1st SUNDAY OF ADVENT  Advent: a broadening horizon – Mk 13:33-37

   Advent is like a door that opens, a horizon that widens, a breach in the walls, a hole in the fence, a crack in the ceiling, a handful of light that the liturgy throws in our faces. Not to dazzle us, but to wake us up. To help us push upward, with all our strength, every black sky we encounter. «Beyond the night, I hope, the taste of a new blue will await us» (N. Hikmet). The Gospel today tells of a night, it lays out the tiring list of its stages: “you do not know when it will arrive, whether in the evening, at midnight, at cockcrow, or in the morning” (Mk 13.35). One thing is certain: He will come. But in the meantime Isaiah fights, on our behalf, against God’s delay: He returns for the love of your servants… if you were to rend the heavens and descend.

    It is not the human being who climbs to heaven, it is the Lord of the Covenants who descends, walking on all roads, a homeless pilgrim, who seeks home, and He seeks it precisely in me. Isaiah overturns our idea of conversion, which is the turning of the creature towards the Creator. He has the audacity to invoke God’s conversion, he asks him to turn towards us, return, rend the heavens, come down: to convert to his creatures.

    He prophesies the new name of God. He The search for God ends and the time of welcome begins: behold, I stand at the door and knock…

«The most important things should not be sought, they must be waited for» (S. Weil). Even a human being must always be waited for. It seems like a small thing to us, because we want to be active, do, build, determine things and events. Instead, God is not deserved, He is welcomed; He is not conquered, he is waited for. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus never tires of repeating the refrain of two attitudes, our spiritual equipment for the journey of waiting: be careful and keep watch (Mk 13.33-37). Attention has the same root as waiting: it is a tending towards… We have all known days in which life tended towards nothing; we all know what a distracted life is, doing one thing and having your mind elsewhere; meet a person and not remember the color of his eyes; walk the earth and trample treasures of beauty. Distracted. Love is attention. Attention is already a form of prayer, and it is the elementary grammar that saves my interior life.

    The second attitude: stay awake. Don’t let anyone put you to sleep or buy you. Watch over the first steps of peace, of the light of dawn that rests on the wall of the night, or at the end of the tunnel of this pandemic. Watch over and guard all the sprouts, everything that is born and emerges brings a caress and a syllable of God.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF THE B.V. MARY

God calls us to open ourselves to joy – Lk 1:26-38  The Gospel of Luke develops the story of the announcement to Mary like the zoom of a camera: it starts from the immensity of the heavens, progressively narrows the gaze to a small village, then to a house, to the close-up of a girl among many, busy with her chores and thoughts. The angel Gabriel visited Her. It’s beautiful to think that God touches you, touches you in your daily life, in your home. He does it on a day of celebration, in the time of tears or when you say the most beautiful words you know to the one you love. The angel’s first word is not a simple greeting, inside vibrates that good and rare thing that we all seek, every day: joy. “Rejoice, rejoice, be happy.” He does not ask: pray, kneel, do this or that. But simply: open yourself to joy, like a door opens to the sun. God approaches and holds you in a hug, He comes and brings a promise of happiness. The angel’s second word reveals the reason for the joy: you are full of grace. A new term, never before heard in the Bible or in the synagogues, literally unheard of, such as to disturb Mary: you are filled, filled with God, who bent over you, fell in love with you, gave Himself to you and you overflow. Her name is: beloved forever. Tenderly, freely, without regrets loved. The angel calls her full of grace, the Christian people call her immaculate. And it’s the same thing. She is not full of grace because she said “yes” to God, but because God said “yes” to her even before her response. And she says it to each of us: each full of grace, all loved as we are, for who we are; good and less good, each loved forever, small or large each filled with heaven. 

    Mary’s first word is not a yes, but a question: how is it possible? She stands before God with all her human dignity, with her maturity as a woman, with her need to understand. She uses her intelligence and then pronounces her yes, which then has the power of a free and creative yes. Here I am, as the prophets and patriarchs have said, I am the servant of the Lord. Servant is a word that has nothing passive about it: servant of the king is the first after the king, the one who collaborates, who creates together with the creator. «Mary’s response is a liberating reality, not a submissive submission. It is she who personally chooses, autonomously, to pronounce that courageous “yes” which sets her against her entire world, which projects her into the grandiose plans of God” (M. Marcolini). 

    Maria’s story is also mine and your story. Again the angel is sent to your house and tells you: rejoice, you are full of grace! God is within you and fills your life with life.

2nd SUNDAY OF ADVENT / Show us, Lord, your mercy and give us your salvation. It is good news that restarts our life – Mk 1:1-8

Two voices, centuries apart, shout the same words, in the heat of the same desert of Judah. The joyful voice of Isaiah: «Behold, yours God comes! Say it to the heart of every creature.” The dramatic voice of John, the John of the waters and the burning sun, eater of insects and honey, repeats: «Behold, one comes after me, He is the strongest and will immerse us in the holy whirlwind of God!» (Mk 1,7). Isaiah, voice of heart, he says: «He comes with power», and immediately explains: He holds the youngest lambs on his chest and slowly leads the mother sheep. Power possible for every man and every woman, which is the power of tenderness. The two prophets use the same verb, always in the present tense: “God comes.” Simple, direct, sure: He comes. Like a seed that becomes a tree, like the morning line of light, which seems in the minority but it is a winner, a small breach that swallows the night. Two very intense sentences open and close this gospel. The first: Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the good news about Him. What makes you start living again, planning, forming bonds, that that restarts life is always good news, a crack of hope. Beginning of the gospel that is Jesus Christ. The good news is one person, the Gospel is Jesus, a God who flourishes under our sun, come to make humanity flourish. And his eyes that heal when they caress, and his voice that knocks down demons is so strong, and that enchants children, it is so sweet, and that it forgives. And that he draws another one possible world. Another possible heart. God presents Himself as the God of the beginning: from there where everything seems to stop, start again; when the wind of life «turns and turns and comes back around and nothing seems new under the sun» (Ecclesiastes 1,3-9), it is possible to open up the future, to generate new things. How can I start living again, planning, crossing deserts? Not from pessimism, nor from bitter observations, not even from reality existing and its claimed primacy, which do not contain the wisdom of the Gospel, but from “good news”. In the beginning of everything there is one good thing, I believe so. At the foundation of all life there is one good thing, I believe it. Because the Bible begins like this: and He saw what He had done, and behold, it was good. Someone stronger than me comes after me. His strength? Jesus is the strong one because He has the courage to love to the extreme; to hold nothing back and give everything. To raise hopes so strong that not even death on the cross could wither, on the contrary it strengthened. He is the strongest because He is the only one who speaks to the heart, or rather, He speaks «on the heart”, close and warm like breathing, tender and strong like a lover, beautiful like the most beautiful dream.

3rd SUNDAY OF ADVENT/ B My soul rejoices in my God. John the Baptist the witness of light – Jn 1: 6-8.19-28

John came sent by God, he came as a witness, to bear witness to the light. To one thing only: to the light, to the friendly light who caresses things for hours and hours, and doesn’t get tired. Not that infinite, distant light that lives in the heavens of heavens, but that ordinary, light of earth, which illuminates every man and every story. John is the “martyr” of light, a witness that the approach of God transfigures, is like a handful of light thrown in the face of the world, not to dazzle, but to awaken the shapes, colors and beauty of things, to broaden the horizon. Witness that the cornerstone on which history rests is not sin but grace, not mud but a ray of sunshine, which never yields. Every believer is entrusted with the same prophecy as the Baptist: to announce not the degradation, the ruin, the rot that threatens us, but eyes that they see God walking among us, pilgrim’s sandals and a heart of light: among you there is someone you do not know.

Priests and Levites came down from Jerusalem to the Jordan, an institutional commission of inquiry, which came not to understand but to catch him out: Who do you think you are? Elijah? The prophet everyone is waiting for? Who are you? Why do you baptize? Six increasingly pressing questions. To them Giovanni replies “no”, three times, he does so with increasingly shorter answers: instead of replying “I am” he prefers to say “I am not”.

He takes away gratifying, prestigious images, which perhaps they are even ready to recognize in him. Locusts, wild honey, a camel’s skin, that rocky and wild man, of few words, boasts no merit, he is the exact opposite of an inflated balloon, as happens so frequently on our scenes. He responds not by addition of merits, titles, skills, but by subtraction: and thus shows us the path towards the essential. One is not a prophet by accumulation, but by spoliation. I am a voice, I speak words that are not mine, which come from before me, which go beyond me. Witness another sun. My identity lies from the parts of God, from the parts of my sources. If God is not, I am not, I live by every word that comes out of his mouth. The rigorous voice of the prophet exposes us: I am not my role or my image. I am not what others say about me. What it does to me human is the divine in me; the specific of humanity is divinity.

Life comes from Another, it flows into the person, like water in someone’s bed stream. I am not that water, but without it I am no longer. “Who are you?”. I seek the alms of a voice that tells me who I really am. One day Jesus will give the answer, and it will be the most beautiful: You you are light! Light of the world.

4th SUNDAY OF ADVENT / B

The Holy Mother: root of flesh of the Gospel – Lk 1:26-38

     At the opening, a list of seven names crowds the page: Gabriel, God, Galilee, Nazareth, Joseph, David, Mary. Seven, the number of totalities, because what is about to happen will involve all of history, the depths of the sky and all the perennial swarm of life. A Gospel that goes against the grain: for the first time in the Bible an angel addresses a woman; in any house and not in the sanctuary; in her kitchen and not among the golden lampstands of the temple. On an ordinary day but marked on the calendar of life (in the sixth month…). Joy is the first word: rejoice! Gospel within the Gospel! And here’s why: Mary, you are full of grace. You are filled with heaven, not because you answered “yes” to God, but because God first said “yes” to you. And he says “yes” to each of us, before any of our answers. For grace to be grace and not merit or calculation. God is not deserved, he is welcomed. The Almighty fell in love with you and now your name is: beloved forever; like her I too loved forever. All, tenderly, freely loved forever. Love is the passion to unite: the Lord is with you. An expression that he should have warned the girl about, because when he expresses himself like this God is entrusting a beautiful but arduous task (R. Virgili): he calls Mary to a story of chills and courage. Mary, you will have a son, yours and God’s, a son of earth and heaven. You will give Him the name Jesus (first time: only the father had the power to give the name). And the girl, ready, intelligent, and mature, after the first disturbance is not afraid, she dialogues, objects, argues. She stands before God with all the dignity of a woman, with maturity and awareness, she asks questions: explain to me, tell me how it will happen. Zechariah asked for a sign, Mary asks for the meaning and how. And the angel: the infinite comes in your blood, the immense becomes small in you, what does it matter how? The light that created the universes clings to the darkness of your womb. Who cares how it happens? And yet Gabriele stops to explain the inexplicable, to reassure her: he speaks of the Spirit on the waters as at the origin, of the shadow on the tent as at Sinai, he invites her to think big, as big as she can: trust me, it will be He who find the how. He also found it for Elizabeth. You will feel it in your body, like her. The Spirit could have chosen other paths, of course, but without the body of Mary the Gospel loses body, it becomes ideology or ethics. Now God is still looking for mothers. It is up to us, as loving mothers, to help the Lord to incarnate in this world, in these houses and streets, taking care of his word, of his dreams, of his gospel. God will live because of our love.

CHRISTMAS OF THE LORD – Mass of the day The whole earth has seen the salvation of our God. In the world the true light that illuminates every man – Jn 1:1-18

We hear an immense Gospel today, which forces us to think in great. John begins with a hymn, a song, which calls us to fly high, an eagle flight that projects Jesus of Nazareth towards the boundaries of the cosmos and time. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. In the beginning and in the depths, in time and out of time. A myth? No, because the eagle’s flight glides between the tents of the human camp: and he came to live, He pitched His tent among us. Then John opens his wings again and launches towards the origin of things that exist everything was made through Him (v 3). Nothing at all without Him. “In the beginning”, “everything”, “nothing”, “God”, absolute words, which put us in relationship with totality and with eternity, with God and with the cosmos, in an extraordinary vision that embraces time, things, space, divinity. Without him nothing that exists was made. Not just humans, but the blade of grass and the stone and the robin this morning, all life has blossomed from his hands. Nobody and nothing is born from itself…Christmas: the true light came into the world, the one that illuminates every man. Every man, every woman, every child and every elderly person, every sick person and every migrant, everyone, no one excluded; no existence is without a gram of that light, no story without the sparkle of a treasure, deep enough so that no sin can ever extinguish it. And then there is a fragment of the Word in every flesh, a little piece of God in every man, there ‘is holiness in every life. The light shines in the darkness but the darkness has not overcome it! Darkness does not overcome light. They never win it. The night does not defeat the day. Let us repeat it to ourselves and to others, in this hard and sad world: darkness does not win. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God…”. Which I would like to translate in the beginning there was tenderness / and tenderness was God. And the tenderness of God became flesh. Christmas is the story of God fallen to earth like a kiss (B. Calati). Christmas is the thrill of the divine in history (Pope Francis). This is why we are happier at Christmas, because you listen to the thrill, you slow down time, you look at your child more, you give him a caress…Jesus is the story of God’s tenderness (Ev. Ga.), he brings the revolution not of omnipotence or perfection, but of tenderness and smallness: God in humility, the secret of Christmas. God in smallness, the explosive force of Christmas. God lying on the poor straw like a new ear of corn. We are not waiting for Someone who will suddenly come, but we want to become aware of Someone who, like a light, already inhabits our life.

HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH

The Lord is faithful to his covenant.

The old age of the world and the eternal youth of God – Lk 2:22-40

They took the Child to Jerusalem to present Him to the Lord.

A very young couple and a newborn baby carrying the poor offering of the poor: two turtle doves, and the most precious offering in the world: a child. They come to the house of the Lord and on the threshold, it is the Lord who comes to meet them through two creatures imbued with life and the Spirit, two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, eyes tired from old age and young from desire: the old age of the world welcomes among its the eternal youth of God in his arms.

And the liturgy that takes place, in that courtyard open to all, is natural and simple, natural and therefore divine: Simeon takes Jesus in his arms and blesses God. He performs a priestly gesture, an authentic liturgy, possible for everyone. An elderly man, who has become a wave of hope, a laywoman under the wing of the Spirit blesses God and the son of God: the blessing is not an elite office, but an excess of joy that everyone can offer to God (R. Virgili). Mary and Joseph are also blessed, the whole family is enveloped in a veil of light due to the blessing and prophecy of that couple of elderly lay people, prophets, and priests at the same time: blessing and prophecy are not reserved for a sacred category, they live in the courtyard open to all. The Spirit had revealed to Simeon that he would not see death without first seeing the Messiah. Words that are for me and for you: I will not die without having seen the offensive of God, the offensive of the light already underway everywhere, the mild and powerful offensive of the yeast and the mustard seed.

Then Simeon says three immense words about Jesus: he is here as a fall, a resurrection, as a sign of contradiction. Jesus as fallen. Fall of our small or large idols, ruin of our world of masks and lies, of insufficient and sick life. Come to ruin everything that ruins man, to bring sword and fire to cut and burn what is against humanity. He is here for the resurrection: it is the strength that makes you get up when you think it’s over for you, that makes you leave even if you have emptiness inside and blackness before your eyes. He is here and ensures that living is the infinite patience to start again. Christ is the contradiction of our illusory balance between giving and having; that contradicts all my mediocrity, all my misconceptions about God.

Fall, resurrection contradiction. Three words that give breath and movement to life, with within them the luminous power to show that all things are now inhabited by a beyond. The figure of Anna closes the large fresco. A female prophet! Another, in addition to Elizabeth and Mary, capable of being enchanted in front of a newborn because they feel God as the future.

