Sometimes someone asks me if I believe in God or if I have faith. Most of the time it is women, both young women and adults, who do this, while men who believe that they are always already men of the world and are eternal children keep away from questions about faith.
I always remain a little uncertain about the answer, not out of fear but out of shame, and I try to slip away by changing the subject. But, in reality, the discourse returns as, for now, the sun and the moon return and, then, it is better to face it. So, you believe in God, do you have faith?
I believe in the dignity and freedom of human life, but my faith is not religious transcendence. Faith in the biblical God and in our Father is also my faith, but it is a faith without religious myth to which, ultimately, human selfishness clings to be pardoned and saved individually.
This very human and very natural act of selfishness is none other than life that seeks to preserve itself beyond its end no longer belongs to me, and I recognize that human life, however universal it may be, is individually finite and destined to be consumed.
The creation of human life inevitably passes through its destruction and the very words of Christ on the Cross – my God, my God why have you forsaken me? – are the expression of the free life of men that they would not be if God, by withdrawing, had not abandoned them in order to make them exist by killing them. But in that piece I only enclosed in a few lines the essence of Christianity which is the true religion, meaning that gives birth to the human soul and creates the individual.
If we are individuals identified people we owe it to Christianity which is the only successful revolution because it has concerned not politics and power but the soul and from here it has influenced the same power giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.
The individual once created aspires, by virtue of his self-love, to preserve himself beyond himself, as if he could live forever in the bliss of paradise. After all, what is paradise being with the gods, if not individual life without evil? But a life without evil is conceivable only in the imagination, while in reality, that is, in life itself, life is such precisely because it is the evil, the desire, the hunger, the nourishment, the desire, the cupiditas for which the Judeo-Christian thought itself created the “original sin”.
The devil, which is the very vital manifestation of God, is our raison d’être with which and against which we live and fight for the conquest of well-being and for the preservation of the higher good which is our freedom, always linked body and soul to evil, to pain, to error which constitute its internal fuel.
The bliss of a paradise lost never had is only the expression of our hedonism with which we imagine life as an eternal holiday on the island of the blessed, while Christianity itself, at its roots and in its radicality, shows us how the same sin is a felix culpa that gives us the nobility of the free condition and the necessary work to preserve it.
Eternal life is the condition of the pure of heart who either recognize purity in the same impurity or are fanatics or impostors. The other night I dreamt that, while I was dying, a priest was showing me letters written by the Lord and found on his desk. The priest was showing me the letters and in order to induce me to conversion completely useless because from the very name I am nailed to my Christian desire -he also staged the coming of Jesus.
A dream, just a dream troubled by the heat. In which one glimpses the practice of priests approaching the dying man’s soul in an attempt to extort the words of repentance and conversion from him at the moment of his last hour and his weakness, while man in the vigour of life has kept faithful to life itself in its beauty and damnation, truth and falsehood, holiness and perversion.
I exposed to the black soul of the priest a kind of tempting devil, my religious belief that is the religion of freedom in which eternal life is to live and serve the Lord with joy, until the same Lord who rules life more than we can do gives us the possibility to endure life with fearsome sufferings because, instead, when the sufferings are led to the limit of the human it is better that the hidden God immediately lightens our chest.
Lay faith in life is faith in the possibility of believing in life. It is not at all taken for granted because his life is elusive and we are not the masters but the players. The sense of becoming brings out the tragic feeling that humanity, abandoned and close to the divine, carries in its chest and head.
Human life is a river that, whether we want it or not, takes us away, but if we want to live a decent life we can do nothing but have faith in the being that becomes, otherwise that life is One or Many, for us there is no possibility of being there and we are destined to lose and dissolve even before the final dissolution.
Sometimes it happens and people get lost in life and its infinite and conflicting desires, while to live more humanly we need to stop a feeling and build as much as possible ourselves and become what we are or believe we are. Human existence is made up of scales, one ascends and descends, or it is both matter and form or form that is “lowered” to matter in order to still be worked into a new form.
We are a journey by sea and by land between Athens and Jerusalem, we are pagans and Christians, we are unbeknownst to ourselves a form of knowledge in which life with its green and luxuriant tree makes itself known and cultivates itself to sprout and bear fruit new life that will still want life and will still want to know from glory to glory, de claritate in claritatem, from concept to concept as in a Bacchic dance in the order of ideas and things and of the poor human heart.
The Benedictine rule of prayer and work is the form that humanity takes once men are no longer divided into free and slaves and everyone is recognized as free because everyone is redeemed by the unknown God who recognizes us as worthy of love in our vital fragility that so much makes us proud in health and so much immerses us in infirmity.