A letter on becoming Christian

Dear C.,

I’m very glad to hear about your recent powerful experience about the Christian faith. Being touched by God’s love changes everything in one’s life. This can happen of course in many different ways, but I do think there is something specific when this love manifests more specifically as Jesus’ own love.

As I’m learning, I see that being Christian is an ongoing process of conversion. More than being Christian, we can become Christian, more and more, every day. When Jesus calls, he usually asks us to follow him. This entails a dynamism: we need to move from where we are and go somewhere else. There is a sense of growth, deepening, learning, endurance—and faith. There is a tension in this process.

To follow and remain true to this dynamism it is important to appreciate the nature of the tension it creates, and to realize where we’re going and how we move forward (instead of backward). So, let me share with you what I’ve learned so far about these aspects. Perhaps you’ll find something useful for yourself in what follows, or perhaps not.

The tension

You feel a tension when something is pulled or moved in opposite directions. We tend to be averse to tensions and see them as contradictions that need to be resolved or synthetized. But Christianity is an invitation to live in the tension and make good use of it—as if you would do with the tension in the strings of a musical instrument, which makes it possible to play it.

The tension in Christianity manifests in different ways (and a meta-tension is how to reconcile them all): God is both impenetrable and unfathomable in His being, but also providentially present in our histories; Jesus is both a human being and God Himself; He came to reconcile the world with God, which means both taking care of the world and indicating a path of transcendence; He came to love the sinners, but also to convert them; He came to announce His message to all, but not everybody did listen or does listen or will listen to Him. The list goes on.

For now, I’d like to emphasize that once we feel this tension (the fact of being pulled in opposite directions) we need to find our own way to use it to move with and be moved by it. It needs to become our own source of energy, like when you have a question you want to solve, a piece you want to write, something you want to accomplish, you still don’t know how, but you feel the tension that pulls you into action. However, the way of doing so consists in remaining true to the tension, without attempting at dissolving or resolving it, but rather letting it deepen its meaning and open new perspectives as it brings you towards what you could not imagine.

Let me try to illustrate this general idea (which I present as nothing but something I am myself struggling with) with two examples, connected with what you write about the goal of religious life and the role of experience within it.

The goal

The goal of Christian faith is the advent of the ‘Kingdom of God’. This is a puzzling expression, that occurs often in the Gospel. It has two main meanings: (1) it indicates God’s act of exercising His power in the world; (2) it indicates an eschatological state at the end of time, following the final judgment. The first meaning anticipates the second, and the second brings the first to fulfillment. Behold, the tension! In several cases in the Gospel, Christ talks about the Kingdom of God implying that He is already that Kingdom (in the first sense: Christ is God acting and exercising his power from within history). In other passages, and especially in the Book of Revelation, the Kingdom is presented as the state that arises from the glory of Christ, in which the whole world is finally reconciled with God’s love. My favorite passage is this:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21: 1-5)

I’m sketching these brief remarks to point out that, in Christianity, the ultimate goal or salvation is identified with the ‘Kingdom of God’, which has some peculiar features: (a) it entails a personal relation with Christ and with the whole people of God (in fact the whole of humanity, since everybody is called to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the coming of this Kingdom, i.e. to Christ); (b) it is not an individual goal achieved by one single individual independently from others (the whole people enter the Kingdom); (c) it is not achieved by anybody because of their own value or activity, but it is bestowed by God’s grace, through conversion, repentance, reconciliation, as a gratuitous and superabundant act of love (nobody can ‘earn’ the Kingdom, except that by saying a free ‘yes’ to Christ).

The tension between the two meanings of the ‘Kingdom of God’ also entails that this goal is neither entirely mundane nor entirely supra-mundane. Christ was not a political reformer who wanted to make the world as such a better place. Many people at his time were expecting someone like that, but he clearly said to Pilate: “my Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). In this sense, we should not forget that the goal lies beyond the horizon of this world and of anything we can achieve within it. However, it’s impossible to announce the Gospel without also changing this world and making manifest in it the presence of God. Since the Word that Jesus brings is a Word of love, reconciliation and glory, everybody who will be genuinely touched by it will naturally starts living differently and hence will have an impact on the world. Christians are the ‘salt’ of the world (Matthew 5:13)—what makes it tasty; they are the light of it (Matthew 5:14)—what allows people to truly see how things are; and the Kingdom is like the ‘yeast’ of the world (Matthew 13:13)—what makes it grow. Hence, it is impossible to be a disciple of Jesus without also attempting at spreading his love here and now. Staying in this tension means rejecting both pure asceticism and pure activism. What remains in the middle of these two extremes doesn’t have a precise label, it is just us, trying to figure it out by following Him, trying, failing, asking for help, and trying again.