MARY HOLY MOTHER OF GOD

Blessed by those whose faces and hearts are bright – Lk 2:16-21 Eight days after Christmas, the Gospel takes us back to the Bethlehem cave, to the only visit reported by Luke, that of the shepherds smelling of milk and wool, always following their lambs, never in the synagogue, who arrive at night guided by a cloud singing. And Mary, a victim of amazement, kept everything in her heart! She carved out space within herself for that child, son of the impossible and of his womb; and she meditated, she sought the meaning of words and events, of a God who knows of stars and milk, of infinity and of home. You don’t live only on emotions and amazement, and she has the time and heart to think big, a life teacher who takes care of her dreams. At the beginning of the new year, when the time comes as a messenger from God, the first word of the Bible is a wish, beautiful like few others: the Lord said: You will bless your brothers (Nm 6,22) You will bless… it’s an order, it’s for everyone. In the beginning, first you too will bless, whether they deserve it or not, good and less good, before anything else, as a first attitude you will bless your brothers. God Himself teaches the words: May the Lord bless you, may he descend upon you as the energy of life and births. And may He keep you, be with you in every step you take, in every road you take, be sun and shield. Let his face shine for you. God has a face of light because He has a heart of light. God’s blessing for the coming year is neither health, nor wealth, nor fortune, nor long life but, quite simply, light. Inner light to see deeply, light to your steps to understand the path, light to enjoy beauty and encounters, to not be afraid. True blessing from God, around me are people with luminous faces and hearts, who exude goodness, generosity, beauty, peace. May the Lord be gracious to you: for all the mistakes, for all the abandonments, for some cowardice and for many foolish things. He is not a pointing finger, but a hand that raises. May the Lord turn his face towards you and grant you peace. Turning your face to someone is like saying: I’m interested in you, I like you, I keep you in my eyes. What does the coming year have in store for us? I don’t know, but I am certain of one thing: the Lord will turn towards me, His eyes will seek me. And if I fall and hurt myself, God will bend over me even more. He will be my border of heaven, bent over me like a mother, because not a single sigh must escape Him, not a single tear must be lost. Whatever happens, God will be bending over me this year. And may he grant you peace: peace, fragile miracle, broken a thousand times, in every corner of the earth. May God grant you that dream of Him, which seems to dissolve at every dawn, but which He Himself will not allow us to tire of.

EPIPHANY OF THE LORD / B 

All the peoples of the earth will adore you, Lord.

The most precious gift of the Magi? Their own journey – Mt 2:1-12

   Epiphany, feast of seekers of God, of those far away, who set out following their inner prophet, with words like those of Isaiah. «He raises his head and looks». Two beautiful verbs: he raises, raises his eyes, looks up and around, opens the windows of the house to the great breath of the world. And he looks, searches for a hole, a corner of the sky, a polar star, and from up there interprets life, starting from lofty objectives. The Gospel tells of the search for God as a journey, at the pace of the caravan, at the pace of a small community: they walk together, attentive to the stars and attentive to each other. Staring at the sky and at the same time at the eyes of those walking alongside, slowing down the pace of the other, of those who are struggling more. Then the most surprising moment: the journey of the Magi is full of errors: they lose the star, they find the big city instead of the small village; they ask a child killer about the child; they look for a palace and they will find a poor house. But they have the infinite patience to start again. Our tragedy is not to fall, but to surrender to falls. And behold: they saw the child in his mother’s arms, they prostrated themselves and offered gifts. The most precious gift that the Magi bring is not gold, it is their own journey. The priceless gift is the months spent searching, going and still going after a stronger desire for deserts and toil. God wants us to desire Him. God thirsts for our thirst: our greatest gift. When they entered, they saw the Child and His mother and adored Him. They love a child. Mysterious lesson: not the man of the cross nor the glorious risen one, not a wise man with words of light nor a young man in full vigor, simply a child. Not only at Christmas is God like us, not only is he the God-with-us, but He is a small God among us. And you can’t be afraid of Him, and you can’t walk away from a child you love. Find out carefully about the Child and then let me know so that I too can come and adore him! Herod is the killer of still-infant dreams, He is inside us, it is that cynicism, that contempt that destroys dreams and hopes. I would like to redeem these words from their prophecy of death and repeat them to my friend, to the theologian, to the artist, to the poet, to the scientist, to the man in the street, to anyone: Have you found the Child? Please search again, carefully, in history, in books, in the heart of things, in the Gospel and in people; search carefully again, staring into the abyss of the sky and the abyss of the heart, and then tell it to me like you tell a love story, so that I too come to adore it, with my dreams saved by all the Herods of history and of the heart .

BAPTISM OF THE LORD We will draw joyfully from the sources of salvation.

A love so great that it even pierces the heavens – Mk 1:7-11

    On the banks of the Jordan, the Father presents Jesus to the world, snatching Him from the anonymity of thirty years. Jesus had no need to be baptized, it is as if he had instead baptized the Jordan, sanctified the creature of water by contact. He knows it and the celebrant repeats it in the third Eucharistic prayer: “You who make the universe live and sanctify”. Extraordinary theology of creation: You who not only give life to man but to the entire universe; you not only give life to things, but you make them holy! Sanctity of the sky, of the water, of the earth, of the stars, of the blade of grass, of creation… “And immediately, coming out of the water, He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending towards Him like a dove.” I feel all the beauty and power of the verb: the heavens are torn apart, as if by an irrepressible love; they tear, they tear under the pressure of God, under the urgency of Adam and the poor. They open wide like the arms of the beloved for the beloved. From this open sky resounding with life comes, like a dove, the breath of God.

   A dance of the Spirit on the water is the first movement of the Bible (Gen 1:2). A dance in the waters of the mother’s womb is the first movement of every child of the earth. A dove dancing on the river is the beginning of Jesus’ public life. A voice came from heaven and said: “You are my Son, the beloved, my pleasure”.  Three powerful words, but first comes you, the most important word in the cosmos. An “I” addresses a “you”. The sky is not empty, it is not silent. And he speaks with the words of a birth. Son is the first word, a powerful term for the heart. And for faith. Summit of human history. God begets children of God, he begets children according to his own kind. And the begotten, you and I, we all have a source in the sky, the divine chromosome in us.

    Second word: my name is not just son, but beloved. I am immediately, before I do anything, before I respond. For who I am, as I am, I am loved. And whether I am loved depends on him, it does not depend on me.

The third word: I have placed my pleasure in you. The Voice shouts from the sky, shouts over the world and in the heart, the joy of God: it is beautiful to be with you. I love you, son, and I like you. I’m happy with you. Before you say yes to me, even before you open your heart, you give me joy, you are beautiful, a prodigy who looks and breathes and loves and is enchanted. But what joy can I give to God, I with my bumpy and distracted life, I who have so little to give back? With all the times I forget about Him? Yet those three words are for me, a lamp to my steps, a light lit on my path: son, beloved, my joy.

2nd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Behold, Lord, I come to do your will.

The look of the Master is the first announcement – Jn 1:35-42    The characters of the story: a Giovanni with penetrating eyes; two wonderful disciples, who do not sit comfortably and satisfied, in the shadow of the greatest prophet of the time, but set out along unknown paths, following a young rabbi of whom they ignore everything, except for a dazzling image: here is the lamb of God! A story that smells of freedom and courage, where the first words of Jesus are set: what are you looking for? So along the river; so, three years later, in the garden: woman, who are you looking for? Always the same verb, the one that defines us: we are gold diggers born from the breath of the Spirit (G. Vannucci).  What are you looking for? The Master begins by listening, He does not want to impose Himself or indoctrinate, the two boys will dictate the agenda. The question is like a fish hook lowered into them (the shape of the question mark resembles that of an upside down hook), which descends deep inside to hook, to bring hidden things to light. With this question, Jesus places his holy hands in the deep and living fabric of the person, which is desire: what do you really want? What is your strongest desire? Words that are “like a hand that takes your bowels and makes you give birth” (A. Merini): Jesus, master of desire, exegete and interpreter of the heart, asks each one: what hunger keeps your life alive? What dream are you walking behind? And it does not ask for renunciations or sacrifices, not to sacrifice oneself on the altar of duty, but to return to oneself, return to the heart (reditus ad cor, of the spiritual masters), look at what happens in the vital space, guard what is it moves and germinates within. He asks each one, in the words of Saint Bernard, “put your lips close to the source of the heart and drink”. Rabbi, where do you live? Come and see. The master shows us that the Christian message, before being made up of words, is made up of glances, testimonies, experiences, encounters, closeness. In a word, life. And that is what Jesus came to bring, not theories but life in fullness (Jn 10:10). And they go with him: conversion means leaving the security of yesterday for the open future of Jesus; move from God as duty to God as desire and amazement. Millions of people would like and dream of being able to spend the rest of their lives in their pajamas on the sofa at home. Perhaps this is the worst that can happen to us: feeling like we have arrived, remaining still. On the contrary, the two disciples, those of the first Christian steps, were formed, trained, trained by the Baptist, the rocky and wild prophet, not to stop, to go and go again, to move in search of God’s exodus , even further. Like them, “happy is the man, blessed is the woman who has paths in her heart” (Ps 83.6).

3rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Let me know, Lord, your ways.                                                                                                                                                                                           Those who follow him know that God gives everything, fills the nets – Mk 1:14-20   «Passing along the Sea of Galilee» (the watery landscape of the lake is Jesus’ favorite natural environment) «He saw Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the sea». Fishermen carrying out their daily activity, and that is where the Master meets them. God incarnates Himself in life, He prefers time to the temple, the small to the extraordinary. As throughout the Bible: Moses and David are met while following their flocks to pasture; Saul is looking for his father’s donkeys; Elisha plows the land with six yoke of oxen, Levi is sitting at the tax office… There is nothing profane in loving labor. And Jesus, the carpenter’s son, who got his hands dirty with His father, who knows how to recognize every tree by the grain and scent of the wood, who became mature and strong in daily toil, there He encountered the exodus of God in search of His creatures: «God is somehow found at the tip of my pen, of my pickaxe, of my brush, of my needle, of my heart, of my thought» (Teilhard de Chardin). Come after Me, I will make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left the nets and followed Him. They don’t even recover them, they drop them in the water, and they go, like Elisha who burns the plow in the furrows of the field… “throughout the Bible the actions say the heart” (A. Guida). Jesus passes and sets lives in motion. Where is His strength? What was missing from the four to convince them to give up everything for an unlikely profession like fishing for men? Leaving behind that young rabbi, without even knowing where He would lead them? They had a job, a home, a family, health, faith, everything they needed, yet they felt the bite of an absence: what is life? fish, eat, sleep? And then again fishing, eating, sleeping. That’s all? They knew the lake routes by heart. Jesus offers them the path of the world. Instead of small fishing after fish, He offers an adventure into the heart of God and His children. A dream was missing, and Jesus, healer of dreams, gives the dream of new heavens and a new earth. Jesus doesn’t explain, they don’t ask: and leaving their father, boat, nets, workmates, they went after Him. Those who have followed the Nazarene have experienced that God fills the nets, fills life, multiplies courage and fruitfulness. He steals nothing and gives everything. That «giving up for Him is the same as flourishing» (M. Marcolini). Two pairs of silent brothers are the first nucleus of universal brotherhood, the project of Jesus, who will speak of God with the language of home (abbà), who will want to extend family relationships to the level of all humanity, which he has experienced so beautiful and generative : all children, “all brothers”.                                                                                                                                   

4th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Listen to the voice of the Lord today.                                                                                    Yes, the Lord truly came “to ruin us” – Mk 1:21-28                                                           People were amazed by His teaching, like when in the desert of the always same you come across the unheard of. He was amazed, and the listening became disarmed. And the reason: because He taught with authority. Jesus is authoritative because he is credible, in Him both message and messenger coincide: He says what He is, and it is what He says. He doesn’t play a role. Authoritative, literally means “that makes you grow”. He is growth of life, great breath, free horizon. He did not teach like the scribes … The scribes are intelligent, they have studied, they know the Scriptures well, but they listen to them only with their heads, in a reading that does not move the heart, does not ignite it, does not become bread and gesture. Many times we too are like scribes with ourselves, we just need to approach the Gospel with reason, we even seem to have understood it, we often like it, but existence does not change. Faith is not knowing things, but making them become blood and life. Jesus taught as someone in authority. The world desperately needs authoritative teachers. But who do we listen to? Let us choose our teachers carefully and with humility, walking at the pace of those who have gone further? Who to learn from? From those who help us grow in wisdom and grace, that is, in the capacity for infinite amazement. We must choose who gives wings. The true masters are not those who will put further ties to my life or new stakes, but those who will give me further wings, who will allow me to transform them, comb them, lengthen them, make them strong. They will give me the ability to fly (A. Potente). The first miracle then takes place in the synagogue of Capernaum. A demoniac is praying in the community, he is a regular on Saturday. He had listened to many sermons… You can spend your whole life going to the synagogue every Saturday, to church every Sunday, praying and listening to the Word, and yet keep inside a sick spirit, a distant soul that cannot be reached. You can live your whole life as a Sunday Christian without ever being touched by the Word of God (G. Piccolo), without it truly making your life new. The following two questions are beautiful and engaging: What does Jesus have to do with us, with our daily life? You are in the Sunday rite, you are in church, or in the highest heavens; but what do you have to do with our everyday life? Do you want to know if you believe? If this changes your life. Have you come to ruin us? The answer is “yes!”: He came to ruin the swords that become sickles; it is the ruin of the spears that become plows, of the hard shells that imprisoned the pearl. «My sweet ruin» (D. M. Turoldo), which ruins masks and fears, and everything that ruins humanity.                                        

5th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME / B Heal us, Lord, God of life.                        A “beyond” to which we can entrust our hope – Mk 1:29-39                                     At the beginning of His public life, Jesus passes through the places where life beats strongest: work (boats, nets, lake), prayer and assemblies (the synagogue), the place of feelings and affection (Simon’s house). Jesus, having freed a man from his sick spirit, leaves the synagogue and “immediately”, as if pressed by something, enters the house of Simon and Andrew, where “immediately” (the urgency, the pressure of affection is beautiful again) they speak to Him of the mother-in-law with a fever. He is an unexpected guest, in a house where the service manager is ill, and the environment is not ready, He has not been prepared as best as possible, he is probably in disarray. Great master, Jesus, who does not worry about disorder, about what is unprepared in us, about that much dirt, about the somewhat closed air of our lives. And she too, now an elderly woman, is not ashamed of being seen by a stranger, sick and feverish: he came precisely for the sick. Jesus takes her by the hand, raises her up, “resurrects” her and that house with a blocked life comes back to life, and the woman, without setting aside a time, “immediately”, without saying “I need a moment, I have to settle down, recover” ( A. Guida) begins to serve, with the verb of the angels in the desert. We are used to thinking of our spiritual life as something that takes place in the living room, and we are well dressed and tidy before God. We believe that the reality of life in other rooms, the banal, daily, bumpy one, is not suitable for God. And we are wrong: God is in love with normality. He seeks our imperfect life to become leaven and salt and a lifting hand. This story of a modest, unobtrusive miracle, without comments from Jesus, inspires us to believe that the human limit is God’s space, the place where his power lands. The sequel is energy: the house opens up, or rather expands, becomes large to the point of being able to welcome all the sick people of Capernaum on its doorstep in the evening. The entire city is gathered on the threshold between the house and the street, between the house and the square. Jesus, pollen of gestures and words, who loves open doors and open roofs where eyes and stars enter, who loves the risk of pain, of love, of living, heals there. When it was still dark, He went out secretly and prayed. Simone chases Him, looks for Him, finds Him: «what are you doing here? Let’s exploit the success, Capernaum is at your feet.” And Jesus begins to deconstruct Peter’s expectations, our illusions: let’s go elsewhere! An elsewhere that we don’t know; I only know that I haven’t arrived, that I can’t sit down; a “beyond” that every day seduces me a little and scares me a little, but to which I return to entrust my hope every day.                                                                                                    

