Culture of encounter

My name is Bruno, and I like to present myself as faithful husband of one wife and devoted father of five children. Yes, five! In an age of voluntary sterility, that’s practically a public provocation. From this you can conclude that I am a Catholic, and in my free time – free time means whenever I am not doing what my wife tells me to do – I like to do theology and philosophy. But others describe me as a changemaker. Sounds trendy, doesn’t it? As if I were the CEO of hope. What does it mean? It means that I like to generate and create space and time for an opportunity and possibility for change to occur. Change in myself (because revolutions that skip that step end in blood), change in my family, in my local community and eventually in the world we live in. Thanks to math, physics and biology, we calculated that this is the only world with intelligent life, and that we need to survive. And I have good news for you: you will die. That is the most certain fact about everyone and each of us. You will die. People you love will die. My children and their children will die. Who is going to save us? Do you know why we die? Do you know what is on the other side of death? Think about this good news and these questions. Those are the most important questions and news one can think of.  

And while we may be uncertain of what is on the other side, we are pretty certain about what is on this side. And on this side, we have fragmentation, polarization and division – division in ourselves, fragmentation of our families, and polarization in our communities and our society. And it is not just that we have all these things, it is more that we have this perspective or paradigm of understanding our lives through the logic of conflict and exclusion. And worse: not only do we endure this; we think this way. We speak the grammar of conflict. We conjugate verbs in opposition. So, we put one against the other: political left vs political right – to start with the most obvious. Then we put individual vs community, global vs local, capital vs labor, nature vs culture, religion vs science, price vs gift. In this context and with this prevailing logic, we want to know what is on the other side, so we can destroy it. If we belong to political right, we want to destroy political left, if we are capitalists we want to destroy the idea of gift, so we can put price on everything that surrounds us. We live under Nietzsche’s will to power, with Amazon Prime delivery.

I believe you asked yourself why that is so? I believe you are here because you question and seek the answer. Why do we live in this kind of world. Fractured world. And I am sure that you have some relevant answers, and here I would like to present you the answer that Catholic church offers – not to just faithful Catholics, but to all people of the good will.

We live in this kind of world because of sin.

In the Bible, we read that God created heaven and earth, He created plants and animals, and eventually He creates humans – and He sees, everything He had create was good. The world was whole, the world was united with Him, and the world was good. There was no fragmentation, no division and no polarization. There was no violence, and no death. The world was in harmony with itself and with God. We can know this because we can read that God walked with human and human walked with animals in this beautiful garden. Together, as one. The nature of created world was one and whole.

But then something happened – something that divided humans from God, but also humans from nature and humans from humans. That something fragmented nature and broke the harmony. The first sin happened. The first sin was violation, rejection of God’s authority. He commanded not to eat from one tree. God expresses his authority through this commandment. The consequence of this rebellion against God’s authority was death, but also fragmentation of the nature and division, or crack within the human nature.  Since then, our nature has been broken. More than that, the consequence was the division, separation between God and human, separation between human and nature, but also separation between us humans. Sin became the obstacle for authentic relationship of us with God, us with nature and us among ourselves.

So, there are three types of consequences of the (first) sin:

• Obstacle in the relationship between us and God (vertical one)
• Obstacle in the relationship between us humans (horizontal one)
• Obstacle in the relationship between us and nature (systemic, ecological one)

This is what Church says why do we live in this kind of world where polarization, fragmentation and division prevail. This is the cause and the reason: sin became mediator of relationships. Every relationship happens through sin. The sin became the obstacle to achieving unity and wholeness of human nature, nature in general and of the world.

But God didn’t give up on us and on the world He created. What did He do? He revealed Himself to humanity and in theology we call this the history of salvation. This history is divided into three parts: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the End times.

The Old Testament: LAW.

