Mario Luzi

Christian mourning is not gloomy or desperate, but it does not attenuate the pain or lessen the bitterness of tears. We often see in places of devotion drawn and afflicted faces, suffering for a loss, or the pain of a sacrifice, acquire from the composure of the faith something more of intensity and grief. This is not right, or better, it is not fair but it is so: faith is tried, interrogated and tested precisely by the anguished steps of our experience. Rarely do happy events, the serenity of tranquil days, call us to prayer or primary meditation. And yet they should: Christianity knows also joy and ecstasy. Are only the Saints able to bear witness to this? Not quite, but only the scanty angelic hosts who are busy on earth among men, under various guises, fortuitous and why not, disciplinary, reflect it. For the majority of men of faith, what counts most of Christ is the sacrificial aspect: his passion, suffering, cross and death. Certainly, also the resurrection - otherwise what faith would it be? Paul would consider it neither sufficient nor opportune - but the explosion of life which breaks joyously forth from the tomb draws a less lasting response from the Christian people, we must admit. Death, more than victory over death, marks the apex of sharing. The resurrection is represented triumphantly above all by the force of some Renaissance artists, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello for example, and this is not without significance. Nevertheless in the Western Christian's patrimony of veneration it has considerable importance, yes, but also more conceptual than participated. "Who do you say that I am? could also ring out for us from one of those brilliant images, coming from the lips of a figure confused by its own power. It would not be inconvenient to listen to those words at the height of glory. But exaltation and triumph rarely leave space for those intimate hesitations or the type of external concern in the case that the phrase us understood as legitimate, certainly not gratuitous, curiosity (Jesus perhaps intends to verify the effect of his preaching).

Also in the episode I wish to tell you about, the parusia, and the lightening recognition of the Master, lasted for an instant under a condition of pain which might be called insupportable; the kind that dissolves even that unconscious dignity of creature which each of us carries in his heart. The friend, a quiet, modest man, under the immense weight of the disaster which had befallen him, was also physically disfigured. I had before me someone defeated, annulled; a person from whom one could no longer rightly expect composure, or even an unsteady agony. He was succumbing, poor man, to an event beyond all measure and he appeared broken, dejected.

The day before, his eighteen year old son, his only son upon whom he and his wife had concentrated all their reasons for living, working, and hoping, had crashed his motor-bike into the wall of an underground tunnel. Every day tragedies like this occur. This time, and I do not think he asked why, the tragedy had struck him, precisely him, who appeared so unsuited for the trial, inadequate.

And yet, that meekness, which had always been his, persisted, the only sign of continuity in that human catastrophe. And little by little precisely this attracted my admiration, I saw it blossom in the ancient science of the unconsciousness of destiny, together with a transcendent patience. In that humble and woeful face a supernatural power began to shine.

The identification with Christ was sudden but not surprising. Christ had made that face his own. "I am not far away, I am here among you, in you, like you".

I thought how often, in memories and dreams, there re-emerge from forgetfulness the faces of companions which the present and the insolent struggle of ordinary life almost exclude and confine in their insignificance, but they return humble, yet strong, as signs of the ever-present Righteous one.

(Mario Luzi, born in Florence 1914, is one of the major Italian poets of the 20th century. He has published outstanding lyrics, stories and play, particularly appreciated are his reflections on poetry).