At lunchtime, in front of a golden breaded steak, me and another novice had a discussion about the immigration issue.

Both of us -almost the same age- are sensitive to the matter, politically open to the possibility of a European population that includes Asians, Africans and Latin-Americans, we do not even think about a society closed to migrants.

For us justice is a high value, and a more fair society is an objective to achieve and not a dream.

Furthermore we are novices, the desire to give our lives to the Lord is followed by the one to give our lives to the people of our time through the challenges that our present offers us.

But in front of these great desires, at one point, we lost our way forward, in the sense that going from observations to reality and from reality to welcoming immigrants, we did not find the way how to proceed.

After a feeling of protest for the people dead at sea, after those who do not believe in violence and cruelty we humans are capable of creating, sometimes to hide ourselves from cruelty, we see the world from a far and safe place, using binoculars.

From a far place, immigration is always simple; first immigration shelters become containers; people become just numbers, ages, names; wounded arms become just a tv advertisement; sharing and brotherhood become just procedures, actions without soul, just to comfort the guilty conscience.

On the contrary from a closer point of view things become painful and unbearable.

Lunch is over, the breaded steak too, and a rounded apple follows it. On the way to my room that rounded apple helps me figure it out.

We always look at immigrants with our binoculars, I mean, we place ourselves at the harbour.

We prepare mattresses in our garages giving our unnecessary things, then we wait. We wait for that foreigner, who comes to meet his needs with what we give him.

But when he really comes with all the tragedy he has been through we realise that this is not the real answer to the situation of this man.

We find ourselves unprepared, maybe through a sense of superiority that has become part of our daily life.

It is time for the Greek lesson now, I run downstairs to the classroom, passing by the crib. Always the same cave. The same of my memories, without barriers from the outside. There everything is one. The space between man and God is just one, the same.

The lesson has begun, we read about the birth of Jesus… I’m almost 33 and even in the novitiate I still barely believe God could have showed himself in such a fragile and simple way like a baby, in a place without doors, walls, windows; showing all to everybody.