6th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME You are my refuge, you free me from anguish.                                                                                                                               God wants to heal everyone. He never rejects anyone – Mk 1:40-45                                                                         A leper enters the scene, a desperate man who has lost everything: home, job, friends, hugs, dignity and even God. For society, that man who is decomposing while alive is a sinner, rejected by God and punished with leprosy. He comes and approaches Jesus, and he must not, he cannot, the law imposes absolute segregation on him. But Jesus doesn’t run away, He doesn’t shy away, He doesn’t send him away, He stands in front of him and listens. The leper should have shouted from afar, to anyone he met: “unclean, contagious”; instead, up close, face to face, he whispers: if you want you can make me pure! “If you want”. The shipwrecked leper clings to an “if”, it is the “hook of Him in the middle of the sky”, dry land after the swamp. And I seem to see Jesus falter before the subdued request of this adrift creature. Wavering, like someone who has received a blow to the stomach, a fingernail to his heart: “he was gripped in the gut by compassion.” «If you want» … big question: tell me the heart of God! What does he really want for me? Do you want leprosy? That I am the country’s garbage? Is he the one who sends the cancer? Jesus sees, stops, is moved and touches. For too long no one had dared to touch him, his flesh was dying of loneliness. Jesus stretches out His hand and touches the untouchable, against all laws and all prudence, He touches him while he is still contagious; and this is how He begins to heal him, with a caress that arrives before His voice, with fingers more eloquent than words. Touching, an experience of communion, of body to body, always reciprocal action (we touch and are touched, inseparably!), a communication of our closeness, a touching, a shiver, a vibration of God with me, of me with Him. Then, the beautiful answer, the cornerstone on which the new image of God rests: “I want!” A total, absolute verb. God wants it, He is involved, He cares, He cares about it, He suffers with me, He urges in Him a passion for me, a suffering and a passion. The second word illuminates God’s will: “be purified”. God intends good. No one is rejected. According to the law the leper was excluded from the temple, he could not approach God until he was pure. Instead that day here is the reversal: get closer to God and you will be purified. Welcome Him and you will be healed. And He sent him away, in a stern tone, ordering him not to say anything. But the healed man does not obey: and he began to proclaim the message. The excluded becomes a source of amazement. He carries around his happiness, his happy experience of God. Who knows how many villages he had to escape from, and now it is precisely in the villages that he enters, looking for the people from whom he had to escape before, to say that everything has changed, because it has changed , with Jesus, the image of God.                                                                                                                  1st SUNDAY OF LENT / B All the paths of the Lord are love and faithfulness.                                                                                                               Temptation pushes you to choose your compass – Mk 1:12-15                               The Spirit pushed Jesus into the desert and He remained there for forty days, tempted by Satan. The temptation? A choice between two loves. To live is to choose. Temptation asks you to choose the compass, the polar star for your heart. If you don’t choose you don’t live, not a full heart. To the point that the apostle James, walking along this thin but very strong thread, makes us jump: consider perfect joy to undergo all sorts of trials and temptations. Almost as if to tell us that being tempted is perhaps even beautiful, which it certainly is absolutely vital, for the truth and freedom of the person. The rainbow, launched on Noah’s ark between heaven and earth, after forty days of navigation in the flood, takes new roots in the desert, in the forty days of Jesus. I glimpse the colors in the words: He was with the wild animals and the angels served Him. It emerges nostalgia for the garden of Eden, the echo of the great alliance after the flood. Jesus rebuilds the lost harmony and also the infinite aligns. And nothing that’s scary anymore. But those beasts that Jesus encounters are also the symbol of our dark sides, the shadowy spaces that inhabit us, what does not allow me to be completely free or happy, which slows me down, which scares me: our wild beasts that a day they scratched us, mauled us, clawed us. Jesus was with… Let’s learn with Him to stay there, to look them in the face, to name them. You must neither ignore nor fear them, you must not even kill them, but give them a name, which is like knowing them, and then giving them a direction: they are your share of chaos, but who makes you encounter them is the Holy Spirit. To you too, as to Israel, God speaks in the time of trial, in the desert, it does so through your weakness, which becomes your strength. Maybe you won’t heal completely your problems, but man’s maturity consists in starting a path, with patience (you mature not when you solve everything, but when you have patience and harmony with everything). Then you realize that God speaks to you in your fragility and that the Spirit is the one who speaks to you it allows you to fall back in love with reality in its entirety, starting from your deserts. After John was arrested Jesus went to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. And He said: the Kingdom of God is near. Jesus proclaims the “gospel of God”. God as “good news”. It wasn’t obvious at all. Not all of the Bible is gospel; Not everything is beautiful, joyful news; sometimes it is threat and judgement, often it is precept and injunction. But the original feature of the rabbi of Nazareth is announcing the gospel, a word that comforts life, joyful news: God has come close, He is an ally lovable, it is a hug, a rainbow, a kiss on every creature.                                                                                                    

2nd SUNDAY OF LENT                                                                                                      I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.                 Save the light for when darkness comes – Mk 9:2-10  The mountain of light, located halfway through Mark’s story, is the watershed of the search into who Jesus is. As in a diptych, the first part of his booklet recounts the works and days of the Messiah, the second part, starting from here, draws the other face of the “Son of God”: gospel of Jesus, the Christ, the son of God (Mk 1,1). The story is artfully woven with the golden threads of the language of Exodus, mountain, cloud, voice, Moses, splendor, listening, frame of revelations. What is new, however, is Peter’s enthusiastic cry: how beautiful it is here! Experience of beauty, from which joy flows without interests. Marco is telling a moment of happiness of Jesus (G. Piccolo) which infects his. It is proposed to us who eternal Pharisaism has made us wary of joy a Jesus who is not afraid of happiness. And His disciples with Him. Jesus is happy because the light is a symptom, the symptom that He, the rabbi of Nazareth, is walking well, towards the face of God; and then because He feels loved by the Father, He hears the words that every child would like to hear to say; and He is happy because He is talking about His dreams with the greatest dreamers of the Bible, Moses and Elijah, the deliverer and the prophet; because he has nearby three boys who don’t understand much, but who still love Him, and have followed Him for years, everywhere. Even the three apostles look, get excited, are stunned, feel the impact of happiness and beauty on the mountain, something that takes away the breath: how nice with you, rabbi! They see faces soaked in light, eyes full of sunshine, what we also notice in a happy person: your eyes shine. eyes! They would like to freeze that experience, the most beautiful ever lived: let’s make three huts! Let’s stop here on the mountain, it’s a moment perfect, the best! There is a God to enjoy, to be happy with. But it’s a short illusion, you can’t stop life, life is infinite and infinity it is in life, ordinary, weekday, fragile and always on the move. You cannot keep happiness under a glass bell or lock it up inside a hut. When it is given to you, an intermittent miracle, enjoy it without fear, it is a caress from God, a glimpse of resurrection, a life card created. Enjoy and give thanks. And when the light fades and goes, let it go, without regrets, come down from the mountain but not forget it, preserve and cherish the memory of the light experienced. So it will be for the disciples when everything gets dark, when their Master He will be taken, chained, mocked, stripped, tortured, crucified. Like them, for us too in our winters, it will be necessary to look for the archives of the soul, the traces of light, the memory of the sun to support your heart and faith. Night descends from oblivion.                3rd SUNDAY OF LENT Lord, you have words of eternal life. The merchants in the temple and those in our heart – Jn 2:13-25                          The episode of the expulsion of the merchants in the temple was so forcefully imprinted in the disciples’ memories that it was reported in all the Gospels. What is surprising and moving in Jesus is seeing how in him the tenderness of a woman in love and the courage of a hero coexist and alternate, as in a dance step (C. Biscontin), with all the passion and the impetuosity of the Middle East. Jesus enters the temple: and it is like entering the center of time and space. What Jesus will now do and say in the holiest place in Israel is of capital importance: it affects God Himself. In the temple He finds the animal sellers: sheep, oxen and merchants are chased out, all together, eloquence of gestures. Instead he addresses the dove sellers: the dove was the offering of the poor, there is a sort of respect towards them. He threw down the money, the God of money, the mammon idol raised above all, installed in the temple like a king on the throne, the eternal golden calf. Do not make my Father’s house a market... I wonder what the true house of the father is. A house of stones? “We are the house of God if we cherish freedom and hope” (Heb 3:6).  The word of Jesus then reaches us: do not market people! Don’t buy or sell life, any life, you who buy the poor, the migrants, for a pair of sandals, or a worker for a few euros. If you take away freedom, if you let hopes die, you desecrate and profane the truest tabernacle of God. And again: don’t make a market of faith. We have all placed a money changer’s table with God firmly in our soul: I give you prayers, sacrifices and offerings, in return you assure me of health and well-being, for me and mine. Faith of shopkeepers, who use the poor, decadent law of barter with God, almost as if God’s was a mercenary love. But love, if it is true, cannot be bought, it cannot be begged, it cannot be pretended. God has a mother’s bowels: you can’t buy a mother, you don’t have to pay for her, you are born anew every day from her. A father must not be appeased with offers or sacrifices, we are nourished by his every gesture and word as a life force. A few minutes later, the dove merchants had already lined up their cages, the money changers had recovered even the last change from the pavement. The money was weighed and counted again, it was laundered according to the law. Blessed by all: pilgrims, priests, merchants and beggars. Jesus’ gesture seems to have no immediate consequences, but it is prophecy in action. And the prophet loves the word of God even more than his results. The prophet is the guardian who watches over the slit through which hope and freedom enter the heart. Anyone who wants to pay for love goes against his very nature and treats him like a prostitute. When the prophets spoke of prostitution in the temple, they meant this cult, both pious and offensive to God, when the faithful want to manage God: I give you prayers and sacrifices, you give me security and health. Love cannot be bought, it cannot beg, it cannot be imposed, it cannot be pretended. But then, if he entered my house, what would he ask me to throw on the ground, among my small or large idols? All the superfluous…                                                                                 4th SUNDAY OF LENT The memory of you, Lord, is our joy.                        The essential thing is God’s great love for the world – Jn 3:14-21  The impetuous, thunderous scene of Jesus driving the merchants out of the temple has just ended. In Jerusalem, leaders and common people all talk about the novelty of that young rabbi. Now, from that sensational and subversive scene we move on to an intimate and collected gospel. Nicodemus has great respect for Jesus and wants to understand more, but he does not dare to compromise himself and goes to Him at night. First surprise: that Jesus who will say «your speaking be yes yes, no no», respects Nicodemus’ fear, does not get lost within the limits of his lack of coherence, but by showing understanding for his weakness, transforms him into the courageous one who he will oppose his group (Jn 7.50) and will come at sunset on Great Friday (Jn 19:39) to take care of the body of the Crucified. When all the brave flee, the fearful one goes under the cross, carrying thirty kilos of aloes and myrrh, an excess quantity, a surplus of affection and gratitude.  Jesus transforms. It is a completely new path for us who the masters of the spirit have always had to choose between: courage or cowardice, coherence or incoherence, resistance or weakness, perfection or error. Jesus shows a third way: the respect that embraces imperfection, the trust that welcomes fragility and transforms it. Jesus’ third way is to believe in man’s journey more than in the finish line, to focus on the humble truth of the first step rather than on reaching the distant goal. Master of sprouts. In that nocturnal dialogue, Jesus communicates, in a few words, the essentials of faith: God loved the world so much… it is something certain, something that has already happened, a central certainty: God is the lover who saves you. His decisive words, to be savored every day and to which we always cling. You must be born from above: I live from my sources, and I have sources of heaven to find. Then I will finally be able to be born into a higher and greater life, and look at existence from a new perspective, from a hole opened in the sky, to see what is ephemeral and what is eternal. That which is born from the Spirit is Spirit. And the night lights up. He who is born of the Spirit not only has the Spirit but is the Spirit. Not only is it a temple of the Spirit, but it is of the same substance as the Spirit. Every being generates children according to its own species, plants, animals, man and woman. Well, God also generates children according to God’s species. And there is no upper or lower case in the original texts: upper case for the Spirit of God, his generating force, lower case for the spirit of the generated man. It is not possible to distinguish whether “spirit” refers to man or to God. This confusion is extraordinary. A beautiful revelation: you, reborn from the Spirit, are Spirit. V SUNDAY OF LENT Create in me, O God, a pure heart.            The “life” lesson of the grain that “dies” – Jn 12:20-33                                                   “We want to see Jesus”: question of the eternal soul of the man who seeks, and which I feel is mine. Jesus’ response requires deep eyes: if you want to understand, look at the grain of wheat, look in the cross, the ultimate synthesis of the Gospel. If the grain of wheat does not die it remains alone, if dies and produces much fruit. One of the most famous and most difficult phrases in the Gospel. That “if he dies” weighs on the heart and overshadows everything else. But if you listen to the lesson of the grain, the meaning shifts; if you observe, you see that the heart of the seed, the intimate and living nucleus from which the ear, it is the germ, and the womb that envelops it is its nourishment. The grain is actually a treasure chest of life that slowly opens, a small one live volcano from which, instead of lava, a small green miracle erupts. In the earth what happens is not the death of the seed (the seed rotten is sterile) but a tireless and wonderful work, a continuous and uninterrupted donation, a true gift of self: the earth gives the grain its of him mineral elements of him, the grain offers itself to the germ (and they are one) as nourishment, as a mother offers her breast to the child. And when the grain has given everything, the germ throws itself around with its roots hungry for life, it throws itself upwards with its fragile tip and very powerful of its little leaves. Then the grain dies, yes, but in the sense that life is not taken away from it but transformed into a more evolved and powerful form of life. “What the caterpillar calls end of the world everyone else calls butterfly ”(Lao Tze), he no longer crawls, he flies; he dies to his former life to continue live in a higher form. The main verb that governs the parable of the seed is “produces fruit”. Glory of God is not dying but fruitfulness, and its trigger is gift of self. The keystone that holds the world, from the grain to Christ, is not the victory of the strongest but the gift. The second icon offered by Jesus is the cross, the purest and highest image that God gave of Himself. To know who God is I just have to kneel at the foot of the Cross (Karl Rahner). God enters death because every child of him goes there. But from death he comes out like a germ from earth, an indestructible form of life, and drags us out, up, with it. Jesus: a grain of wheat that is consumed and sprouts; a naked cross where he already breathes the resurrection. “The Cross was not given to us to understand but to cling to it” (Bonhoeffer): attracted by something I don’t understand, but which seduces me and he reassures me, I cling to his Cross, I walk with Him, eternally dying in his brothers, eternally resurrecting. Art on the cross divine love offers itself to cosmic contemplation, gives itself to the fruitfulness of lives.                                                                                            PALM SUNDAY: PASSION OF THE LORD My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Week in which to stay close to the wounds of Jesus – Mk 15:1-39   Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is not just a historical event, but a parable in action. More: a love trap because the city welcome Him, so that I can welcome Him. God courts His city (faith is my response to God’s courtship): He comes like a beggar King (the master needs it, but he will send it back immediately), so poor that He does not even own the poorest beast of burden. A humble Powerful One, who does not impose Himself, yes proposes; like an unarmed lover. Blessed is He who comes. It is extraordinary to be able to say: God comes. In this country, for these streets, in my house that smells of bread and hugs, God still comes, traveler of millennia and of hearts. He approaches, He is at the door. Holy Week unfolds, one by one, the days of our destiny; they come towards us slowly, each generous with signs, with symbols, of light. In this week, the rhythm of the liturgical year slows down, we can follow Jesus day by day, almost hour by hour. There holiest thing we can do is to be with Him: «men and women go to God in their suffering, they cry for help, they ask for bread and comfort. That’s what everyone does, everyone. Christians, on the other hand, remain close to God in his suffering” (Bonhoffer). They are close to a God who on cross is no longer “the omnipotent” of our infantile desires, the lifesaver in our shipwrecks, but he is the All-embracing, the Omni-loving cha he is shipwrecked in the perfect storm of love for us. These are days to be close to God in His suffering: the passion of Christ is still consumed, live, in the infinite crosses of the world, where we can stand next to the crucified of history, let ourselves be wounded by their wounds, feel pain for the pain of the earth, of God, of man, to suffer and bring comfort. The cross disorientates, but if I persist in remaining next to it like the women, looking at it like the centurion, an expert in death, I certainly won’t understand everything, but one thing is, that there, in that death, is the first cry of a new world. What did the centurion see to make him, a pagan, pronounce the first complete Christian act of faith? “He Truly he was the Son of God”! He has seen a God who loves to death, to die for it. The Christian faith is based on the most beautiful thing in the world: a perfect act of love. He saw the turning the world upside down; God who gives life even to those who give Him death; whose power is to serve rather than enslave; overcome violence not with more violence, but taking it upon Himself. The cross is the purest, highest, most beautiful image that God has given of Himself. These are the days that reveal it: “to know who God is I just have to kneel at the foot of the Cross” (K. Rahner).                                   EASTER VIGIL ON THE HOLY NIGHT Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.The Easter movement of endless love – Mk 16:1-7 Three women, early in the morning, almost clandestinely, in the hour when we pass from darkness to light, go to take care of the body of Jesus, as they know, with the little they have. They love Him even in death, their Master, and discover that the time of love is longer than the time of life, as they pass from surprise to surprise: «looking.. they saw that the large boulder had already been moved.” Easter is the celebration of boulders rolled away, of stones overturned from the mouth of the heart, from the entrance to the soul. Amazement, disorientation, fear, yet they enter, fragile and indomitable, meeting a greater surprise: a young messenger (the world whole is new, fresh, young, on that morning) with an announcement that seems to be the long-awaited good news: «Jesus you have seen crucified, He rose again.” They should have rejoiced, but instead they fell silent. The young man urges her “He’s not here“. How beautiful is this word: “he is not here”, he is there, he lives, but not here. He is the living one, a God to be surprised in life. He is there, but He must be looked for outside territory of the tombs, around the streets, in the houses, everywhere, except among dead things: “He is in every choice for a more great love, He is in the hunger for peace, in the embraces of lovers, in the victorious cry of the child being born, in the last breath of dying” (G. Vannucci). And then yet another surprise: the immense trust of the Lord who entrusts the great announcement to them, so disoriented: “Go and tell“, with the two imperatives of the mission. From disciples without words, to missionaries of disciples without courage. «He precedes you in Galilee». And a migratory God appears, who loves open spaces, who opens paths, crosses walls and throws open doors: a seed of fire that opens its way into history. He precedes you: He advances at the head of the long caravan of humanity on its way towards life; He walks in front, opening the immense migration towards the promised land. In front, to receive the wind in the face, the death, and then the early morning sun, without ever taking a step back. The Easter Gospel tells us that in life He is hidden a secret that Christ came to whisper lovingly in our ear. The secret is this: there is a movement of love within life that never allows it to remain still, which sets it in motion again after every death, which relaunches it after every setback, that for every man who kills a hundred there are those who heal the wounds, and a thousand cherry trees that stubbornly continue to bloom. A movement of love that never ends, that no human violence can ever do arrest, a vital flow within which everything that lives is caught, and which reveals the ultimate name of God: Resurrection.

