A fundamental mission
We have this mission that Saint Paul already speaks of and that we often forget as a fundamental charism in our Christian life. **Comfort as we are consoled**.
A call to live it
For a few days now, due to different circumstances that I live around me and with the people I love, I feel called in some very poignant way to live it. The lives of the people around me are full of headaches, obstacles, pain. My sufferings – coming from age, life, normal shortcomings or “diminutions” as Teilhard de Chardin would say – I find them quite irrelevant compared to others. Or, the very fact of living them with Jesus and for Jesus means that they are not so burdensome for me.
The consolation that makes difficulties bearable
Often – and I would say almost always – the only thing we can do is be with people, love, accompany and, if possible, **comfort with the comfort that we are comforted**. It is a consolation that does not solve or improve things, but makes them bearable in the light of faith and gives them an even luminous tone that enriches us without us being aware of what is happening in us, while accepting with faith and confidence what life brings without being able to do anything to avoid it.
The importance of presence
It is the power of some simple and seemingly insignificant gestures like sitting next to that person who is suffering, listening to them, hugging them if appropriate, incorporating their pain into your life, without the need to give explanations or advice … only “with the presence and figure” to caress the soul of the one who is having a bad time.
To be humanist and Christian
We all need it at some point in our lives and perhaps even more so those who think they don’t need it and that they can get out of the most painful and poignant circumstances on their own. I repeat to myself very often that you can be a humanist without being a Christian, but you can never be a true Christian without being a humanist. That is why I live and always have before my eyes in my room, in front of the table where I work, those words from the Gaudium et spes of my beloved Vatican Council II that I lived very closely in my youth: “The joys and the hopes, sorrows and anxieties of the men of our time, especially of the poor and those who suffer, are at the same time joys and hopes, sorrows and anxieties of the disciples of Christ. There is nothing truly human that does not find an echo in his heart” (GS 1).
