One winter evening at the gates of Amiens, a young soldier meets a poor man, almost naked and shivering. He has nothing left on him but his weapons and his cloak, so he draws his sword, cuts the cloak in two and hands over half. That night, his biographer tells us, he sees Christ in a dream, wearing the half-cloak. The soldier was Martin, later bishop of Tours. On our phones, though, “share” mostly means forwarding a link, and a sharing emoji in the Christian sense has yet to be drawn.
Sharing has been at the heart of the faith from the beginning. The Acts of the Apostles describe the first believers who “had all things in common” (Acts 2:44), and the five loaves and two fish of the miracle came from a young boy who could have kept them (Jn 6:9). In parishes it takes very practical shapes: the Sunday collection, the food bank, the soup kitchen on a winter night, the lift offered to a neighbor for Sunday Mass.
The keyboard already has 🤲, 🫶, 🍞 and 🐟, good ingredients. What remains is to combine them into a sign that says: I give, no strings attached. A cloak cut in two, bread broken between two hands, a table with an empty chair for the unexpected guest: over to you, and for once share something other than a link.
Amen !by AI Generator
Amen !by AI Generator
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