The Unexpected Question

Simone Riva - After 16 years, I still haven't managed to get used to the first day of school. Having done the preparatory meetings, prepared the provisional timetable, the time comes when I enter school for the first class of the new year. On the car ride from home, the question is always the same: Why am I going to school? After vacation time and having reacquainted myself with the style of a possible life without that commitment, the question seems less obvious than ever. 

And, while the question is always the same, the answer is not. Over the years it has changed, matured, purified: I go to find myself. There is, in fact, a part of me that otherwise would not be challenged enough and that needs those faces, those questions, those intemperances, to find itself.

And there is One waiting for me there so that I can be reached by the Grace of His presence where everyone's normal life takes place. So, every day, before entering school, I turn to Christ with a simple invocation, a single word: Surprise me! 

Even on my first day this year. He is an introverted boy who hardly ever talks, but observes a lot. Intelligent and reluctant in relationships. I always had him in mind when I walked into his class, so much so that I would take class first and foremost for him.

One of those from whom you don't expect a first move, but whose full potential you glimpse. He plays recess on the first day. 

Crashing into the class I was in, which should also have been his if he had not flunked it, he immediately comes up to me to greet me and ask, “ Prof, is he in this year too?”

I ask him about the summer, how he experienced the flunking... but I am struck by the impetus, totally unforeseen and unpredictable, of his coming to find me with that chilling question, if you just guess the full extent of it. 

The fear of losing time, the taste for life, the passion for the moment, need one to be there again this year.

The risk, we know well, is to lose ourselves in nothingness, as a wonderful contemporary poem (contained in the collection

“When I Wasn't Dying” published by Einaudi in 2019) by Mariangela Gualtieri (born in Cesena in 1951): “This day that I lost / and that did not yield / except a sadness, the punctiliousness / of its modest pile / of chores. / This day that I lost / and I was in exile / inside cloths that were not mine / and shoes that discomfited me / and pockets that I did not recognize / and I ran punctually / without even a gift / for anyone.

Just an empty, short / breathing. Confirming to me that in unlove / doing even if you do remains un-done."

 How many times the temptation of unlove has come, and will come, to insinuate the idea that the important thing is to do, to fix, to box, to solve. But they will be, as they have been, lost days. 

Only a love is able to make us conquer life within the details of the everyday. And love does not solve, does not fix, rather it leaves, as a wake, a longing for itself. 

My first day of school was traversed by this nostalgia, which took face and voice in that boy who, without knowing it, asked the only question I needed.

Published on the Monza Newspaper - Out of the Choir. The author has not revised its translation.

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