That love has never ceased to flood my life
Reversing the idea that we are the good ones and the good ones, we tell in this column when we have been “merciful”
For only by discovering love can we return it. In fact, in addition to doing the works of mercy, we must learn to receive and acknowledge them
(by Ivano Lanzafame)
God’s silence in our lives is a sign of His immense trust in us. For He waits patiently for our response to His love. So said a few days ago His Eminence Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity, who came to Battipaglia for an event. And it is true, I can testify to that.
Back in my college days, I was a young man like many: curious and open to the world; eager to dive into life; heedless of that hint of nostalgia for a past made of certainties.
The search for my identity and my place in the world, however, pushed me down winding paths and, without realizing it, I allowed myself to be drained by what seemed to fulfill others instead. After a few years, in the mirror I saw an outsider, disheartened by sterile entertainment, troubled rather than reassured by “that’s the way they all do it.”
Inside me, however, grew stronger and stronger, the sometimes distressing longing for a “more” to which I could not yet give a name.
That longing gave me the courage to take a trip, alone, around Europe for a whole month in search of the beauty and the essential I had lost.
During that adventurous interlude I began to feel a thirst (a call?) for supernatural things and decided to extend my journey by a few days by stopping in … Lourdes!
Thus, in front of that cave, in the silence of timeless contemplation,
I heard an unmistakable whisper, the certainty that from that moment a new phase of my life was beginning. Now I knew what to look for: God!
The following year, in Tanzania, at the diocesan mission in Catania, my hometown, I experienced another stage of my conversion. Thanks to that period of service and full life made up of simple joys and contact with poverty, my prayer had become deeper, like an intimate dialogue in which to each of my questions, however, the answer was always the same: “I love you! I trust you!”
It was the Jubilee year of 2000 and that Love never ceased to fill, flood, overwhelm my life: to the point that I had to share it in every way with others.
Initially just with my former “snack buddies,” shocked by my change. And on and on until here, for 25 years, through 3 wonderful years of service in the Missionary Youth Movement of the Pontifical Missionary Works.
And then in the family, at work, with friends, in service to the sick.
No longer afraid of silence, never detaching myself from the source of Love through the sacraments and the daily prayer of the Holy Rosary.
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