Rivista DMA
Going A Step Beyond
Going A Step Beyond
Going beyond, taking an extra step this is how we may paint hope. That which is based on a certainty: Jesus, the Lord, is risen. This is a great hope.
It is the view by which this issue of the magazine proposes the reflection of the call to be Witnesses of Hope, witnesses of the Resurrected One. It is not a hope that rests on mere emotion or on the expectation of something or of someone. Because we follow Christ and believe in the Good News that has been communicated to us, we are women of hope. We are so in the joyful times when we glimpse a glimmer of light and the way is smooth and level. We are so when it seems that all is collapsing in us or around us.
“Hope is not the conviction that things will have a happy ending; it is the certainty that things have meaning”, said Vaclav Havel. And we find meaning in what transcends the immediate, in a future that has been promised to us and in which we believe. Hope may thus live within the logic of everyday events, not only as a refuge from our anxieties, but as personal involvement in building the fabric of the days and of
events because hope is also commitment, responsibility, tenacity, promotion of justice. This means getting up in the morning and believing that notwithstanding the struggle of “putting together the many pieces of life”, we are still not “fragmented”...there is meaning in all that happens.
Hope, faith, trust. Inseparable values that allow us to believe in the impossible. This biblical attitude is experienced by those who have made choices in counter-tendencies in meeting with the lifestyles of present day life. So it was with Mary, the efficacious witness who walks with us, the “Help” that
accompanies us toward future frontiers. So it was with Don Bosco, Mary Domenica Mazzarello, and many Sisters and young people who became “testimonials” of hope.
We are aware today of a widespread crisis of hope in the young and not-so-young. However we also find in our educating communities credible persons who know how to “sprinkle sparks of gentle wisdom, of
transparent faith that recognizes God as the highest value of life”. They are persons of every age, frequently elderly Sisters, who carry out the intuition of John of the Cross: “I know well the source that wells up and flows, even though it be night”.
They live side by side with us, know how to radiate hope around themselves and in the young people to whom they draw near as the Promised Land, an open horizon, a “vast field” to be cultivated for a full life. In
faith. In prayer. In the daily gift of self.
gteruggi@cgfma.org