Sergio Zavoli

We move towards the end of the millennium and shadows of ancient uncertainties appear. The era of the lights, in nearly two hundred years, has not managed to illuminate with reason alone the world of the "dependency of the mystery", as Alvin Toffler calls religiosity. Something unresolved continues to exist in the relationship between man and religion, and faith, and God. I think mainly of young people, because the resurfacing, among them, of the religious feeling is evident. Going back to rummaging in their soul they discover that what they were looking for outside was not there. Beyond infatuations, ingenuity, of some forms which are even morbid, what strikes the most in their search is that it does not advance, abstractly, on the paths of God; fearing other disappointments, they have turned again to Jesus whom they consider, let's say, one of them. It's that he is here, say young people, for no other reason than the fact that he has already been here. They tell us they need to "reconstruct" the image nearest to them, that of the Son, that is of Christ. It's a sort of naive attempt, but not a banal one, to recognise oneself in a God prepared to make his identity clear, while the one of the Father - divine, too divine - often surpasses their erratic, confused, generous search. The question Who is Jesus Christ today? is it not based on that complex dilemma which is believing and non-believing, young people seem to be asking in turn? In essence it has to do with the same question that Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, addressed to his disciples, who discussed it until the Resurrection: "But you, who do you think I am? Thousands of books have attempted to provide that answer. And no one has been able to resolve every doubt. Therefore it must not be surprising, and it is not at all scandalous that the endless questions which theologians have been dealing with for twenty centuries have even become "pop theology". Do you remember? Jesus Christ Superstar, are you who they say your are? One has looked with suspicion, and even disapproval, at this attempt to return Christ into the world to obtain from Him answers which the world has not been able to provide. But precisely this need for "reality", as naïve as it may appear, could enclose the hope of meeting, through Christ, a God considered confined in the heavens, and thus in hiding during our history.

Young people have the "habit" of wanting to know what spaces and what bases are left to religion in the face of the violence of individuals and regimes, of that use of technology which in the name of well-being accepts violence, alienation and pollution, of large parts of humanity without guarantees of survival, of lives imprinted in the closed circuit of work-money-consumerism? For the first time, in the history of the human soul, methods of reason have the better: suspending one's certainties - or, more rapidly one's beliefs - questioning, mobilising forces in the search for a remote, inaccessible God. The emblem of this faith is no longer the rock, young people propose, but the reed which bends when the flood passes to rise again immediately afterwards. The wave first invests the comfortable bastions which have made faith easy, that is the inherited securities, nearly always a delay, at least psychologically, to an extreme, providential, saving key of Paradise. Not infrequently committed to this comfortable faith, and not gratified by it, young people want to know how they will be able to save themselves; they know there is a risky ransom on God because those who look for Him compromise their freedom, those who accept Him change their lives, those who rejects Him risk their salvation. They know they have no other resource than their own choices, and that the problem is knowing if this resource has a limit. But while they are naturally disposed to freedom, and aspire to it, they often appear without a direction in the face of the responsibility of which precisely freedom charges them; indeed, they feel the need to manage everything as if it depended entirely from their own, personal responsibility. Therefore every task and every ambiguity - in science, philosophy and religion itself - is like an escape from themselves. After all, until when man will be unable to find within himself the centre and significance of existence, every confrontation with God will be useless or a loss; and every hypothesis, or project of freedom will be in vain. But what is the sense of a ransom on God? Is there a place where He can be met, to see at least if He exists and what He is like? And then, what God is in hiding? A God in himself, solitary, closed in a category of thought who thinks only of himself, immersed marvellously in his beatitude, good to the point of inertia, and on occasion, touchy, excitable and vindictive? Really is such a faraway God been sought, who is always looking out over on our destinies, who becomes an adventurous bet on everything? Such a distant and secure God is not interesting for the young people of today not even as an antagonist; a God hidden in his mystery doesn't even attract them as an adventure. A faith like this does not seduce them; and to conquer the authentic one they are not prepared to face our old trials, which they refuse from the start. They know we have often had to confront ourselves with doctrinal systems capable of guaranteeing the "truth" and confirming the "right-duty" of classifying good and evil based on principles built more on human cautions than on divine tasks, on codes and canons which confirmed the infinite cases of sins envisaged in moral texts, on the insufficiency of the choice and application of rules to witness one's own faith: from the semantics of supernatural to the disquieting oratory on sin, from speculations on grace to invective on impure passions. A cascade of regulations which fed man's sense of guilt and the fragility of his choices, troubling him from his childhood: mortal sin in ambush, the evil body, the crying of the guardian angel, the tongues of fire of the damned, the soft clouds for those who save themselves, the sickle of death, the tail and horns of the devil. A closed door debate, with the soul and with history, balancing between origin and destiny, myth and research, faith and belief, body and spirit; and then, the conclusion of all in the fear of the end and of the after life. In this process of psychological and moral relegation, man's freedom, which underwent impossible comparisons, paid. Young people do not appear ready to move among those traps. The recourse to faith, in order to avoid them, was and is certainly possible, but what faith can God drawn on through codes which are so often foreign, if not even contrary, to our ability to understand? "The space between God and man", wrote the youth of Taizé on a huge bed-sheet, "is either reduced or we shall remain on our own". How best to express it: who's was the idea of digging such a huge abyss between His untouchability and our contamination? If God is inaccessible, can He ask us to love Him? I heard a student ask: "The Church is called to establish above all the sins of man, and tell him continuously "rise and walk", or to walk with Him?" Behind these questions, to be able to gain from the lack of answers, a radical, bigoted, uncommunicative religion is always ready; a religion which is only good enough for itself, produced by a light which, instead of illuminating, stuns. But then, who can affirm that he is closer to this light? Isn't it more human to recognise, like Rilke used to have an angel say, that we are all faraway? Not by chance was space found even for a request to God - a wicked, but I would say a religious request - to give us faith exempting us from religion.

