“Outside the centrifugal action of love, human beings seem to hold on to whatever causes division. They find millions of reasons, through religion itself, to set themselves apart, nullifying that freedom of movement that had been restored by Jesus when he brought down the walls of division and established that there would no longer be neither Greek nor Jew, neither slave nor master, neither male nor female – but God would be in all, and all would be in God. (…) That is love’s goal: that is the goal of existence, to make all one. To make all the Oneness that is God. By the impulse of Divine Love, existence, all of history became a return march towards unity. Everything comes from God; everything returns to God. Making yourself one with a neighbour means disappearing in him, such that between God, my neighbour and me a direct passageway is established, through my elimination, an unobstructed descent – from Oneness to the other: and so I find God in that neighbour. The neighbour is like the temple that ignites God’s light. So, I find God in the Sacrament of the Altar and in the person of my neighbour, through the effect of love. The neighbour breaks down the barriers and, in the breach, allows life to flow: the life that is God. The neighbour is ianua caeli, “gate of Paradise”. There are Christians who go to serve the least, in the lowest social classes, not so much to convert them, but to convert themselves: giving love in the form of service (to the ailing, the unemployed, the elderly – all the social refuse as they are labeled), and they find Christ. Much more than they can ever give, therefore. They offer a loaf of bread and find the Father. They convert both the helpers and also the assisted. They become holy as they bless their neighbours. Therefore, you rise to God by descending beneath every human level, to serve all people from down there, on whatever plane they may be; whereas, the Jewish priest who did not look upon the unfortunate of this earth because his gaze was fixed on the God of Heaven, never found neither God nor neighbour. He never found God because he was never turned towards his neighbour. And this is a way of proceeding from the Father who proclaims his glory in highest heaven by allowing his Son to be born in the most humble of shelters: a stable, thus establishing a connection between stars and stables through the divinizing action of love. Thus, the last shall be the first in an overturning of logic, or rather, God’s way of calculating; his counting starts from the least while we start counting from the most. What is first for us becomes last for him, and what is last for us becomes first for him. And so wealth, power, glory which we consider to be first and foremost, God considers them to be last; they count for nothing and have to wait in line. This is the actual yardstick for measuring people and things.” (From Igino Giordani. Il fratello,(Rome: Città Nuova, 2011), pp.78-80.