by Mario Carrera
«There is a very deep source within me. In that spring there is God. Sometimes I manage to reach it, more often it is covered with stone and sand: in that moment God is buried." These are words of the young Jewish Etty Hillesum, written in the Auschwitz concentration camp, which resonated in her memory when I heard Pope Francis speak about the joy of the priest. This adventure of total self-giving to God and others as a source of joy sometimes seems a little dull. Moreover, fewer and fewer young people wish to respond to the call of the Spirit to prolong the presence of the qualities of Jesus in today's world. It is undeniable that in these times young people are experiencing «a moment of solitude, of fragmentation, of reflux into the private, in a "liquid society" devoid of strong grips and riddled with profound anxieties». The new generations are afraid of the future and cannot find the strength to bet on a life of gratuitousness. The welfare society presents the following as the goal of a successful life: profit, appearance, success. The gift of gratuitousness lies elsewhere; today, we lack the courage to say yes to the will of Another. This does not mean canceling our personality, but living it fully in the service of others as the Master did.
Among the resolutions on the eve of his priestly ordination, Don Guanella made that of being a grain of salt ready to be thrown into life to give flavor and taste where Providence desired it to dissolve for the joy of souls.
In the generosity of his gift, Don Guanella also wrote that he "wanted to be a sword of fire in the sacred ministry". With this expression he meant what Don Lorenzo Milani, the prior of Barbiana, would have said about the mission of the priest who must not be like «a merchant (Pope Francis would say: an official) who satisfies the tastes of his customers, but a master who contests them and changes them."
Paul VI had said that it is important to be "teachers", but it is essential, above all, to be "witnesses", that is, bearers in one's own flesh of the message that is announced: to bring with one's life the pain and death of men into the very heart of God.
We must ask the Spirit for the gift of rediscovering the source that gives primacy to God, the Eternal, to that future full of immortality that awaits loving hearts to make it bear fruit.
God has called us to live in a time of great scientific and cultural revolutions but which cannot indicate a certain future. It has been written that for our time "the greatest tragedy is not so much the absence of God, but the fact that so many do not seem to suffer from this lack". So, it seems urgent to invoke the Holy Spirit to multiply the presence of saints who know how to speak about God with their lives like inspired poets: poetry is the only language that makes the secret soul of things speak. Poets, therefore, know how to open up horizons, point out a distant homeland, lighting the fire of that cloud that led the Jewish people to the promised land.
In the letter to the Hebrews we speak of a cloud of witnesses, bearers of torches of light. At the beginning of every priestly vocation in the soul of the young man called there is the presence of at least one witness.
The young Luigi Guanella had an uncle who was a priest in his family: an exemplary priest. Throughout the years of his training and in the priesthood he also had the joy of meeting authentic saints. Among the famous ones we find: Don Bosco, Card. Ferrari, Saint Pius