Young people know that they can re-appropriate themselves of the reasons to live, and of a project of salvation, only by rediscovering the profound sense of hope. A hope which will have to become something provoking, going back to being scandalous like the death of Jesus on the cross, defeated by the resurrection. That's why so often, for these young people, God is in the face and words of Jesus, in the credit that the Father earned sending the Son to tell us that through Him death was defeated. Hoping, thus, no longer has a consoling and gratifying meaning, it is no longer giving oneself without will and without weight to something which has no cost and will happen anyway: it's committing oneself to correct history arching from bank to bank, like bridges, love and reason, to join reality and utopia, life and death, contingent and absolute; it's building, meanwhile, one's own earthly fate, it's trusting man despite the show into which, not infrequently, we transform our lives. Hoping, today means knowing that the lesson of opportunistic calculation and winning transgression will not prevail, nor the suspicion that there is no longer anything to imagine or want because everything, now, is resolved through compromise, and therefore in the daily surrender. Although recognising the individual value of hope, young people question themselves on the needs that this may also be collective: that is personal and at the same time historic. "We will not come to the destination one by one, but two by two", wrote the French poet Pal Eluard with his soul, one would say, touched by the invitation of Jesus. Young people know that hoping, today, means being optimistic also socially, not accepting life as a silent container of facts, but knowing how to listen to what it's asking of us committing ourselves to correct it: not carrying the burden of things as they are, and proceeding with a resigned step, but feeling everyday inaugurated and justified by the future, having as the objective solidarity, that is love for the poor, the humble, the weak, the outcast, minorities subjected to cultural prejudices, to ideological intolerance, to ethnic violence. Young people are calling strongly for an end to discrimination and diversity among us. This request was also noted among the group of youngsters of various races and religions who in Loreto "united" to say to God that the choice of wanting Him is common; and it is a good sign that the fences erected by religion are beginning to fall, each around its own God. Or in the commitment expressed by volunteers, which cultivate and re-launch the spirit of a solid, concrete and efficient charity. Among the numerous lay communities which have decided to live the Gospel according to the practice of everyday I think of that of Sant'Egidio, established in 1968 in a Roman high school, the "Virgilio". The imagination of those young people, to go back to a slogan of the time, had not gone to power, but something more serious and lasting had marked their soul. This community, all of which deeply Catholic, inspires its model of life to a total religiousness; and yet no one, that I know, in all these years has chosen to become a priest or a nun. "Today faith dresses you with the Gospel", ventures with joy a youth of Taizé, underlining the prophetic nakedness of a tunic. Do they not say Jesus wore the habit of the poor and the rejected?

That's why they understand the Son better, who says things that are divinely human. But if Jesus wants to be assimilated to our condition, reducing him to our size, with sociology, or psychology, it is still the young who state that the great step of the Church is prophetic, and that its language will have to include that of the announcement and the promise. They quote Abraham Heschel: "There is no birth, and thus hope, in which man and God are not involved together. To realise His dream, God must enter the dreams of man and man must be able to dream the dreams of God". As if to say that everything is part of our history, that every event takes the face of our actions, that flesh and spirit, desire and project are one thing alone at any moment and place: that no one and nothing, therefore, can separate us from our present. Knowing that Jesus has committed us to pass here - in this sweet, bitter, saintly life - our talents. Here where we put everything at stake. For those who believe also, and above all, in the after life.