ADVENT
Our self-awareness must be dominated by the finality of the ultimate meaning of our own “I.” This finality, however, risks becoming an automatism that would make life rigid if another event did not dominate—the incumbency of Christ’s coming. His coming is incumbent, which means that it is imminent and that such imminence arouses a duty. It is imminent, but we do not know when He will come, so all our actions must be a step toward Him.
When He comes, He will judge, but this is not only the final judgment; every action is a judgment, it must become a paradigm of life as imitation of Christ. The Church calls this judgment by the name of contrition, which consists in being vigilant in the expectation that He will come. What duty does His coming arouse? The only duty for which life is given is the mission, which is to build the Church, and to do this we need to build fraternity, communion among us, that is the place He uses to conquer the world. 

CHRISTMAS
We normally look for our consistency in what we do or in what we have, and so life is never at peace. But by identifying with the experience of Mary, of the shepherds, of the Magi, we can understand that the certainty is something that has happened to us, Someone that has happened to us. It is Another who breaks into life, and from that moment our identity coincides with that event. Natural experience also allows us to sense the existence of the Mystery and grasp its bond with humankind, but what happened to Mary and the shepherds is totally different—an event imposed itself and burned away even the awareness of their expectation. It was an intrusive presence, so much so that they did not stop to reason over their aspirations because now that child dictated everything. This tenderness of God to us is a million times greater than a man’s embrace for his woman. There are two corollaries from the certainty of this event—the first is the inclusiveness of this tenderness, which comes to embrace all things and people we encounter; the second is that sin is no longer decisive, because we experience continuous forgiveness. Life, then, is no longer our own; our life is mission, that is communicating what has happened. Mission is making present that which made itself a Presence for us, wherever we are. 

LENT
During Lent, the Church calls us to conversion, not formally, but through three concrete signs. The first is prayer. Prayer means expecting Christ, His manifestation, and from this comes memory. For a man who is in love, the memory of his woman coincides with his desire to see her again, and the same happens with Christ.  Prayer has as its first implication the certainty that He will fulfill His plan in us, and this certainty is guaranteed by an experience that we already have in the present. The second implication of prayer concerns the value of the passing of time. We normally perceive time as useless or as a limitation because we are unable to fulfill ourselves on our own, and so prayer becomes a claim. It is, instead, the event of Christ that determines life, and time is given for God’s freedom to be revealed until we overcome our fragility. Only in time does Christ’s Resurrection become ours, and our certainty lies not in the ability of each one of us but in His presence. The second concrete sign of Lent is fasting, that is, sacrifice, which means being faithful to what is most meaningful. It is precisely in affectivity, in our relationships, that we need to be faithful, and the evidence of this attitude is the freedom concerning the other person and our own abilities. The third sign the Church points to is fraternal charity. We normally tend to instrumentalize the other, and this attitude comes from the lack of simplicity of heart.

EASTER
The Mystery is not simply the unknown; it is the unknown as it becomes the content of a sense experience, it makes itself a presence in human history. The Resurrection is the summit of the Christian mystery and it is at the same time the highest intensity of our self-awareness. This event is the key to a novelty in the relationship between me and myself, between me and others, between me and things. For this reason, the Resurrection was the first and fundamental content of the Christian message, “If Christ were not risen, our faith is vain.” This is not an inner experience; the apostles had to yield before the evidence of the facts. So, the value of every single thing we have to do, big or small, comes from the fact that inside it vibrates the Resurrection of Christ. Immersing ourselves in His Mystery as the Risen One is a judgment, it is the supreme act of human reason that happens by grace, so it is something we need to ask for. Asking to acknowledge this is the most realistic experience we can have because the alternative to the risen Christ is nothingness. Whereas, when we are immersed in this Mystery everything is born again, reality is regenerated and appears in its ultimate truth. Even time and space are no longer limits for our humanity but become expressive factors, they become the possibility of sharing in Christ’s lordship over the world.

