Confined to our homes, we can be connected to each other.

Confined to our homes, we can be connected to each other, through words of life and gestures of kindness.

The Gospel proposed on the 5th Sunday of Lent speaks of a house of two sisters, Mary, Martha with their brother Lazarus, the friend of Jesus. Lazarus has just died, and Martha then Mary leave to meet Jesus. Jesus is seized with deep emotion and the rest of the story shows the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus. It is a miracle that a dead person after four days comes back to life. The story of Lazarus is our story. Everything that is not alive is called to be resurrected. Including where we think it is over, that it is dead, the victory of God's love awaits us. Jesus calls each of us to be resurrected in love.

With reference to this text, some accounts of the concentration camps have been called "Lazarean". They tell stories of people plunged into extreme inhumanity, a suspended time where everything is closed and condemned, struck by abandonment, bathed in fear, where all possibilities of survival and death are exhausted. Lazarean literature, at the same time, bears witness to what helps survival, the experience of beauty, the fraternal gesture, the word of mercy that saves.

These are stories of confinement far more terrible than ours. However, they show us a voice, that of fraternity, they show us a possible path to find a way towards hope, that of attention to others, with delicacy and foresight.

Magda Hollande-Lafon, a deportee, recounts a long journey woven with rebirths in Quatre petits bouts de pain. Des ténèbres à la joie (Albin Michel, 2012). In the horror of the camps, she writes, the Nazis " had no power over the sky." At night, they could not prevent us from seeking strength in its starry beauty. She also remembers a day at Birkenau when " the sky was not veiled in ashes; it was haloed in light. The wind chased the clouds that were racing at high speed; I was fascinated. I told myself that the clouds were moving, I too could move."
Magda also recalls the moment when a dying woman beckoned to her as she left a barracks. " She opened her hand very gently and there were four small pieces of bread in her hand. 'Take it, ' she said to me, ' you are young, you must live. 'You will live!' she also said. Her words touched me more deeply than it seemed at the time. She woke me up inside. It's true, she did. And I lived! "

Let's take advantage of this confinement to develop the attention, gestures and words of kindness that keep us alive!