The Christian goal compared to Buddhism

A crucial point you raise in your message concerns the relation between Christianity and other faiths or traditions. You mentioned you’ve been practicing Buddhism before being touched by Christ (something very similar happened to me as well). Of course, now it’s more than understandable to raise the question: what is the relation between the two? And even more radically: which one is ‘right’? These are heavy questions. I won’t attempt to answer them for you, but I’ll share the answer I arrived at myself, based on my own experience, knowing you might disagree or it might not work for you.

Behold, here we find the tension again. On the one hand, there are clear points of convergence between Buddhism and Christianity. Buddhism, like Christianity, posit a strong emphasis on moral behavior (moral practice is the basic form of meditation practice for the original Buddhist sources) and it denounces the ‘conceit’ of the ego-centric self and its attempt at controlling experience for fear of facing suffering as the fundamental problem of human existence. On the other hand, however, Buddhism offers a very different ideal of salvation. Since the self is conceived as the result of conditionings rooted in the individual (via karmic structures, which for now I’ll leave aside), it follows that (1) it is the individual itself that needs to work on itself in order to remove those conditionings; (2) their removal is achieved when the self is also effaced so that experience remains completely impersonal and de-realized; (3) this state of salvation (nirvana/nibbana/freedom) is achieved by one individual at the time.

The Christian ideal of salvation counters all these three points: (vs. 1) the Kingdom of God cannot be achieved by the individual on its own but only by relying on God’s grace; (vs. 2) the way to the Kingdom and to the overcoming of egocentrism is not de-personalization but the loving relationship with Jesus, which requires to remain a self capable of feeling love; (vs. 3) ultimately the Kingdom is not achieved by an individual in isolation, but by the whole ‘people of God’ and it presents itself as a ‘city’ (see quote above from Revelation 21) where ‘many’ will live together.

Let me observe here that we live in a culture that is very emphatic on the need for the individual to act and operate for themselves, being self-directed in achieving their own goals. This is clearly how neo-liberalist ideology imposes itself, but it is also a much older tendency that humans have in claiming their own independency (in fact, the very legend of the ‘original sin’ presents human beings as wanting to be autonomous and act as if they were gods). Behold, the tension again! We want to be saved, but we are actually saved (in the Christian perspective) by a gift that we receive regardless of our merits. I can’t but think at how beautifully Shakespeare paraphrased this idea in the Merchant of Venice (Act IV, Scene I, bold added):

But mercy is above this sceptred sway;

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. 

From a Christian perspective the Buddhist idea (which makes it so appealing for our present culture) of seeking one’s own salvation through one’s own resources is precisely the epitome of the mentality that leads to sin. One is saved only (and insofar as) abandons this mentality, and accepts that “in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation”, by thus opening to receive that salvation as a gift of gratuitous love. This does not mean that I remain completely passive an inert, in the same way in which loving someone does not make you inert—the tension again! Once you let yourself be moved by His love, then you'll inevitably act, but no longer out of what you want by yourself. The 'I' will be replaced by the 'we'. Being love calls for loving in return, and loving Christ means going out in the world doing one’s best to observe His word and witness it to others, because ultimately salvation is not an individual process, but a collective, communitarian process.

Now we can appreciate the tension (!) between Buddhism and Christianity. What should we do with it? One option is trying to smooth it out, adjusting the two so that they match. But then we do violence to both, since we deny their respective identities and differences. Another option is trying to decide that one is right and the other is wrong. But then we generate a conflict for supremacy, which eventually won’t help anybody. Behold, the tension! My suggestion is that we live in this tension, using the points of convergence as a basis for dialogue when we need to cooperate with (in this case, say) Buddhists, while at the same time, activating the points of divergence to remind ourselves (in this case, say) Christians, about what actually defines the specificity of what a Christian is supposed to be.

