Daily we observe around us many suffering that can make us feel helpless, if they do not open glimpses of humanity. Sometimes, however, the response travels on WhatsApp, as happened to a small city community of Italy who wants to live the unit: "... in the hospital where I work there is a young, foreigner, who is completely alone and is dying. Maybe someone could pass a few minutes with him, to give some dignity to this situation?"It is a shock: the answers follow one another quickly. The message of those who have been present in the last few hours says: "In his bedside we immediately saw that the assistance is punctual, careful and loving and that therefore we had nothing to do concrete except to be there. Neither he, By now in a coma, he could benefit our presence ". Useless? In those few hours a small community, inside and outside the hospital, accompanied and given meaning. Who knows if a mother will cry him in his country. Certainly his "passage" was not in vain for those who have been able to love that young man, no longer unknown.
Compassion is a feeling that comes from within, from the deep of the human heart. It makes it capable of interrupting your journey full of commitments and frenetic appointments of the day and taking the initiative to approach and offer a look of care, without fear of "touching" the wounds.
Chiara Lubich explains it with incisive simplicity: «Let's imagine we are in his situation and let's take it as we would like to be treated in his place. He is hungry? I'm hungry - let's think. And to eat him. Do you suffer injustice? It is I who suffer it! And saying words of comfort and we share his penalties and we don't donate peace until it is illuminated and lifted. We will slowly see the world around us "[1].
The African wisdom with an Ivorian proverb: "Those who welcome a foreigner hosts a messenger".
This idea offers us a key to achieving the most authentic humanism: it makes us aware of the common humanity, in which the dignity inherent in every man and woman is reflected, and teaches us to courageously overcome the category of physical and cultural "closeness". In this perspective, it is possible to broaden the boundaries of the "we" to the horizon of "all" and find the same foundations of social life. And it is important to take care of ourselves, with the help of the friends with whom we walk together, when we seem to succumb to the suffering that surround us. Remembering that -as the psychotherapist psychiatrist Roberto Almada says- "If the vouchers abandon the battle because of tiredness, our common humanity will run the greatest of the risks: value impoverishment"[2].