Giordani: To implant God firmly in the soul

[…] Crowds of young people today are joining together to recover the value of religion in their lives, and they draw from this collaboration new energies of renewal in the ordinary workings of society which are threatened by multiple abberations such as the use of nuclear energy, murder, the tyrannies of war, drugs, and pornographic sexual practices.

It could be said that the new consciousness of young people is attached to corpuscles that reduce faith to a reliquary decorously laden with violently charged ideologies, typical forms of externalized force, under the pressure of superficiality. But even from their tangle of politics and anarchism these unattached cells can learn the substance of the faith by looking at the attitude of bishops in countries where freedom is threatened, by looking at the life of believers that are causing a reaction based on convictions, after the lust and fear of violent and fearful rulers have offered a most powerful demonstration that, without faith in God, we do not live, we die. You die spiritually and often physically as we can sorrowfully observe in countries of the Third World.

The task of evangelization is therefore to implant God in the human soul […] If he is everything, then even our actions in this world, for others and for ourselves, are all influenced by his inspiration.

[…] Then the day is not only comprised of acts of labor and human relations and the cult of  the human self, but it is enriched in an intimate higher life, a life of the spirit that imparts a dignity on a par with the freedom assured us as sons and daughters of the Almighty. The entire day is His intimate presence who gives us strength in trials, joys and weakness. It unfolds in a spontaneous evangelization, which so much of society is in need of, a society which is not atheistic, but ignoring the Gospel.Bottom of Form

[…] The existence of the Christian is also from God, just as it is for everyone else. Perhaps it is contemplated as something external, gaining, growing, learning, having fun and maybe even with a bit of effort to develop some inner virtue and draw near to God. But the Christian will live only to the degree in which he and she are attentive to their need to channel every action of the day toward the relationship with God, carrying out these actions with a view toward carrying on the Incarnation of Christ.

Every person, even the smallest, ailing, miserable and powerless human beings can yeild holiness, enrich humanity, and strengthen their brothers and sisters. And so nothing is a waste: every thought, every word, every action, within this vision of life created by God, serves to provide us with raw material for the construction of His Kingdom. And the day assumes a priestly value, as an association brought about by man between the life of Heaven and the needs of the earth.

The internalization of Christianity in the modern soul, therefore, is not so much a question of institutional reforms […] as it is a matter of “metanoia”, a continual daily rebirth in entering more deeply into the mystery of God, where the soul is immersed in His strength which is love.”

Città Nuova, n.13, 10/07/1977, p.29.