Automatic translation from Italian, under review.
Years ago I gave two girls who were preparing for their first Communion a rather unusual catechism lesson: I took a newspaper, a flower, and a ceramic vase and, in silence, in front of them, I burned the newspaper, pulled the petals off the flower, and broke the vase; then I asked them what was left of the newspaper, the flower, and the vase. They answered: “Nothing!” At that point it was easy to help them understand that everything passes, that everything can end from one moment to the next.
Like a vase that shatters into a thousand pieces, every day we witness a thousand breakages, in our own lives or in the lives of others: that job lost through a sudden dismissal, that young man injured in a road accident, that family overwhelmed by misfortune, studies interrupted for lack of means...
After this talk with my very attentive listeners, I asked them whether there was something that does not pass away, something that nothing and no one can chip away at. Together we discovered that there is a reality that, so to speak, marks an epoch in every epoch: God!
Study, career, marriage, success, everything can fail, but God cannot. Choosing him means, then, falling in love with a reality that never passes away and that is Beauty itself, beautiful Love, because “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16); choosing him means building one’s house on rock: the storms and the earthquakes will come, but our house will never fall (cf. Mt 7:24-27).
In work, in study, in leisure, in the family, in friendships, in our very ideals, we want to find him in everything, his loving presence, which guides us through it all.
God alone is; he himself says of himself: “I am who I am” (Ex 3:14); everything else is not, and has neither value nor substance unless it is in him. God is our all, because everything is in him; let us choose him, then, as the one great love of our life, and let us leave everything else for his sake.
To do this in a concrete way, let us learn to listen to the voice of conscience; it suggests to us, at every moment, what to do in order to choose Love, who is God, in the concrete reality of our daily life.