ONLY IF WE LOVE GOD, WITHOUT EASY OPTIMISMS AND DANGEROUS DETERMINISMS, "EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE"

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Everything will be fine, but for whom? After each epidemic, war or earthquake has always gone well? We are sure of it? Only after several years and at the cost of losses and sacrifices, not without those corruption situations that distinguish situations of social destabilization, everything went fine.

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Author
Ivano Liguori, Ofm. Capp.

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the photo is a hoax [see WHO] but the image itself could make the idea tragically …

My role as a priest requires me - with great sacrifice - to continually discern reality, starting from the Word of Christ and leaving out the word of the world. This means learning to stay within a history of salvation that has Christ as its origin and fulfillment, instead of getting lost behind self-produced mirages of salvation that promptly reveal all the limits and inefficiencies of the case. And when I speak of salvation, I am referring to the one par excellence: the integral salvation that has become revelation and that embraces the body and spirit of man.

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I want to start by analyzing an expression which in the past weeks of quarantine has become the leitmotiv of coronavirus resistance in Italy. On closer inspection, I find it on the border between the low psychology of optimism and the melancholy sense of civicism. Needless to say, it contained little Christian. And the expression to which I refer - and which I find out of place - is the following: "everything will be fine". There would also be another that says "it's my responsibility", but the first already gives enough material for critical reflection.

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"Everything will be fine" it is a human expression suggested by the emergency that we experienced and which seems not to have ended - also formulated with good intentions - but which once again suffers from that pretense of self-salvation that excludes grace and enhances the innate Promethean desire of man. An expression that closely resembles that American film optimism, that positive thought but distracting from faith, a way of being and appearing that shines for the spirit of initiative but nothing more. Sorry, but I don't find myself there, I don't really believe in this: "Everything will be fine".

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Doing a quick search for news on the Web [1] it seems that in Lombardy, between 5 and the 6 last March, written on post-it with this slogan and later on this phenomenon spread to the rest of Italy. To this sentence it has been thought well to add the omnipresent rainbow supported by two clouds, symbol that today has been enlisted by the unique thought, emptied of any biblical connotation and noachian covenant [cf. Gen 9, 8- 12], to re-edit it as a symbol of lobby and to fight rights. And to see how the rainbow antivirus was packaged, one would expect the appearance of Lepricani and pots of gold coins, and instead…

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A modality that will perhaps be able to distract children but that will hardly convince adults. In fact - to this day - the current health crisis, begins to spread a certain generalized discomfort that will not be long in turning into traumatic depression. Instead, regarding the genesis of the annex slogan antiviral, different interpretations can be chosen. There are those who opt for secular origin, arguing that it is the literary intuition of an anonymous Lombard poet [2]. Still others [3], with the tendency to baptize everything, they argue that it is a phrase said by Jesus to Juliana of Norwich, English mysticism lived between the 14th and 15th centuries.

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"Everything will be fine", what it actually means and what is the subject of this expression? Let me understand, everything will be fine after the virus has stopped, after thousands and thousands of deaths have occurred, after many have lost their jobs, after the national economy is on its knees, after health is reduced to historic lows, after families no longer manage to pay their bills and put together lunch and dinner? Everything will be fine, but for whom? After each epidemic, war or earthquake has always gone well? We are sure of it? Only after several years and at the cost of losses and sacrifices, not without those corruption situations that distinguish situations of social destabilization, everything went fine.

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At this point a question: this is the optimism that should take charge of supporting people, even those who believe? As a priest I cannot indulge such a thought, sorry for all those who will disappoint and who would like to see in the priest the dispenser of a certain mass anesthetization that keeps the flock good pending the inevitable shearing.

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I don't want to follow the hermeneutics of optimism but of sure hope, resolute in the Pauline teaching he says: "Who will therefore separate us from the love of Christ? Maybe tribulation, the anguish, the persecution, hunger, nudity, the danger, the sword? But in all these things we are more than winners by virtue of the one who loved us " [cf. RM 8,35]

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Just as all the Fathers of Patmos Island did with their latest writings on this topic, I also think that the way of seeing St. Paul when he always affirms in the Letter to the Romans is decidedly more credible and Christian more sensible, some verses before the previous ones I mentioned, «Everything contributes to good, for those who love God " [cf. RM 8,28].

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In this sentence we understand immediately what we are talking about. Christian good is the result of a love relationship, that is, a refined work of the Spirit, which reveals the weltanschauung in which God manifests himself through the work of the Son [cf. GV 5,17]. It is in this pact of indissoluble and irreplaceable love that everything becomes a vehicle that contributes to good; everything is needed, everything is interconnected, there is no reality in which God does not make his voice heard.

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How many saints, Christian faithful and ordinary men have discovered God starting from situations of suffering, in those realities apparently distant from Him. This is the case of the young Christoph Probst, proud opponent of the Nazi regime and Hitler, than during his captivity, before being sentenced to death and guillotined, will receive holy baptism, Communion and Anointing of the Sick. However, he will have time to write a letter to his mother, with these words: «I thank you for giving me life. Come to think of it, it was only a path to God » [4].

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Here is the felix blame of the Easter preconio, a slow and unstoppable path to God, in which ancient guilt - the origin of all evil - becomes the happy paradox of Providence, through which God saves those who love him, they hope and rely on him.

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We can get out of this pandemic only by loving God and letting ourselves be loved by him, it is the Lord who is speaking to us in these circumstances, indeed it is screaming at our heart through its Spirit, as he did with the blessed apostle Peter: "Simon, son of John, what is? […] you love Me?» [cf. GV 21,15-17]. And Peter had to answer right after the denial, after that guilt consumed in fear, after that spiritual illness that had made his oaths vain [cf. MC 14,29-31]. That denial, made in the courtyard of the high priest [cf. MC 14,66-72], it was a happy fault for him that allowed him to redeem himself by loving the Lord more and letting himself be loved by Him even in the awareness of his own weakness.

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«Everything contributes to good, for those who love God ", let's write it in every heart, not as a dangerous determinism whereby anything will turn to good but in correspondence with that crucified love that has conquered the world and still wins it today.

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Without the love of God, nothing, to think about it, will never go well.

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Laconi, 18 June 2020

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[1] HTTPS://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_marzo_05/coronavirus-spuntano-lombardia-decine-biglietti-solidali-anonimi-tutto-andra-bene-a29b7edc-5ed0-11ea-bf24-0daffe9dc780.shtml?refresh_ce-hp

[2] HTTPS://www.animafaarte.it/andra-tutto-bene-significato-archetipico/

[3] HTTPS://it.aleteia.org/2020/03/24/non-andra-tutto-bene-ma-dio-e-sempre-con-noi/

[4] http://liceogbruno.edu.it/docum/giornata_memoria/giornata_2016/La Rosa Bianca-Documenti.pdf

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