Since the sin became the obstacle, or mediator, for relationship between humans and God, God acted in a way to overcome that obstacle by giving the Law to humans. The Law was there to facilitate the relationship between people, between the people and nature, and between the people and God. That is why in Old Testament everything is subjected to the Law: how one should behave, what to think, how to approach nature and fellows’ humans, how many steps during the Sabbath. And the punishment for breaking the Law was death (since the Law was some sort of replacement for the sin). Or trying to establish relationship avoiding the Law or neglecting the Law – the punishment is death. Now, in Old Testament, relationships happen through the Law. It didn’t work out in a best way, but also it was just a short-term intervention until the time has come for God himself to deal with the sin and the punishment for it – death. God gives Israel a code – a bridge over chaos. Rules for life, worship, neighbor, nature. Break the Law, and you die. It worked – poorly, and briefly.

The New Testament: Incarnation of Love

So, the New Testament is the highlight of God’s actions regarding the consequences of the sin. His final move: Incarnation – God become a human – and Resurection – human became God. In Jesus, the God expressed Himself in final manner – showing us who He is and what is He doing for us. In Christ, God is uniting us again – He is fixing and healing the broken human nature, He is making us whole again and He is taking us into His divine life. Theology calls this holiness. We are meant to be holly, united with oneself, with nature and with God.

But how is it possible? There is only one way, only one truth and only one life: and Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. And what did he do? First, he gives us the new law: to love God and to love our neighbor as he loved us. So, now it is not Law anymore, but Love which is a gift from God for overcoming the obstacle of sin. Now it is the Love that should facilitate the relationships between human beings among themselves, with nature and with God. Secondly, he restored the authority we are against off – authority whose rejection causes fragmentation, polarization and division between humans and nature and God. Christ repairs the fracture. He reweaves the fabric. Holiness is nothing but wholeness – union with God, with nature, with self.

The End Times: restoring authority

The New Testament gives us a scene as sharp as a blade, slicing through our illusions about power and freedom. The Jews lived under Rome’s iron fist, paying taxes to a pagan empire. They dreamed of a Messiah who would break the yoke, topple the occupiers, and set up a divine government – finally, the Kingdom of God on earth with them as cabinet ministers. And since Jesus was a Jew and a prophet, they imagined He would bless their revolution.

So, they come, coins jingling in their pockets, and ask Him: Should we pay taxes to Caesar? A trap disguised as patriotism. Jesus asks for a coin. He turns it in His fingers and asks the simplest, most devastating question: Whose image is this? They answer: Caesar’s. And then the line that echoes through history: Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. With that, Jesus restores authority – not only God’s, but also the earthly kind. He reminds us that the world is not an anarchic accident but an ordered cosmos. Authority is not a human invention; it flows from natural law, inscribed in creation from the beginning. To rebel against it is to rebel against reality itself. To accept it is not slavery; it is sanity. It is the only way to stitch the torn fabric, to overcome the fracture, to find unity again.

The coin is one, but it has two sides, and this fact is what we need to have in mind if we want to overcome divisions, fragmentation and polarization. There is unity, but only through acceptance the authority and rejection of the sin that becomes obstacle for genuine encounter and relationship with others, with nature and ultimately with God. But our culture tears coins. We chant: My body, my choice. My truth, my law. Authority? Dead. The result? Division, conflict, war. And how can we do that in contemporary world that is oriented toward being your own master, your own boss. How is it possible in the world in which we identify with our sin, and we embrace it as something we are proud of. If I am CEO of exploitive company and I am proud of that, or if I am a stock market broker earning enormous amounts of money based on speculations and manipulations. Is that something to be proud of? We live in a world and culture that says: I am my authority. There is no other authority over me, nor in heaven, nor on earth. If we rebel against external authority, accepting only one coming from oneself, then we cannot escape the prevailing logic of division, conflict and exclusion, we cannot go beyond the polarization and fragmentation of our society. Then we cannot achieve unity.

