Rediscovering Hope: from darkness to light.
By Simone Riva - How the Road to Emmaus and the Cross Illuminate Our Path to Faith and Transformation This Easter Season.
"At this crossroads of darkness / before us you rise, formidable, / a barren tree, a balance scale / that holds the great inert body. / A bare crossbeam cuts across the space / and a naked vertical timber / soars beyond time: / Cartesian axes / of life and death, / around which now unfolds / the black cloverleaf." Margherita Guidacci (1921–1993), in the 1908 book "The Isenheim Altar". Inspired by Grünewald's majestic and disturbing altarpiece, she describes Christ's passion with poetic words. Who knows how many times we have imagined those days when darkness seemed to have found a way to steal the last word on the story of the world and ours.
In these days of the Easter season, the Liturgy starts from this very suspicion and confronts it fearlessly.
Fearless, like the famous story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They walk away dejected, at the mercy of their moods, with the women's announcement hanging in the balance, awaiting their verification. They're distracted, focused only on what they are discussing. A spark is missing. Suddenly, a mysterious Traveler joins them and challenges them: "What are these conversations you are having with each other as you walk along?" As if to say: "What does your dialogue reveal about the fullness of your hearts?" They quickly turn to current events, as if the problem lies outside them, and respond, surprised and a bit irritated: "Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?" The Traveler, who doesn't reveal himself and waits for them to recognize him, persists and asks: "What things?"
The two disciples begin to recount the past days' events, starting with: "The things concerning Jesus of Nazareth..." Perhaps here lies why "their eyes were kept from recognizing him," and the cause of their resignation. They thought the events only concerned Jesus as if they had removed themselves from the happenings. They are missing from their own story. Christ endeavors to bring them back into their experiences, even rekindling their hearts with the miracle of longing: "As they approached the village to which they were going, he acted as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, 'Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.'" They didn't understand, but they felt (in the most powerful sense of the word) that this Traveler had something to do with their hearts.
The missing flame had finally arrived, as they would later say after breaking the bread: "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road, when he opened the Scriptures to us?" The danger of "talking and debating together" without truly being present is something everyone can fall into. So much idle talk, so many superficial opinions and so many irrevocable judgments. And then, it takes just a moment of truth with ourselves when we confront what we're missing and what we long for, and everything opens up again. Relationships have grown cold, friends shrouded in suspicion, secret wars that are no less significant than those fought with weapons, for what? The Traveler would say: "What are these conversations that you are having with each other?" offering himself again with the same patience and longing. This, in essence, is the heart of the "spectacle of the cross," of those "Cartesian axes of life and death." Those two beams definitively cross space and time, just as our lives are. Recognizing this gift in this Easter season prevents us from falling into the trap of letting darkness have the last word.
Unrevised translation by the author. Monza, 05.07.2024
