Summer is the brightest season, which helps us walk with eyes longing for beauty, so much so that it makes us sing: «Sweet to feel how love is being born in my heart...». Saint Francis, "the universal brother of humanity", took words and song to express gratitude, thanks and adoration for the divine footsteps sown in creation. 

The saints we venerate are "added values" to the colorful flowerbed of creation. To each saint who most closely resembles Jesus, the Creator wanted to give a divine fragment to complete the mosaic of creation, constantly growing towards the summit of absolute beauty which is the very heart of God, made a visible reality in the person of Jesus , our brother in the flesh, who makes us become familiar with God through baptism.

In these times, walking with the guidance of Pope Francis, we are rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) the great paths of a ferial sanctity, fertile like soil tilled and guarded with love by the saints. Pioneers, like Don Guanella, and silent climbing companions, who increase courage and ardor in sharing the anxieties and dreams of the poor.

I like to remember that, at the end of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, the council fathers delivered a message to some very important personalities, representatives of the driving movements of history. For the world of the poor, the message was delivered to a guest of the Don Guanella Opera who could act as a standard-bearer in the strategies planned in favor of the most fragile and socially weak categories.  The memory of this honorable and onerous conciliar commitment stimulates us to be constant laborers not only in being the voice of the voiceless, but in being assiduous weavers of positive relationships alongside the marginalized and those who are alone. 

To do this you don't need television or radio, but a smile, a caress, an act of courtesy is enough. Summer sometimes multiplies solitudes, but it also gives us the opportunity to fill them. Summer and holidays are opportunities for good reading, but also for provident exercises of love.