If we are at peace with our brethren…

There is a very simple way of judging whether or not we are at peace with God. We are at peace with God if we are at peace with our brethren. Our love for God in heaven is measured by our love for the others on earth. It is all so simple and down to earth, because it is very heavenly.
If we do not love our brethren, we the redeemed, pass from life to death. Therefore, the application of: «Do not do to others what we do not want others to do to us.» is a negative sense of «Do to others what you want others to do to you». It is a positive outlook.

Igino Giordani, The brother, New City, Rome, 2011, p.75-76.

I would not want to be calumniated, hungry, homeless, jobless, unhappy …: and so, for as much as I can, I have to act in a way that others can be honoured, fed, sheltered, employed and filled with consolation. And this establishes a sort of equality: God treats me the same way as I treat my brother; God treats me the way my brother treats me. We could say that God is the first to practice the Gospel’s main precept: «Love your neighbor as yourself» and he loves us with a God’s love, meaning to say, infinitely. In fact this love is so urgent that he wants us to be one with him, so as to make us participate in his nature. Didn’t he take on our nature for this reason? And this is a spiritual humanization of God: he put himself at our level, to allow us to live with him.

Igino Giordani, The brother, cit., p.76.

Individualism which encloses and bloats our ego in a shell of personal exclusivism, suffocates the soul: and with the failure of circulation, the warmth is extinguished. And the soul suffers the cold and dies of frost. This is the common complaint of many lay and religious who were not raised in the coexistence with their brethren. It would suffice for one to start loving his brother, in order to warm the brother’s spirit, and himself. Our brother breaks barriers and in the opening allows life to pass through: the life which is God. Our brother acts as the ianua caeli, the door to Paradise.

Igino Giordani, The brother , cit., p.79.

In approaching my brother, I undertake a responsibility for his eternal fate and, therefore, also my own, due to solidarity which governs our relationships. Most often, my brother’s sin, whether slight or great, is also our own: a disaster operated by our own lack of love. Most often the criminal is an individual who was never loved, so much so that the Crucifix above the heads of the judge in court could repeat: «Whoever is pure, throw the first stone!». How many brethren have been lost because they were abandoned by us!

Igino Giordani, The brother, cit., p.82-83.

Our brother is a mine in which the divine digs. You love and serve him to dig up God. Love your Creator in him, look for the Father in your brother. For as long as you serve your brother, he will be your door that opens the way to God: if you exploit him, leaning on him, he will be a barrier and will barricade the passage to God. And instead, you have to learn also to renounce your brother: renouncing yourself and him, so that only God remains. In God you thus will find him and yourself.  In such a relationship which is continuous, minute by minute, since we deal with them every minute, remember the value of the precept: «It is better to give than receive».

Igino Giordani, The brother, cit., p.89.