Let’s imagine for a while that not only are we in a pandemic, but that communications (including the Internet), safe air or maritime transport no longer exist, all States have fallen and the United Nations, the European Union and any organization that favors the encounter and dialogue between peoples has disappeared. Everything is submerged in barbarism and everyone has to look out for their own interests, protected by small groups of neighbors who must watch for their own safety.

Making use of this fiction, and with due respect to historians, this image comes to mind when I try to immerse myself in what the fall of the Western Roman Empire was in the year 476 AD. What is unbelievable is that a little over a thousand years ago, the fall of the empire that brought many contributions to our civilization fell into the hands of barbarians who used the same logic of expansion: violent conquest and slavery.

Exactly at the end of the same 5th century a person was born who developed what I call, the “revolution of labor” focused in a free person with all their dimensions: body, soul and spirit at its center. Saint Benedict of Nursia is the father of the monastic experience in the West, as well as the patron of Europe for all the impact that the Benedictine experience has generated in Western civilization.

Commemorating his day on July 11, we facilitated a meeting with Abbot Lepori, so that he could bring us more to date about this experience that was born silently, generating “triple impact” throughout Europe, at a time when everything was in ruins.

The actions of a single person seem insignificant compared to the great problems of humanity, but that did not stop Benito, who affirmed that “work is good for the person, for their happiness and fulfillment”; and this offers us a starting point to build a new humanity from the precise context where we live. Precisely because of this need of the person, its rule is summarized in “Ora et labora” (pray and work): a proposal for communion between the transcendent and the contingent, where prayer is a relationship with God and our siblings, generating a new gaze on all things, and work is relationship with divine creation.

“It is the subject capable of communion who gives quality to work, provided that they deepen their awareness of themselves, their nature and vocation… For those who cultivate this awareness, nothing is trivial and of little value; everything is universal and encompasses earth and sky. ” Lepori continued telling us at the meeting.

I need to reconquer this awareness of work and the value of my actions every day, not only because of how much or little impact they have, but because of the self-awareness they imply. Lepori challenges me with this striking phrase: “Without work, a man is not his own friend.”