The Word of God
“I write to you, young men, because you are strong and the Word of God remains in you, and you have conquered the evil one.” (1 Jn 2,14). The strength and the struggle against evil: according to the apostle John this is what marks young people, this is what a young man is invited to.
And the Word of God is what gives the young man strength in this struggle leading him to triumph. The Word of God heard, prayed, interiorized to the point that it remains and lives in the young man. Of course, the young man today can criticize the Church, but he should also learn to recognize the place of relevance that the Word of God has acquired and how this lets him approach a faith freer and closer to the bible through the spiritual route of the listening to the Scriptures - the real sacrament that consigns the Word of God - which leads him to meeting Christ’s image and loving him. Listening, meeting, loving: this very human route of relations with another is also the spiritual route required in the relationship with the Lord in order not to let it remain a vague reference that doesn’t take up behaviours reducing itself to the pure intellectual dimension, but that become existential involvement taking the form of an entire life adventure!
The word of God is the light that orientates the steps of the man (cf Ps 119,105) and for the young man who nears through faith, confessing that it’s word is personally addressed to him, it reveals Christ himself as Lord of his own existence, a “way, truth and life” (Jn 14,6) of his own life. Therefore, the Scripture becomes a point of reference and root of a route of unification of the young man: unification of many words to the Word, of many “him-selves” perceived as possible realizations of his own identity to the “personal I”, of the dissipation in the outward appearance to the inner life, of the everlasting search for something new to the digging out in depth beginning from what is essential. Unification and progressive order of all faculties and relations in the light of the priority love of the Lord.
Without doubt, all this is hard and it’s not favoured by the actual cultural context, dominated by the dimensions of images and sounds, the myth of spontaneity, the imperative of efficiency and productivity, the slogan of “everything and now”, the preeminence of emotion over reason, a fragmentary perception of time so that it’s perceived like something instantaneous, immediate, episodic and not like something long, not like perseverance, faithfulness, patience.
And at this point the young man must feel that the seriousness of his own life, the human and Christian one, is at stake. In front of a situation in which nothing seems to grip, to consolidate, where everything has a short term programme, a brief breathe, the young man must take conscience that “all the great realizations, so as the bonds of love, marriage, friendship and the rights of justice, truth and beauty need time, firmness and memory, otherwise they will finish in degenerating. A constant and daily attending of the Scriptures and especially of the Gospel, even if only for a brief moment, is what every young Christian, seriously aimed at letting Christ reign upon his own life, must assume as a daily opening to the light and the strength of the Word of God. But this route of acquaintance of the Lord must go along with a parallel movement of self acquaintance.
Enzo Bianchi