2nd EASTER SUNDAY /B Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good: his love endures forever. The wounds of the Risen One, alphabet of love – Jn 20:19-31

The disciples were locked in the house out of fear. Fear of the Jewish leaders, of the temple guards, of the fickle crowd, of the Romans, of themselves. And yet Jesus comes. In that house with barred doors, in that room where there is no air, where you can’t feel good, despite everything Jesus comes.

Eight days later the disciples were back in the house and Thomas was also with them. Jesus came to closed doors. His first coming seems without effect, eight days later everything is as before, and yet He is there again. Centuries later He is still here, in front of my closed doors, meek and determined like a seed that doesn’t let itself be dismayed by any black earth. How beautiful is our God!!  He does not accuse, He does not reproach, He does not abandon, but He proposes Himself again, He gives Himself back to disciples who did not understand Him, easy to cowardice and lies. He had sent them through the streets of Jerusalem and the world, and He found them still paralyzed by fear. In what poor hands He put himself in. Who get tired quickly, who get dirty quickly. Yet He accompanies faith with infinite delicacy slow gods of Him, of whom He does not ask to be perfect, but to be authentic; not of being immaculate, but of being on the path. AND He turns to Tommaso-poor dear Tommaso who has become proverbial. But it is precisely the Master who had educated Him to interior freedom , not to conform, rigorous and courageous, to come and go, he a Galilean, through the streets of the great Jewish and hostile city. Jesus invites him: Put your finger here and look at my hands; reach out your hand and place it in my side. The resurrection has not closed the nail holes, it did not heal the lips of the wounds, as we would have expected. Because the cross is not simple accident along the way to overcome and forget, but it is the glory of Jesus, the highest point of the divine art of loving, which in those wounds are offered forever to the contemplation of the universe. It is precisely because of those holes in His hands and side that God has it resurrected, and not despite them: they are the indelible alphabet of His love letter. Jesus doesn’t want to force Thomas, either He respects fatigue and doubts, He knows everyone’s times, He knows the complexity of living. What He wants is His amazement when He understands that His faith is based on the most beautiful thing in the world: a perfect act of love. Touch, look, put! Whether in the end Tommaso touched or not, it no longer matters. My Lord and my God. Thomas repeats that little one adjective “mine” that changes everything. Mine not of possession, but of belonging: hold me in You, hold on to me. Mine, as is the heart. And, without it, I wouldn’t be. Mine, as is the breath. And without it, I wouldn’t live.

3rd SUNDAY OF EASTER May the light of your face shine upon us, Lord. The risen Jesus and that invitation to eat with him – Lk 24:35-48

They are still talking, after the joyous night ride back to Jerusalem, when Jesus Himself appeared among them to them. In between: not above them; not in front, so that no one is closer than others. But in between: all important allo same way and He is the glue of lives. Peace is the first word. Peace is here: peace to your fears, to your shadows, to your thoughts who torture you, to remorse, to broken paths, peace also to those who have fled, to Thomas who is not there, peace also to Judas… Shocked and full of fear, they thought they were seeing a ghost. They knew Him well, after three years of Galilee, of olive trees, of the lake, of villages, eye to eye, yet they don’t recognize Him. Jesus is the same and He is different, He is the same and He is transformed, He is that than before but no longer as before: the Resurrection is not a simple return back, it is moving forward, transformation, fullness. Jesus explained it with the parable of the grain of wheat that becomes an ear: it is buried like a small seed and rises again from the earth like a full ear of corn. I am consoled by the disciples’ difficulty in believing, it is the guarantee that this is not an event invented by them, but of a fact that shocked them. Then Jesus pronounces, to dispel fears and doubts, the simplest and most familiar verbs: “Look, touch, let’s eat together! I’m not a ghost.” I am struck by the lament of Jesus, a very human lament: I am not a breath in the air, a cloak of words full of wind… And you feel His desire to be welcomed like a friend returning from far away, to be embraced with joy. You cannot love a ghost or hold it close to you, what Jesus asks for. Touch me: by whom do you want to be touched? Only from those who are friends and love you. The apostles surrender to a portion of roasted fish, at most familiar with signs, with the most human of needs, with a lake fish and not with angels, with friendship and not with a prodigious theophany. They will tell it as proof of their meeting with the Risen One: we ate with Him after His resurrection (Acts 10.41). Eating is the sign of life; eating together is the most eloquent sign of a rediscovered communion; a gesture that strengthens the bonds of lives and makes them grow. Together, to feed on bread and dreams, on understandings and reciprocity. And He concludes: you belong to Me witnesses. Not preachers, but witnesses, that’s another thing. With the simplicity of children who have good news to give, and they can’t keep quiet, and you can see it on their faces. The good news is this: Jesus is alive, He is the power of life, He envelops you in peace, He cries our tears, He captures us within His resurrection, He lifts us to fullness, on eagle’s wings, in time and eternity.

4th SUNDAY OF EASTER The rejected stone has become the cornerstone. 

The God-shepherd gives life even to those who take it away – Jn 10:11-18 

I am the good shepherd! Seven times Jesus introduces Himself: “I am” bread, life, path, truth, vine, door, good shepherd. And He doesn’t mean “good” in the sense of patient and gentle with sheep and lambs; not a shepherd, but the shepherd, the real one, the authentic one. Not a paid shepherd, but the one, the only one, who puts his life on the table. I am the handsome shepherd, the original Gospel text -literally – says. And we understand that His beauty does not lie in his appearance, but in His beautiful relationship with the flock, expressed with a lofty verb that the Gospel today relaunches five times: I offer! I don’t ask, I give. I don’t demand, I give. What is the content of this gift? The maximum possible: “I offer life”. Much more than pastures and water, infinitely more than grass and a safe sheepfold. The shepherd is true because He makes the most regal and powerful gesture: giving, offering, donating, throwing his life on the scales. Here is the God-shepherd who does not ask, He offers; He takes nothing and gives the best; He does not take life but gives His life even to those who take it away from Him. I try to understand more: with the words “I offer My life” Jesus is not referring to His dying, that Friday, nailed to a tree. “Giving life” is God’s job, His work, His inexhaustible activity, understood in the way of mothers, in the way of the vine that gives life to the branches (John), of the spring that gushes living water (Samaritana), of the olive trunk that transmits good power to the grafted branch (Paolo). From Him life flows inexhaustible, powerful, unlimited. The mercenary, the shepherd, sees the wolf coming and runs away because he doesn’t care about the sheep. On the other hand, the pastor cares, I care. Beautiful verb: to be important to someone! And it moves me to imagine His voice assuring me: I will take care of your happiness. And here the parable, the simile of the handsome shepherd opens on an unrealistic, unsettling, excessive level: no shepherd on earth is willing to die for His sheep; to fight yes, but not to die; it is more important to save life than the flock; losing your life is something irreparable. And here the God of Jesus comes into play, the upside down God, our different God, the shepherd who loses Himself to save me. The image of the shepherd opens onto one of those details that go beyond the realistic aspects of the parable (Paul Ricoeur calls them eccentric). They are those loopholes that open onto the excess of God, on the “more” that comes from Him, on the unthinkable of a God greater than our heart. I trust this God, I entrust myself to Him, I believe in Him like a child and I would like to place all the lambs in the world in His hands.

5 SUNDAY OF EASTER My praise to you, Lord, in the great assembly.

More than clean, God asks for hands full of the harvest – Jn 15:1-8

Jesus communicates God to us through the mirror of the simplest creatures: Christ vine, I branch, he and I are the same plant, same life, single root, single sap. And then the wonderful metaphor of the peasant God, a vinedresser scented with sun and earth, who takes care of me and uses all His intelligence so that I bear much fruit; who does not hold the scepter from above the throne but the spade and looks at the world bent over me, at the height of a bud, a branch, a bunch, with beautiful eyes of hope. Of all the fields, the vineyard was my father’s favorite field, the one in which He invested the most time and passion, even poetry. And I believe it is like this for all farmers. Talking about vineyards is therefore revealing a preferential love on the part of our peasant God. You, I, we are God’s favorite field. The metaphor of the vine grows towards a summit already anticipated in the words: I am the grapevine, you are the branches (v.5). We are faced with an unprecedented statement, never heard before in the Scriptures: creatures (the branches) are part of the Creator (the grapevine). What did Jesus come to bring to the world? Perhaps a more noble morality or the forgiveness of sins? Too little; He came to bring much more, to bring Himself, His life into us, the divine chromosome inside our DNA. The great potter who shaped Adam with the dust of the ground became the clay of this soil, the sap of this grape. And if the branch must remain grafted to the grapevine to live, it happens that the grapevine also lives on its branches, without them there is no fruit, no purpose, no history. Without His children, God would be the father of no one. The metaphor of work around the vine has its ultimate meaning in “bearing fruit”. The golden thread that runs through and stitches together the entire passage, the word repeated six times and which illuminates all the other words of Jesus is “fruit”: in this, My Father is glorified that you bear much fruit. The weight of the peasant image of the Gospel lands on the hands full of the harvest, much more than on the clean, perhaps, but empty hands of those who did not want to get dirty with the incandescent and staining matter of life. Evangelical morality consists in fruitfulness and not in the observance of rules, it brings with it happy harvest songs. At the sunset of earthly life, the final question, to tell the ultimate truth of existence, will not concern commandments or prohibitions, sacrifices, and renunciations, but will focus all its sweet light on the fruit: after you have passed into the world, into the family, at work, in the church, have bunches of goodness or a harvest of tears grown from your vine? Is there more life or less life left behind you?

VI SUNDAY OF EASTER The Lord revealed His justice to the people. If you love, your life is still a success – Jn 15:9-17

The few verses of today’s Gospel revolve around the magical vocabulary of lovers: love, beloved, love each other, joy. «The whole thing “law” begins with “you are loved” and ends with “you will love”. Whoever abstracts from this loves the opposite of life” (P. Beauchamp). Big stuf . A question that fills or empties life: I tell you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full. Love is from take it seriously, our well-being, our joy is at stake. Indeed, each of us is playing, consciously or not, the game of own eternity. But I struggle to follow Him: love is always so little, so at risk, so fragile. I even struggle to understand what true love consists of, everything mixes in it: passion, tenderness, emotions, tears, fears, smiles, dreams and concrete commitment. Love is always wonderfully complicated, and always imperfect, that is, unfinished. Always artisanal, and like any job craftsmanship requires hands, time, care, rules: if you observe my commandments, you will remain in my love. But how, Lord, close within the commandments the only thing that cannot be commanded? You discourage me: the commandment is a rule, constraint, sanction. A leash tugging at me. Love, on the other hand, is freedom, creativity, a divine madness… But Jesus, the healer of lack of love, offers His safe pedagogy in two stages: 1. Love one another. Not simply: love each other. But: one another, one does not love humanity in general or in theory. They love each other people one by one; we love this man, this woman, this child, the poor man next door, face to face, eye to eye. 2. Love each other as I have loved you. He doesn’t say “as much as me”, because we would never get there, at least me; but “like me”, with my style, with the my unique way: He, who washes the feet of adults and hugs children; who sees someone suffering and feels a cramp in the belly; He who, yes, it moves and touches the flesh, the skin, the eyes; that He doesn’t send anyone away; which forces us to grow up and caresses and combs them our wings because we think big and fly far. Who really loves you? Certainly not someone who fills you with sweet words and gifts. True love is what pushes you, pushes you, forces you to to become so much, infinitely so, to become the best of what you can become (Rainer Maria Rilke). So children don’t need things, but fathers and mothers who give horizons and great wings, who make them become the best of what they can become. Even when He had to seem like they forget about us. Word of the Gospel: if you love, you don’t make mistakes. If you love, you will not fail in life. If you love, your life has already been a happened, anyway.

ASCENSION OF THE LORD / B The Lord ascends amidst songs of joy. The mission to make the world a Baptism – Mk 16:15-20
He only has eleven scared and confused men left, and a small group of faithful and courageous women. They followed Him for three years on the streets of Palestine, they didn’t understand much but they loved Him very much, and they all came to the meeting on the last hill. When they saw Him, they bowed down. But they doubted. Jesus performs an act of enormous, illogical trust in doubting men and women again, entrusting the world and the Gospel to them. He doesn’t stay with his ones a little longer, to explain better, to clarify better, but He entrusts them with the happy news despite the doubts. Doubts in faith are like the poors: we will always have them with us. Jesus entrusts the gospel and the new world, dreamed together, to the poverty of eleven illiterate fishermen and not to the intelligence of the top of the class. With total trust, entrust the truth to doubters, call the limping to walk, the limping to travel all the roads of the world: it is the law of the mustard seed, of the pinch of salt, of the light on the mountain, of the burning heart that can infect with the gospel and births those He meets. Go, perfume the lives you encounter with heaven, teach them the craft of living, just as you saw me do it, show them your face tall and bright of the human. Baptize, which means immerse people in God, that they may be imbued with heaven, imbued with God, soaked in living water, like someone who is lowered into the river, the lake, the ocean and comes back up, drenched in the dawn. Here is the mission of the disciples: to make the world one baptism, a laboratory of immersion in God, in that God that Jesus described as love and freedom, as tenderness and justice. Each of us today receives the same mission as the apostles: announce. Nothing else. He doesn’t say: organize, occupy the key positions, do great charitable works, but simply: announced. And what? The Gospel, the good news, the story of God’s tenderness. Not the most beautiful ideas, not the solutions to all problems, not a better politics or theology: the Gospel, the life and person of Christ, the fullness of humanity and the tenderness of the Father. Ascension is like a navigation of the heart. Jesus did not go far or high, to some remote corner of the cosmos. He came down (ascended) in the depths of things, in the depths of creation and creatures, and from within he presses as an ascending force towards a brighter life. “Our faith is the certainty that every creature is full of his luminous presence” (encyclical Laudato si’ 100), that «the risen Christ it dwells in the depths of every being, surrounding it with its affection and penetrating it with its light” (Laudato si’ 221).

PENTECOST SUNDAY  Send your Spirit, Lord, to renew the earth. Humanity needs the Spirit to shake it – Jn 15:26-27;16:12-15

When the Spirit comes, He will guide you into all the truth. It is the humility of Jesus, who does not claim to have said everything, to have the last word on everything, but He talks about our history with God with only verbs in the future: the Spirit will come, He will announce, He will guide, He will speak. A sense of vitality, of energy, of open spaces! The Spirit is like a current that drags history towards the future, opens paths, makes people move forward. Praying to Him is like look out onto the balcony of the future. Which is the fertile and uncultivated land of hope. The Spirit causes a short circuit in history and in time: it brings us back to the heart, lights up in us, like a flint that raises sparks, the beauty of then, of gestures and words of those three years of Galilee. And in love with spiritual beauty we become “true seekers of God, who stumble upon a star and, trying new ways , they get lost in the magical dust of the desert” (D.M. Montagna). We are like pilgrims without a road, but tenaciously on the move (John of the Cross), or even in the middle of a flat sea, on a nutshell, where everything is bigger than us. At that moment: you have to know at all costs / to raise a sail / on the emptiness of the sea (Julian Gracq). A sail, and the sea changes, it is no longer a void in which to get lost or sink; all it takes is for a sail to arise and let it run over you from the vigorous breath of the Spirit (I am the sail, God is the wind) to begin an exciting adventure, forgetting the void, following a route. What is the Holy Spirit? It is God in freedom. That He invents, opens, shakes, does things you don’t expect. Who gives Marya an outlaw son, to Elizabeth gave a prophet son, and who tirelessly carries out the same work in us as then: she makes us wombs of the Word, which give flesh and blood and history to the Word. God in freedom, a nomadic wind, which carries pollen where He wants, brings springs and disperses the mists, and makes us all wind in the Wind of Him. God in freedom, who cannot stand statistics. Scholars look for consistent recurrences and patterns; they say: in Bible God works like this. Don’t believe it. In life and in the Bible, God never follows patterns. We need the Spirit, He has it this stagnant world of ours, without impulse, is needed. For this Church that struggles to dream. The Spirit with His gifts gives to everyone Christian a genius that is his own. And humanity is in dire need of brilliant disciples. That is, we need everyone to believe in own gift, to one’s uniqueness, and so can keep life high with inventiveness, courage, creativity, which are gifts of the Spirit. Then He will never lack the wind for my sailing ship, or for that little sail that trembles high above the void of the sea.

