A pact of friendship
I'd like to tell you a personal story: I come from a humble family; my parents, with great effort, managed to build a dignified life and support our family. In our neighborhoods of humble people, in America, solidarity among neighbors abounds: we help each other when children need to be looked after, we share food when a family needs it, and lifelong bonds are formed.
This was the friendship between my mother and Mrs. Carmen, our next door neighbor.
I remember when I was 5 years old I saw a truck full of furniture, plants, two dogs and 5 children arrive in that house. From that moment on, a 50-year history was woven between our families and lasts to this day. Both women have created a great long-lasting friendship. A relationship based on concrete gestures and sacrifices. Everything went very well until a few years ago, when Mrs. Carmen communicated to my mother that she was changing religion and had found in the Pentecostals "the true Church of Christ." From that moment, a wall rose between them. My mother, deeply Catholic, and the Pentecostal evangelical stopped talking and this for more than a dozen years, breaking their old pact of friendship.
In 2006, Mrs. Carmen died and her older daughter sought me out to thank my mother for her friendship. It was a surprise to me, because I didn't know they had been talking again.
She told me that in the last years of her life, her mother had been suffering from diabetes, which had left her almost blind. My mother had found out that Mrs. Carmen could hardly see anymore and was always alone in the house, because the members of her church did not visit her. From that moment, my mother put her pride aside and every morning she crossed the street to visit her old friend and the ritual was always the same: my mother slowly read a passage from the Bible that was on the bedside table, prayed and went home . So for two years, every day, uninterruptedly.
It would be nice to end by saying that Mrs. Carmen returned to the Catholic Church, but this is not the case. The end of the story has to do with the value of the "given word", with the oath of friendship that overcomes all division and diversity.
A word with an explosive effect
Like the "yes" that changed the life of a young girl from Galilee and that affects millions of Christian and non-Christian believers: "The story of Mary - says the governor of Saudi Arabia, Turki Bin Talal - tells the story of each true winner [. . .]. The moral of her story is clear; it is through the 'yes' to God that success can be achieved against all struggles and pandemics. Only by living in harmony with the universe and its Creator will we see the immense strength that lies in uniting as one being."
The Cosmos begins with the creative Word pronounced by God and lasting over time. We, from the first word spoken, begin a process of building a life: desires, feelings, our "I", our identity.
