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That clock tower on Amatrice church indicating 3:36 am is a powerful image for what happened this night. That minute was the last minute for many victims, it will be a minute forever remembered because it is written in the flesh and hearts of their families. And it will be remembered by our country, whose recent history is also a series of clocks stopped forever by the violence of men and of the earth. I will also remember it forever, because this cry of the earth also reached the house of my parents in Roccafluvione, around twenty kilometres from Arquata del Tronto, where I am visiting them. It was a long night of fear, suffering and thoughts for Amatrice, Arquata, Accumuli, towns of my childhood, close to where my grandparents come from, villages where I would accompany my father as he went about his business selling chickens. And then there were thoughts, thoughts we never have, because you can only have them on these terrible nights. I thought about all the time that clock had measured right up until 3.36. It stopped there, dead, but it was only one dimension of time which the Greeks called ‘kronos’: the surface, the soil of time. In the world there is our managed time, domesticated, constructed, which live by. But beneath it there is a another time: the time of the earth. This non-human time, and at times inhuman, and commands the time of men, mothers and children. And I thought that we are not the masters of this other time, which is deeper, abysmal, primitive, which doesn’t follow our path, and at times is against the paths of those who walk above. On such momentous nights we become aware of this different time, on which we walk and build our homes, and that we are ‘grass of the field’, watered and nourished by the sky, but also swallowed up by the earth. The earth, the real one and not the romantic and naive one of ideologies, is both mother and stepmother. The hummus generates man but also turns him back into dust, sometimes in a good way at the right time, but other times it is bad, and too soon, with a so much suffering. Biblical humanism knows this very well, but for this has fought a lot with the pagan cults of local peoples who wanted to make a divinity of the earth and its nature: the power of the earth has always fascinated men who have tried to ‘buy’ it with magic and sacrifices. Whilst I tried in vain to go back to sleep, I thought about the tremendous books of Job and Qohelet, which you can understand on such nights. Those books tell us that no God, not even the real one, can control the earth, because He too, once he entered into human history, became a victim of the mysterious freedom of his creation. God cannot even explain to us why children die squashed beneath the ancient pillars of our towns. He can’t explain it to us because if he knew why he would be a monstrous idol. God, who today looks on the land of the three As – Arquata, Accumuli and Amatrice – can only ask himself the same questions as us: he can cry out, remain silent, cry together with us. He can perhaps remind us with the words of the Bible that all is vanity of vanities: everything is breath, wind, mist, waste, nothing, ephemeral. Vanity in Hebrew is written Habel, the same word as Abel, the brother killed by Kane. Everything is vanity, everything is an infinite Abel: the world is full of victims. This we know. We know it, we forget it too often. These terrible nights and days make us remember. * 1 Kings 19:11
We can bring all things as a gift to God, if we learn how to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, transforming each pain into love. The setting of these words is the Christian community in Corinth. It was extremely lively, full of initiative, animated by groups linked to different charismatic leaders. This also gave rise to tensions among individuals and groups, to divisions, personality cults, the desire to dominate. Paul intervened decisively and reminded everyone that, in the richness and variety of gifts and leaders belonging to the community, something much deeper bound them in unity: belonging to God. Once more the great Christian proclamation rings out: God is with us, and we are not lost, orphaned, abandoned to ourselves, but, as God’s children, we are God’s. As a true Father God cares for each one, without letting us lack anything we need for our good. Indeed, God is superabundant in love and in giving, as Paul affirms: ‘The world, life, death, the present, the future—all belong to you!’ God has even given us his Son, Jesus. What huge trust on God’s part in giving each thing into our hands! How often instead have we abused his gifts! We have believed ourselves to be the lords of creation to the point of plundering and despoiling it, lords of our brothers and sisters to the point of enslaving and slaughtering them, lords of our own lives to the point of wasting them in narcissism and self- destruction. God’s huge gift – ‘All belong to you’ – asks for gratitude. Often we complain about what we don’t have and we only turn to God to ask. Why don’t we look around and discover the beauty and the goodness surrounding us? Why don’t we say thank you to God for what he gives us each day? This ‘All belong to you’ is also a responsibility. It demands our attention, our tenderness, our care for all that has been entrusted to us: the whole world and every human being, the same care that Jesus has for us (‘you belong to Christ’), the same care that the Father has for Jesus (‘Christ belongs to God’). We ought to know how to rejoice with those who rejoice and to weep with those who weep, ready to gather up every groan, division, pain, violence, as something that belongs to us, so as to share it, to the point of transforming it into love. Everything has been given to us so that we bring it to Christ, that is, to the fullness of life, and to God, that is, to its final goal, giving back the dignity and the deepest meaning that belong to each thing and to each person. One day in the summer of 1949, Chiara Lubich sensed such a unity with Christ that she felt bound to him as a bride to her Spouse. This led her to think of the dowry she would bring, and she understood that it should be the whole of creation! On his side, he would bring her as his inheritance the whole of Paradise. She remembered then the words of the psalm: ‘Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.’ (Ps 2:8) And she commented: ‘And we believed and we asked and He gave us all things that we may bring them to Him and He will give us Heaven: we the created, He the Uncreated.’ Towards the end of her life, speaking of the Movement to which she had given life and in which she saw herself reflected, Chiara Lubich wrote: ‘What, just now, would be my last wish? I wish that the Work of Mary [that is, the Focolare Movement], at the end of the ages, when it will be waiting, united, to appear before Jesus forsaken and risen, may be able to repeat to him, making its own the words of the Belgian theologian Jacques Leclercq, words I always find moving: “On your day, my God, I shall come to you…. I shall come to you, my God … with my wildest dream: to bring you the world in my arms.” ’1 Fabio Ciardi 1 Essential Writings, (London and New York: New City and New City Press, 2007), p. 369.
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“While taking a short break, contemplating the immensity of the universe, the extraordinary beauty and power of nature, my mind rose spontaneously to the Creator of it all, to a new sort of understanding of God’s immensity. (…) I saw that he is so great, so great, so great that it seemed impossible he should think of us. This impression of God’s immensity stayed with me for several days. To pray, ‘Hallowed be thy name’, or ‘Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit’, is different for me now: it has become a need of the heart. … We are on a journey. When people travel, they are already thinking about the surroundings they will be in on their arrival, the landscape, the city; they are getting ready. We should do the same. Will we praise God up there? Then let’s start praising him right now, letting our hearts cry out to him with all our love… Let’s praise him with words and in our hearts. We can take this opportunity to enliven some of the prayers we say daily which have this purpose. Let’s glorify him also with our whole being. As we know, the more we become nothing (modelling ourselves on Jesus Forsaken, who reduced himself to nothing) the more we cry out with our lives that God is everything, and so we praise him, we glorify him and adore him. During the day let’s find many opportunities to adore God and praise him. Let’s do so during our meditation, or when visiting a church, or at Mass. Let’s praise him beyond nature or in the depths of our hearts. Above all, let’s live dead to ourselves and alive to the will of God, to love for our brothers and sisters. May we too be, as Elizabeth of the Trinity used to say, a living praise of his Glory. In this way we shall experience a bit of paradise, and make up for the indifference to God in many hearts living in the world today.”
(Chiara Lubich, Cercando le cose di lassù, Roma 1992, p. 15-17)
Student accommodation “I live with six other students in a rented flat. We divided the chores and cleaning shifts,but Franz was not helping out and thus created tension in the group. I tried in vain to remind him. One day, precisely his family was coming to visit, and as an act of love for them, I started cleaning the bathrooms and also Franz’s room. His parents and sister were so pleased with the order they found that before leaving, they went to shop for loads of food that filled the fridge. Since then Franz has become very thoughtful and caring towards others. (F.F. – Austria) The poor helping the poor “That couple was extremely poor and ashamed of it, and their worries reached a peak with the arrival of their first son. The love of other friends warmed their hearts. Struck by the story of an equally poor family, but that believed that God who is a Father never abandons his children, they thought of sharing some of their food with another poor family. And the next day to their surprise, they saw all sorts of foodstuff arriving at their doorstep. In addition, there were also the things their son needed, a cradle, baby clothes, bathtub….…” (J.E. – Brazil) Praying for rain “That evening I felt very tired and wanted to tell the kids to say their night prayers by themselves in the room so I could immediately go to bed. But John, our eldest, asked if we could say the rosary to pray for rain: in fact, it hadn’t rained for a long time and the corn and sweet potatoes we had planted really needed it. To our surprise, that same night it started to rain and continued up to the afternoon of the next day.” (B. M. – Uganda) The armchairs “In our place, most parents incur so many debts for the weddings of their daughters and consequently have to work all their lives to paythem. For my wedding I made my parents spend as little as possible, confiding in Divine Providence. One day I went with my mom to the furniture shop. At the end he said,«Usually the other girls are never satisfied with what they find… but you are different. I would like to ask you to pray for my son who is very sick.». I assured him that I would do so, and he gave me two armchairs as a wedding gift: it was exactly what I needed.” (C. J. – Pakistan).
