FREE
There is a «beatitude» of Jesus that we Christians have ignored. «When you give a feast, invite the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Happy are you if they can’t repay you». In reality, it’s hard for us to understand these words, since the language of gratitude seems to us to be strange and incomprehensible.
In our «civilization of possessing», almost nothing is free. Everything is interchanged, is borrowed, is owed or is demanded. No one believes that «it’s better to give than to receive». We only know how to give our services that will be paid for and «to charge interest» for all that we do throughout the day.
Yet the most intense and fulfilling moments of life are those that we know how to live gratuitously. Only in uninterested self-giving can you enjoy true love, joy, solidarity, mutual trust. Gregorio Nacianzeno says that «God has made the human person singer of his own shining», and certainly a human being is never so great as when she knows how to shine forth gratuitous and disinterested love.
Couldn’t we be more generous with those who can never return what we’ve done for them? Couldn’t we come close to those who live alone and poor, thinking only in their good? Will we always go about seeking our own interest?
Accustomed to run after all kinds of joys and satisfactions, will we dare to enjoy the hidden but authentic happiness that is enclosed in the gratuitous self-giving to one who needs us? That faithful follower of Jesus who was Charles Peguy lived convinced that in life «the one who loses, gains».
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
