ON THE LIMIT
Pastoral Letter 2025
by
DOMENICO POMPILI
Bishop of Verona
2. Limit as Threshold
2.1 Limit and Boundary
The distinction between limit and boundary is decisive and should not be taken for granted. The philosophical tradition has taught us to recognise this crucial difference. Let us think for a moment about the difference between a wall and a shore. The wall says “up to here”. It is a condition in which one cannot see beyond, and everything seems divided into a here and a beyond of history. It is the experience of every life in exile: in the lived experience of grief, abandonment, illness, and the many “noes” of life, one has the impression of crashing against impassable barriers.
The seashore, by contrast, tells a completely different story. It is neither water nor land, but the place where water and land meet. It is a threshold that divides, yet also unites a space; that separates, yet also allows encounter. Here we may linger, cross over, turn back. It is the line of a living horizon that breathes and speaks of a coming and going without interruption. As we read in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is the one who does not remain still even on the threshold and invites us to do likewise: “Let us go across to the other side” (Mk 4:35).
This image of the shore as a living threshold takes on particular meaning if we think about our relationship with God. We are like children on the beach who absent-mindedly play with grains of sand, unaware that they stand “on the shore of the infinite sea of mystery” (according to the image attributed to Karl Rahner). Every moment of our history, however contingent or apparently insignificant, may become a place where the infinite makes itself present. The limit is no longer a wall that excludes, but a threshold that welcomes and allows passage, transforming our world. This image does not lose its relational dimension: the limit becomes a threshold insofar as it concerns what happens between us, and not only within us.
The discovery of the limit as threshold therefore opens a fundamental question: how do we cross the doors that open before us? How do we avoid fearing that they may be too narrow for our humanity? Emily Dickinson offers a response that is both poetic and wise:
“Not knowing when the dawn may come
I leave each door ajar
That has wings like a bird
Or waves, like a shore.”
(Emily Dickinson, 1884)
2.2 The Threatened Threshold: Between Violence and Attention
The transformation of limit into threshold is not spontaneous: careful work is required if it is to occur in a fruitful rather than fragile way. In these days, when the news reaches us laden with violence—wars breaking out, hands dripping with blood, cities burning, faces closing themselves in hatred—we seem to be witnesses to a world adrift after shipwreck.
Violence always arises when the limit is rejected and one claims to live in the limitless, while the ego dominates the world as if it belonged to it. This is not an accidental outcome. Violence is by nature limitless. It spreads like a fire in a time of drought, overwhelms embankments like a river in flood, humiliates, devastates and kills whatever life stands before it. It knows no measure. It has no effective restraints in the ordinary world, neither within the human psyche nor outside us. On the contrary, it tends to recharge itself by gathering all the anger in the world.
Violence, incidentally, never comes from nowhere. It arises from a self that believes itself omnipotent and denies the limits of reality. In doing so, it enters the realm of the imaginary, the unreal, the dream, and allows itself to annihilate the otherness it encounters. It is the same dynamic we see in someone who, at home, expects everything to revolve around their moods; in the professional who cannot tolerate criticism because it damages their perfect image; in the parent who experiences their children as a narcissistic extension of themselves.
The antidote to this limitless violence is not an opposing force of containment, not a barrier we set against fury. It is something infinite within us that brings about a miraculous shift: attention. Attention is like a return to the shore, the recognition that there exists a threshold to be respected between ourselves and the world, between ourselves and the other.
Attention dissolves the violent dynamic. It is like a reversal in the direction of the soul and of history. It is a form of prayer that asks nothing for itself: it does not seek to change the world according to its own desires but makes itself present to reality as it is, with its wounds and its questions, with its needs and its contradictions. It is the gaze that knows how to pause on the threshold, that does not seek to possess but knows how to contemplate.
This gaze welcomes the simple presence of things, because it loves them in their irreducible otherness and accepts their resistance and mystery; it recognises the other in their authentic face and one’s own suffering in its truth, without the need to alter its nature. It is the art of remaining on the threshold without violating it.
This wisdom has profound consequences for how we educate and how we allow ourselves to be educated. We live in a world that fears the limit because it confuses it with death and despair. But the limit is life. It is the form that allows being to exist and to work through suffering. Without limit there is no beauty, no recognition, no possible love.
Attention also teaches us that the highest prayer is not the one that asks for miracles, but the one that learns to see the miracles already present: the fact that something exists rather than nothing, that a flower grows from the earth, that a child smiles, that it is possible to forgive and begin again. Attention is the most radical form of love because it loves without dominating, looks without judging, receives and gives without demanding.
This is what we most need today: to learn again the art of attention. Not the frenetic attention of the screen that consumes everything and forgets everything, but the contemplative attention that knows how to remain, how to wait, how to recognise in the limit not an enemy to be destroyed but a teacher to be honoured. In the fragment of the world the universe often lies hidden.
2.3 Dissolution: When the Self Becomes a Dwelling
“Water is taught by thirst,” wrote Emily Dickinson. This means that in the situation of limit we learn to recognise not only our needs but also the quality of our desire. When we find ourselves at the edge of our possibilities, a decisive question emerges: are we beings who demand satisfaction at any cost, or cups capable of receiving the good given to us with gratitude?
Perhaps we too, at some point in life, have cultivated the illusion of being self-sufficient. It is human: we grow up thinking that if we try hard enough, if we are good enough, we will be able to control everything that happens to us. And so, without realising it, we begin to live as though the world should adapt itself to our needs. Little by little we turn relationships into instruments for our well-being, rejecting the idea of depending on someone or something. The result is paradoxical: we build the most bitter form of dependence there is.
