In fact, gratuity speaks of generosity, solidarity, enthusiasm of helping, which cross the requests and the sufferings, the needs and the urgencies that come towards us and that we try to satisfy because something arouses in the heart, from within, without claiming anything, without expecting anything.

In truth, every day, all of us can see the really disastrous effect of a life-style too little inspired by the principle of gratuity, by disinterested gifts, by the care and nurturing of those who could in no way return anything to us. In fact, our western metropolis hide in their remotest folding pockets of poverty, of exploitation, of misery. The global system rests on the shoulders of te poor.

Everything is valued in terms of money, of income, of investment. The gesture of solidarity is reduced to sending an sms on the occasion of some tragedy. The rigid and iron law of money has transformed our hearts into armoured, impenetrable safes. The most recent crisis has refined the sense of saving, provoking also the return to a certain sobriety, which penalises the attention we should pay to those who suffer the crisis more than we do.

Thus, it so happens in a paradoxical way that, while the resources have increased in a mediating way at disposal of each westerner if compared to the past, the space of gratuity, generosity and solidarity has decreased. The god money generously reaps its victims among its most devout adorers, as well as among those who suffer the perverse effect of its cult. How to start a journey towards the re-discovery of gratuity? More precisely: where to start from?

Every gesture of gratuity and of gift gives way not only to the problems of persons in need, but also and more radically it brings out our needs. In fact, at the centre of the question we see the relation that each man has with himself and what is necessary for him if he wants to welcome and ultimately love himself. What authorises me to bless my Life? What allows me to welcome it in its contingency, in its impassable and irrevocable finiteness? What leads me to it, knowing that it takes me to death? Here is where we decide "how" we relate with others.

It is on this point that the word Jesus keeps on addressing to each man and woman on earth is transparently visible in its brightness. About the ordinary logic of the world, for which we believe that only by possessing many things we can become a centre of attention for others, arousing their love as a sense of one’s own existence, he invites us to change the perspective literally.

Jesus proposes a conversion of vision: it is not from the promises of others or from the abundance of possessions or from the calculation of things I could acquire, that I could start to decide if and how much I may go towards others and if there is more space for some form of gratuity. The first thing to be done is to perceive an infinite vision of love on one’s being and on the world.

"Love God": this is the first part of the great commandment of love. Therefore, first of all, we must recognise God as a blessed and blessing presence on our life. We have to correspond to His love. This authorises us to love: to go towards the other, with free intentions. Only then Jesus states, "Love your neighbour". Therefore, there is an order, a bond, a law, a journey to be made: from up downwards, from heaven down to the earth; from the heart filled with divine love towards hands and feet capable of hospitable and free proximity.

If I am loved, I can love. If welcomed, I can welcome. If hosted, I can host. Thus, I can avoid to submit myself to the blackmail they oppose to me as price to be paid in order to obtain their love. If it is so, I can untie the thousand unfair links they bind or impose to bind in order to give a piece of my love to the other. Then, we can move with generosity towards one another.

The priority of God’s love unties all of a sudden the tangle of nets that men and women throw on each other and that very often finish by trapping and suffocating them. In the sign of God’s love – of a God whom we are invited to recognise as Father- we can effectively create spaces for a gratuitous encounter, where the appeal and the face of the other may truly become my "inter-esse", something that touches me in my being: in being brothers of a unique Father.

The entire event of Jesus of Nazareth has been consumed in the tentative of extending this authorisation of loving to all men and women. It has not left out any possibility of what is human (the sinner, the sick, the rich, the poor, the powerful, the wounded, man in research, the stranger), reaching the extreme of the cross: place of revelation par excellence. .

From and on the cross Jesus declares tha God’s love for every man is indefectible: nothing is ever able to upset that "yes", addressed to each of us, into a "not", not even violence, unjust calumny, condemnation to death and a cursed death. The authorisation to love is valid also for the High Priests, for Pilate, for the people that refuse Him, for the soldiers who humiliate and crucify him, for Jude who betrays Him.

However, the cross is the last word but one. The last Word of God is the Risen Crucified Lord: it is a God that puts a cross of death, crucifies and opens it to the deepest mystery of love..

Therefore, we can generously go towards the other not only because we are preceded by te gratuitous and irrevocable love of God ("God loves you infinitely more than what you can imagine": this is the beautiful Gospel of Jesus), but above all because in Easter the faithful discovers the truth of this world; he discovers that this world is only and always the last but one. It is not the paradise! This is the revolution of the glorious cross of Christ: a definitive opening of our eyes on the destiny and true consistency of this world. This world is "figure", "sign", "anticipation ", "pledge", "space of wait and invocation". It is not the last one.

If it is so, we cannot ask this world to be the paradise. We cannot ask the things of this world to take down heaven for us into a room. We cannot even ask others to untie completely the fatigue of our being in the world. We are all on a journey..

Yet the reality of our days returns to us a quite different image: men and women who knock at the heart of this world asking it to be paradise and finish by finding themselves in hell, due to disproportioned claims, unattainable perspectives, excessive expectations. Men and women who create for themselves a real little domestic hell, because of the non-kept promises, of sneaky blackmails, of subtle prevarications. Men and women who create spaces of hell for others, exploiting situations of poverty, disabilities, uneasiness and low culture.

Thus, what would be left over to day from the word and the reality of gratuity?

We must recognise that the journey of gratuity is deep and difficult; it invests properly the image each man has of himself and of his being in the worlds and finally the very image of God.

We speak of a God whom the western countries, in their majority, have lost. The Pope is really right when he states that "the true problem in this historical moment is that God has disappears from the horizon of men and, with the extinguishing of the light coming from God, humanity is caught by lack of orientation, whose destructive effects keep on being manifested".

Just this is the point: when God disappears from the horizon of history, history becomes the only horizon, the only and univocal background of sense, unable to return to us the truth of itself and of ourselves.

Then, a reflection of Cardinal Henri De Lubac comes back powerfully: "We do not say that man cannot build up the world without God, because it is rather true that he will build it up against man himself".

Reflecting on gratuity, therefore, means to recognise that only the thought of God can safeguard a conviviality among men subtracted from the dominion of passions and the passions of the dominion from the power of money and the money of the power, the power of the exchange and the exchange of power: The thought of God –the thought that God is love- reminds us, in fact, that our first and elementary task, as men and women created to His image, is that of increasing love present in this world; of increasing the reserves of generosity, of solidarity, of fraternity and gratuity; of circulate ll this. All that truly matters is not destined to perish...

Armando Matteo
National Assistant FUCI
Via F. Marchetti Selvaggiani, 22
00165 Roma