I am most completely a person at the moment when I freely and consciously affirm the other even at the cost of my own life; a dynamic that Jesus expresses in these words, “No man has greater love that he who gives his life” for the others. In other words, no one is more themself, more a person, than the one who in order to save the transcendence of the other transcends him or herself, negating themself.
This, the law of divine sociality revealed and lived by Jesus, is – and cannot be otherwise – the law of human sociality and every form of life. Jesus himself helped us to understand it: the grain of wheat is not itself unless it becomes an ear, which it can only do by passing through a kind of death. He says elsewhere, “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life… will save it.”
Silvano Cola
Scritti e testimonianze
Gen’s, Grottaferrata 2007, p. 63