miniZibaldone

To greet, to listen and to support the faith of those simple people From a letter To greet, to listen and to support the faith of those simple people … and, so often, facing the anguish of men and women that want and seek work and do not find it.  I was only able to shake their hands, caress them, look into their tearful pain-ridden eyes, and weep within. Yes, weep, because it is hard in one’s life to come  across a father of a family who wants to work and has no possibility to do so....  But work is so difficult to obtain, especially as we continue to live moments in which the rates of unemployment are significantly high. Bread solves a part of the  problem, but only half of it, because that bread is not the one earned with one’s work. It is one thing to have bread to eat at home and another to bring it home as  the fruit of one’s work. That is what confers dignity....  The wisdom of our people uses a saying to label one who, though able to work, doe...

We need to be reminded that food discarded is, in a certain sense stolen, from the table of poor and the starving. From the address We need to be reminded that food discarded is, in a certain sense stolen, from the table of poor and the starving.We live in an interconnected world marked by instant communications.  Geographical distances seem to be shrinking.  We can immediately know what is happening on the other side of the planet.  Communications technologies, by bringing us face to face with so many tragic situations, can help, and have helped, to mobilize responses of compassion and solidarity.  Paradoxically though, this apparent closeness created by the information highway seems daily to be breaking down.  An information overload is gradually leading to the “naturalization” of extreme poverty.  In other words, little by little we are growing immune to other people’s tragedies, seeing them as something “natural”.  We are bombarded by so man...

An idle man resembles an idle bird like that [in a cage]. And it’s often impossible for men to do anything, prisoners in I don’t know what kind of horrible, horrible, very horrible cage. There is also, I know, release, belated release. A reputation ruined rightly or wrongly, poverty, inevitability of circumstances, misfortune; that creates prisoners. You may not always be able to say what it is that confines, that immures, that seems to bury, and yet you feel I know not what bars, I know not what gates — walls. Is all that imaginary, a fantasy? I don’t think so; and then you ask yourself, Dear God, is this for long, is this for ever, is this for eternity? You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn’t have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.