I have come back to these words below again and again with a sense of ‘wonder and responsibility,’ recognizing myself to be “a debtor to all of humanity” because I have encountered the Word made flesh, God Incarnate, present in His Church, not only because of His love for me personally (far beyond anything I could ever have imagined, and which I certainly did not deserve) - not only for myself, but also so that He might reach others through me. We have been chosen as Christians to be instruments of His mercy, to witness to and “extend” the awareness of His saving love which He offers to everyone.
“The meaning of this message is that only Jesus responds to the fundamental desire of the heart and of life: the desire for unity, the desire to find a meaning that holds everything together, that keeps us all together, that saves communion, a unity that embraces everything and everyone, and in which we feel embraced by everything and everyone, embraced by the Everything in everything and in everyone that is God, that is the Father, that is Christ, Christ who is the incarnation of the mercy of the Father and thus the incarnation of the embrace of the good Father, the one who welcomes back with infinite joy the prodigal son who returns to Him….
“When this word reaches us, when it reached us and continues to reach us always anew, always new, think of the immense people with whom we already share it. Two thousand years of Christianity, of saints and sinners, of sainted sinners. But it is not a question of numbers, it suffices just two or three people who discover they share that Christ is the one answer, total and universal to the need of the human heart to fill us with wonder, with wonder that this awareness happens to us, that it happens to each of us, to me!, to us who certainly do not deserve it more than billions of other people to whom it has not yet happened.
“What wonder and responsibility! What gratefulness and contrition! Because if you find in your home, eating and drinking with you, sitting right there where you and your siblings sit to eat and chat every day, if you find in your home the one Reality, the one Presence that every human heart needs, that is needed in this precise moment by 8 billion hearts beating on this earth, how can you not feel a dizzying responsibility? In one way or another you become a debtor to all of humanity by the fact that you have been given freely what everyone, absolutely everyone! is awaiting expectantly.”
