We are in the midst of Advent, time of expectation that fills with hope those who are in the darkness of tempest. Itis a time that may be irritating for those who have been taken by the sleep of resignation and the daze of comfort.
It wakes us up because the Lord is coming. He does not leave us alone, he enters into our human condition so tragically frail. He comes to make us feel our strength and greatness, his image hidden in every person, to always be loved and respected. Every person is expectation. The world itself is expectation. Life is itself expectation, even when it might seem hidden in fear, sadness, discomfort, bitter disillusionment, which nourish nihilism.
Today we feel around the expectation of the world that searches for peace and future. There is no future without peace, that needs the answer to the questions, that needs tomorrow while the desire of too many is that today remains today without tomorrow or tomorrow may stretch into infinity. War, on the other contrary, is the end of everything and for everyone, even if we always think it is for someone else, like death. War, with what precedes it and follows it, does not end if peace is not found. Peace is not just a chance, peace is not optional, it is the only possibility to live. We cannot save ourselves alone from the pandemic of war. We will listen to many names of the pandemic of war. This awareness, that we do not save ourselves alone, is somewhat intermittent, because we are not very good. We understand it and then we forget it, as it happened during Covid. This awareness, as it happened with the wars we were involved in, the two world wars, should push us to always practise dialogue, to avoid useless and dangerous vanity, dangerous words, in semantics. We should avoid them because they contain hatred and transmit hatred and ignorance. We should exercise ourselves to think our lives always in relationship to others and not without or against. We should fight polarisation, which we know how much it contributes to allow words and feelings grow, to emphasise ignorant feelings of war.
Is it a dream? Is it a Christmas dream? for those who are naive? Looking for peace is a dream? No. It is folly rather to believe that we can play with war! And the naivety is when man believes that God is himself, to believe he is able to dominate war and able to win war with war. War overwhelms even those who use it, and even the winner is defeated, said don Primo Mazzolari. If we save together - and we only save together - peace is everyone's business and we must all build the ark that protects our very frail lives from the storm of violence.
Jesus whom we are awaiting is the ‘true rainbow, which connects the heavens and earth and bridges the abysses between the continents’, said Pope Benedict. And a piece of this rainbow is hidden in every man and woman, and we can all discover it and give it to others. Advent invites us to prepare that day when, as we have heard, many peoples will climb the Lord's mountain, listen to his word and "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks." - I have the impression that we are exercising exactly the opposite! - "nor shall they train for war again". That is why Jesus descends from heaven, he enters our lives and gets into the boat, the frail boat of our humanity, where we are united in the one destiny, which Jesus makes his own and makes that boat the new Noah's ark.
The waves reveal our weakness, overwhelmed by the brutal force of violence, which makes everyone's life meaningless. I think we cannot imagine what the destroying storm of nuclear weapons means. I cannot really understand what it means that in a few seconds life of millions of people is submerged.
"We are perishing!" This is our prayer, and we listen to the Lord's answer: "Quiet! Be still!" The word of Jesus frees from the logic of evil, it is stronger than the violence of the squall, and it calls us all to be men and women of faith. The prayer is that the noise of war be silenced, the storm of war be ended. Prayer is not the last but the first choice, because prayer becomes memory, solidarity, welcome, intelligence, disarmament of violent words and gestures, a firm conviction to search peace always. We always pray far too little for peace! We are not a mother who cannot rest for a child who is affected by violence and exposed to war. So many times we are rather presumptuous and we still want to renounce to dialogue, so much so to waste occasions and eventually become afraid. We are not able to courageously choose the path of encounter that requires humility to understand and create the conditions for a secure peace. Everything is possible to those who believe in peace, to those who have faith, because God will be with them, because God's name is peace.
In the tempest we feel the cry, the lament, the shout of those who are threatened. Their prayer rises to God from so many corners that are forgotten by the world - but not by Him, so many corners that tend to become chronic, like so many wars. The passion for peace is born from this terrible, enormous, unacceptable suffering, which God makes His own and teaches us to make our own as well. ‘A day here is a thousand years’, say all those who are fighting in war, or do not say it, but live it. War is a machine that imposes its logic and that in the end no one can master because war degenerates even the most just of men, it transforms him into a ‘human animal’, to use the words of a soldier aware of the brutality and perhaps frightened of what war may make him become, a human animal. ‘War is always’, said a survivor. Let us listen to this enormous suffering, let us make it our own.
