

The commitment to development takes on significance and becomes the gift to others of what we have: the possibility of living, of "being". If there was not this certainty of the value of life, why seek that others can live? Why lengthen this time if it is only considered a time of trial, of fatigue, of pain? Why fight if unhappiness were the substance of life?
It is only the certainty of the immensity of the value of life that justifies the commitment to the Third World.


Giorgio Ceragioli
from "Progetto" (now "NP"), 1988, n. 4

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