After Jesus had died and the Holy Spirit had appeared, Mary disappeared into obscurity. She had accomplished her mission and returned to living in her own element: silent service. She solved the problem of old age by seeking refuge in God, almost a second childhood of the spirit. She teaches how to die. The dying process that provokes fear, in Mary, the Mother, became a returning to her origins by constantly losing herself in God: Life that never ends. And that losing of herself in the Eternal was the death of Mary. It came on the day when the Apostles could do it on their own. But it wasn’t death as we intend it or experience it, but rather something short and sweet that theologians express with a variety of terms: pause, transition, transit, falling-asleep, life-giving-death. . . That virgin body would have been contaminated by the process of decomposition; whereas, having suffered with Christ it couldn’t but immediately rise to glory with Christ. What Resurrection was for Christ, the Assumption was for Mary: a double victory of body and spirit over death. In our times there is the terrifying spectre of the destruction of millions of human beings if not all humankind by atomic weapons, or environmental pollution. There is no way out of it other than reproducing the victory of Jesus and Mary. We must spiritually become Jesus and Mary, agents of life, and this is done by inserting our human nothingness into Divine omnipotence. If we join together in living the Gospel we become the mystical Christ, and if we are made Mary we give Jesus to society, and then war will no longer make sense and the atomic weapon will become a museum piece. There will be peace: the one heart and one soul of a community gathered around the Mother, and its blessed fruit will be unity, the unity of the Living. By rising from this bloody swamp of the earth, to the Heaven of Mary, the Fairest Star of the Sea, we come to a better understanding of the meaning of her Assumption which is the ultimate seal on her unique privilege as the Virgin Mother of God. The materialist should also be moved by this, since it represents the exaltation of the physical body by the power of the Spirit. In Mary we celebrate the redemption of matter and exalt the physical universe that is transfigured into a Temple of the Most High. It’s enough to contemplate even for a moment with the knowledge of love, the place of Mary who rises from earth to Heaven through the cosmos to the full grasp of her identity and of her role. She is the masterpiece of creation. Mary is humble, because no outward highness elevates her; silent, because no human voice seems to be able to define her; poor, because no earthly ornament seems able to decorate her. She speaks only with the language of God’s Word whose richness is only Wisdom of God, grand with the grandness of God. So identified with the Lord, Mary is the human expression of the greatness of the Trinity’s very mind and of its love. She is the Queen – Mistress and Servant – of the Lord’s Dwelling, who opens the doors and lets the children in, occupying herself with welcoming everyone into the palace of the Father, for the glory of the Son in the Seal of the Spirit. She provides mortals with an idea of God who infinitely dominates and overwhelms their intelligence. As if to mediate the power, the wisdom and the love of the ineffable Trinity, God wished to manifest all his power in her. In his infinite originality which humankind would never have tapped, the Creator invented Mary in whose womb the Eternal Word became flesh in our midst and, in his humanity, God became accessible and the Divine Love became part of our home life. Mary among us brings God into our midst. She is the Gate of Heaven. She is taken into Heaven in order to gather the children into the Father’s house. That is why they call on her even a hundred times a day, that she might pray for them now and at the hour of death. (Igino Giordani, Maria modello perfetto, (Rome: Città Nuova, 2012 [1967]), p. 157 – 163.
