A Place Where God Meets Each Of Us

The Christian vocation is a call to communion, to community. A community is not "made" by placing ideas together-often they are not even ours but stolen here and there - or by running ahead together with projects which are only dreams. Often the components of our life do not please us, they are bricks all out of place, and they do not "fit well." It is easy then to empty out one's pockets and to look elsewhere for more edifying stories, interests that are less petty. God however is always within history, within events..

It is important to situate ourselves within our own individual histories. To begin with history. Instead we are tempted to go back to superficial things, to live superficially. And yet if there is a reality that is contrary to God, that is the negation of God, it is not so much sin (God is not afraid of sin: "Christ was without sin, but for our sake God made him share our sin," 2 Cor. 5:21), as pettiness, superficiality: "I know what you have done; I know that you are neither cold nor hot. How I wish you were one or the other! But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I am going to spit you out of my mouth!" (Rev. 3:15-16).

There is a whole current of Christianity lived, instead, on this superficial level, without depth. God loves profundity.

It is clear that the tragedy of persons lies in facing their own pettiness every day, in discovering within themselves these roots of superficiality, the many compromises which they are forced to recognize even after so many years of religious life. Often there is a great fear of getting to the core of our own life, of looking our sins, weaknesses, deficiencies, in the face. There is thus born a whole theology of the "positive" to be valued and the "negative" to be forgotten. We seek to wipe out the memory of it in ourselves and "not see" it in the others. We end up placing in parentheses the truest pages of our life. I feel that there is a place where God wants to meet each one of us: our history. This is the new stable where he likes to be born, where he likes to bring to birth histories of love, of salvation for us, for the benefit of the whole world. Your life (not your dreams, nor your proposals, nor your projects nor your desires) is the place where God has prepared to become flesh, again, in our generation.

St. Teresa of Avila says that the life of the person can be divided into four parts: three of them are fantasies, dreams, holy desires; the fourth part is made up of deeds. Here is where God is, here he wants to work.

What I have said up to now seems to me to be a very good introduction to the theme of Jesus the Truth. It is important to place ourselves in this "place where God dwells in us" in order to be able to listen to him and recognize him.

[Text from Christ the Truth, by Ezekiel Pasotti, SSP, Encounters on Jesus Master, Way, Truth and Life, Rome, 1985]

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