John XXIII on the eve of Vatican II said a simple but essential sentence: ‘Mothers and fathers of families detest war’. The Lord welcomes the pain of fathers and mothers who cry for their children, who look every day of war with anguish. The question we want to ask ourselves, and which troubles us, is: have we done whatever we could to stop the storm of war? Someone once said: ‘The situation that made war truly inevitable arrived through words, words upon words that have been misused. If words are so powerful, why should not we be able to stop war?’.
We are preparing ourselves for the Jubilee of Hope. Nothing is impossible to those who believe. Our prayer is that the Jubilee may be an opportunity for peace, for the courage of dialogue and ceasefire, to ask the international community to help guarantee ceasefires and above all to create the conditions for a righteous peace.And the international community may agree in finding this, using all the instruments, which we have perhaps weakened too much. We do not accept that the only way to resolve conflicts is always the same, the one of weapons and force that has become terrible. Pope Francis said in the Bull of Indiction:
"Heedless of the horrors of the past - and we should ask ourselves where we have put our memory - humanity is confronting yet another ordeal, as many peoples are prey to brutality and violence. What does the future hold for those peoples, who have already endured so much? How is it possible that their desperate plea for help is not motivating world leaders to resolve the numerous regional conflicts in view of their possible consequences at the global level? Is it too much to dream that arms can fall silent and cease to rain down destruction and death? May the Jubilee remind us that all those who are ‘peacemakers will be called children of God’ (Mt 5:9). The need for peace challenges us all - says Pope Francis - and demands that concrete steps be taken. May diplomacy be tireless in its commitment to seek, with courage and creativity, every opportunity to undertake negotiations aimed at a lasting peace. (SNC 8)
Definitely, there are many ways of having diplomacy work, many ways to create spaces for dialogue aimed at long lasting peace. This especially involves Europe, which was born from those who imagined peace and repudiated war, the fruit also of its deep Christian roots. Can Europe lose the individual and common right that is the right of peace? Can it renounce to be united in practising the art of dialogue, the art of life? Peace is the heritage of the dead and the survivors and of a generation of people who dreamt and built Europe so that we would learn to think together and no longer against but neither without each other.
We will listen to the names of countries imprisoned in the war. So many, a list that appears to be unending. They are names that contain millions of names, of people. We will light a candle for each of the names, because even a small light is a glimmer of hope in the darkness. And the candles we will light are on the candelabra that accompany all the peace meetings the Community of Sant'Egidio has organised with so many pilgrims of peace in many places since 1987. Let us light our heart and become determined peacemakers, without compromises with the logic of evil and division, without letting it deceive us, without putting it under a bushel basket. freeing ourselves from the sterile save yourself, so that everyone can do his or her part. Because everyone has a responsibility, because we must not hide ourselves away and extinguish the light.
We need to be lit, we need to choose peace, because, as Paul VI said: "Peace is a duty, our inescapable duty. We need to discard inveterate prejudices, namely, that violence and vengeance are the regulation of human relationship; that an injury received has to be matched by another, often more serious injury: ‘. . an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth . . .’ (Mat. 5: 38); that my interest has to prevail on the others regardless of their needs and the universal justice . . . We need to put the hunger and thirst for justice at the root of our social psychology, together with the desire to achieve peace, which earns us the title of children of God (Mat. 5: 6, 9)."
As the pope said: "This is not utopia, it is progress, today more than ever demanded by the development of civilisation, and by the Damocles sword of an increasingly serious and possible terror hanging over its head. Just as civilisation was able to ban at least in principle, slavery, illiteracy, epidemics, social castes . . in other words evils that are inveterate and tolerated as if they were inevitable and inherent to sad and tragic human coexistence, so we need to banish war. - and concluded - The ‘good education’ of humanity demands it." Yes, the good education of humanity, of that humanity that the Lord, who is coming, teaches us to contemplate, to see, to understand. “It is the tremendous and growing danger of a world conflagration that demands it."
We have our own unique and personal duty to be good, which does not mean to be weak; it means to be promoters of good and understanding; it means to be generous; it means to be able to break the sad and logical chain of evil with patience and forgiveness; it means to love, that is, to be Christian. Creation, a gift from the Creator, suggests and imposes this duty on us. We were not made to live and kill like brutes!
Come Lord, teach us men and women true greatness, not to live like brutes, to recognise the image of God within their humanity. And all will soon sing, as on that night in Bethlehem: ‘Peace to those on whom his favour rests’. May peace come soon.
