From this past April 15 to 20 I visited the brothers of the Custody of the Holy Land, especially to be with them for a brief time while the war rages. I absorbed so much tension and fear in the streets, among the houses and above all among the people, and I confess that I still carry the echo of it within me.
I try to listen to this inner resonance to discern the dark time of history in which we are living. The mentality of war is spreading more and more, and I wonder how much it affects our ways of thinking and feeling, of reading reality and of acting and, as believers, how it affects our image of God and the personal and communal relationship with God.
The news we hear about the wars going on in the world are not just news. Something much more is at stake. We realize that war risks getting inside of us, changing us, pushing us to resignation and closing in on ourselves, taking away our taste for the future.
War, with its aggression that transforms the other into an enemy, is within us, and we know that we are in some way co-responsible for it. In fact, the sin has a social dimension.
In the Holy Land I breathed the vile air of war and its consequences, as in my visits to Ukraine, to Goma, to the borders with Haiti, in Sri Lanka and in South Sudan, in northern Mozambique.
Francis of Assisi was not resigned to the almost inevitable idea of war. He rejected it as a young man and, as an adult, he sought a different path, that of meeting with the other, a discovered companion of humanity rather than an enemy. It was a risk: he didn’t know whom he would meet in the camp of the adversary and how it would go. He crosses into the camp of the Crusaders and of the Saracens to the surprise and skepticism of almost everyone. Francis crossed an invisible boundary, an insurmountable wall. For this then he was able to announce the gospel with freedom and meekness. Peace, which is a heavenly gift, shaped his manner of being and acting, of watching and of feeling, of speaking as well as of touching. Before being conformed to Christ with the Stigmata, he is conformed with a meek and humble heart, proper to a minor brother, without barriers.
It seems impossible today to propose a model of this kind, or unrealistic. A dream, an illusion. And yet, we need it so much, because we die of the realism of the powerful and overbearing people of this world. I have intercepted this cry of peace and reconciliation in the eyes of the little ones and of the poor who crowd the refugee camps at Goma and at Juba, who silently cross the streets of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, who cry in Haiti, who ask why it changes with force of pain and hope in Ukraine in front of the burials of children too young to die like this.
I continue to cry aloud: how long, Lord?