Life soon unmasks the illusion and intervenes in its own way, bringing us back to the limit. The effort is unavoidable, yet it often offers the opportunity to mature spiritually. At times limits even heal us: a failure may open unexpected paths of learning, an illness may bring us back to what is essential, a relational crisis may rebalance our emotional life. They are all invitations from life to change pace in order to go further, beyond ourselves.
The process of dissolving the ego does not happen all at once. It is made up of small daily deaths: renouncing the control of the moods of those who live with us, accepting that this generation may follow a different path from the previous one, recognising that our opinion is not always the most important one around the table at work. Each time we let go of a fragment of our imaginary omnipotence, a new space opens up in which to welcome life as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be.
It is here, in the hollows that life offers us to suspend the rhythm of our days, that the miracle of dissolution occurs: the rigid self softens until it becomes receptive. Like clay in the hands of the potter, which must be soft in order to take shape. Then an elderly person who accepts help discovers the tenderness of those who care for them. A figure of authority who acknowledges their own mistake without feeling diminished expresses an authentic humanity. Someone living with illness and at the mercy of pain may discover that their words can be healing for others.
The water that symbolically evokes this transformation is that of desire. As we read in Psalm 104, God sets a boundary for the waters: they shall not pass beyond it nor return to cover the earth. Here the limit appears once more as a guardian of life: not an impediment, but the condition that allows each thing to exist within its possible space and time.
The self that has come to know its own boundaries is therefore not a diminished self, but a self finally free to be itself without worrying about becoming everything.
Freed from its pretensions of omnipotence, the subject can be reborn as a hospitable space. No longer a fortress defending itself from the world, but a house that welcomes life. This is the transformation we see in those who have passed through great suffering without hardening their hearts: people in whose presence others seek refuge, not because they have all the answers, but because they know how to remain with the questions. Their presence does not weigh down; it frees. Their companionship does not judge; it accompanies.
This dissolution of the self into a hospitable space is the most mature fruit of the wisdom of the limit. It is not a renunciation of one’s identity, but the discovery of the truest one: a relational identity that exists in giving and receiving, in being cared for and caring for others. The self has learned that life is not a possession to defend but a gift to share, not a right to claim but a grace to celebrate.
2.4 The Limit of Affliction and the Gate of Heaven
“There is a limit to everything,” we often say. Even to pain and to our ability to endure it? One then thinks of mothers and fathers who have lost a son or a daughter, and who for this reason find themselves in a nameless desert. A pain that has no seasons and no consolation. Here the door between the before and the after is a gate of hell. In the heart there remains forever an empty imprint left by glances, laughter, gestures and light footsteps that will never return.
In this cathedral of silence, language learns to use the conditional: “it would have been, they would have done, we would have seen…”. The experience is extremely harsh, yet also revealing of something we tend not to grasp: love has no boundaries. It goes beyond, transcends absence, slips into the pauses of history. One then discovers that the gate of hell had been preceded by another door: the one we pass through when we bring someone into the world, when we love someone, when we share a passion with others.
It is certainly not a consolation. Yet it may be a path for understanding what it means to live on the threshold even when everything collapses. When pain goes beyond a certain limit, one may speak of affliction, says Simone Weil.
Affliction is the suffering that has branded the soul and rendered it enslaved forever. It happens when an event seizes a life, uproots it and strikes it in every dimension. At that moment even God seems absent. One cannot leave such a situation except by continuing to love in vain, within the void, through the void that has opened before our steps.
I think of a woman named Giovanna who, on the night of the Amatrice earthquake (24 August 2016), in a matter of seconds lost her father, her mother, her son, her daughter and her husband.
Affliction is the true enigma of life. It is useless to search for answers or justifications. If we find them, they are certainly not the real ones. One simply no longer recognises oneself and even ceases to struggle. One feels cursed, and nothing more. The world can no longer reach us in any way. That inaudible vibration offers itself at a frequency that no one receives. Despair consumes itself and becomes anguish. Before this impenetrable muteness, one must stop: the human being experiences their full powerlessness.
Yet there is another kind of powerlessness, more subtle and everyday. It is the bitter experience of parents, friends, pastors and therapists who collide with an invisible barrier when they try to help someone who, day after day, withdraws and distances themselves. One discovers then that all our love, all our dedication and all our competence are not enough.
This form of limit can also become a teacher: it reminds us that we are not the “saviours”. Our task is to offer presence and safeguard the space of encounter, inhabiting a suspension that does not presume to force the timing and conditions of people’s lives.
In any case, we should never allow ourselves to be annihilated by discouragement and by our inability to relieve suffering—our own and that of others—which casts us at the foot of the cross. If in those conditions we remain capable of loving, then within wounded life a passage is formed, infinitely small yet extremely precious: through that fissure in history God manages to pass and reach his creation.
It is not a blessing of evil, nor the fruit of a sadistic or masochistic culture (from which, to tell the truth, Christianity has not always kept its distance). Rather, it is the good news of salvation.
One does not remain still on that threshold. There is a time of entering, made of silence, prayer and feeling. There is a time of going out, towards brothers and sisters, but also towards the whole of creation. In this way we too may become open doors for those who will knock and ask permission to enter our space and our time of life.
This movement of entering and going out is the very rhythm of mature spiritual life: no alienation and no annihilation, only the deep breathing of one who has learned that every limit can become a threshold, every wound can open to healing, every closed door can reveal another open door. Life never ceases to teach us the art of crossing over—the art of transforming every boundary into a place of encounter, every ending into a new beginning.
