March 2021

Dear all,

In these days of Lent, we are continuing together along the path of prayer and contemplation of Jesus Crucified, to prepare us for the joy of Easter.

If we want to progress along this way of Love, I think it’s important to meditate on the Point of Light and put it into practice, communicating the experiences we have: it’s a way of helping each other, and reciprocally sustaining each other, to become holy together.

So, let us do our part to stay in contact with those who proceed with us on the same path, avoiding remaining alone; the life of communion is the powerful means offered us by God to go on more speedily.

The path of the Point of Light is communitarian, it must be done with other people, let us always gather more consciousness to become agents of communion in the Church and society. If we deepen our reciprocal unity with those who travel our same path to holiness, we’ll grow together as a living and effective christian community, there where we are; in this way we'll radiate joy and love around us, sustained by the fire of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus died for everyone, his words should continually resound in our spirit: “I have come to set the Earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” (Lk 12:49).

Let’s do our best in various ways to set our hearts ablaze with the fire of love. Let’s pay particular attention to all those who seem far from God, to those who are on the search for God, to those who don’t believe and are often very sensitive and open to good.

Let us take advantage of every circumstance to meet our every neighbor with whom we come into contact with, with a gaze of faith, seeing Jesus in them.

Let’s organize, according to our possibilities, some sort of significant family reunion even online, leaving no stone unturned to nourish the mutual love between us, although there may be many difficulties. The new commandment of Jesus guides us and illuminates us, making us become always more family of God.

If we look for a moment at the mystery of the Trinity, we’ll see that God is Love: the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Father, the meeting of these two loves is the Holy Spirit. The trinitarian communion is perfect harmony. The Word of God, Christ Jesus, incarnating himself, shared this splendid communion of love with us; not for nothing, as his hour was approaching, he gave us his commandment, that of mutually loving each other as he has loved us.

Giving us this commandment, Jesus, shall we say, transmitted to humanity the law of the Trinity, which is reciprocal love. This means that we will never fully participate in the life of God, until we have the experience of loving and of being loved back.

So, to live Jesus’ new commandment requires not being alone. The christian life is not the ascetic duty of someone who seeks to love others in order to feel at ease with their conscience, beyond the response of others which can always be lacking. Reciprocal love is not the ‘duty’ of loving, it is a love so strong, true, intelligent, authentic that it stimulates and elicits a response, in one way or another. It can even happen that you love a person, and the response comes from other people or from Jesus himself who lets you feel his consolation in the depths of your heart, for the fact that you have recognized and loved him in every neighbor. In any case, reciprocal charity is ordered to generate the christian community united in the name of Jesus.

Jesus’ commandment of loving one another reciprocally (cf. Jn 13:34) is no easy task for our human nature if it is not sustained by grace, but since it is a commandment from Jesus, it means that he also gives us the grace to be able to live it, rendering us in this way participants of the trinitarian communion.

Jesus wants to give us what he commands us: the capacity to live reciprocal love, expression of the human-divine nature which he has shared with us by his incarnation and death on the cross.

To experience mutual communion, we shouldn’t focus on our personal efforts, but we should be ready to lose even “our” way of loving.

Love is a Person, the Holy Spirit, learning from Him, our human way of loving should give way to the true trinitarian communion, gift of grace.

We are not able to build unity between us, only the Spirit can make us into one in Christ our Lord.

It is very consoling to me to think that, giving us the commandment of reciprocal love, Jesus certainly isn't asking something impossible of us; in other words, with the commandment of mutual love, he also gives us the capacity to love each other through his Spirit.

Jesus does not come to abolish the law, but to perfect it, he teaches us the perfect reciprocity of love: “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15,12). It’s that “as” that counts; that is, the gift of self to the point of giving one’s life, as Jesus who died on the cross for us.

Perhaps, we will never be in the situation of giving our physical life for others, but certainly we are daily asked to love in the little things, in the little gestures of everyday life, this is our way of giving our life as Jesus.

Every brother or sister, who we meet in the present, is waiting for our love. Let us learn to love everyone without making distinctions between people, without discriminations. Jesus is present in every neighbor we meet.

God is love; the life of love, which unites the Father and the Son in the Spirit, is the same life which Jesus shared with us; if we often do not succeed in experiencing this, it’s because we don’t open ourselves to the gift of God which is the communion brought us by Jesus in the Spirit; this communion demands, first of all, the respect of distinctions. We should accept being man or woman, of different nationalities, with different cultures, we should act in a way that the differences, instead of dividing us, serve to unite us so that they become heritage of all humanity, where the different treasures of everyone constitute one single harmony: the life of God among us.

Pope Francis invites us to dream of a different world, where universal fraternity reigns; as christians we are called to give a living testimony to reciprocal love, seeds and leaven of humanity renewed by the Spirit.

Only a true spirituality of communion can make us become always more a living church.

So, let us learn to love each other in order to establish authentic relationships of reciprocity, being in front of everyone as if that person was the only one in the world, without thinking about who we have met before or who we will meet afterwards, wholly in the present. This is the love that conquers; if it then becomes reciprocal, this concretization of mutual love, this experience of the new commandment, will be the sign of the christian life; by which, as Jesus said, his disciples will be recognized. It is the love which Jesus commands us; it is the path to come to experience the trinitary life here below.

Sr. Nunziella

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