Re-reading our history

Our Exodus ... The key is Jesus, the fundamental meeting of my life, the sense of everything, always.

by Rosanna Tabasso

In recent days  (ndr ottobre 2012) we have re-read the book of Exodus led by Bruno Baioli of the Pro Civitate Christiana and by Msgr. Lucio Sembrano. A reinterpretation that has helped me to recover the sense of the history of salvation that runs through our lives, our communities, the Church and which runs parallel to the history of men. Our Rule reminded me that it begins just like this: "Re-reading our history". From time to time you really need to stop and reread what we have experienced, as the Jews did, retracing their Exodus in retrospect: the exit from Egypt to the land of the fathers, the transition from a life as slaves to the dignity of the people to service of God through forty years of desert.

There is an exodus in the life of each of us and in the life of each community. It begins with the pain of research, the questions, the sense of inadequacy of what you are experiencing. It continues with the hope that something different is possible, new spaces, vast horizons traced by the Gospel and traveled by entire generations of believers in God before us. It culminates with the leap of faith when God becomes the "God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob", the God of Moses and finally my God, a You for me.

From this meeting begins a new story, of community and of people who believe in the action of God that continues here and now. The leap of faith in a community is a new beginning, it is a new page in the history of salvation, it is the awareness that the advancing Kingdom of God has also reached us.

The exodus continues one yes after another, one stage after another, never definitive landings.

When Ernesto wrote the Rule in 1996, he reread the history of Sermig: “I am looking for the key to our journey, our activities, our loyalty in these years. It is not difficult. The key is Jesus, the fundamental meeting of my life, the sense of everything, always ". And with this key he goes back over the years, retracing the long desert of temptations and acts of faith, of betrayals and consolations, of errors and intuitions, of falls and of recovery ... but always attached to God, always together and always in the Church . And therefore, always available to share in the Gospel.

Through hard daily life we ​​have experienced the pedagogy with which God educates his friends: free to choose good or evil, free to make mistakes and then be taken back, free to walk with our legs to experience that without Him we cannot bring the fruit for which we were designed. We understand that God lets us walk in freedom but never leaves us alone. How many times have we shouted to him the doubt, the anguish of being alone with projects greater than us, just as we read in the book of Exodus: "Is the Lord among us yes or no?" (Ex.17.7), but we also experienced his Presence and learned to recognize it, as the Jews recognized the cloud of the Presence of God that followed their movements from the passage of the Red Sea to the Horeb.

We have always been "attached" to Jesus, to His Word "by putting ourselves, our intelligence, our material and spiritual goods at stake" and the Lord has completed our inadequacy with his Presence and with his gifts, manna and water from the rock, to form us for a new life.

Above all, on this journey he made us experience that a handful of people different from each other in age, social status, origin, state of life can begin to feel like people, a portion of the Church in the stretch of history they are called to live, with the tension to walk together, to overcome diversity, internal struggles. The new life of the Gospel - forgiving the enemy, serving the brother ... - is possible. God's plans are always made to be lived together and are always for many, for all, but they start from a handful of people who renounce the "I" for the "we".