Re-start with confidence
After months of confinement not being able to share our lives with the people we care about, after a Lent without encounters, a Holy Week without stages, a Passover without hallelujah and a year-end with nothing, summer has finally arrived. A time of reunion, an opportunity to resume walks and journeys - not without limits - and a good time to share and evoke these nightmares that we all wish to see belong to the past.
Some dark clouds remain in the blue summer sky, doubts and fears that simply have not dissipated:
Will we be able to meet normally in this new year that begins? Will we be able to meet those we have dreamed of so much during the lock-down - even knowing that many of us will only meet again in paradise, because the virus will have taken them away -? What will this "new normality" look like in our beloved Ascending Life movement? What if there were resumptions of the disease this fall?
Too many things occupy us, worry us and take away the serenity we thought we had acquired over the years.
"Don't be afraid of what kills the body, but can't kill the soul» (Mt 10:28).
We feel that everyone has been so concerned about the elderly, so that they do not contaminate themselves, that they isolate themselves and do not come into contact with anything that could harm their health, that we are faced with the danger of going through what some specialists have called the "cabin syndrome": “Before, I did little, only shopping, mass and Ascending Life, but now I don't go out at all, my children or grandchildren bring me what I need. They drop it off at the door, I am following mass on TV and I maintain a relationship with my friends of the movement through my mobile phone. How does that look like us?”
We must thank very much those who have ensured that we have been well, and that is why they have protected us so much, but the fear of what might happen must not paralyze us.
We must rediscover the dream, the hope, and the joy of meeting each other.
We will do so with all the necessary measures, with masks, keeping the distance and outdoors if necessary and possible, but we must start the year in style, with the celebrations that we could not do to finish the previous one, with the joy of reunion with our brothers, knowing that where we are two or three in His name, He is there in the middle of us ...
It is true that it may not yet be wise to make large, anti-diocesan demonstrations, but as a diocesan chaplain, I am ready to travel wherever you call me to continue to encourage, accompany and train all Life Ascending’s dear friends, not in large groups but in small communities, as the apostles did with the first Christian communities.
Three expressions that we must remember to start a new year:
may no one be hopeless, may no one be dreamless, may no one be alone...
Have a lot of courage and let Jesus continue to take care of us.
José Ignacio Figueroa
National chaplain (Spain)