HOLY TRINITY / B Blessed are the people chosen by the Lord. In the beginning of everything, a bond of love – Mt 28:16-20

The Gospel does not offer rational or symbolic formulas to talk about the Trinity, but the story of an appointment and a sending. The gives names of family and affection: Father, Son, Holy Breath. Names that embrace and make you live. Everyone went there to the meeting on the Mount of Galilee. Everyone, even those who still doubted, a wounded community that has known betrayal, the escape and suicide of one of them… But the master doesn’t give up on them, and makes one of His most typical gestures: He approached them and told them… when he loves God he makes very human gestures. Jesus does not accept distances: He is still not tired of approaching and explaining. Still He is not tired of waiting for me in my slowness to believe, He comes closer, eye to eye, breath upon breath. It is the eternal journey of our “going out” God, walking throughout the earth, who knocks at the door of the human, and the door of the human is His face, or the Heart. And if I don’t open, as has happened many times, He leaves me a flower at the door. And He will return. And He doesn’t doubt me. I am with you every day. With you, within the solitudes, the abandonments and the falls; with you even behind closed doors, in days when you doubt and days when you believe; in the days of singing and in those of tears, when the night swallows you and whenever you feel like it fly. The last, supreme pedagogy of Jesus is so simple: «always get closer, stay together, whisper to the heart, comfort and press on.” Go all over the world and announce. He entrusts faith and the word of happiness to disciples with a heavy heart, yet He does it they will do, and it will spread across every landscape in the world like fresh clear water. Go and baptize, immerse every life in the ocean of God. Accompany every life to the encounter with the life of God and be submerged by it, be imbued and imbued with it, and then be lifted up in high from its gentle and powerful wave! Do it “in the name of the Father”: heart that beats in the heart of the world; “in the name of the Son”: the most beautiful born of a woman; “In the name of the Spirit ”: wind that brings spring pollen and makes us all fan in His Wind (D. M. Montagna). Like all dogmas, that of the Trinity is not a cold conceptual distillation, but a treasure chest that contains the wisdom of to live, a wisdom on life and death: in the beginning of everything, in the cosmos and in my interior, as in heaven so on earth, there is placed a bond of love. “In the beginning, the bond”. And I, created in the image and likeness of the Trinity, can finally understand why I feel good when I am with those who love me, understand why I feel bad when I am alone: it is my profound nature, our divine origin.

HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST / B Him I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord. The flow of divine life in our veins – Mk 14:12-16.22-26 “Take this, this is my body.”

In the Gospels Jesus always speaks with poor, simple, direct verbs: take, listen, come, go, leave; body and blood. Unknown are those half-words whose ambiguity allows the powerful or the cunning to consolidate theirs dominance. Jesus is so radically man, even in the language, that He reaches God and communicates Him through the roots, through popular gestures. We follow the exact sequence of words as reported in the Gospel of Mark: You take It, this is My body... In first place is that verb, clear and precise like a concrete gesture, like hands that open and tense. Jesus does not ask the apostles to adore, contemplate, venerate that broken bread, He asks much more: “I want to be taken by your hands like gift, to be in your mouth like bread, inside you like blood, to make me a cell, a breath, a thought of you. Your life“. Here is the miracle, the heartbeat, the purpose: take. To become what you receive. What is shocking is what happens to the disciple more even than in what happens in the bread and wine: He wants the warm flow of His life to flow through our veins, His courage may take root in our hearts, that we set out to live human existence as He lived it. God in me, my heart is absorbed, He absorbs my heart, and we become one, the same vocation: do not leave this world without to have become a piece of good bread for someone’s hunger and joy and strength. God became man for this reason, because man did do as God does. Jesus gave His two simple commands, He doubled them, and in every Eucharist we listen to them again: take and eat, take and drink. What is the use of a Bread, a God, closed in the tabernacle, to be exposed from time to time to veneration and to incense? Jesus did not come into the world to create new liturgies. But for freeing and loving children. Live His life. “Who eats My flesh and drinks My blood, he abides in Me, and I into him.” Body and blood indicate His entire existence, His human story, His carpenter’s hands with the scent of wood and the nail holes, His tears, His passions, the dust of the streets, His feet soaked in nard and then in blood, and the house that fills with perfume and words that taste like heaven. He abides in me and I in Him, people, when they love, say the same things: come to live in my house, my house is your house. God says it to us. Before I said, “I’m hungry,” He said, “I want to be with you”. He looked for me, waits for me and gives Himself. You don’t deserve a God like this: you just have to welcome Him and let yourself be loved

10th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME / The Lord is goodness and mercy. Jesus, outside the box even for his relatives – Mk 3:20-35

From the south, from Judea, an inquiry commission of theologians get over while from the hills of Galilee His disciples come down to take him away. It seems like a pincer maneuver against that subversive, that outlaw, outlaw master who made Capernaum His headquarters, of a twelve boys army who still feel like fish, of a word that heals weapons. It is the second time that Jesus’ clan descends from Nazareth to the lake, this time they also brought His mother; they come to take Him: He’s out of His mind, He’s gone crazy. He is saying and doing things that are over the top, against common sense, against Nazareth’s common sense: synagogue, shop and family. From the commission of inquiry Jesus receives the mark of excommunication: son of the devil. Yet the pedagogy of Jesus still once enchants: but He called them, He calls near those who judged Him from afar; He talks to them who are not themselves deign to speak to Him, He explains, tries to make them think. Uselessly. Jesus has enemies, we see, but He is not an enemy of Nobody. He is the friend of life. His mother and His brothers and sisters, standing outside, sent for Him. The Gospel of Mark, so concrete and dry, It brings us back down to earth, after the last great feasts, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity, Body and Blood of Christ. The Gospel starts again from the house, from below: He does not hide, with great honesty, that during the public ministry of Jesus, the relationships with the mother and the whole family are marked by contrasts and distance. Indeed, it recounts one of the most painful moments in Mary’s life:: who is My mother? Harsh words that hurt the heart, almost a denial: woman, I no longer recognize you as mine mother … The only time that Mary appears in the Gospel of Mark is the image of a mother who does not understand Her son, who does not  favors Him. She who could generate God, was unable to understand Him completely. Her greater familiarity did not spare Her from the greater misunderstandings. Counting on the Messiah as one of the family, having Him at the table, knowing His tastes, did not make it any less difficult for Her the way of faith. She too, like us, is a pilgrim in faith. Jesus does not contest the family, on the contrary He would like to extend the warm and good relationships of the home to a mass level, multiply them to infinity, to offer a home to all, to house all the lost children: Whoever does the will of the Father is for me a mother, a sister, brother... Besieged, Jesus doesn’t stop, He doesn’t turn back, He continues on His journey. Lots of crowds and lots of solitude. But where is He life passes and flourishes. And a dream of motherhood, sisterhood and brotherhood that He cannot give up.

11th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME It’s nice to give thanks to the Lord. The fullness of the Kingdom and the joy of the harvest – Mk 4:26-34 Two small parables (the wheat that sprouts by itself, the mustard seed): stories of the earth that Jesus turns into stories of God. With words that they know of home, of garden, of field, it takes us to the school of seeds and mother earth, it erases the distance between God and life. We are summoned before the mystery of the bud and of the things that are born, called “to decipher our sacredness, exploring that of the world” (P. Ricoeur). In the Gospel, the green pin of a wheat sprout and a tiny seed become characters in an announcement, a revelation of divine (Laudato si’), a syllable of God’s message. Those who have pure and marvelous eyes, like those of a child, can see the divine that it shines from the depths of every being (T. De Chardin). The earth and the Kingdom are an appeal to wonder, to a long feeling that becomes an attitude of life. It’s moving and fascinating read the world with the gaze of Jesus, starting not from a giant cedar on the top of the mountain (like Ezekiel in the first reading) but from the home garden. Light and liberating to read the Kingdom of heaven from below, from where the sprout that emerges looks at the world, close to the ground, or rather: “I shaved the daisies” as a child corrected me, or the lilies of the field. The soil produces itself, whether you sleep or wake: more things important things should not be sought, they must be waited for (S. Weil), they do not depend on us, you must not force them. Because God is at work, and all the world is a womb, a river of life flowing towards fullness. The mustard seed is headed towards the great future plant that it does not have other purpose than that of being useful to other living beings, even if only to the birds of the sky. It is in nature’s nature to be a gift: to welcome, to offer shelter, coolness, food, refreshment. It is in the nature of God and also of man. God it acts not by subtraction, never, but always by addition, addition, intensification, increase of life: there is a dynamic of growth settled at the center of life. The Creator’s unshakable trust in the small signs of life calls us to take the economy of life seriously smallness leads us to look at the world, and our wounds, in another way. To look for the kings of tomorrow among the discarded and the poor of today, a take young people and children very seriously, to take care of the weak link in the social chain, to find merit where the economy of greatness can only see demerits. Splendid vision of Jesus on the world, on the person, on the earth: the world is an immense birth, where everything is on the move, with its own rhythm mysterious, towards the fullness of the Kingdom. Which will come with the flowering of life in all its forms. Towards the flowering of life, The Kingdom is presented as a contrast, not a clash, but a contrast of growth, of life. God as a vital contrast. A dynamic that yes settles at the center of life. towards the paradigm of fullness and fruitfulness. The Gospel dreams of confident harvests, ready fruit, bread on the table table. Positivity. Joy of the harvest.

12th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Give thanks to the Lord, his love is forever. God saves us not “from” but “in” the storm – Mk 4:35-41 The small boats are safe, moored in the harbor, but that’s not what they were built for. They are made to sail, and also to face storms. We are sailors on fragile driftwood in the sea of life, on walnut shells. Yet the words of Jesus reach us: let’s cross to the other shore, let’s go further. There is a beyond that inhabits things. It is not in the spirit of the Gospel to remain safe, moored to the dock or stopped at anchor. Our place is not in successes, but in a boat on the sea, open sea, where sooner or later during the navigation of life, rough waters and contrary winds will come. True pedagogy is that of Jesus: transmitting, not fear, the passion for open sea, the desire to sail ahead, the joy of the high and infinite sea. During the short voyage, Jesus falls asleep, exhausted. I don’t know why storms arise in life. Luke, Mark and Matthew don’t know it: they tell of storms that are always the same and all without a reason. I too would like an always clear sky and clear lights to indicate navigation, a safe and nearby port. But in the meantime the boat, a symbol of me, of my fragile life, of the great community, resists in the meantime. And not for dying of the wind, not because the problems end, but because of the humble miracle of the rowers who do not abandon the oars, who support each hope of the other. Instead, we seem to be abandoned as soon as the wind of an illness, of a family crisis, of painful relationships, of a pandemic. We feel shipwrecked in a story where God seems to sleep, rather than intervene immediately, at the first signs of fatigue, at the first bite of fear, as soon as the pain claws at us like a predator So here’s the cry: Don’t you care that we die? Eloquence of gestures: he woke up, threatened the wind and the sea…, why yes, I care about you. I care about the sparrows of the sky and you are worth more than many sparrows; I care about the lilies of the field and you are more beautiful than all the flowers of world. You matter to me so much that I have counted the hairs on your head and all the fear you carry in your heart. And I’m with you, to block the darkness, light in the deepest reflection of your tears. In my nights God is with me; He intertwines His breath with mine, and «does not save me» from the storm but “in” the storm. He does not protect from pain but in pain. He does not save the Son from the cross but in the cross »(D. Bonhoeffer). He he is with us, saving us from all our shipwrecks, he has been here since before the miracle: he is in the strong arms of the men on the oars; in the firm grip of helmsman; in the hands that empty the bottom of the boat. He is in all those who, together, perform the exact and simple gestures that they protect life.

13th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME / B I will exalt you, Lord, because you have raised me up. In pain and in life Jesus holds your hand – Mk 5:21-43

There is a house, in Capernaum, where death has placed its nest; an important house, that of the head of the synagogue. Powerful house, and yet incapable of guaranteeing the life of a child. Jairus came out, walked in search of Jesus, found Him, fell at His feet: my little daughter is dying, come! She is twelve years old, the age at which one must flourish, not succumb! Jesus hears her father’s cry and interrupts what He was doing, He changes His plans, and they walk together, the free Master of the streets and the man of the institution. The pain and love have begun to beat the rhythm of absolute music, and Jesus enters it: they are our roots, and he reaches us, with mother’s step, right through the roots. From the house they came to say: your daughter is dead. Why are you still bothering the master? The storm definitive has arrived. The last hope has fallen. And then Jesus turns, approaches, blocks the pain: don’t be afraid, just have faith. Once they reach the house, Jesus takes her father and mother with Him and recomposes the vital circle of affection, the circle of love that brings life. “Love is to say: you will not die” (Gabriel Marcel). He also takes His three favorite disciples with Him and puts them in the school of existence. He doesn’t explain them because she dies at twelve years old, because pain exists, but he takes them with Him in the melee with the last enemy. «He took the hand of the girl”. Jesus a hand that takes you by the hand. Beautiful image: God and a little girl, hand in hand. He was not allowed under the law touching a dead person became impure, but Jesus smells of freedom. And He teaches us that we need to touch people’s desperation be able to raise them. A story of hands: in all homes, next to the bed of pain or that of birth, the Lord is always an outstretched hand, as it is for Peter when he is sinking in the storm. Not a pointing finger, but a strong hand grabbing you. Suchness kum. Girl get up. He can help her, support her, but it is she, it is only she who can recover: get up. And immediately the little girl got up and walked, returned to the embrace of her, to a vertical and moving life. “She ordered her parents to feed her.” She says to those who love her: guard this life with your lives, make it grow, push it to become the best of what it can become. Nourished with dreams, caresses and trust of her the reborn  child heart of her. And then God repeats on every creature, on every flower, on every man, on every woman, on every boy and girl, the blessing of those ancient words: “Talità kum. Young life, I say to you: arise, arise, live again, shine. she Return to hugs.

14th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Our eyes are turned to the Lord. Thus the rejected Jesus continues to love us – Mk 6:1-6 «But isn’t he the carpenter, the brother of James, Joses, Judas and Simon?»

A few pages earlier these same brothers went down to Capernaum for bring Him home, their strange cousin, because they said: He’s gone, He’s out of His mind; they call Him a heretic, we must also protect Him from Himself. And now in Nazareth, where everyone knows each other, where everyone knows everything about everyone (or at least that’s what they think), people are surprised by speeches that never heard, of words that seem to come not from sacred scripture, as they have always heard it in the synagogue, and perhaps not even from God: from where on earth do these things come from? And it was a source of scandal for them. What shocks them? Humanity, the familiarity of a God who He abandons the temple and enters the ordinariness of every home, becoming the “domestic God” (Julian of Norwich, 13th century), the God of the house. Jesus, a rabbi without titles and with calluses on His hands, began to talk about God with parables that taste like home, land, a garden, where a sprout, a mustard seed, a fig in spring become characters of a revelation. It scandalizes the humility of God. It can’t be this is our God. Where is the glory and splendor of the Most High? And his disciples, these guys from outside, only familiar with boats, what do they have? more than Joses, James, Judas and Simon? Weren’t the young people of the country better? A prophet is only despised in his own house… An observation that reaches us all, surrounded as we are by syllables of God, drops of prophecy on the lips and in the gestures of a thousand people, at home, on the street, at work, or in another part of the world. But we: I’m not up to par, let’s say; and we measure them, we weigh them, we give them grades, we make excuses, rather than opening up. And God is amazed, but He does not give up and repeats: “whether they listen or not, let them know that at least a prophet is among them” (Ez. 2,5). We are surrounded by prophets, perhaps small ones, maybe minimal, but continuously sent. And we, like the inhabitants of Nazareth, squander and squander our prophets, without listening the unheard of God. Even Jesus is surprised at the refusal of His fellow villagers, but He does not give up. His response is neither resentment nor condemnation, much less depression, but a wonder that reveals how God has a heart of light: “No wonder could work there”. But immediately yes He corrects: “He alone laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them”. The rejected God still heals, even for a few, even for just one. The rejected lover continues to love, even without return. God is not tired of us: He is only amazed. And then He “sends prophets again, certain men of God, men with hearts on fire, and you come on to speak their bushes” (Turoldo).