ASCENSION AND PENTECOST
A completion of the Resurrection is the Ascension into heaven. Heaven is not a place far from the earth but the profundity of the earth itself, the truth and the origin of things. Christ now enters into a definitive possession of these things which will be manifested according to the design of the Father; therefore, the Ascension is nothing less than the extension of the Resurrection to the whole world.  But how can we begin to experience and judge everything from such a judgment? This happens thanks to the Spirit that drives our relationships to their truth and generates a new affection and intelligence in us. Now, for all this to happen, it must be a present fact, contemporary to life. For life to change, we have to live for Christ, but He must be present today; and He is present through a human reality, the Church, which is a companionship of people that is precise in its boundaries. We may resist this fact by reason of our neglect of the “I,” or of our desire to affirm ourselves at all costs, or of a form of pharisaical moralism. The acknowledgment of the Mystery of Christ, instead, immediately makes those who follow Him one only thing, a unity that is true witness to the world. This unity bears joy and freedom as fruits in the individual person, as the beginning of a different humanity.

ORDINARY TIME
The time after Pentecost opens with the Feast of the Holy Trinity; Christ is the instrument through whom the Mystery of the Father and the Spirit reveal themselves to us. So then, if the Trinity is the Lord of life, our life has meaning only as an offering, as a sacrificial offering to It. Every breath of life possesses the greatness of this offering that generates the true autonomy of the person, the true consistence in ourselves. The generative factor of the new consciousness of ourselves is the Spirit who truly knows us, so our task in this time is to invoke the Spirit. In this invocation lies the nourishment, the clarification of the consciousness. This is a continuous broadening of the measure of our minds; in fact, while we normally tend to reduce Christ, we need to ask the Spirit to make us understand and accomplish the dimensions of Christ. The supreme gift of the Spirit to man is the awareness of mercy, the experience of life as forgiveness. The Resurrection breaks the normal law of nature and renews the face of the Earth through forgiveness.

MARY IN THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST AND OF THE CHURCH
Humility is the word that dominates in Mary. Our Lady was aware that she was nothing, just as everything is nothing. This awareness can often generate sadness or cynicism, but inside her it generated an expectation. An expectation comes from the fact that even though we are nothing, we are “nothingness” that has been called. So, when the angel made the announcement to her, her true nature, namely that of religious sentiment, emerged. Religious sentiment arises in the relationship between our nothingness and the awareness that nothing is impossible for God. Because of this, her nothingness was taken, becoming a vehicle for the greatest Mystery in history—God made Himself visible, became her son. Through her fiat, her freedom adhered to Being, and man’s greatness lies precisely in acknowledging the presence of the divine within a human reality. Mary became a protagonist in history because she said “yes,” as Peter did after his betrayal, she accepted Christ’s invitation, “Follow me.”

EUCHARIST—THE GREAT PRAYER
The Eucharist identifies the method with which God manifested Himself by responding to the need that constitutes the human heart. Such manifestation happens at one point in time and space, so that the truth is this man, Christ, who is present. Sensible reality is then no longer contrary to the Mystery, which is why prayer becomes an offering, that is, realizing that everything is made by God, and the culmination of the offering is Christ giving himself. In the Eucharist, carnal reality, bread and wine, coincide with the Mystery of the Son of God. The apparently ephemeral detail becomes an expression of the divine; this is the beginning of Christ’s triumph in time and space. This triumph will be complete only at the end of time, but now it already begins through His people manifesting themselves in the world as a source of peace.

EUCHARIST—A PRESENT, FAMILIAR REALITY
The paradigmatic moment of the relationship between man and Christ is when, during the Last Supper, John rests his head on Christ’s shoulder. Man is no longer facing a vague and distant God, but the Mystery that makes things is so concrete that he can rest his head on His shoulder. What happens in the Sacrament is exactly the same thing—God makes Himself tangible, He translates Himself into a totally human reality. Approaching the Mystery requires only one thing—the awareness of our culpable poverty, of our total incapacity. This sorrow is not a feeling but a judgment on ourselves, and it is the only support point God needs to build our conversion. What keeps us away from the sacraments is not our mood, but lying to ourselves, that is, not accepting the desire for good that constitutes our heart. And yet, the Sacrament is the simplest form of prayer, because we only need to be present, be there, and ask to become ourselves.