Living Gospel: welcoming reciprocity
Those who love participate in the life of God and experience their freedom and the joy of self-giving. Going out of ourselves and meeting the other through listening opens the door to communion with our brothers and sisters and gives life to reciprocity. In prison I am a prison chaplain and for me each prisoner is ‘Christ-imprisoned’ to be loved. During Lent, to prepare them for Easter, I thought of reading some Gospel passages to them, accompanied by experiences. Noticing a certain interest, I thought of introducing them to some young people involved in a church movement. Having obtained the necessary permits, before even setting foot in the prison for the first time, we prayed that our being there would be a gift for the inmates. We did not talk much. But after celebrating Mass, enlivened by the young people’s songs, I saw hardened men begin to cry and heard them say: ‘Clean, innocent faces still exist!’ Evidently they had never met any before. Since then those young people have been coming once a month to the prison to animate the mass, which is always eagerly awaited. And when an inmate was transferred to another prison to be closer to his family, he had only one regret: losing contact with them. (Don Marco – Italy) In true communion One day I had a phone call from a fellow student at the academy where I studied whom I had not heard from for some time. She wanted to know how I was, among other things about the children and in particular the latest one. Evidently the news had not reached her that the pregnancy had not come to term. At that point I started telling her how things had gone, but at the same time I felt I was communicating to her the most intimate experience of that painful event: the special union with God that I experienced thanks to the support and concrete love of family and friends. As I spoke, I could sense that my friend was really listening, and it occurred to me that in those days when we studied together we had never dared to speak of God to one another. So it came as a great surprise at the end of the phone call when she confided to me: ‘You know, deep down I have always been a believer even if I didn’t want to admit it, but now hearing you speak so serenely I feel a great desire to get to know God more deeply. Why don’t we meet to talk about it?’. (J.V. – Belgium)
Edited by Maria Grazia Berretta
(taken from Il Vangelo del Giorno, Città Nuova, year X- no.1 May-June 2024)