Aurelio Porfiri
We are very worried about what is happening around us, and we are certainly right. Work, family, responsibilities … all these things inevitably attract our attention, they instinctively hold us together because they are part of our external world, a world that we experience every minute that passes. And it is right that we worry about all this, no one can deny that all this must be part of our attention.
Yet, if we focus on priorities, we should recognize that the spiritual should have primacy over the rest, and this, mind you, does not mean having little care for work, family or responsibilities, but knowing how to look at them with a spiritual eye.
In a homily of 1959 Divo Barsotti said: “If we do not live peace and because we still live outside, while He is inside. … It is up to us to live the life of heaven now, it is no longer up to God, because God has already given himself. If we do not already live in paradise, the fault is not of the things, or even less the fault of God: the fault is ours alone that we still live outside.”
Here, this call of the great Italian mystic to live the life of heaven seems important to me, it does not mean not taking care of what is given to us in the world, but it means, as the Brazilian thinker Plinio Côrrea de Oliveira taught us, having a sacred gaze, knowing how to look at everything with different eyes. Divo Barsotti was a man of great spirituality and for this very concrete reason, he knew that the true penetration of the essence of reality passes through the life of the spirit. That is, reality acquires more depth if it is seen with eyes purified by a spiritual gaze. After all, Father Barsotti did nothing but take us back to Saint Augustine, who taught us that God is more intimate to us than ourselves.
Jesus taught us that we must worship God in spirit and in truth. The two are not split, spiritual life and truth of things, reality. Kahlil Gibran said that “believing is a beautiful thing, but putting into practice the things you believe in is a test of strength. There are many who speak like the roar of the sea, but their life is shallow and stagnant like a putrid swamp. There are many who lift their heads above the peaks of the mountains, but their spirit remains asleep in the darkness of the caves.”
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