-Text MAURO LEONARDI
-Priest and writer @mauroleonardi3
In thanking Dom Gianni, Abbot of San Miniato, for the exercises preached to the Curia, the Pope underlined the itinerary that every believer is called to follow. "Faith, he said, is to abandon yourself firmly in what you do not yet see, hope is to hope for what you firmly believe, to love is to be in the presence".
The way of holiness is not to fill oneself with theorems, not even those of theology, but to walk the paths that open before us. During his preaching, Dom Gianni mentioned many important cultural references: we must not forget, however, that the time of holiness is to live the present vigilantly, especially that which seems to have no relevance.
"Vigilant present." because God is the eternal present, and if we want to live in his footsteps we must live in the present in his image. Vigilance consists in living without melancholy and without blockades towards the past and without escapes towards the future. Yes to memory and hope; yes to the ability to have projects, but without revolutions that want to overthrow everything immediately with the radical intention of "starting from scratch".
The path of holiness thus becomes a prayer to know the beauty and greatness of a path in which God manifests himself to us in a particular way, not by what happens but by how we listen to what happens in the present moment. It is therefore necessary to pray in order to be open to all that God works through us and to be able, in a second moment, to be grateful and rejoice for how much he works in our life and through us. Life is a path that we walk at night, when the sun has not yet risen. So, the lantern we carry with us must light the way and we must overcome the temptation to examine the valley with our little light. If we were to make this mistake, the valley would not be illuminated and, moreover, we would not know where to put our feet.