So, I think that really important question is: why do we do anything? And I think there are three reasons why to do anything at all:

• Because I want to do it
• Because someone told me to do it (weather they asked nicely or commanded it like my wife does to me)
• Because it is something that must be done

If I want to do it, then I confirm my authority over myself. Then I am my own boss, and I do what I want. Then I think of myself as individual – free and responsible for things I do. Then I put myself opposed community and other people, continuing fragmentation and implementing the logic of division, exclusion and conflict. If I do something simply because I want to, then I crown myself king over my little kingdom of desires. I become my own lawgiver, my own boss, my own idol. I decide, therefore I am. Freedom, I tell myself, pure and unbounded. I act, and I call it responsibility – because I chose it. But in truth, I am a tyrant over a territory no bigger than my ego. And what follows? If I am sovereign, then every other person is a rival sovereign. My liberty collides with yours; my will crashes into your will. So, we build walls. We withdraw into fortresses of autonomy and then wonder why we feel so alone. This is how fragmentation is born – not by accident, but by ideology. It is the logic of division: you against me, me against us, all of us against the common good. We call it freedom, but it is a polite name for war.

If I do what others tell me to do, then I am submitted to external authority. Those of you who are married now what I am talking about. I obey the command of other people. Then I can be exploited, and I am dependent on others who have authority over me. If I act simply because someone told me to, then I am no longer a king in my tiny kingdom – I am a pawn on someone else’s chessboard. My will bends like a reed in the wind of another’s command. I obey, yes, but out of fear or convenience, not out of love for the good. But here lies the danger: when I live only by another’s orders, I exchange one tyranny for another. I trade the prison of my ego for the chains of dependence. I become an object to be used, a tool to be wielded. Then I can be exploited, manipulated, reduced to an instrument for someone else’s ambition. And what is worse, I begin to forget my own dignity. I no longer ask what is true, but only who commands.

But if I act because the thing itself calls to be done – because it must be done – then something remarkable happens: I am no longer under the tyranny of my own whims, nor chained to the caprice of another’s command. I step into a freedom that neither ego nor empire can give. Then, I am like the “unworthy servant” of the Gospel, who does his work not for applause, nor fear, nor pride, but because the work is true and good in itself. In that moment, I cease to ask, Who wills it? – me or him? – and I begin to ask, What is willed by the very order of things? Then my obedience is no longer servitude, but harmony. I am attuned to the Creator’s design, like a string vibrating to the music of the cosmos. I am not acting for profit, nor for praise; I am acting because reality itself whispers: It is right. It is necessary. And so I am free – not because I do what I want, nor because I do what I am told, but because I do what must be done. I do what echoes the will of God woven into the fabric of being.

So, when Jesus speaks of the coin, He is not merely giving a clever answer to a tricky question. He is unveiling a metaphysics of order inscribed on a piece of metal. That small, cold circle of silver is preaching to us: the coin is one, and yet it has two faces. Caesar on one side, God on the other – not in competition, but in a hierarchy of meaning. It is natural, He says – yes, natural – that taxes are paid. It is natural that social life has a structure, that authority should exist as a principle of order. The world is not an anarchic chaos; it hums with symphony, not cacophony. To deny authority is to deny nature, to declare war on the harmony that birthed us. If we accept this coin – its unity of difference – we enter into peace. If we reject it, we grind the metal of our lives into shards of conflict. Refuse the coin, and you perpetuate the logic of exclusion and division; accept it, and you rediscover that freedom is not the absence of law but the fulfillment of order through love. For when we obey – not slavishly, not grudgingly, but for the love of God and our brothers and sisters – then even the law ceases to be a burden. It becomes as natural as breathing. Paying the tax, honoring the hierarchy, structuring life around authority – these are no longer humiliations, but harmonies. Then we act not out of compulsion, but out of necessity – the bright necessity of truth. We do what must be done because reality itself, in its quiet wisdom, wills it so.