15th SUNDAY ORDINARY T. Show us, Lord, your mercy. Life without demons and a healed world – Mk 6:7-13

He called the Twelve to Him and began sending them. Every time God calls you, He sets you on a journey. Our God loves horizons and gaps. Two by two: because two is not simply the sum of one plus one, it is the beginning of us, the first cell of the community. He ordered them to take nothing but a stick. Just a stick to support the tiredness and a friend to rest your heart on. Neither bread nor bag, nor money, nor two tunics. They will be daily dependent on heaven. You see them advancing from a bend in the road, it seems beggars under the sky of Abraham. People who know that their secret is beyond them, «infinitely small announcers, because only like this the announcement will be infinitely great” (G. Vannucci). But if you look closer, you can notice that in addition to the stick they carry something: a jar of oil on their belt. Theirs is a gentle pilgrimage and body to body, house to house healer. The mission of the disciples is simple: they are called to carry life forward, the weak life: they anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. They deal with life, like the prophet Amos, they chase away demons, they touch the sick and their hands say: «God is here, he is close to you, with love». They saw with Jesus how wounds are touched, how he never runs away from pain, they have learned the art of caress and proximity. And they proclaimed that people should convert: convert to God’s dream: one world healed, life without demons, relationships become harmonious and happy, a world of open doors and breaches in the walls. Their hands on the sick they preach that God is already here. He is near me with love. He is here and heals life. Francis warned his friars: one can also preach with words, when there is nothing else left. If somewhere they don’t welcome you and don’t listen to you, go away and shake it up dust under your feet as a testimony to them. Jesus also prepares them for failure and the courage not to give up. Like the prophets, who believe in the word of God even more than in its fulfillment: Isaiah will not see the virgin give birth, nor will Hosea see Israel led back into the desert of first love. But the prophets they love the word of God even more than His successes. The Twelve have that same faith as prophets: they believe in the Kingdom well before see it take place. The ideal in them matters more than what they can achieve from it. Beautiful Gospel, where a triple economy emerges: of smallness, of the road, of prophecy. The Twelve go, smaller than the small; on the road that is free, that belongs to everyone, that doesn’t stop never and takes you away, like God with Amos; they go, prophets of God’s dream: a world totally healed.

16th SUNDAY ORDINARY T The Lord is my shepherd: I don’t need anything. As long as there is compassion the world can hope – Mk 6:30-34

Come aside and rest a bit. His parents returned happy from that expedition two by two, from that mission in which He had them launch themself, a pilgrimage of the Word and of poverty. The Twelve met many people, they did it with the art learned from Jesus: the art of closeness and caress, of healing from the demons of life. Now is the time to meet yourself, to reconnect with what happens in your vital space . There is a time for everything, says the wise man of Israel, a time to act and a time to question the reasons for acting. A time to go from house to house and a time to “make home” among friends and with oneself. There is so much to do in Israel, sick people, lepers, widows of Nain, tears, yet Jesus, instead of throwing His disciples into the vortex of pain and hunger, brings them away with Him and teaches them the wisdom of living. We live today in a culture where income that must grow and productivity that must always increase have convinced us that It is commitments that give value to life. Jesus teaches us that life is valid regardless of our commitments (G. Piccolo). The people understood, and the unstoppable flow of people reaches them even in that secluded place. And Jesus instead of giving the priority to His program, He gives it to the people. The reason is said in two words: feel compassion. Term of a  beautiful meaning, infinite one, a term that recalls the bowels, and indicates a bite, a cramp, a spasm inside. Jesus’ first reaction: He feels pain for the pain of the world. And He began to teach many things. Perhaps, we would say, there were more pressing problems for the crowd: heal, feed, liberate; more immediate needs than teaching. Maybe we have forgotten that there is a life deep within us who continue to mortify, starve, dehydrate. Jesus turns to this, like a handful of light thrown into the heart of each one, to light the way. This Jesus who makes himself available, who doesn’t spare himself, who lets it dictate to others the agenda, generous with feelings, delivers something great to the crowd: «You can give the bread, it’s true, but whoever receives the bread may not be in extreme need. Instead of a gesture of affection every tired heart needs. And every heart is tired” (Sister Maria di Campello). It is the great teaching to the Twelve: learning a gaze that has emotion and tenderness. The words they will be born. And it applies to each of us: when you learn compassion, when you find the ability to be moved, the world does graft into your soul, and we become one river. If there are still those among us who know how to be moved by man, this world can still hope.

17th SUNDAY T. ODINARIO Open your hand, Lord, and satisfy every living person. That multiplied bread that calls to brotherhood – Jn 6:1-15

Sunday of bread that overflows from hands, from baskets, which seems to never end. And while they were handing it out, it didn’t come to to miss; and as it passed from hand to hand, it remained in each hand. There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fishes… A barley loaf, the first cereal that it ripens; a boy, in which a man matures. That first fruit of humanity understood everything, no one asked him anything and the boy made everything available. He is this is the first spark of the response to the crowd’s hunger. But what are five loaves for 5,000: one for a thousand. The Gospel underlines the disproportion between the little starting point and the innumerable hunger that besieges. Disproportion, however, is also the name of hope, which has reasons that reason does not know. And the Christian cannot measure his choices only on the reasonable, on the possible. Why should we believe in a Risen One, if we are tied to the possible? We feel the same disproportion when faced with immense problems of our world. I only have five loaves of bread, and the poors are legion. Yet Jesus doesn’t care about quantity, enough of it even less, much less, a crumb. it is  the madness of generosity. And in fact, as soon as they tell him the poetry and courage of this boy feels like a spring snapping inside him: Make them sit down! Now it’s possible to start tackling hunger! Jesus took the loaves and after giving thanks He gave them… John does not report how this happens. How certain miracles happen is not we will never know. They’re just there. There are even too many. There are, when the law of generosity wins: little bread broken with the others is mysteriously sufficient; our bread jealously kept for us is the beginning of hunger: «In the world there is bread sufficient for the hunger of all, but insufficient for the greed of a few” (Gandhi). He took the loaves and after giving thanks He gave them… Three blessed verbs: take, thank, donate. Jesus is not the master of the bread, He receives it, He is crossed by it, a simple place of ride. When we consider ourselves the masters of things, we profane their soul, we ruin the air, the water, the earth, the bread. Nothing is ours, we receive and we give, we are crossed by a life that comes before us and goes beyond us. He gave thanks: to the Father and the nameless boy, to the soil and the autumn rain, to the millstone and the fire, mother and father of bread. Everything comes to us, it is life that hosts us, a gift that comes «from a divine labyrinth of causes and effects» (M. Gualtieri). What does it do life a sacrament of communion. And he gave them. Because life is like breath, which you cannot hold or accumulate; it’s like a manna that doesn’t last for tomorrow. Giving is living.

18th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME / B Give us, Lord, the bread of heaven. The work of the Lord is to nourish life – Jn 6:24-35

Jesus has just performed the “sign” that He cares about most, the shared bread, and it is also the most misunderstood, the least understood. There in fact, people look for it, reach it and would like to grab it as a guarantee against any future hunger. But the Gospel of Jesus does not it provides bread, but rather mild and powerful leaven to the heart of history, to make it flow upwards, towards indestructible life. In front of them Jesus announces His absolute claim: just as I have satisfied your hunger for one day, so I can fill your depth of your life! And they can’t follow Him. Like them, even I, who I am a creature of the earth, prefer bread, it makes me live, I feel it in my mouth, I taste it, I swallow it, it’s like that concrete and immediate. God and eternity remain elusive, vague ideas, little more than a blur of words. And I don’t judge them, those of Capernaum, I don’t feel superior to them: there is so much hunger on earth that for many God can only have the form of a bread. A fundamental misunderstanding then begins, a dialogue on two different levels: What is God’s work? And Jesus responds drawing the friendly face of God before them: Just as He once gave you the manna bread , so today God still gives. Two words very simple and yet the keystone of biblical revelation: nourishing life is the work of God. God does not ask, God gives. He doesn not demands, He offers. God doesn’t demand, He gives everything. But what exactly does the God of Jesus give? Nothing among things or consumer goods: «He cannot give anything less of Himself. But by giving us Himself, He gives us everything” (Caterina of Siena). We are before one of the peaks of the Gospel, one of the most beautiful names of the Lord: He is, in life, the giver of life. The gift of God is God who gives Himself. One of the most beautiful names of Jesus: I am the bread of life. From His hands life flows unlimitedly and unstoppable. Peter will confirm it a little later: «Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have words that makes life to be alive.” Words that give life to the spirit, mind, heart, eyes and hands. God’s work is a warm current of love that enters and makes life flourish roots of every human being. So that you become, like Him, a giver of life in life. This is the work of God, to believe in Him who He sent. At the heart of faith is the tenacious, sweet trust that the work of God is Jesus: a high and luminous face of the human, free like no one, healer of disaffection, which urges you to become the best of what you can become. No threatening appearance in Him, but only the two open wings of a hen who protects and guards his chicks (Lk 13.34), and makes them grow with combative tenderness, against everything that is bad for life.

19th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is. Thus Jesus is the bread of life and force of attraction – Jn 6:41-51

I am the bread that came down from heaven.

In a single sentence Jesus collects and interweaves three images: bread, sky, descending. Power of writing, creativity of the Gospels, and even before Power of a  language so full of imagination and breakthroughs that are typical of the poet from Nazareth. I am bread, but not like a handful of flour and water passed through the fire: bread because my job is to nourish the bottom of life. I am heaven that descends down to earth. Earth with sky is garden. Without it, it is dust that has no breath. some contestation arised in the synagogue: but what kind of bread and what kind of sky!? We know everything about you and your family… And here is the key of the story. Jesus has within Himself something that goes beyond. Something that applies to all the reality: there is a part of the sky that makes up the earth; a “beyond” that inhabits all the things; our secret is not within us, it is beyond us. Like bread, which has the dust of the ground into it and the gold of the sun, the hands of the sower and those of the reaper; It suffered the harshness of the millstone and the fire; it sprouted as it is called by the ear future; it was nourished by light and now it can nourish others. Like bread, Jesus is a son of the earth and a Son of heaven. And He adds a beautiful phrase: no one can come to me unless the Father who sent Me draws him up to Heaven. Here is a new image of God: not the judge, but the strength of attraction of the cosmos, the force of celestial gravity, the force of cohesion of atoms and planets, the force of every communion. Inside each one There is a tireless force of divine attraction at work within us, calling us to embrace beauty and tenderness. And we will never become real, never ourselves, never happy, if we do not set out on the roads of enchantment for everything that calls us to embrace. Jesus says: let the Father attract, let communion speak deeply, and not either evil or fear. Then yes that “everyone will be instructed by God”, educated with gestures and words and dreams that attract us and convey well-being, because they are clear and healthy, they taste like fresh bread and life. The bread that I will give is My flesh given for the life of the world. Always the word “life”, Jesus’ pounding certainty that He has something unique to give so that we can live better. But he doesn’t say my “body”, but my “flesh”. In the Gospel of John meat indicates the original and fragile humanity that is ours: the word became flesh. I give you this humanity of mine, take it as a high and luminous measure of living. Learn from me, stop the bleeding of humanity in history. Be human, because the more human you are, the more the Word manifests itself divine germ that is into the people. If we feed ourselves in this way with the gospel and humanity, we will become good news for the world.

 ASSUMPTION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY – Evening mass Arise Lord, You and the ark of Your power. Magnificat, an open window on the future – Lk 11:27-28

Luke offers us, on this feast of the Assumption of Mary, the only evangelical page in which women are the protagonists. Two mothers, both “impossibly” pregnant, they are the first prophetesses of the New Testament. Sun, no other presence, except that of the mystery of God pulsating in the womb. Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb! Elisabeth teaches us the first word of every true dialogue: to those who are close to us, to those who share the road and home, to those who bring me light, to those who bring a hug, I repeat Her first word: may You be blessed; You are a blessing that has come to my life! Elizabeth introduced the melody, she began to beat the rhythm of the soul, and Mary became music and dance, Her body is a psalm: My soul magnifies the Lord! Where does Mary’s song come from? She felt God enter history, come as life in the womb, intervene not with deeds spectacular of commanders or heroes, but through the humble and amazing miracle of life: a girl who says YES, an old woman who flourishes again, a six month old baby dancing with joy in his mothers embrace. She comes through the miracle of all who save lives, on earth and in sea. The Magnificat is the gospel of Mary, the good news about Her reaching all the generations. Ten times she repeats: it is Him who has looked at me, it is Him who does great things, which He has unfolded, which He has scattered, which He has overthrown, which He has raised, which He has filled, which He has sent back, who helped, who remembered… it’s Him, ten times over. The cornerstone of faith is not what I do for God, but what God does for me; salvation is that He loves me, not that I do I love. And whether I am loved depends on Him, it does not depend on me. Mary sees a God with His hands entangled in the thick of life. And She uses al verbs past, with a prophetic stratagem, as if everything had already happened. Instead it’s Her bold way of saying that it will be done, with absolute certainty, a new earth and sky, that God’s future is as certain as the past, that this world brings another world into womb. Praying the Magnificat means looking out with her onto the balcony of the future. Saint Mary, taken up into heaven, victorious over the dragon, brings down upon us a blessing of hope, consoling, over everything that represents our pain in living: a blessing on the years that pass, on the tenderness denied, on the loneliness suffered, on the decay of this body of ours, on the corruption of death, on the suffering of dear faces, on our small or large red dragon, which however will not win, because beauty and tenderness are, in time and eternity, stronger than violence.

20th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is. Eternal life is already here, in the flesh and blood of Jesus – Jn 6:51-58

A Gospel of only eight verses, and Jesus repeating eight times: Whoever eats my flesh will live forever. Almost an incantatory rhythm, a divine monotony, in the style of John which advances in concentric and ascending circles, like a spiral; like a stone you throw in the water and you see the circles of the waves getting wider and wider. Eight times, Jesus insists on why eat His flesh: for simply live, to really live. It’s one thing to live, another thing to just survive. It is the pressing certainty on the part of Jesus that he possesses the secret that changes the direction, the meaning, the flavor of the whole life. Whoever eats my flesh has eternal life. With the verb in the present tense: “has”, not “will have”. Eternal life is a free and authentic, just, who gets up and doesn’t give up, who does things that deserve not to die. A life like that of Jesus, capable of loving like no one else. Blood and flesh is a word that indicates the full humanity of Jesus, his carpenter’s hands with the scent of wood, his tears, his passions, his hugs, the feet soaked in spikenard and the house filled with perfume and friendship. And here is a surprise, a thing unpredictable. Jesus does not say: take my wisdom upon yourselves, eat my holiness, the sublime that is in me. Instead he says: take it my humanity, my way of inhabiting the earth and of living relationships as a leaven of yours. Feed on my way of being human, how a child who is still in his mother’s womb feeds on his blood. Jesus is not talking about the sacrament of the Eucharist, but about the sacrament of His existence: eat and drink every drop and every fiber of me. He wants the warm flow of His life to flow through our veins, for His courage to take root in our hearts, so that we set out to live human existence as He lived it. He became man for this, so that man might become like God. Then eat and drink Christ means taking Him as measure, leaven, energy. Not “going to receive Communion” but “making ourselves the sacrament of communion”. At that time the fundamental movement is not our going to Him, it is instead He who comes to us. He on the way, He who travels the heavens, He happy to see me arrive, that He says to me: I’m happy you’re here. I can only welcome Him in amazement. Before I say, “I’m hungry,” He has said: “Take and eat”, He sought me, He waited for me and He gives Himself. Take, eat! His words that surprise me every time, like a declaration of love: “I want to be in your hands as a gift, in your mouth like bread, in your depths like blood, to make me a cell, a breath, a thought of you. Your life“.

21st SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME Taste and see how good the Lord is. God, there is no one else to whom we can entrust our lives – Jn 6:60-69 

John stages the account of a dramatic crisis. After the long speech in the synagogue of Capernaum on His flesh as food, Jesus sees the shadow of failure looming: many of His disciples withdrew and no longer went with Him. And they clearly explain: this word is hard for us. Who can listen to it? It had been hard for the rich young man too: You sell everything you have and give it to the poors. The words on the mountain were hard: blessed are the persecuted, blessed are those who weep. But what Jesus now proposes is not a new morality, more difficult than ever, but an even more revolutionary vision, an even more subversive faith: I am the bread of God; I transmit the life of God; My flesh gives life to the world. No one had ever said “I” with this absolute claim. No one had ever spoken of God like this: a God who does not shed blood, sheds His blood; a God who goes to die of love, who makes Himself small like a piece of bread, makes Himself food for men. The religion of external practices, of rites, of obligations is over, this is the religion of being one with God: I in Him, He in me. The turning point of the story occurs around the disconcerting words of Jesus: do you also want to leave? The Master does not try to stop them, to convince them, He does not beg them: wait a moment, stay, I will explain better. There is sadness in His words, but also pride and challenge, and above all an appeal to the freedom of each: you are free, go or stay, but choose! I am even called to choose again, either to go or stay. And Peter’s wonderful answer comes to my aid: Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life. You alone. God alone. A beautiful beginning. Nothing better than this. And it excludes an entire world. You alone. There is no one else to whom I can entrust my life. You alone have the words: God has words, the sky is not empty and silent, and His word is creative, it rolls away the stone of the tomb, conquers the frost, opens roads and clouds and encounters, opens caresses and fires. You alone have the words of life. Words that give life, they give it to every part of me. They give life to the heart, they give it either courage and horizons, they dissolve its hardness. They give life to the mind because the mind lives on freedom and truth, and you are the truth that sets us free. Life to the spirit, to this divine part deposited in us, to this portion of heaven that composes us. Words that also give life to the body because in Him we are, we live and breathe; and his words move the hands and make them generous and ready, they sow new eyes, bright and welcoming. Words of eternal life, which bring eternity as a gift to all that is most beautiful in our hearts. Which make life alive, finally.

