first page" "
It is enough to be a hand, bare and poor, but placed under the same hand as Peter, as Moses who raised his hand and rendered his people victorious, in the name of YHWH; he lowered it and the people’s victory relapsed. Who took the decision to become a hand that simply exists, and no longer acts, so long as the arm of John Paul II is kept raised? It can be so in every moment of the day and in every latitude: it is the heart that urges and incites. It is the listening to the Word, the invocation of help, the act of thanksgiving, the entrusting to the Mother, that permit a tired old man to draw the energies for a gargantuan task that everyone rejects: the task of eliminating wars from the face of the earth and enabling peace to reign. His raised hands sometimes bless, sometimes they greet us in a fatherly way, sometimes they enable us to sense his suffering, his tiredness, and his human limits that are being tested to the limit. Below all this, as always, there is another hand: a praying hand that transmits to those hands the energy of the Spirit, the love of God the Father for all his children. This is the great wound that lacerates those hands: all are God’s children, no one excepted. And he, the Father of Christianity, not only in Europe but throughout the world, has amply demonstrated this, even after the entry into his body of the bullets that the hand of Mary deflected from their mark. If we become a hand, we shall be like the hands of Aaron and Korah, and be able, until night falls, to support his tired and wrinkled hands. Human events are legion, but pierced by a single power: a son’s hand that grasps that of the father, in order not to leave him alone, to tell him I am and we are always with you, until the goal that you await: that of seeing God face to face. The joy and the smile shall never be extinguished from his face, because he shall always feel the hand of each, a welcoming hand, rich not of itself but only of the beauty of she who wanted him to be all hers, so that he should be all ours: Mary. The battles of man are endless. When one studies history, there is no end to war; the end of one marks the beginning of the next; and everything, life and death, sowing and harvesting, feasts and funerals, love and play, are signed by this stigma of destruction. The whole of history is all too familiar with these bloody episodes, from prehistory to the tragic conflicts in course in our own time. Even if a war is not being waged in our own country, with all its cruelties and reprisals, a battle is always going on: the light must vanquish the darkness. For the Christian, there is an inescapable certainty: Chist, the Risen Lord, has already vanquished death and sin. Yet, the task of fighting our personal battle is left to us, in our stretch of history and time. It’s a battle to be experienced together. Below the wars of our world, there is a deeper war that is being waged without pity and with extreme determination: the mystery of the darkness demands it. The weapons change. People play other roles, now visible, now invisible; but all of them very real and incisive. But all are remembered by the father and by the brother who for twenty-five years has fought without sparing himself; in that combination of resistance and surrender that seems inherent in his temperament and that is forged in his character by the innumerable vicissitudes he has overcome. A war stripped bare, in which the weapons are the hands stretched out, defenceless, a body bent by over-exertion, a voice that has become faint and slurred. Who does not remember the combative and proud Pope on the day of his election? Who can ever forget his sprightly step and ringing voice? How many of us, Christians and Europeans, has he taken upon himself? How many has he absorbed into his very skin, to share with him every gesture, every step?