Consider an ecosystem. You have plants, trees, insects, animals, stones, whatever. They are different, but they are part of the same environment. They do not perform all the same functions, nor have all the same goals. Yet, they live together and, willing or unwilling, they eventually help each other out. We do not need to agree in everything to be helpful to each other, and we do not need to win over others in order to trust in our specificity.

The view that tries to squeeze all views into just some universal generalist account, reducing differences to surface, minor details, in the name of some alleged common essence is potentially very dangerous. It might easily justify distorted views of the actual historical realities and identities, by thus preventing a sincere and authentic dialogue between them. We need difference to get in touch with one another, as much as we need unity to do something together—yes, the tension again!

At the same time, once we accept that different soteriological views aim at different goals, it does not make sense to ask whether one or the other is the ‘exclusive’ path that leads to salvation. They are different paths leading to different kinds of ‘salvation’. I do believe that Buddhist practice delivers precisely what it purports to deliver. But I do not see how what the Buddhist tradition describes as ‘nirvana’ or ‘the end of suffering’ could be squared with the goal aimed at in Christianity. I’m reluctant to say which one is ‘better’. It would be a bit like asking: is it better to go on holidays on the mountains or at the beach? The only adequate question would be: which one appeals to you more? Maybe adding: why?

Moving away

This brings me to take up the other aspect of becoming Christian, which has to do with a process of leaving behind our own self-centeredness. This is neither easy nor straightforward. The only true guide we have is Christ’s own voice: He calls, we go towards Him. What can prevent this movement is our own attachment to things, attitudes, ideas, experiences, whatever would prevent us from going towards Him. In fact, He asks to bring nothing with us, but our love for Him. His call is thus a question: “do you love me more than these?” (John 21:15). Sometimes the answer is straightforward, sometimes it isn’t.

To understand this issue, it’s important to remember where do we hear Christ’s voice. There are three places: (a) in our own heart; (b) in the Scripture, especially the Gospels; (c) in His community (the Church), and especially through those who consecrated their lives to Him. To hear well, these three sources should be tuned to one another, so that they all mutually support, reinforce and amplify one another.

This is an important point, since it entails that my personal subjective experience is, at best, just one place where I can meet Christ. Given what you write about the role of experience, let me elaborate a bit more deeply on this point.

There is a sense in which Christianity is a form of witnessing. Everyone who is touched by Christ in their life, is then called to witness this encounter and how it changed things for them: “we testify to what we have seen” (John 3:11). However, experience is never a purely subjective fact. We do not just ‘have an experience’, we also always ‘interpret’ that experience and make sense of it, and for doing so, we rely inevitably on other people, contexts, traditions. It’s a bit like language: you can’t speak a language by yourself, and in order to make sense of a word you need to keep in mind its context. Hence, when we talk about ‘our’ experience, that experience is never completely ‘ours’, it is always filtered and shaped by views, presuppositions, desires, most likely coming from outside. (we’re not monads without windows). Any experience is thus a witnessing of Christ only insofar as it actually fits the other sources through which we hear His voice (Scripture and the community).

I once heard a Buddhist monk reminding practitioners that they should also interpret their experience in light of the Buddhist scriptures and of the monastic tradition. This is an interesting point of agreement with what I’ve mentioned above. However, if we look at the Buddhist scriptures themselves and at the monastic tradition, a crucial feature of Buddhism is precisely that one’s own experience is the ultimate court for assessing one’s progress towards awakening.

The Dhamma is ‘visible here and now’ and ‘known directly by the wise’. Buddhism, in its core, does not require any external authority to validate one’s realizations: Scriptures and fellow practitioners can provide reference points, but no one can judge for another. In fact, there shouldn’t be any such authority, nor any sincere practitioner would search for it. Everything starts with one’s conditionings, and when they are eradicated, one will know it, and that will be enough. The rest would just be conceit (one of the most resilient fetters). Moreover, since what needs to be removed are mental conditionings that shape one’s own experience, it makes sense for Buddhist practice to focus on increasing one’s metacognitive awareness of psychological processes and fostering one’s own ability to steer intentionality in alternative ways.

