September

7 September 1965

“Unless a man is born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” (John 3.3)
To be born again implies making oneself small, simple and humble. Being born again sets us in humbleness: on which his Kingdom is established. This truth is easier said than done! Pride – which is the old man in us – at times enfolds in a thick gloom – a dark night – this truth which consists in simplicity, and cannot be separated from the infancy of the spirit. And so, the ascent lies mainly in creating this infancy in oneself, liberating oneself, removing the massive loads of spiritual senility made up of self-importance, driven by ambitions. And so one finds that the path is that of obedience: where the social standing is the last rung of the ladder, the one closest to God.

26 September 1965

We complain of this rain or storm of delusions. But these purifications clean our eyesight: they make us see that only God counts. Only God remains. Solus cum sola. It may seem like solitude in the world, and liberation from the chaos of myths, clogging our vision like heavy clouds bursting with strokes of lightning.

23 September 1971

Tomorrow I will be celebrating my 77th birthday. I will not cease to thank the Lord for the gifts he has endowed me with. I will celebrate it with my friends in church, at the Mass and it coincides with one of those events which, in other moments, would have made me collapse, like the menace of financial obligations due to the rupture of underground pipings in one of my wife’s shops: the thought of her suffering alone would have crushed me.
But now it seems well underway in transferring all worries beyond all: to God. Before they would accumulate like a weight over my head but now they pile up like a footrest, like a platform from which I throw myself with more impetus toward Eternal Love. Our trials lighten the heaviness of human things, and break the bonds with the earth. 

1 September 1973

I see that in keeping myself united with Him (and this is what He wants and what he died for), a great peace descends in me, a luminous joy, albeit amid the trials of my arthritis and Mya’s femor fracture, which has kept her immobilised for over a year. But we place our pains in Him. He is Love and takes them up.
And through Him we are free from grudges, cupidity, envy,  and even from the vanity of being renowned, cited, awarded… This is what it means to be in the world as sons of God, with the powerful endowment of the freedom of the sons of God, and thus not compressible, commandeered, and never, absolutely never underlings. Maybe we are servants out of love, that is, freely, but we are never ever slaves who prostrate themselves before the powerful and the rich.

30 September 1978

With God and men faith stirs up a relationship of coexistence which becomes confidence. The house is full, even if there is no one: the atmosphere reveals a breath of the Eternal Father and Mary is with me in various ways, always loving, and so is Catherine, also members of the family in photographs which keep them alive and omnipresent. And there is a flow of confidence for which each soul is open to the other, in assiduous donation of only joy.
I’d say that original sin from which the evils of society originate, consisted above all in rejecting unity with one’s own companion. Likewise, sin and evil in the homes and cities lie in the choice of division, classes, castes, and indifferences, to cut off the passage of God amongst men.

Igino Giordani, Diary of fire, New City, Rome (1980) 2005 X edition , pages 179, 180, 195, 204, 235.