Una vita in Africa - A life in Africa

These days we hear a lot about the results and failures of the G20, the expectations for the G8, the discriminatory or purely racists laws of some European governments, but we, following the liturgy of the Church, can realize that we are the depositary, those responsible, for a message of extraordinary modernity and political relevance. Upsetting. Revolutionary in respect to all scheme, to all diplomacies, to all human efforts.
The leader is the one who washes the feet of the others, the one who is ready to die for the others, for all others. We are brothers, members of the family of the Lord of History.
Maybe the habit has removed for us its powerful charge. More probably we do not want to understand because we are afraid of the risk that love always demands.
But at least let us not be deceived by the barriers and boundaries traced by human hands, by the ideologies made up in order to lord over the others, by the hypocrisies of the “Us” and “them”. These belong to the past. The world crisis that has still to come is not economic or financial. It is a crisis of civilization. To avoid it we have to change attitude. We could enter a new dimension of civilization only when we will have profoundly interiorized that “we” are “the others”.
Paul VI and Raoul Follereau used an expression that too runs the risk of being emptied by the habit and by our cynicisms: “the civilization of love”.
At different levels the World bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the national governments and their nationalistic ideologies, the attitude of worrying only about our local dead and never share the suffering of the others, even things that looks so stupidly innocent like the national and local football fans, are institutions and attitudes definitely old, that hinder our progress towards that dimension of world horizon in which we have to enter if we want to really build up a new future. Or, more simply, if we want to have a future.
How is it that the Mthunzi boys, with whom I share this time of Easter, can so easily understand that the teaching of the Gospel is Life? The African proverb that says that “the elder can see far even without climbing a tree” is wrong. Wisdom springs from a pure heart, not from many years of life.
Happy Easter, let’s look forward, let’s enter in the process of the resurrection.