Two weeks have passed since that terrible first January in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, where a night of celebration that marked the transition from one year to the next meant another transition, for too many kids. From life to death, in a very long flow of moments of terror and pain.
Two weeks have passed and the newspapers and TV channels, greedy for news, hardly talk about it anymore, rightly so, to protect the torment of so many families. We have in our hearts the tearful words of fathers, mothers, brothers, friends at the funerals of their loved ones, the high and moving homilies of those who celebrated them. Let’s not forget them.
They were words of comfort, of hope, and it seems madness to say so, in such a desperate situation. Yet we felt the embrace of a wounded and participating humanity and the presence of the Mystery. We were able to bet, if we could not trust, that those deaths were not eternal, that those children of all had not died in vain, youths thrown into thin air, at random. Submerged and saved, as in a cruel and senseless Russian roulette.
We cannot convince ourselves that a tomb is what remains of those cheerful and laughing lives. We cannot believe that that party was the mockery, the treacherous claw of death. It is more human and truer to lean on the balm of faith and keep within us for a long time the thoughts that touched us in those first days of a 2026 that started badly, it was said, or not.
Because 2026 also began badly in the Ukrainian trenches, in the rotting tents of Gaza, in the prisons and curfews of Caracas, in the fear of those who die because they wear a cross around their neck, in many African countries. Because 2026 began well in the warmth of many families, of many friendships, of many gestures of love, of brotherhood, of care.
Let us always look around us to find the beautiful and the good, in every day that begins and ends. Because nothing begins and nothing ends, except from Creation to Paradise, for us and for the world, and Paradise is a new beginning. It is the only card to play to cope with the horror of memories and fire, which mercilessly enveloped those joyful boys.
To cope with the pain of those who wait anxiously at the doors of an intensive care unit, with their suffering and that of those they love that extends over time, without certainties. Who survived, who will survive, how will they still be able to smile? How will he emerge from hell? Grateful to be alive, or cursing that disfigured new life?
The newspapers don’t talk about it anymore, let’s keep them in our prayers. We have only the wounds of Christ and the blood of Christ shed for each and everyone to face the confusion, the fear of the abyss that strikes us down, in the memory of that Swiss place, in the awareness of the many places in the world where evil dominates, rekindled by men.
In collaboration with Credere
Credere, the magazine for living the “adventure of faith”
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