The Culture of Encounter

After this long but necessary prologue, let us at last pronounce the name of what we seek: the culture of encounter. A phrase simple, almost banal at first glance—until you taste the weight of its promise. For what is an encounter if not the trembling threshold between two freedoms, the mystery of two beings daring to face each other without devouring one another? Encounter means relation. Relation means that my being is not an isolated monolith but a bridge, an opening, a wound perhaps, but a fertile wound. There is no encounter without relationship, and no relationship without the risk of self. To exist is to be with. This is not poetry; it is ontology. The human is made for communion.

But – and here lies the abyss – what if the bridge is cracked? What if the fertile wound has festered? If sin has indeed inserted itself like a thorn in the very heart of our connections, then every meeting bleeds suspicion. The other ceases to be a gift; he becomes a rival, an obstacle, a threat. Conversation turns into calculation; dialogue becomes duel. We stretch out a hand only to count the fingers before they snatch what is ours. So, if every relationship is mediated by sin, then every encounter is already poisoned at the root. This is not melodrama – it is our daily experience: envy glimmering beneath politeness, fear crouching under smiles. To encounter under these conditions is to dance on the edge of war.

Is there an alternative? Can the thorn be plucked, the wound cauterized, the bridge rebuilt? Or are we condemned to these armed courtesies forever? Who can save us from the tyranny of sin in our very ways of loving?

And this is precisely the horizon Pope Francis sets before us when he speaks of a culture of encounter. Not a slogan, but a conversion of life. Change of our mind – metanoia. It is the radical decision to refuse the dictatorship of sin – the cold arithmetic of power, the sterile logic of control, the savage dance of exclusion – and to embrace instead the divine madness of love. The culture of encounter is not about mere civility or diplomatic tolerance. It is about communion – an existence re-stitched by grace. It means meeting the other not as competitor, not as prey, but through Christ, in Christ, with Christ shining between us like a third light. Look at the great arc of salvation: sin raised its wall, God gave the Law to scale it, but Christ came to tear it down. The Old Testament was scaffolding; the New is the house. In Jesus, the commandment is distilled into a single, incandescent word: Love. Not the pale echo of love we peddle in songs and slogans, but the love that bleeds and forgives, the love that stoops to wash feet and stretches wide on the Cross.

And so Saint Paul dares to write the most outrageous sentence in Scripture: “God made Him who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5,21). The Innocent became guilty so that the guilty could become holy. Here lies the grammar of the culture of encounter: not subtraction, but exchange; not suspicion, but self-gift; not rivalry, but redemption.

This means an exodus – not from Egypt, but from the prison of the self. It means breaking the chains of egocentrism, fleeing the desert of individualism, to meet the other not as an object to be used, not as an obstacle to be crushed, but as brother, as sister, as co-heir of the same grace. In this culture, differences do not dissolve into a gray uniformity; they sing, but in harmony, not in hatred. They remain, they even shine more vividly – but instead of building walls, they open windows, as Mother of God does so when St. Peter closes the doors. They do not lead to division; they lead to dialogue. And dialogue – what a worn-out word, yet what an abyss of meaning it hides – dialogue is not two megaphones blasting into the void, not two monologues exchanged like bullets across a trench. No. Dialogue is, as Greeks would say, dia-logos – through the Logos, through the Word, through reason that reasons us. It is not I against you; it is something passing between us, something greater than both of us – a bridge built from meaning, a current carrying truth. And perhaps – yes, let us dare say it – perhaps the Logos Himself passes there, the eternal Word moving in the fragile syllables we share. Dialogue is not about victory; it is about revelation. Not triumph, but truth. And truth does not arise from crushing the other under arguments; it blossoms from the common soil we till together, the common ground that bears the fruit of the common good.