Christianity, though, relies on a different model. One enters the ‘Kingdom of God’ (in its already present form, Christ) by saying ‘yes’ to the invitation that Jesus raises. He asks each and every one: “do you love me?” (John 21:17). The question presupposes the freedom of saying ‘no’, or ‘yes, but…’, and even to change this answer over time. Moreover, this question is addressed to everybody in different ways, often in such a way that they can understand it. It can be through other people, through events, through encounters, maybe occasionally through something more spectacular. In my experience, if I look backward in time to my whole life, I do recognize that forms of this questions have been around me since my childhood, often phrased or appearing in very different forms, because at each time I was able to receive this question only in a specific way or through a specific ‘phrasing’. In any case, since the answer is an act of love, an exercise of freedom, and a confession of faith, it does not require a detailed analysis or knowledge of our psychology. It does require, instead, a committed decision to stick to the answer or deepen it if possible. As Jesus said to his disciples during the last supper: “remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love” (John 15: 9-10). One’s ‘yes’ has to be said not only with words or mental belief, but also, and foremost, with each and every aspect of one’s being, in each and every aspect of one’s life. It’s a ‘yes’ that does not concern primarily how I see the world, but rather how I want to be with Him.

Having practiced Buddhist meditation for a while, when I started to delve into Christian practice, I quickly found back a number of contemplative states that were phenomenologically comparable with those cultivated in Buddhist meditation. For some time, I thought that I only needed to cultivate them through the ‘Christian route’, but that they were actually the ‘proof’ that I was on the right track and that God was coming close to me in those states. I now see things differently.

When I feel unending love and warmth in myself after contemplating for some time some piece of the Gospel, I do not think that in this mental state or experience there is anything more than a trace of how the Gospel has impressed its mark on my being. In other words, I do not think that in that experience I am in touch with God because the experience itself feels so and so. The experience is at best a screenshot of my inner state, for how it is modified by the encounter. The encounter, though, is not entirely within me. In fact, what I experience is that the encounter asks me constantly to move outside of me (which is the original meaning of the term ‘ectasis’), but in a very concrete and practical manner: since God decided to manifest himself by descending into something that became small, weak and doomed to suffer (his Son), we cannot find God by ascending or reaching towards some sublime state. Quite the contrary, we find God by descending from the peaks of our expectations and desires, getting out into the world, and meeting Him among others—and foremost in the liturgy of his Word and in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Because it is within the sacred life of His community that He is really publicly and openly present in this world.

This does not mean that personal subjective experience is not important—it is. Behold, the tension again! Personal, subjective experience is also important, but it is not just the whole story. The idea of cultivating a direct individual experience of God is a theme developed in Protestant theology, which today has been widely secularized and disseminated due to the global economic hegemony that makes it square nicely with the neo-liberal emphasis on individualism. This is also an idea that penetrated our understanding of Indian traditions like Buddhism, and which eventually led to overemphasize individual experience in our understanding of them. Turning our own individual experience in our guide, though, is an act of pride, which eventually cuts us off from God and hinders our actual growing in closeness with Him.

I’m making these remarks because for me it has been particularly important to learn how to value experience differently. Instead of searching for specific experiential states as a proof of having reached a certain degree of freedom, I now tend to interpret them as feedback on how I feel about my relation with God and how that relation affects me—knowing that it is not ‘me’ who really does the work, but rather Him who transforms me. I do not think that I can find God in any meditative state, nor that he could be found there. How could something infinite be encompassed in the experience of a finite subject (pace Descartes & Spinoza)? There is a deep and implicit form of narcissism (not uncommon even among philosophers) in thinking that the Absolute should fit the limits of my own human consciousness (or saying that what I experience as consciousness is what God actually is). Would you say that your best friend is just what you own experience of them? Quite likely, anybody has aspects of themselves that we didn’t discover yet, no matter how familiar we are with them—not counting that nobody knows how they will develop in the future. No matter what is the screenshot we have of them in our mind now, that’s just a screenshot, not the whole relationship. Screenshots are important, but must not be overinterpreted (sacraments are way more essential).