22nd SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME He who fears the Lord will dwell in His tent. The secret to having more love and more freedom – Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23 

These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away. Today Jesus directs our attention to the heart, those interior oceans that threaten us and generate us; that sometimes submerge us in shadows and suffering but that more often produce islands of generosity, beauty and light: be free and sincere. Jesus came from the true fields of the world where life cries and laughs, And now what does He find? People who connect religion to stains, hands and washed dishes, to external practices. Jesus, instead of being discouraged, becomes an echo of the ancient cry of the prophets: true religion is to purify the heart in the image of the Father of lights (James 1:17): it is from the hearts of men that evil intentions come out… It is the great turning point: the return to the heart. Moving from a religion of external practices to a religion of interiority, because the self exists by gathering itself not by dispersing itself, and because when you gather yourself you make the discovery that God is near: “I was looking for you outside of me and you were within me” (St. Augustine). Return to your heart: the term heart appears almost a thousand times in the Bible, which does not indicate the seat of feelings or affectivity, but is the place where actions and dreams are born, where one chooses life or death, where one is sincere and free, where the attraction of God takes hold, and seduces and burns, as at Emmaus. The return to the heart is a precept as old as human wisdom («know thyself» was written on the pediment of the temple of Delphi), but it is not enough to save, because in the heart of man there is everything: roots of poison and fruits of light; fields of good grain and diseased herbs. The decisive action lies in evangelizing the heart, in fertilizing with the Gospel our clods of hardness, our intolerances and closures, our dark desires and our disguised idols… Jesus, Master of the heart, exegete and interpreter of desire, places his holy hands in the deepest tissue of the person, on the engine of life, and saves desire from its death drives: from within, that is, from the heart of man, come evil intentions: prostitution, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness… and an impressive list of twelve evil things follows, which make life impure and empty. But you do not give them citizenship, do not legitimize them, do not let them leave you, do not allow them to gallop on the prairies of the world, because they are signs of death. Evangelizing then means to bring down on the heart a happy message. The joyful announcement that Jesus brings is this: it is possible to live better, for everyone, and I know the secret: a heart free and on the path, that grows towards more love, more conscience, more freedom.

23rd SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME Praise the Lord, my soul. «Ephphatha»: when you open your door, life comes – Mk 7:31-37 They brought to Jesus a deaf-mute. A man imprisoned in silence, a life without words and without music, but who did not suffer shipwreck, because he was welcomed within a circle of friends who took care of him: and they brought him to Jesus. Healing begins when someone takes up the very human art of accompaniment. And they asked Him to lay His hand on them. But Jesus does much more, it is not enough for Him to lay his hands in a hieratic gesture, He wants to show the excess and closeness of God: He took him aside, away from the crowd: «You and I alone, now only you count and, for this time, nothing is more important than you». I imagine them looking into each other’s eyes, and Jesus taking that face in His hands. Very corporeal and delicate gestures follow: Jesus placed His fingers on the ears of the deaf man. The fingers: like the sculptor who delicately models the clay he has shaped. Like a caress. There are no words, only the tenderness of gestures. Then with saliva he touched his tongue. An intimate, engaging gesture: I give you something of mine, something that is in the mouth of man, together with the breath and the word, symbols of life. A Gospel of contacts, of smells, of flavors. Physical contact did not displease Jesus, on the contrary. And bodies become a holy place of encounter with the Lord, a laboratory of the Kingdom. Salvation is not foreign to bodies, it passes through them, which are not paths of evil but “divine shortcuts” (J.P.Sonnet), Then looking towards the sky, He let out a sigh. A sigh is not a cry that expresses power, it is not a sob, but the breath of hope, calm and humble, the sigh of the prisoner (Ps 102:21), and Jesus is also a prisoner with that man. And He told  him: Ephphatha, open up! In Aramaic, in the dialect of the house, in the mother tongue, starting from the roots: open up, as one opens a door to a guest, a window to the sun, arms to love. Open up to others and to God, even with your wounds, through which life exits and life enters. If you open your door, life comes. A healed life is one that opens up to others: and immediately his ears were opened, the knot in his tongue was loosened and he spoke correctly. First the ears. Because the first service to render to God and man is always listening. If you do not know how to listen, you lose the word, you become mute or you speak without touching anyone’s heart. Perhaps the aphasia of the church today depends on the fact that we no longer know how to listen, to God and to man. An eloquent detail: only those who know how to listen can speak. A gift to be tirelessly asked for, for the deaf-mute in us: give us, Lord, a heart that listens (see 1 Kings 3:9). Then thoughts and words that know of heaven will be born.

24th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living. The question of Jesus that questions my heart – Mk 8:27-35 

And on the way He asked: a continuous, prolonged action, a lifestyle: road and questions. Jesus is not the answer, He is the question; He is not the arrival spot, but the force that makes life to set sails, dismantle the tents at sunrise. The many questions of the gospel function as a meeting point between Him and us. People, who do they say that I am? Not a simple survey to measure His popularity, Jesus wants to understand what of His message has reached the hearts. He realized that not everything worked in communication, something broke in that Galilean crisis that all the evangelists report. In fact, the people’s response, if it may seem gratifying, instead reveals a distorted perception of Jesus: for some He is a master moralizer of customs (“they say You are John the Baptist“); others have perceived in Him the strength that knocks down idols and false prophets (“they say you are Elijah“); still others do not perceive anything new, only the echo of old messages already heard (“they say you are one of the prophets“). But Jesus is nothing among the things of yesterday. He is the newness on the move. And the questioning continues, becomes direct: but who do you say that I am? To bring out the ambiguity that dwells in everyone’s heart, Jesus questions Himself. It is not easy to submit to the evaluation of others, it costs a lot of humility and freedom to ask: what do you think of me? But Jesus is without masks and without fears, free like no one else. You are the Christ, Peter exposes Himself, the meaning of Israel, the meaning of my life. At this point the register changes and the story becomes disconcerting: Jesus began to teach that Christ had to suffer a lot and be killed and on the third day rise again. How can Peter accept a losing Messiah? “You are the Messiah, the awaited one, what sense does a defeated Messiah have?” Then He takes him aside and begins to reproach him. He challenges him, points out another story and other dreams. And the tension rises, the dialogue becomes heated and culminates in very harsh words: go behind Me, Satan. Your place is to follow me. Peter is the voice of every ambiguity in life, this river that carries everything, mud and specks of gold, and passes through patches of sun and shadows; gives voice to that ambiguity without guilt (G. Piccolo), for which things are not clear to us, for which in our words we hear at the same time the sound of God (not even flesh or blood have revealed it to you) and the whisper of evil (you think according to the world). The solution is the one indicated to Peter («go behind me»). Jesus has given a caress to my wounds, has crossed my contradictions and makes me walk right there, along the «uncertain line that divides the light from the dark» (A. Camilleri).                                                                 25th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME The secret to having more love and more freedom  Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23  These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far away. Today Jesus directs our attention to the heart, those interior oceans that threaten us and generate us; that sometimes submerge us in shadows and suffering but that more often produce islands of generosity, beauty and light: be free and sincere. Jesus came from the true fields of the world where life cries and laughs, And now what does He find? People who connect religion to stains, hands and washed dishes, to external practices. Jesus, instead of being discouraged, becomes an echo of the ancient cry of the prophets: true religion is to purify the heart in the image of the Father of lights (Jm 1:17): it is from the hearts of men that evil intentions come out… It is the great turning point: the return to the heart. Moving from a religion of external practices to a religion of interiority, because the self exists by gathering itself not by dispersing itself, and because when you gather yourself you make the discovery that God is near: “I was looking for you outside of me and you were within me” (St. Augustine).    Return to your heart: the term heart appears almost a thousand times in the Bible, which does not indicate the seat of feelings or affectivity, but is the place where actions and dreams are born, where one chooses life or death, where one is sincere and free, where the attraction of God takes hold, and seduces and burns, as at Emmaus. The return to the heart is a precept as old as human wisdom («know thyself» was written on the pediment of the temple of Delphi), but it is not enough to save, because in the heart of man there is everything: roots of poison and fruits of light; fields of good grain and diseased herbs. The decisive action lies in evangelizing the heart, in fertilizing with the Gospel our clods of hardness, our intolerances and closures, our dark desires and our disguised idols…    Jesus, Master of the heart, exegete and interpreter of desire, places his holy hands in the deepest tissue of the person, on the engine of life, and saves desire from its death drives: from within, that is, from the heart of man, come evil intentions: prostitution, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness… and an impressive list of twelve evil things follows, which make life impure and empty.     But you do not give them citizenship, do not legitimize them, do not let them leave you, do not allow them to gallop on the prairies of the world, because they are signs of death. Evangelizing then means to bring down on the heart a happy message. The joyful announcement that Jesus brings is this: it is possible to live better, for everyone, and I know the secret: a heart free and on the path, that grows towards more love, more conscience, more freedom.                                                                              26th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME / The Lord’s precepts make the heart to rejoice. He who gives a sip of life is of God – Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48 Master, that man is not one of us. That stranger who works miracles, but who is not a member of the group; who improves people’s lives, but perhaps is a bit heretical or too free, is blocked. And at the head of the operation is John, the beloved disciple, the fine theologian, “the son of thunder”, but who is still the son of a small heart, bitten by jealousy. “You are not allowed to make the world a better place if you are not one of us!”. Form before substance, membership in the group before good, the idea before reality! Instead, Moses, in the first reading, gives such a liberating answer to those who tell him of two who are not on the list and yet prophesy: ​​if only they were all prophets… The answer of Jesus, the man without borders, is very articulated and very Moses-like: Let him do it! Do not draw borders. Our aim is not to increase the number of those who follow us, but to increase the good; to increase the number of those who, in many different ways, can experience the Kingdom of God, which is joy, freedom, and fullness. It is a great thing to see that for Jesus the ultimate proof of the goodness of faith does not lie in a theoretical adherence to the “name”, but in its ability to transmit humanity, joy, health, and life. Whoever gives a sip of life, belongs to God. This places us all, serenely and joyfully, alongside so many men and women, believers or non-believers in different ways, who however have life at heart and are passionate about it, who are capable of inventing miracles to bring a smile to someone’s face. The Gospel calls us to “stand beside them, dreaming of life together” (Evangelii Gaudium, 74). Whoever gives you a glass of water… will not lose his reward. A little water, almost nothing, something so simple and poor that no one is deprived of it. Jesus simplifies life: the whole Gospel in a glass of water. Faced with the invasiveness of evil, Jesus comforts: oppose evil with your glass of water; and then trust: the worst will not prevail. Moses and Jesus, teachers of the faith, invite us not to plant stakes but to love horizons, to look beyond the courtyard of the house, to the entire human camp, to the entire road to travel: lift your eyes, don’t you see how many seeds of the Spirit are flying everywhere? How many people fight for the lives of their brothers against modern demons: pollution, violence, fake news, corruption, and the economy that kills? And even if they are outside our camp, they are still prophets. They are the ones who hear the cry of the unpaid reapers (James 5:4) and give them back their word because everything that concerns the human adventure concerns us. Because everyone belongs to us and we belong to everyone.  27th SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME May the Lord bless us all the days of our life. From the beginning, the Lord has joined lives together – Mk 10:2-16  Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife? It is well known, the entire religious tradition, endorsed by the Word of God, legitimized it: yes, it is lawful. But Jesus distances Himself: what did Moses order you? As a Jew, He should have said: what did Moses order “us”, instead He marks His difference. Moses allowed a bill of divorce to be written. Jesus also distances Himself from Moses: because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote this rule. An enormous statement: the law that we call divine does not always, not all reflect the will of God, sometimes it is the reflection of our hard heart. In the beginning it was not like this. Jesus is not interested in moving the moral stakes forward or backward, disciplining life, but in inspiring it, igniting it, renewing it: the Gospel is not a moral, but a shocking liberation (G. Vannucci). It takes us by the hand and leads us into the territories of God, into His initial, original, original dream; it teaches us to look not from the point of view of the end of love, but of its beginning: for this reason the man will leave his father and mother, will unite with his wife and the two will become one flesh. God’s dream is the two who seek each other, the two who find each other, the two who love each other and who become one. Let no man separate what God has joined together. From the beginning God joins lives! This is his name: “God joins”, like a prophecy of communion and bond. He brings lives together, unites them, glue of atoms and the cosmos. Instead, the name of his enemy, the enemy of love and life, is exactly the opposite: the devil, that is, He-who-separates. The problem is brought to the root: no longer repudiation or not, but keeping alive the breath of the origin, committing oneself with all one’s strength to nourish God’s dream: protecting and guarding gestures, thoughts, words that in turn have the joyful power to protect love and join lives. Because love is fragile, and hungry for care. The real sin is not to transgress a rule, but God’s dream. And this happens upstream, it is a long thin web that is slowly woven with those harsh or indifferent behaviors that extinguish love: infidelity, lack of respect, offense to dignity, being on top of each other, the cause of daily mortification, rather than life. Jesus lays the foundations for our freedom: my behavior is not called to adapt to a law external to man, but to that internal norm that rekindles the face, protects the smile and the dream of God. So if you do not commit yourself to cultivating it, if you do not mend the tears, if your love over the years has become hard and aggressive instead of sweet and humble, you are repudiating the dream of God, you are already an adulterer in your heart.                                        28th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME Satisfy us, Lord, with your love: we will rejoice forever. – Mk 10:17-30 Jesus is on the road, the place He loved most: the road, which belongs to everyone, connects those who are far away, is free and open, a breach in the walls, loves horizons. And behold, a man, one without a name but rich (his identity stolen by money) runs towards Him. He runs, like someone in a hurry, in a hurry to live, to truly live. The man without a name is about to face a great risk: he asks Jesus to know the truth about himself. «Good Master, is my life or not? What must I do to be truly alive?». Eternal question. Universal. Jesus responds by listing five commandments and a precept. «Master, I have already done all this, forever. And yet…. Jesus looked at him and loved him. He loved him for that “and yet,” which tells of hunger and thirst for something else: observing the law has not filled his life. Jesus stares at him. That man has a terrifying experience, he feels Jesus’ gaze on him, he meets His loving eyes, he could sink inside. And if I were to continue the story I would say: now he follows him, now he is gripped by the enchantment, by the charm of the Lord, he cannot resist… Instead the conclusion goes in the direction you do not expect: “You lack one thing, go, sell, give to the poor…”. Give. You will be happy if you make someone happy. You are not what you have, but what you give. To give: a fearful verb. We want to take, hold on to, accumulate. To give to the poor… In the Gospel the verb to love is always translated with the verb to give. But the rich man goes away sad. We all have two lives at war with each other: one is made of things and everyday life and the second is nourished by calls and appeals, by vocation and dream. The rich man walks sadly: things and money have won; he will no longer follow life as an appeal, but only life as an ordinary existence, hostage to things. Three times today it is said that Jesus “looked”: with love, with concern, with encouragement. Faith is nothing other than my response to God’s courtship, an adventure that is born from an encounter, when God enters you and I give him time and heart. Here then is one of Jesus’ most beautiful words: everything is possible with God. He is capable of making a camel pass through the eye of a needle. God has the passion for the impossible. Ten camels will pass. Don Milani on his deathbed understood it: now I finally see the camel pass through the eye of the needle. It was he, the camel, he of a rich and powerful family, who passed through the eye of smallness. Lord, here we have left everything and followed you, what will we have in exchange? You will have in exchange a hundred brothers and a multiplied heart. “With my eyes in the sun at every dawn I know that giving up for you is the same as blooming” (M. Marcolini).                                                                         29th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME Give us, Lord, your love: we hope in you. Jesus surprises us: I came to serve – Mk 10:35-45 It is not like this among you! A beautiful expression that highlights the Christian difference. Others dominate, not be so among you. You will put yourselves alongside people, or at their feet, and not above. Others oppress. You instead will lift people, you will pull them up for another light, another sun, another breath. The glorious history of each one is not written by those who had the ability to dominate us, but by those who had the art of loving us: the glory of life. I came to give My life as a ransom for the multitude... Jesus redeems the humans, repaints the icon of what the person is, what life is  and what is not, brings out a treasure of light, of sun, of beauty from each one. He frees the new face of humanity, He redeems the human from the claws of the inhuman; He redeems the heart of man from the deadly power of indifference. Jesus is the healer of the sin of the world, which has only one name: lack of love. James and John, the “sons of thunder”, asked Him, with a childish tone: We want you to do to us what we want… The other apostles are indignant, they do it out of rivalry, out of jealousy, because the two brothers have tried to manipulate the community. But Jesus does not follow them, He goes ahead, saves the question of the two and also the indignation of the others: He calls them to Himself, in intimacy, heart to heart, and explains, argues. Because behind every human desire, even the most twisted, there is always a good matrix, a desire for life, for beauty, for harmony. Every human desire always has a healthy part behind it, even a very small one. But that is the part that should not be lost. Men are not bad, they are fragile and easily mistaken. “Even sin is often a wrong way to look for you” (D. M. Turoldo). The last sentence of the Gospel is of capital importance: I came to serve. The most disconcerting self-definition of Jesus. The most revolutionary and counter-current one. But which suddenly illuminates the heart of God, the meaning of the life of Christ, and therefore of the life of every man and every woman. A God who, while in our imagination is omnipotent, in his revelation is a servant. From omnipotent to servant. A complete novelty. Why did God create us? Many of us remember the answer of the catechism: To know, love and serve God in this life, and enjoy Him in the next. Jesus turns the perspective upside down, gives it a beauty and depth that stuns: we were created to be loved and served by God, here and forever. God exists for you, to love you and serve you, to give His life for you, to be surprised by us, by these unpredictable, free, splendid, creative and fragile children. God considers each child more important than Himself.                                                            30th SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME The Lord has done great things for us. We are all beggars of love and light – Mk 10:46-52 Gospels of roads and encounters, during these weeks. «As He was leaving Jericho…». We are at the gates of the city, where the caravans of pilgrims gather, where the beggars wander around, hoping for a coin among the many who meet at the gates. A blind man, sitting on the ground, motionless, is there begging for his survival from those who pass by. But then «feeling that it was Jesus of Nazareth» Bartimaeus is struck by a shiver, by a shock: he raises his head up, revives, begins to cry out his pain. He is not ashamed of being the poorest of all, on the contrary, it is his own strength. We are all like him, beggars of affection or love or light. Begging is the source of prayer: Kyrie eleison, cries out. Of all, the most Christian and evangelical prayer, the most ancient and the most human. Which in our liturgies we have confined to the penitential act, while it is the request to be born again. Lepers, women, blind people repeat it and it is not a request for forgiveness for sins, but for light for dull eyes, for a new skin that still receives caresses. Like a child who cries out to his distant mother, they ask God: show yourself as a Father, feel like a Mother to this shipwrecked son, let me be born again, give me back to the light! Bartimaeus seeks a God who intertwines with His life in pieces, with his rags. But the crowd around him forms like a wall against his own cry: be quiet! You disturb! Terrible to think that suffering can disturb. Disturb God! Bartimaeus then does the only thing that can be done in these cases: he cries out louder. It is his battle, with the darkness and with the crowd. The Nazarene hears the cry and responds in a completely new way: He involves the crowd that first wanted to silence the beggar, He trusts the crowd, even if it is so easily changed in mood: call him! And the crowd goes, spokesmen for Christ, and addresses the blind man with beautiful, thrilling words, where the heart of the evangelical message is kept. Easy words that go straight to the heart, to be learned, to be repeated, always, to everyone: “Courage, get up, He is calling you“. Courage, the virtue of beginnings. Get up, it is up to you, you can do it, take your life back into your hands. He is calling you, He is here for you, you are not alone, the sky is not silent. And here the compressed energy is released, and almost excessive gestures flourish: he does not speak, he shouts; he does not take off his cloak, he throws it; he does not get up from the ground, but he jumps onto his feet. He heals in that voice that caresses him, calls him and becomes the road on which he walks. We, who are at the same time beggars and crowd, in our Jericho, along our streets, to every person on the ground, we bring as a gift, without ever tiring, these three generating words: “Courage, get up, he calls you“.

