Easter, Available for His Definitive Company
Simone Riva - “Often, when I hang out with a guy I really like, he ends up using me, ignoring me, and then disappearing. After a while, he comes back asking for forgiveness and then disappears again. I think I like the wrong people.” Who knows how many times—perhaps not in the dramatic terms used by my student—we have had a similar experience. The feeling is that of not being understood, accepted, or embraced for who we are. The shadow of a distant ideal of ourselves obscures the reality of our lives. We find ourselves either in a perpetual struggle to achieve an unattainable goal or, more often, disillusioned and discouraged for having met the wrong people, shifting the heart of the challenge outside ourselves. In any case, our conclusion always remains the same: “Is this all there is?”
Restlessness finds no home and often embarks on an unstoppable race to see who can distract themselves first. We continue to do our tasks, fulfill our duties, and fill our time to avoid thinking, but we are not truly present. Isolation from reality takes the place of wonder. Shiva expresses it well in his song Diversi: “You can talk, I can’t hear you / Hurt me, I won’t change / I’m calling God right now / I need a break.” Whatever happens, we are always elsewhere, in a perpetual interval.
What happened to the apostles after Jesus’ death was no different. Disoriented and afraid, they thought it best to hide in the place where they believed they could find safety. The Upper Room, which just hours earlier had been the site of the total self-giving of the Son of God, transformed into a place of self-preservation and fear. This is the fate of life when Christ is absent.
And what initiative did the Mystery take to shake things up again? The same one as on the night of Bethlehem: it broke the silence of the night of fear with the announcement of its presence. A definitive companion to every human life remains the possibility for everyone to discover the reasons for starting over. This introduces a new way of living that, if left to us, would never begin: “That Christ is risen, that the person of Jesus of Nazareth who conquered life lives, that this is not a fact of the past, that it is not a devout memory, that it is not a feeling, that it is a presence that remains in time, we understand this because it introduces a new way of looking at everything, and we can touch it with our own hands on many occasions: through the testimonies of others who introduce us to a way of looking at reality where the resurrection of Christ vibrates. And this makes concrete circumstances begin to be different” (Fr. Julián Carrón, Notes from the School of Community, June 17, 2015).
All of them, even the annoying ones that we don’t know how to handle, that break our patterns and reasoning, force us to come to terms with the fact that they happen. They often find us disoriented, afraid, suspicious, or skeptical, like many who witnessed Christ’s condemnation and death on the cross. God, however, did not spare those people from experiencing what they were—willingly or unwillingly—participating in. Just as He did not spare His Son the extreme loneliness of those hours, filled only by the presence of Mary, with whom there was, as Pope Francis wrote in his meditations for the Way of the Cross at the Colosseum this year, “an indescribable understanding, an indissoluble alliance.”
Don Giussani effectively describes the dizzying loneliness of Jesus on Calvary: “It is also fruitful that Christ, dying alone, advised everyone, even his closest friends, not to follow him openly, thus dashing their hopes of months or years; indeed, his lonely end called that hope into question, as the two disciples of Emmaus confirm. But Christ dying, in his human consciousness, what perception did he have of his being seed, the disruptive principle of history and of the world!” (Viterbo 1977).
The idea of looking at life with the simplicity of children, without discarding any part of reality, is one of those questions we cannot delegate or pass on to anyone else. So, what are the concrete circumstances that have recently begun to be different for us? With what face did the resurrection of Jesus come to meet us? How has our “But is this all there is?” been challenged, so as to rekindle our desire for the infinite, which even uses a question like this, and a loneliness that can open the way to fruitfulness?
And then: “Have you ever experienced, even in your relationships with people and with limited things, a boundless fullness? Yes. Well, this is only a very distant image of what Christ introduces into life. If the Resurrection is not this, if Christ is not the Presence that introduces this newness into life, then we would be as lost as everyone else, because man’s desire is endless... But at certain moments, it is as if this horizon breaks through, and we begin to see that the Mystery introduces something new, something not yet familiar to us, but of which we have already perceived all the truth, all the density of reality, because we have been happy, because we have been overflowing—not because things have ‘gone well,’ but because of Him. If this is not an experience, the Resurrection remains an absolutely empty statement, because inside there—inside, not beside, not after, not dreaming of a different situation—when you are with your children cleaning their bottoms, the resurrection of Christ vibrates” (Don Julián Carrón, Notes from the School of Community, June 17, 2015).
