The end of the year gives many people the opportunity to sum up their projects or brag about their achievements. Too subjective, if the nature of life reveals their superficiality, they consider themselves offended – a good reason not to change. While vain expectations usually creak on their own, the victimization of the self-fulfilled male regularly exhibits the same melodramatic, unsympathetic and offensive folklore.

Over the years, I try to avoid, precisely because of this, consciously melancholy. Besides the collective joy of the holiday, I prefer to spend time with a good book at hand. Later, surrounded by libraries, in the world of “humanities”, I learned that salvation is not necessarily in books. Appreciation of life depends on the joy of reading because it helps you maintain a sense of reality and refine its scope. Montaigne, who did not mince words to impress his readers, on the contrary, knew why a person deserves to have une tête bien faite, not une tête bien pleine.

Old proverb being a gentleman is an accident, being a man is a big deal this seems to me to be the main key to human interaction with the book. Extolling personal advantage, directly or indirectly, is always a mortal danger to those who seek objective judgment, because we are not without the temptation to judge others. However, to understand the value of reading and the motive of intellectual health, we need an apprenticeship under some authors or masters who, surprised by the existential taste of wisdom, prove that no passage through the world is in vain.

Looking around at the year that has begun, the instability, the incompetence, the humiliating lack of kindness and devotion, the violence and misery of war, the refusal to use one’s own reason and the lack of enthusiasm to conquer day by day our humanity, but especially the religion of ourselves, are only some of the challenges that we call the main ones in the modern world. Who does not know that confused moral capital and public (dis)order, before breaking the heart, have the power to crush the weak hopes of society? If our struggle with ourselves does not seek to make our lives easier, and our struggle with Evil is not honest, can we still count on the promises of the Gospel?

Vittorio Messori – an Italian who continues to be one of the most translated Christian authors in the West – recognizes the central theme of the message of Jesus eternal life. However, the writer frankly notes that when the Church loses its taste for this truth, preferring to be like a branch of some international profane organization, the life of the believing community falls under the influence of world reductionism. Gospel means “good news” in Greek; Jesus was not involved in politics – says Messori –He did not directly condemn even slavery. He came to open the gate of heaven for us. The joy and pain intertwined in the person and life of Jesus, as in our lives, is the key to this gate. Rowing among the deceptive models offered by modern society, in the impossibility of any adequate guarantees of hope, Vittorio Messori does not hesitate to repeat: I am interested in faith, the possibility to believe, to bet on the truth of the Gospel. The rest just follow him. Ethics, society, work, politics… Everything is necessary, but absurd, if one does not first try the existence and resistance of the nail on which each thing hangs. And that nail is Jesus.

The year that has begun brings with it numerous changes, some of which are predictable, but most of them are not suspected. How could a believer respond to so many trials? If we could believe, we would understand why the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem already foreshadows his tragic fate; why from the first days in the world God does not save His Son from life’s worries, why his existence on earth from the beginning is aimed at Good Friday – to bring God’s plan to fulfillment. His death on the cross—the sacrifice of man’s redemption—cannot be reduced to a marginal accident at the end of a journey in a world marked by evil and cruelty. It is the culmination of the mission for which Jesus was born, thus setting a new course for the events of history. _ Read the entire article and comment on it on Contributors.ro