Through our encounter with other people, with ourselves, with the cosmos and with God, we are discovering our identity. The answer to the question of our priority relationships – as much of communion as of conflict – reveals to us who we are. Those relationships we identify, are they the result of an option, are they the consequence of the lucid and loving exercise of our freedom? What fundamental choices are at the basis of our similarities and differences?
God calls us to initiate new and transforming relationships with our environment. God has inscribed his plan for the fullness of life in communion as a deep and intense desire; but our personal and relational histories, our weaknesses and limitations can deform it, hide it, or even turn it off. The gospel tells us: “Where your treasure is there is your heart also”. What is the treasure we protect or want intensely? What is the deep yearning that drives us to risk even life itself?
Our exterior and interior senses are doors that allow us to access reality. What we see and hear, what we smell and taste, touch and embrace, awakens in us a range of feelings that are in us and which are conditioned by our personal history, our social position, our theoretical frameworks, and from our experience of God. Our context bombards us, with the possibility to arouse varied emotions; we must be lucid with them.
The feelings and thoughts that have their origin in God impel us to connect ourselves to his plan by which man lives. But go towards that way requires a commitment. The selection of our discerned perceptions means to choose, and to choose means giving up. Any option, as we know, implies giving up.