Ah, the common good! Another phrase dulled by textbooks, yet radiant when rediscovered: the good not for me, not even for you, but for us – for all, and for the whole person, body and soul. But how can we reach that good if the only compass we follow is self-interest? If what lies between us is not communion but calculation? So, let us ask, seriously and without masks: From what interest do I act? What truly dwells in that space between us? Is it love, or is it leverage? Is it God, or is it gold? To answer, we must go to the root of the word itself: interest – from Latin inter esse – to be between. There is something there, in that fragile, sacred between. The question is: what – or rather, Who? So, the original sense of the word interest means to be between – in-between.

Interest – how impoverished our notion of it has become! We think of it as a percentage on a bank loan, a cold calculation scribbled on financial charts. But in its original pulse, interest is far more tender, more metaphysical: it is what stands between. It is the mysterious reality that makes relationship possible. Between you and me, there is a space – not empty, but charged, like the silence between two notes that makes the melody sing. And in that interval, in that trembling in-between, dwells the Infinite. Yes, I believe that in this between, God Himself pitches His tent. Is this not the scandal and glory of the Incarnation? Christ did not come to colonize one side against the other; He descended into the gap, the abyss we dug by sin, to make it a bridge, to be a bridge, to be a relation. He became, as Paul says, the Between – the mediator, the meeting point, the living Interest that binds what was broken. He is the Logos that courses through dialogue between two people. He is the Presence that breathes in the fragile air of encounter.

When we recognize this – when we bow to the truth that between my ego and yours there stands Someone greater – then dialogue ceases to be a duel. It becomes liturgy, a celebration of life and joy of our differences. It becomes sacrament making one body of husband and wife. Words cease to be weapons and become windows with beautiful view. The encounter no longer wounds; it heals. No longer fragments; it transfigures. For where two or three are gathered in His name – in that sacred interval – there, precisely there, He is.

The culture of encounter is not a polite handshake or the thin gruel of tolerance. It is not relativism, nor is it the flattening of differences into a dull uniformity. No, it is the art of meeting one another through Christ – in dialogue that is rooted in truth, illuminated by love, and ordered toward life in common. It is the courage to see others not as a threat, but as a gift. It is only possible if love becomes our true interest – our inter esse, what truly stands between us and binds us. To live this way is to open the door (and not just windows) for something new to be born from that sacred in-between, something neither mine nor yours, but ours – a reality where God Himself breathes and reality we both share as the air we breathe.

And when we choose this path, something extraordinary begins: the broken threads of relationship – vertical with God, horizontal with one another, and even ecological with creation – start to mend and heal. We begin to heal. Our nature begins the heal. The polarization, the fragmentation, the hostility that scars our world slowly yield to unity, communion, and peace.

This is no utopian dream. It is the Gospel breaking into history, here and now. It is the good news embodied in flesh and blood. It is the call of Pope Francis: to abandon the logic of conflict and step into the logic of encounter – through Christ, with Christ, in Christ. It is life we must be living.

What does all this mean for our shared existence—our politics, our culture, our economy? It cannot remain an abstract dream; it must take flesh in the very structures that shape our lives.

Pope Francis did not stop at the poetry of encounter; he moved toward the prose of economics. He called for something audacious: a new economy – the Economy of Francesco. Why such a bold claim? Because the system we inhabit today often breathes the same air as sin: it divides, it isolates, it devours. It is an economy scripted by the logic of fragmentation, where competition is crowned king, where profit takes precedence over people, where creation is not cared for but consumed. Look closely: what stands between us in this economy? Not God. Not love. But money – silent, seductive, omnipresent. Power, too, lurking behind its numbers. Self-interest, disguised as freedom. These have become our mediators, the false gods that govern our transactions and corrupt our relationships.

The Economy of Francesco calls us to conversion – not only of hearts, but of systems. It asks us to imagine an economy that is not a battlefield but a common table. An economy where the between is filled not with greed, but with fraternity, justice, and sustainability. Where the human person – not the idol of profit – stands at the center. Imagine a marketplace where dialogue is possible – not the dialogue of manipulation, but of mutual flourishing. Where the rule is no longer winner takes it all, but everyone shares in the good. This is not naive romanticism; it is the radical realism of the Gospel when it touches finance, trade, and labor.

