I am a mom and I work in a hospital, but now I am home on maternity leave with my other children. My husband, an anaesthetist, has started to work in intensive care with coronavirus patients and this situation worries me all day long. But he comes home happy, not because the situation is not dramatic and delicate, but because he is responding to what reality is asking. Therefore, I have begun to ask myself: how can I be useful to the world, to my friends, how can I be in front of what is happening by spending my days locked up at home with my children who do not give me a moment’s peace? What is my task now?

I was reminded of a passage in Bruce Marshall’s book To Every Man a Penny: "One could become a cyclist or a footballer only by riding a bicycle or kicking a football, but one could become a saint by doing all sorts of unsaintly things in a saintly manner, the abbé Gaston said. One could offer to God’s greater glory all sorts of things besides prayers. One could offer the depth one dug a ditch or the height one jumped or the way one wore a pretty dress, for if to pray was to work, to work was also to pray.”

Read also - "If you do not see Jesus here, it is because you do not want to"

Then, my usefulness in this difficult circumstance does not lie in thinking I want to be somewhere else, but in offering what I do during the day to those who are sick, for my husband, for those who work in hospitals. And everything acquires a new taste, unimaginable in the dramatic situation in which we are called to live. The usual things like cleaning, washing, cooking, being with my children, which I sometimes happen to do unwillingly, are more precious than before, thinking about those who would like to do them, but who cannot because they are unwell. And the lament is overcome by the conscience that I am called to this now, not before or after, now. I cannot detach this new consciousness of myself from the encounter that, "by its very nature, in time, becomes the true shape of every relationship, the true form by which I look at nature, at myself, at others, and at things”, as Fr. Julián reminds us in his letter to the Fraternity. And now the "virtual" company of my fraternity (we meet via video) is my call to always live the real intensely".

Roberta, Monza, Italy