Read and listen to our little prayer of April 17, 2023

Summary

Wind

Like a breath of wind you flew away.

I felt it, I tasted it on my skin.

The last moments of your short but intense life you spent breathing the air, all the air that your lungs young and vivid but full of cancerous matter could absorb.

Every 17th of every month it's like this. I look at you. I think about you. We talk to each other. I cry. Of joy, of pain, of love.

Crying is the union of joy, pain, love.

In my silence I love feeling that wind on my skin, over and over again.

And the Gospel that I read every morning is my friend. Only in his words do I find truth, I find justice, I find fairness, I find love, love true, a lot love. What I need, what you left me, in my lap.

Eugenio and Remigio climbing the Gianicolo — Eugene and Remigio uphill to the Gianicolo

Eugenio embraced by Remigio — Eugene and Remigio uphill to the Gianicolo

Pain digs furrows that reach up to thelove.

This is where we are: upon arrival, uponlove, me and you.

If you have dreams of true glory, not of the glory of the world that comes and goes, but of the glory of God, this is the way: the works of #mercy give glory to God more than anything else.
Pope Francis via Twitter

Wind of life, wind of freedom

commentary of Jn 3,1-8, edited byAndrea Piccolo S.J

Birth is never as sure as death.
And this is the reason why being born is not enough.
It is to be reborn that we were born.
Paul Neruda

I enter the text (Jn 3,1-8)

There was among the Pharisees a man named Nicodemus, one of the leaders of the Jews. He went by Jesus, at night, and said to him: “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a master; in fact no one can perform these signs that you perform, if God it's not with him."

She answered him Jesus: “Very truly, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God”. Nicodèmo said to him: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter his mother's womb a second time and be reborn?”

He answered Jesus: “Very truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don't be surprised if I told you: you must be born from above.

The wind blows where it wills and you hear its voice, but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes: so is anyone who is born of the Spirit".

I get inspired

The birth from the flesh did not see us active and protagonists: we came into the world at the behest of our parents, no one asked us to have our say, no one asked us for our opinion. It is also for this reason that our being in the world always contains an element of drama and a space of darkness, of irreducible passivity on our part.

Jesus he proposes to Nicodemus another birth, that of water and the Spirit: this second birth, on the other hand, provides for the freedom and responsibility of the answer made in the first person. Being born of the Spirit means being born as a human person not only biologically understood, it means being born to faith and to a free and fruitful relationship with the Creator, it means being more man, more woman.

Here, then, the birth of the Spirit has the ability to powerfully reconcile us with our birth from the flesh: it gives us the ability to relive our dramatic birth and to give it new meaning, giving it a new and further meaning.

Birth from the Spirit instills a type of freedom that experiences the limits and fragility of every human reality - which are constitutive of our being creatures - as obstacles and efforts that stimulate us to leave, to go out of ourselves and to give ourselves: another name for the Spirit it's love!

Whoever answers "yes" to being born of the Spirit receives as a gift a great desire for freedom, an intense strength to live it and the simplicity necessary to achieve it by entrusting oneself to the hands of the Lord.

Andrea Piccolo S.J