 ALL SAINTS Here is the generation that seeks your face, Lord. That God who chose the least as blessed – Mt 5:1-12a 

Blessed is the man, the first word of the first psalm. Which is echoed by the first word of Jesus’ first speech, on the mountain: Blessed are the poor. What does blessed mean, this somewhat obsolete and faded term? The mind immediately runs to synonyms such as: happy, contented, fortunate. But the term cannot be compressed only into the world of emotions, impoverished into a random state of mind. Instead, it indicates a state of life, it consolidates the most human certainty that we have and that composes us all in unity: the aspiration to joy, to love, to life. Blessed, and it is like saying: standing, on the way, forward, you poor (A. Chouraqui), God walks with you; come on, stand up straight, do not give up, you non-violent people, you are the future of the earth; courage, get up and throw away the cloak of mourning, you who cry; do not let your arms fall, you who produce love. Depths that I will never reach, Gospel that continues to amaze me and escape me, yet to be saved at all costs; overpowering nostalgia for a world made of peace and sincerity, of justice and pure hearts, a completely different way of being alive. The Beatitudes are not one more precept or a new commandment, but the good news that God gives joy to those who produce love, that if one takes on the happiness of someone, the Father will take care of their happiness. Yours is the kingdom: the Kingdom belongs to the poor because the King made Himself poor. The earth belongs to the meek because the powerful made Himself meek and humble. To this earth, soaked in blood (your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground), planet of tombs, who does give a future? Who is more armed, stronger, more ruthless? Or not instead the weaver of peace, the non-violent, the merciful, the one who cares? The second says: Blessed are those who weep. The most paradoxical beatitude: tears and happiness mixed together, but not because God loves pain, but in pain He is with you. A mysterious angel announces to anyone who weeps: the Lord is with you. God is with you, in the deepest reflection of your tears to multiply your courage; in every storm he is at your side, strength of your strength, a barrier to your fears. As for the disciples caught at night by the storm on the lake, He is there in the strength of the rowers who do not give up, in the firm arms on the tiller, in the eyes of the lookout who seek the dawn. Jesus announces a God who is not impartial, who has His hands entangled in the thick of life, who has a weakness for the weak, who begins with the last in line, from the underground of history, who has chosen the world’s rejects to create with them a history that does not advance through the victories of the strongest, but through sowings of justice and harvests of peace.                                             COMMEMORATION OF ALL THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED I am sure that I contemplate the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living . The gates of death open to life – Jn 6:37-40  The liturgy has no tears, because what it commemorates is not death, but the resurrection. The liturgy has no tears, unless dried by the hand of God; in fact, it does not pronounce words about the end but about life. “If you had been here, my brother Lazarus would not have died.” Martha has faith in Jesus, yet she is wrong. So we repeat her words and her mistake: in this illness of my family member, where is God? If God exists, why this innocent death? If you are here, my loved ones will not die… Instead, God is here, always, but not as an exemption from death. Jesus never promised that his friends would not die. For Him, the greatest good is not a long life, an infinite survival; the essential thing is not in not dying, but in already living a resurrected life. Eternity has already entered us long before it happens, it enters with the life of faith (…whoever believes in Him has eternal life), it enters with the gestures of daily love. The Lord teaches us to be more afraid of a wrong life than of death. To fear an empty and useless life more than the last frontier we will cross, holding on tightly to the heart that will not let us fall. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Neither angels nor demons, neither life nor death, nothing will ever be able to separate us from love (Rm 8,35-37). This is enough for me. If God is love, He will avenge me for my death. His revenge is the resurrection, a love never separated again. God saves, this is His name. To save means to preserve. By His precise will nothing will be lost, not a love, not a glass of fresh water, not even the smallest blade of grass. A prayer for the deceased, perhaps the most beautiful, invokes: admit them to enjoy the light of your face. The verbs of faith yield to a humble and strong verb, defenseless and very human: to enjoy. Reason yields to joy, faith to enjoyment. Eternity flourishes in the verbs of joy. Because God is not the answer to our need for explanations, but to our need for happiness, He is for my senses, my spirit, my affections and my heart, for the totality of my person. Our experience maintains that everything goes from life to death. The Christian faith declares instead that man’s existence goes from death to life. From the sanctuary of God which is the earth and where no man can remain to live, the doors of death lead outwards. But what do the doors of this door open onto? Don’t you know? On life!                                                  31st SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME I love you, Lord, my strength. To love is to give a future to the world – Mk 12:28b-34 Which is the greatest commandment of all?  Help us to return to the simple, to the beginning of everything… Jesus does it, He goes outside the box, He answers with a word that is not among the commandments. How beautiful is the freedom, the anti-conformist intelligence of Jesus, He is the crystal-clear icon of freedom and imagination. The answer begins with a verb: you will love, in the future, to indicate an infinite story, because love is the future of the world, because without love there is no future: you will love each other, otherwise you will destroy each other. And then to live well, because the scale on which the happiness of this life is weighed is to give and receive love. But first there is a “zero commandment”: shema, listen, remember, do not forget, keep it tied to your wrist, put it as a seal on your heart, as a jewel before your eyes… It is touching to see a God who asks: “Listen to me, please”. Loving God is listening to Him. You will love with all your heart; not as a submissive but as a lover. Someone has proposed another translation: you will love God with all your hearts. As if to say: with your heart of light and with your heart of shadow, love Him with the heart that believes and also with the heart that doubts; as you can, as you manage, perhaps out of breath, when the sun shines and when it gets dark, and with your eyes closed when you are a little afraid, even with tears. Saint Teresa of Avila in a vision receives this confidence from the Lord: “For one “I love you” of yours, I would remake the universe again”. With all your mind. Intelligent love must be; which means: know him, read, speak, study, think, try to understand more, enjoy a sudden caress, write a prayer, a song, a love poem to your love… But with this, what new thing did Jesus say? After all, the same words have been repeated by mystics of all religions, by seekers of God of all faiths, for millennia. The evangelical novelty is in the unexpected addition of a second commandment, which is similar to the first… The genius of Christianity: you shall love man is similar to you shall love God. The neighbor is similar to God. The neighbor has a face and voice, hunger for love and beauty, similar to God. Heaven and earth are not opposed, they embrace each other. A cross-eyed Gospel, one might say: one eye up, one down, head in the sky and feet on the ground. But who is my neighbor? Another doctor will ask Him. There is an answer that has enlarged my heart, that of Gandhi: “my neighbor is everything that lives with me on earth“, nature, water, air, plants, animals. Love the earth, then, as yourself, love it as God loves it. To live is to live together, to exist is to coexist. Not to obey commandments or celebrate liturgies, but simply, wonderfully, happily: to love.                                                                                                      32nd SUNDAY ORDINARY TIME Praise the Lord, my soul. The poor widow, true teacher of generosity – Mk 12:38-44 A nameless woman, alone, a poor widow, is the last character that Jesus meets in the Gospel of Mark, the last teacher. Jesus has always shown a particular predilection for single women. They belong to the biblical triad of the defenseless: widows, orphans and foreigners. And then God intervenes and takes their defense: “they are mine!”. A teacher without words and without titles, wise in tears and courage, and “if you listened only once to the lesson of the heart you would give a lesson to the scholars” (Rumi). Sitting in the offering room, Jesus observes: His gaze has become penetrating and sharp like that of the prophets, like someone who loves and cares for life in all its details. She sees a gesture of nothing in which the divine is hidden, she sees the absolute flash in the detail of two cents. She threw two pennies into the treasure, but she gave more than all the others. Why more than all the others? Because the scales of God are not quantitative, but qualitative. His scales do not weigh quantity, but the heart. That woman does not give something of her excess, she throws everything away, she spends herself to the full in her relationship with God, she puts in everything she has to live. Do not look for holy people in life, perhaps you will find them, perhaps not (in fact we do not know if the woman’s moral life was upright or not), do not look for perfect people, rather look for generous people, who give time and affection, those of small gestures with so much heart inside. A gesture of kindness drawn from our poverty is never insignificant or insignificant. Let us entrust ourselves to the generous, not to the perfect or the powerful. Marco’s original words are brilliant: she threw her entire life into the treasure. That woman has put a lot of heart and the entire heritage of her life into circulation in the veins of the world. And all this circulates in the universe like a gentle and powerful energy, because every human gesture done with all our heart brings us closer to the absolute of God. Every “total” human act contains something divine. This woman has given more. The question of the last evening will resonate with the same verb: have you given little or have you given a lot to life? Where you passed, behind you, was there more life or less life left? The first places belong to those who, in each of our homes or cities, give what makes us live, give heart with small and large gestures, gestures of care, nurturing, attention, kindness, addressed to parents or children or strangers. Even if they were just two pennies of kindness, just crumbs, just a smile or a caress, those who do them with all their heart believe in the future. The night begins with the first star, the new world with the first gesture of a little good Samaritan.                                 – 33rd SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME  Protect me, O God: in you I take refuge. God is near, He is at the door. He comes like an embrace – Mk 13:24-32 In those days, the sun will darken, the moon will go out, the stars will fall from the sky… The universe is fragile in its great beauty, but “those days” are these days, this world darkens with its ongoing wars, the earth is poisoned, endless human caravans migrate across seas and deserts… Does it seem to you like a world that is sinking, that is drifting? Look better, look deeper: it is a world that is moving towards rebirth. Jesus loves hope, not fear: learn from the fig tree: when its branch becomes tender and its leaves sprout, you know that summer is near. Jesus takes us to the school of plants, because the laws of the spirit and the profound laws of reality coincide. Every bud assures that life wins over death. Learn from the wisdom of trees: when the branch becomes tender… the softening of the branch you can’t even imagine in winter; its softening due to the sap that starts to swell the small channels again is a surprise, and an ancient wonder. The most beautiful things are not to be sought, they are to be awaited. Like spring. And the leaves sprout, and you can’t do anything about it; perhaps, however, yes: contemplate and guard. Then you understand that summer is near. In reality, the buds indicate spring, which however in Palestine is very short, a few days and it is immediately summer. So you too know that he is near, at the doors. God is near, He is here; beautiful, vital and new like the spring of the cosmos. From a bud you learn the future of God: who is at the door, and knocks; He comes not like a pointing finger, but like an embrace, a humble sprouting of life. “The whole world is a germinating reality” (R. Guardini). Then I feel like a ship, which is no longer anxious about the route to follow, because a Wind of heaven blows above it, and the lamp of the Word is lit on the bow of the ship. The sun and the moon pass, which are the clock of the universe, the earth crumbles, but my words do not, they are a sun that will never set from the horizons of history, from the heart of man. We are a complaining generation, which no longer knows how to give thanks, which has squandered the prophets and the poets, the lovers and the good. And instead they are the parable, the sprout, the branch of the fig or almond tree of the saved world. I am here and now, on the whole earth and inside my own house, like good shoots, soaked in heaven, imbued with God. Those who love me are lamps to my steps. Look at them carefully, a drop of light is caught in every wrinkle, a gram of spring and future has taken root in every face. Faith repeats to me that God is at the door, He is near, He is here, He is in them. «Each one has his own moment of God» (D. M. Turoldo).                                                                                               OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST KING OF THE UNIVERSE The Lord reigns, He dresses himself in splendor. It is unarmed love that changes the world – Jn 18:33b-37  Pilate, the man who holds the greatest power in Jerusalem, and the young unarmed rabbi: one facing the other, facing the history of the world. Are you the king of the Jews? Is it possible that that Galilean with the clear and straight gaze is the leader of a revolt, that a danger for Rome arises from it? No, that defenseless man is a danger to the conspiracies of the Sanhedrin, to the games of politicians: they have handed you over to me, they want to kill you. What have you done? Jesus moves me with His courage, with His inner stature, as he raises a regal wind of freedom and pride over the praetorium. And now He opens Pilate’s world, expands it, makes another dimension burst in, another latitude of the heart: my kingdom is not of this world, where there is fighting, violence, abuse, deception, devouring. In my kingdom there are no legions, no swords, no predators. For the kingdoms down here, for the heart down here, the essential thing is to win, in my Kingdom the most important thing is to serve. My kingdom belongs to the poor, the pure, the free, the artisans of peace and justice… I have come to raise up the kings of tomorrow among the little ones of today. “I have come into the world to bear witness to another truth.” The word of Jesus is true precisely because it is disarmed, it has no other strength than its light. It is there in front, the truth; it is that man in whom the most beautiful words in the world have become flesh and blood, they have become true. Today we do not celebrate the ascension to the throne of the master of the world, Jesus is not this: he is the author and servant of life. Who changes the logic of history through the revolution of tenderness, the final word on the meaning of our existence and, together, on the heart of God. So, who is my king? Who is my Lord? Who gives orders to my future? I choose Him, still Him, the Nazarene, with the certainty that our twisted heart, this tangled history, is following, despite all the denials, a path of salvation. Because God is involved, He is here, His hands are forever entangled in the thicket of every life. Pilate takes Jesus’ statement: I am king, and makes it the title of the condemnation, the derisive inscription to be nailed to the cross: this is the king of the Jews. He wanted to mock Him, and instead he was a prophet: the king is visible there, on the cross, with open arms, where He gives everything of Himself and takes nothing of ours. True power, the one that changes the world, is the ability to love like this, with disarmed love, until the end, until the extreme, until the end.