In Buddhist meditative practice, you can learn to recognize certain psychosomatic markers (e.g. tingling sensations, energy levels, joy, etc.) as milestones to distinguish different contemplative states. Cultivating these states, in turn, is essential to assess the degree at which you have relinquished greed, aversion, ignorance. And this is important because, as I mentioned above, it is the practitioner themselves that need to self-assess how they are doing in terms of ‘liberation’.

Becoming Christian, instead, it’s a constantly ongoing process of meeting and learning to love someone, knowing that we will never know Him or love Him enough. In this sense, there is no end point of the process. The milestones concern mostly how we relate to Christ’s own community, how we manage to live in it, despite all difficulty, how available we are for it, despite our own wants and fears. At different times it will feel different, but the differences in the psychosomatic states does not have any inherent value. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux mentions in her autobiography that for most of her last years she faced spiritual ‘aridity’, as if she had lost the experience of her faith in Jesus – and she was a Saint!

All that Jesus ever asked was to obey his commandment: “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). Note: he says “as I have loved you”. He’s not saying: just be kind to each other. He’s not saying: become a philanthropist. Jesus’ unique way of loving is by giving everything for his friends so that they might meet the Father. It entails (a) loving without condition, for the sake of (b) recovering our original status of ‘children’. I won’t comment further on these points. What I want to stress is that Jesus’s command is not just a general invitation to a general universal love, it’s rather specific. More importantly, He’s saying that we meet him and remain with him (so we’re in union with him – and union being the state sought by mystics) while we learn how to love in this way others. Clearly, this entails way more than just cultivating one’s own mental state: it entails living in a community in a certain way and trying to being there for others with this ideal in the mind-heart-body.

Christianity is not a do-it-yourself practice. Especially in Catholicism (and this is actually one of thing I like most about it), tradition is as important as the Scripture itself. Why? Because tradition is community (and vice versa), as it spreads out not only in space but also over time. Of course, tradition can be seen at times as ‘conservative’, since this after all is what a tradition does: it passes on (from the Latin tradere) something from a time to the next, taking care that it remains still alive as it was before. But when I try to depart from this tradition and make my own version of what Christianity is or should be, more often than not, the result is actually an attempt at adjusting the Gospel for my own purposes and make it ‘fit’ my own limitations, or simply making myself more comfortable and avoiding facing tensions that I do not want to face. Does this make sense for someone invoking Christ, who’s usually represented in his glory as hanging from a Cross? Did He ever make anything simple, plain, comfortable for Himself?

I acknowledge that there are different branches of Christianity (tension again, here you go!). I do think that it is important to appreciate their respective differences and understand how they historically arose. Yet, one should then also really reflect on which one makes sense to oneself, and why. I do not think we need to create new versions or personalized brands. Jesus himself never tried to ‘sell’ his ‘Good news’ or make it more palatable for his audience for the sake of just winning them over. In fact, from a strict marketing and communication point of view he was quite a failure in his own lifetime. We too should probably learn more how to fail with and for him.

What is clear from the Gospel is that Jesus himself wanted to create a community of people and disciples, so that they might grow and eventually proclaim his Gospel till the ends of the world. This means that there is simply no Christianity without Church, since the Church is the ‘convocation’ (the original meaning of the Greek ekklesia) of those who believe in Him. Even more radically: I, as a private individual, cannot believe in Christ. I can believe in Him only as part of a community of believers. Belief in Christ, in other words, is not a private act, since Christ’s revelation is not a private revelation. Yes, He calls me by name, but not just to ‘fix’ my relation with Him. He calls me to enter and become part of a ‘herd’ or be a branch of Him as the ‘vine’. When I say ‘yes’ (and to the extent I am capable of saying ‘yes’), I’m not just saying ‘yes’ to Him, but to His whole body, which is His community. Being part of this community does not only mean meeting other people at given places and times, but more fundamentally means becoming a whole body through the communion created by the sacraments. Where do I meet Christ? In His Word (read in the Gospel but also living in people), in His sacraments (especially the Eucharist), and eventually in partaking in the life of His Church.

