Dear friends of Gethsemane, peace be with you! The gifts of the Lord are always many, despite the difficulties that the pandemic iscreating at an economic level and especially at a personal level, in the mind and psyche ofmany fragile people. But the Promise of the Lord does not fail, and this awareness shouldhelp us to have, more and more, a transcendent gaze that rises to Him, to live by Him and HisWord… of his Spirit! Last Sunday, the feast of Pentecost, from this holy place, looking at theUpper Room, we too invoked the gift of the Holy Spirit. We still sing the hymns of theliturgy while in these days Ordinary Time has begun. We seem to better understand the newexperience lived by the first Church (men and women like us!), spreading the Gospeleverywhere from Jerusalem.It is fascinating and important to draw attention to how the "extraordinary" (the RisenOne) entered the "ordinary" life of the first Christians! We must remember: it is so also forus! The strength of the Gospel is actuality, and this means that our daily life can be Gospel.The Lord himself HERE at Gethsemane entered this ‘ordinary’ place ("where he used togo…" Lk 22,39; "often he retired to that place…" Jn 18,2) to fulfill the will of the Father: to love! May the Lord help us to live his Gospel with greater awareness.
Hora Sancta
We are the sons of St. Francis, and we are THE custodians, according to the will of God, of one of the places that Jesus loved the most: the garden called GETHSEMANE. This is a unique place in the world. It is the place where the Lord manifested his Yes forever by being ready to enter where nobody else had ever entered, where he plunged into darkness, in the final battle against death, in which humanity has always ended up being a loser.