After three years in the seminary, for their fourth year, each seminarian departs for an experience of mission abroad in order to discover what it means to live in a house of the Fraternity. When I boarded the airplane for Minnesota, I was unsure about what I would find there. I had only known my previous experiences in Kenya and in the parish of Santa Giulia in Turin. For this reason, I knew my good qualities and my weak points: great enthusiasm when it comes to being with kids and a difficult experience in the charitable work done by the GS group with the elderly. But the first (re)discovery that I made, coming to America, is that the Lord does not call us to reinforce that we are good at something; He involves us and asks us to build up the Church to change us and convert us to Him. The second thing that I learned is that we do not say “yes” to exalt our own capacity but so that God can open our heart to His Mystery in every circumstance in which we find ourselves living.
And for this reason, despite a parish school with around 180 children, despite one of the biggest and most beautiful communities of Communion and Liberation in the United States, despite the blossoming grounds of young people of all ages and numerous families with tons of kids, I am here today writing about the visits that every Thursday morning, Fr. Pietro Rossotti and I would go to the elderly of our parish in North Saint Paul. Bringing Communion to the homes of these elderly or to nursing homes was for me a great change of perspective: accompanying a priest, I do not need to administer the Sacrament and, since I have only been here for a few months, I do not know the families and their connection with our mission. Add to all this that speaking is as easy for them as understanding English is for me, and it makes for a pretty potent cocktail!
God attracts us, inviting us to go out from ourselves in order to make us live as He does
And yet, it is precisely this series of factors that made this experience so mysterious and profound. The speed and essentiality of our meetings, the poverty of our dialogues, remind me that it is not we who are expected: not our brilliance or our patience but Christ in the form of the Eucharist and the poor form of our presence. But, above all, bending over to feed the elderly, feeling their breath on our finger, smelling the scent of their homes reminds me that it is Jesus who tells me: “Deeper down, Gianpaolo. Deeper down, where I am. Freedom is there.”
Because God attracts us, inviting us to go out from ourselves in order to make us live as He does, within those imperfect circumstances in which, however, more profoundly we can glimpse the Mystery. And in this becoming something different than what I think of myself, in this going where I do not know, I discover that, in reality, I live a great beauty when I resemble Him even a bit more, when I live a life of poverty, when I look at things as He looked at the lilies of the field.