So, what awaits us on the other side of polarization, of the splintering of hearts and the empire of exclusion? What lies beyond this desert of suspicion and rivalry? On the other side is not a void. It is encounter. It is dialogue – not as a political technique or a polite compromise, but as the space where truth and love embrace. On the other side is a new way of inhabiting the earth and shaping our common life – a way that smells of fraternity, tastes of justice, and breathes the air of hope. It is an economy no longer haunted by greed but animated by care. A society no longer obsessed with possession but enchanted by generosity. A culture no longer armed with hostility but clothed in love. This is the horizon Pope Francis dares us to look toward: not a utopia beyond reach, but the other side that begins – if we allow it – right here, in the fragile, luminous space between us.

But here is the most important thing: the other side is not an exotic land beyond the mountains, nor a paradise postponed to some distant age. The other side begins here – hidden in the fragile between of two faces meeting, in the narrow passage where dialogue is possible and encounter becomes real.

Think of the coin. It has two sides, and yet it is so thin that the one side almost kisses the other. A mere fraction of a millimeter separates them, and yet that sliver is everything. Or picture the circle: its most distant points are, paradoxically, those that almost touch – infinitely close, and yet the entire circumference must be traveled before they embrace. So it is with us. The other side – the side of unity, justice, and peace – presses right against our own. It is closer than breath, but we cannot leap there by shortcuts; we must take the long road of conversion, the full arc of love. If we can keep that sacred in-between – where God Himself dwells – uncontaminated by the idols of power and pride, then, even now, the other side will begin to dawn. Not as a dream, but as a reality that bursts forth where two or three gather in His name.

And perhaps, here lies the answer to the question with which we began: What is on the other side of death? Not nothingness, not a cold void, but life – life in its purest sense. Life in communion, life restored, life without end. Eternal life, not as an abstract promise, but as the flowering of every authentic love, every true encounter that we have dared to live here and now. Every genuine dialogue, every word that passes between us without devouring the other, every gesture that resists the gravity of selfishness – these are already fragments of eternity scattered through time. Each is a foretaste, a sacrament of the world to come: Kingdome of Haeven. The culture of encounter, then, is not a mere survival tactic for a broken planet. It is not a strategy for making globalization slightly more bearable. No – it is the beginning of the new creation. It is the first shimmering dawn of the world that waits beyond the horizon of death. And the marvel is this: that horizon is nearer than we think, as close as the thin line of a coin, as close as the space between two hands reaching toward each other.

We began with a question: What is on the other side?

Is it chaos? Is it nothingness? Is it just more of the same—more conflict, more fragmentation, more noise? Or could it be something else? Something greater? Something that calls us to risk, to change, to hope?

On the other side of our divisions is unity.

On the other side of our fear is communion.

On the other side of our rebellion is the joy of obedience – not as submission to a tyrant, but as freedom under the gentle yoke of the true Authority, the One who orders the stars and writes His law in our hearts.

So, what is on the other side? It is not a distant continent or a utopian mirage—it is a Kingdom, already pressing against the walls of our fragile world like light through a cracked door. It is the reign of God, where division dies and communion is born, where authority- no longer tyranny but harmony – is restored. For authority, when it is true, it does not crush; it orders, it gives space for life to flourish, like the firmament holding the stars. And every time we risk an encounter – every time we step out of our fortified self to recognize the Other and the order He has inscribed into creation – we open that door a little wider. The other side is closer than the thinness of a coin, yet it requires the long pilgrimage of the heart (like circle). It is closer than our own breath, yet it will cost us our life. And perhaps that is the paradox: that in surrendering to the true Authority, we become free; that in losing life, we find it. For on the other side of death waits not an end, but the embrace for which we were made – the eternal encounter with the God who is Love and Lord.