Walking on the ridge

In our troubled world – but what season is free from troubles? – the secular vocation sends us to share from within the birth pangs: at this turning point in history it seems urgent, in fact, that a “new man” is born, capable of bridging the gap that has arisen between the dizzying speed of technological and scientific progress and the awareness of ourselves as human beings capable of solidarity and fraternity.

We can thus say that our vocation, which is also that of every Christian, places us in the ever-living search for how to be in the world but not of the world (cf. Jn 15:19), simultaneously faithful both to the Kingdom of God and its values and to the world with its achievements and its anxieties: today, in fact, it is increasingly understood that the experience of God inwardly implies fidelity to the earth.

The famous theologian H. U. von Balthasar spoke in this regard of paradox, since it requires a double and total fidelity both to God and to the world. “It is like walking on a ridge between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world,” he writes, suggesting the image of the summit of a mountain.

“Walking on a ridge” thus evokes an undertaking that is not easy, but also a place from which a vision opens up that allows the gaze to embrace the mountain on both sides with the valleys below. The breadth of the scene allows one to grasp the variety of a landscape in which the contrasts of shapes and colors come together in an evocative whole.
[...]
Authentic secularity then leads us to be contemporaries of our today, to remain in rapidly changing realities (even in the harshest ones, such as migration) with a contemplative attitude, to perceive there the presence of God: the only one capable of authentic novelty and of making “all things new” (Rev 21:5).

In the following article “A Road in the World” (1981), Adelia, the first missionary of our Secular Institute, expresses the profound heart of secularity: the Incarnation of Jesus who saved man in his totality and wholeness, even in his smallest, most apparently insignificant gestures: “In becoming flesh, he made them deeply human, because he saved them, freed them, impregnated them with resurrection.”

Mariella
(Read more: SSE Magazine 2024 n.1)