The pleasure to be read

Fr. Livio Tonello, director

Dear readers, I address myself to you who are reading this article. Maybe to day it is hot, maybe you are sitting under a leafy tree or on a sofa... maybe you are worried about something or you are waiting for something... Reading adds endless benefits to our daily lives and maybe summer is the perfect time to read as we have more time. But reading is not only a form of entertainment: reading changes our lives.

This does not concern only a page of the Gospel (that maybe is not here) but all the books we read. Reading builds a relationship between the author and the reader, when we read books the stories in them transport us from the world we are in to the world within the pages of the book. Reading does not only improve our knowledges but it changes us. The knowledge learned by reading books does not depend on their number but on the books that “have read us”.

There are some books that may influence and change our lives. After reading we are not the same as before because if you let them, books can change your whole life, give you an interesting insight into things and help you to grow as a person. This dialogue is food for thoughts, it can improve our concentration, make changes. Through the mirror of the words reading builds on empathy by constantly presenting us with thoughts, emotions and scenarios outside of our perspective.

It is the meeting with the author’s cultural world who implicitly had already thought of me. For example this concerns the writing of the Gospels drawn up two thousand years ago for me too. The Gospel was not only preached in the past but its message is still relevant in time today and it continues to challenge us. Its words speaks to us through our feelings as they did with the people who lived so long ago.

They can do it because they go deep into the innermost self of the people of all the ages and of all the places. The pages of a book are never neutral: they can challenge us in different ways, they can encourage us to grow by transforming our life for better and for worse. This is happening now too while you are reading this text: I write thinking about you even if I do not know you but I know that we are communicating remotely.

I am writing thinking about what these words will tell you: I know that while you are reading them something will enter into your spirit. I will never know your reactions but I am sure that what I write (or what I say) will see into your heart and it will bring out emotions, memories and experiences. So the most important thing is not be what you read in this magazine but what it reads in your life to make it better.