She grabs my hands and squeezes them strongly… She wants to talk, longs for giving vent to her feelings but only tears come out of her heart. Tears and silence flood our mute dialogue. I also keep silent, gathering in my heart those bitter tears full of sorrow. Then, after long, endless minutes, she starts saying: “I made a mess of everything. My life is dirty. I am disgusted at myself. Since I was taken to an orphanage (it was ten years ago and I was just an infant), and left to myself, I entered the prostitution racket. From that moment, my life plunged into a bottomless abyss, increasingly dark and filthy. Not even God can forgive me… He is so Beautiful, Pure, up there in His bright heaven.”
I listen to her at length, then, exchanging the handshake with kindness and love, I tell her: “No, but you are plunged, even if mysteriously, into God’s Kingdom. Yes, because God’s Kingdom, says Jesus, resembles a treasure hidden in a field (Matthew 13:44). Therefore, God is not only up there in heaven but also “underground.” A treasure hidden under the mud is neither beautiful nor clean. It is stained and filthy. Yes, inside it is precious and wonderful, but the container is encrusted with mud. I don’t know if your body is dirty and wretched but your tears are pure and beautiful gems that tell me that you, my dear sister, are not far from God’s Kingdom.”
Listening to my words, a timid smile appeared on those young lips, while she kept repeating to herself: “Then my life is not over and done? God loves me and is not far from me!” “Yes, my little sister – I repeat certain as I am of my affirmations – life is beautiful because God’s Kingdom is so near to us as to be present also in the terrain where we are walking.”
It is beautiful to be priests, missionaries, and to give hope to all announcing that God’s Kingdom is not only there in the crystal-clear and distant heaven, but also, like a treasure hidden underground. Life is beautiful. Yes, it is really beautiful even when….
JESUS IS LIKE A DRAGNET
A man approaches me and asks to speak with me. He starts telling me his painful experience: “At 46, I was the director of an important factory. When there was a great economic crisis, in 1998, the firm started drastically to retrench, cutting jobs in order to save on production costs. Suddenly, I found myself jobless with two children to care for. I reacted to this situation by doing everything: I became night janitor, staircase cleaner, newspaper deliverer, parking assistant, dish washer… all casual jobs, season jobs that lasted too short. Little by little, my body and my spirit weakened: disappointments, bitter experiences and family wrangling since what I was bringing home was never enough to support the family. I started drinking, to find consolation in alcohol and, little by little, I sunk, without being aware of it, into the cold abyss of drunkenness and now I don’t find the way of climbing up out of it. I lost my family, my dignity and God Himself whom I used to love and whom I strongly believed in.”
“No, my friend,” I lovingly reproach him, “God lives with you also in this painful life experience. God’s Kingdom – says Jesus – is like a dragnet cast into the sea that brings in a haul of all kinds (Matthew 13:47). The sea is murky and dull; in its depths, there are good fish and bad ones just as in your heart at the moment. There, in your cloudy and turbid heart, the Kingdom of God is present.” “But I thought I was very far from God’s Kingdom; I thought it was far from me, in heaven…” “Life is beautiful, my dear brother, because God’s love accompanies us even in the saddest and most desperate moments of our human existence. God’s Kingdom is with us even when, like a heavy dragnet, we plunge into the somber abyss of existence.”
A LIFE FULL OF JOY AND HOPE
It is beautiful to be consecrated to God and announce to everyone that the Kingdom of God is like a dragnet thrown into the gelid waters of the cold and dark sea of life, the dark and impenetrable recesses of our personality. Even there, we can find it and are able to love.
Life is beautiful. Yes, it is really beautiful even when… As a missionary, I wander through paths, streets, crossroads and squares, looking for “the secularized person of our time” to whom it is no longer enough to live in this world always turning his/her eyes up to the enchanting but faraway heaven, waiting and dreaming of a better and more just world: the seraphic Paradise that a distant day will arrive, but to take him/her by the hand and remind him/her that, with Jesus, God’s Kingdom has become flesh and is present and is with us, today. It embraces all the dimensions of our joyful and exciting but also poor and miserable existence. It is a Dimension that is close to each one of us because it is like “a hidden treasure” and, therefore, “underground”; for it is like a dragnet thrown into the cold sea, even in the dark experience of depression, loneliness; it is also in the ambiguity of life where good and evil grow together (Matthew 13:24), in the joy of a “newly-found son” (Luke 15:11), in the joy of friends who throw a party (Luke 15:66).
It is beautiful to be a missionary and point out to all people the signs of the presence of God and His Kingdom in our midst. This is what makes my life beautiful, full of joy and hope: this is the “Good News” that Jesus came to bring us and that I would like to communicate and pass on to each and everyone by my mere existence. I want to conclude this letter with a prayer which is very dear to me:
I will praise the Lord as long as I live,
I will sing hymns to my God as long as I exist.
The Lord gives justice to the oppressed,
the Lord gives bread to the hungry.
The Lord frees the captives.
The lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord raises the fallen,
the Lord loves the just.
The Lord shelters the strangers,
the Lord sustains the orphan and the widow, but upsets the ways of the wicked.
The Lord reigns forever.
Life is beautiful. Yes, it is really beautiful… because God is the lover who is madly in love with the poor, the weak and with our frail humanity.
