Anniversary of the death of Ezia Fiorentino.
Celebration of the fifth Sunday of Lent – 2 April 2017
A matter of life or death
1. We prefer not to think about it.
There are many ways to avoid thinking about serious things. To discuss everything, to pursue every novelty and update, to be anxious for many minutiae, to fill the time with many occupations. Avoiding silence: preferring music or even noise, rather than silence. Being in company, even if it might be unpleasant and boring, looking for virtual company, through messages and phone calls, rather than staying alone. We prefer not to think about certain things and even to saying certain words is bad taste. It is not right to even say: “Lazarus, my friend, is dead”, so it’s said rather: “He disappeared, he left, he ended his days.”
2. But are we or are we not condemned to death?
The fact of not thinking about it, the distraction, the superficiality, that way of speaking that eliminates obscure words from the dictionary, doesn’t eliminate the problem, but allows you not to frame it, to live by pretending it doesn’t exist. You can live happily, you can live anguished by many things, you can be busy in many good things that fill the day. But until the question can be avoided: are we or are we not condemned to death?
3. Do we prefer resignation?
It is better to avoid the question because the answer is already known. The man of our time – who knows everything and has already understood everything and has already decided what can be understood and what is not worth knowing – this man already knows the answer to the big question: yes, we are condemned to death! Yes, there, at the end of the street, the old lady, who doesn’t allow herself to be moved by anyone and doesn’t let anyone pass awaits us! Yes, it’s evident and there is no way out: we all have to die. So we try to live the best we can this little time we have left, then it will be what it must be and we will bury the axe. The man of our time seems to prefer resigning to dying rather than hoping to live. The man of our time looks a little like the heads of the priests and the Pharisees who rather than rejoice because a dead man is resurrected, they decide to send to death also the one who gives life!
4.Witnesses of the resurrection.
Therefore the mission of the disciples of Jesus meets mistrust and indifference. Perhaps Christians are valued as long as they work hard for some good work, when they try to put a patch on a society that, like a worn out dress, tears off from one side and the other. But when they speak of the essential, of the message of Jesus they experience being condemned to ridicule: “On this we will hear you again” (see Acts 17.32)! But the disciples of Jesus can not keep silent: because of the great love with which he loved us, from the dead we were for the sins, he made us live with Christ … with him he also raised us and made us sit in the heavens , in Christ Jesus.
How will they testify?
The secular institutes, according to the intuition that Ezia Fiorentino has made on her own, have their own specific way of giving testimony in the concrete of daily life: not only with activities of explicit apostolate, not only with discourses and participation in the life of the community in they live. Rather by practicing a transfigured experience that can be persuasive or perhaps even provocative for those who meet the consecrated women on the streets of the city, in the ordinary activities of work, health, illness, youth and old age.
The witness of the resurrection reveals that we are in fact his work, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared for us to walk in them (Eph 2: 10).
What are these good works prepared by God?
They are certainly the works of mercy that occupy so much of our time. And yet it seems that sometimes they shine a little, and the spontaneous judgment that many express on ordinary life reveals evil, denounces problems, signals dramas. The sons of the resurrection have the responsibility to make mercy shine so that everyone may be consoled.
The splendor of mercy is joy.
The splendor of mercy is the quality of relationships.
The splendor of mercy is the frankness of the word, which argues, which explains, which helps everyone opening his eyes to see the glory of God filling the earth.