Seen from this perspective, though, things seem to get more difficult, because I might like what I occasionally read in the Gospel, and it might feel good vibes about what I occasionally experience when pondering over it, but I might dislike this or that person in this or that Church, or this or that teaching, or this or that aspect of the Church history, and so on. Not being in communion with a Church might prevent me from partaking in sacramental life, and that in turns undermines my ability to really encounter Christ as he’s really present in the world. Well, welcome to family life! Church is like family, the basic ideal is love, but the daily practice might be something quite different. Like in a family, you live with your loved ones primarily by spending time with them outside of your own thoughts of them. I don’t just meditate about my mom in my room, I call her to talk to her over the phone. So, I don’t just meditate about Jesus, I go to mass or to adoration, to meet with Him in person. This, for sure, requires getting out of my little safe corner and meet people with whom I might never have had anything to do. We grow precisely by living in this tension, trying to bring the daily practice more in line with the basic ideal, one step at the time, together. Yet, it is through this tension we really discover Christ (that’s the practice, if any), while we betray Him if we give up the tension and create instead our own little niche (perhaps our little community we’ll share only with those we like or are like-minded).

Becoming Christians

Let me conclude this long letter by coming back to where I started. I would be hesitant to define myself as a Christian (although, formally, I am), and more comfortable saying that I am striving to be one. I can witness how Christ has changed, changes, and will change my life—but this is an ongoing process and I still don’t know where it will lead nor how I will live it till the end. I witness this transformation both in myself (insofar as I try to grow and develop in faith), and to others—but I can only authentically witness what I have lived so far and to the extent I have lived it. When relating to other people, I do not dare to tell them what they should believe, especially if they are not yet touched by Jesus’s call. Yet, I can witness what I have seen, I can declare what I believe, and just raise (mostly implicitly) the question: “and you?”. Inviting others to reflect is legitimate, I think, since it’s part of being in a dialogue. However, I do not claim that anybody must answer to me (I’m just a witness, not a judge). Whatever answer they will utter, it is God who is listening. I see and expect different kinds of answers, nay, a whole range of different answers, from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ and all the shades in between. The task of reconciling these differences is not mine. They simply express our freedom.

For me, the very fact of this freedom is a proof of the existence of our Father, since freedom comes from love, and if there is all this freedom, we must have been loved so much! In this sense, the tension itself is a witnessing of freedom, and hence of love. I do hope that there will be more ‘yes, totally!’ than ‘no, never!’ in the end, and I do try to provide the best witnessing I can at any time for that. But I also know that in no way I can really influence the answer, since it is not ‘me’ who can touch the heart of others, and even God cannot force a recalcitrant heart to convert (since love prevents Him from undermining freedom). It’s not my task to tell people if they are wrong in anything they believe. I limit myself to be clear about which path I’m trying to follow, why, and how I can do that, so I can also point it out to others in all clarity, when asked about it.

I am fully aware that we can’t follow all paths at once, since this would simply make us stuck and lead nowhere (wanting everything at once is not a way of staying in the tension, but rather of dissolving it). It’s important to acknowledge both potential convergences, but also be true to their divergences. Faith is also a matter of choice; it takes courage, and it entails risk. It’s an adventure. You don’t know what will happen, but if you don’t try, you’ll miss it. I’m happy to talk about these issues, because I do realize that most often the ‘no’ or the ‘but’ depend on some misleading assumptions or presuppositions, which once they are clarified can lead to take a quite different perspective. But again, it’s not up to me to draw any consequences for others.

What I personally found extremely helpful so far was the possibility of relying on trusted consecrated people, with whom I was lucky enough to exchange thoughts, receive guidance, and more generally sharing this adventure. Luckily enough for us, we still live in a part of the world where there is abundance of them. As someone said: a Christian alone is a dead Christian. Anything that can strengthen and support this sense of connection with the Christian community (which will inevitably taking the shape of a link with a specific Church community) will surely help me growing further in this ‘marathon of love’ (to paraphrase Saint Paul, Philippians 3:10-14). I hope you too will join the race. Fully striving for it might be the genuine prize to win.

May the peace and grace of Christ be always with us all!