Good customs

I have taken from the pantry a package of biscuits, good ones.
I opened it some time ago, for the breakfast of one of my sons. They had not liked the flavour; and therefore the pastries had been carefully sealed and put away. Now, in spite of all precautions they become hard as steel, and can't be eat.
Every thing, also a good one, after some time goes stale. The only things that can survive the passing of the time are the alive ones, those who can adapt themselves, answer to the circumstances in new ways taking from experience.
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
Tennyson make his dying Arthur say.
The evil often arrives from the good intention. Every dictator, revolutionary, conqueror or crazy killer has started from his own good plan to impose to the rest of the world. Satan itself, deep down, had its good reasons in order to rebel to God.
Let's not permit our own good custom to become everything, to be everything. Making us, in its defense, moralists, ideologists, demons.
The biscuits? I have thrown them away.

Signs of infinity

"We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened."

Mark Twain

I know the equations that make the stars bright. I know what makes them burn, the nuclear marriages that warm their boiling hydrogen heart. I know also their distance, even if I do not succeed to imagine it, eternity of void.

But when I watch to them I do not see this. The stars are holes in the sky that leak out the light of the infinite.
Those stars that Dante has placed to seal its work: "It was from there that we emerged, to see-once more-the stars".
Those stars that Francis of Assisi has indicated as the most beautiful works of the Lord: “The spangled sky, and Clare”
Those stars that are the farthest point we can watch, just nearer than God itself.

If everything we do has not a connection with stars, from kissing someone to write on a blog, we will always crawl on low and foggy land, the lungs of our being with the breath of a flea.
The stars are questions screwed over our head to make us look up.

Rusted brains

No man loses his time in writing or speaking unless he thinks that he is right and the others are wrong. This means to be dogmatic; because a dogma is a belief we have, to which it is necessary to believe. Our entire life is a run to build certainty, sure answers. If this is not our target, then our brain is rusty.

Read, please, what Chesterton wrote almost 80 years ago (the proof that modern thinkers have same ideas as their great-grandfathers):

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in our time fallen on our Northern civilization. All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere existence of their neighbours. (...)

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."

Truth, in its time, becomes undeniable against all words and ideologies, because reality itself is pasted with truth. It is a pity that in the meantime rust can do so great damage.

Phylacteries

The Pharisees, like their descendants today, hang to their head pieces of paper containing passages of the Scripture, inside boxes called phylacteries.
But a phylactery is just a piece of paper nailed before our eyes, to the wall, the wall of our hearts; it changes nothing. Fine words are useless, just like my countless phylacteries. Only living words can change us, penetrate into the wall, crumble it, become part of our lives.

Eluana, and the words

I lack Words.

When the right is left down, when chance of the freedom is denied in name of freedom, when the hope is denied in name of the hope;

when who is called unworthy is killed for his own worthiness, when man does not call man what man is, when cruelty is called mercy;

when the man is made by the law and is unravelled by the same law, when is defined civilization what denies the base of civilization itself, when man believe to be the master of life because causes death, then in order to define all this

I lack words. Because when words fail to be true, fail to be reality then how can I use them?

Therefore I will be silent, and pray.

Obama, Congo and to save mankind

Do we (they) believe, really believe, that Osama's election will be the salvation, the redemption for all?

The silent massacre in the Congo, that goes ahead from more than a decade but of which we hear about only now (and it always remains the doubt this is done purposefully) shows that man is not able to eliminate the lack of justice. Every man (me, you), because every man (me, you) have in his heart this very lack of justice.

It will not be Obama to save the mankind, and the world, also if he would, also if he had the chance. Because everyone of us is not able to save even itself, either if we should be called Obama, with the name of an inhabitant of the heart of Africa or of the heart of this Europe filled with foolish pride and vain hope.

We (me, you) can hope to save our own painful humanity, our own painful smallness, and therefore the world, only accepting to be saved. Only praying to be saved.