Displaying items by tag: Easter

Rome experienced its Friday for Future on the day which we, christians, call the Good Friday. It seemed to me a good key to understand this day not in mourn, but as it is presented in the Catolic Liturgy, which is with the thought of redemption. A festive, but at the same time a serious provocation done by Greta Thumberg and her teenage friends confirms again that we need new generations to push us to change things. There will always be polemics, but apart from them, educators, forever optimists, work all the time so this grain could grow and become nutritious, and so the bad seeds could not drown them down with discouragement.

The hippies of ’68 and the generations of “Death Poets”, students, writing poems on the walls of universities, believed that this would be a sign of hope against terrorism and any other kinds of violence. This generation of social activists can nowadays help the young to take actions that will help them make good life choices concerning their life as such and their professions, in a real innovative way. This is the challenge that appears with the drammatic appeals of scientists, as well as with the silence of potents of the world.

On the Good Friday Christ started the the Easter Mystery with his blood, as the Liturgy recalls it. As the mankind does its Way of Cross, and continues to register more and more falls, sufferings and sins, we need to remember, that Jesus has already included them in His Passion. He experimented all the horror of death. He showed us how muchi t is against God’s project of life. None of the espressions of the evil shoud take from us the faith in the omnipotence of God, the One that is operating even now. God creates new things every day, in every generation. “See, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”(Is 43:19).

So, it is also true for our times, that “Jesus is risen, and he wants to make us sharers in the new life of the resurrection. He is the true youthfulness of a world grown old, the youthfulness of a universe waiting “in travail” (Rom 8:22) to be clothed with his light and to live his life.” (post-synodal Esort.. Christus vivit, n. 32). The Pope does not write it to the young only, but he warns, that their not ready innovative cannot be efficent without an intergenerational sinergy: “i vostri anziani faranno sogni, i vostri giovani avranno visioni.” (Gl 3:1).

Happy Easter to all!

Wishes… Who invented them? Ancient Romans? Egyptians? And why do we give them in particular days like birthdays, different feasts? It could be an interesting topic to discuss, but maybe let us leave it for another time.

Nowadays to send wishes we use postcards. They do not have a lot of space, therefore we do not need to force ourselves intellectually to write a long letter. Two sentences will do the work. In certain moment in time there was this danger that postcards would disappear, because everybody started sending emails. At first it was possible to send only text, but with the development of technology people started sending photos as well. And now we have a big come back of postcards containing more or less beautiful photos and already written text. All you need to do is to sign and then click. It’s done.

These days we will have a lot of postcards around, giving best wishes for… for what? Easter? Or wishing just Happy Feast? Sometimes maybe even all the best for the beginning of spring? Well, each occasion is good, everyone can celebrate whatever they want, share their joy with family and friends as they like it. Everyone can choose a photo which they like and which suits the best, or maybe the one that comes as the first one in the browser. Somebody will send a postcard with a chick, somebody else will choose the one with Easter eggs or a bunny. Or maybe another one will find the one with a Man in a white cloth, with light coming out of space (a tomb? a hidden place?).

Anybody can send whathever they want, whatever they like or their addressee likes. However, if this Feast is about the Resurrection of Jesus, maybe we could think a little bit more about Him? After all, it is His Feast, not a feast of a bunny or colourful eggs, with all the respect for them.

The big questions of our time are about the future of the man on planet Earth. That is coloured by actions of sensibility and generous solidarity, maturing people’s consciences and moving societies forward. But the same planet is also greatly harmed by an obtuse and iresponsible selfishsness: that gets sometimes devastating because of scientific and technological progress, though it was hypothesized to be able to unlock the human potential towards boundless horizons.

Moreover, if as an alternative to the Posthuman we explore the world of the Human-Plus, we realize that it indicates today the ways to the technological enhancement that appears to be a poor surrogate of the human fullness: from the research of the elixir of life to the achievements of plastic surgery and bionic prosthetics, or – even more boldly – to a cryopreservation, man by his nature doesn’t want to “disappear from the existence”– as it declares one of the candidates for hibernation – and doesn’t want to lose the heritage of the affections that he or she has experimented in a lifetime. Foscolo’s “joy” of the sepulchres (“only the one who leaves no heritage of love sees little joy in the urn”) seems to be a solace which is absolutely inadequate in front of the potential that man bears.

But to live doesn’t mean to persevere, not even to prolong into infinity the time which is, by its nature, precarious and inconsistent.

As a young man, Goethe’s Faust was convinced that there wasn’t any moment in man’s life that would have been as beautiful to want it to transform into an eternal present; but becoming an old man, blind and suffering from depression, Faust dreams about a world all in happiness thanks to human genius, an ideal world where you could say: «Linger on fair moment, you are beautiful!» without being afraid that this moment would become past. God doesn’t deny this desire, because it is Him who has set eternity (i.e. the duration of the times) in the human heart (Qo 3:11) and, therefore, the aspiration to free themselves from the sequence of time. In a Greek myth, Chronos consumes his children, but man by his nature aspires to enter in eternity, which is the dimension of present that lasts, and is immune from temporal changes: He who «has made everything beautiful in its time» and therefore in its fragility, has created man so he could participate in His own life: «this is what He promised us – eternal life» (1Jn 2:25).

This is the “transhumanise” which for Dante (Par. 1:70) constitutes the horizon of the very human nature: an overstep of human without destroying it into post-human. For «life in man is the glory of God; the life of man is the vision of God» (Irenaeus of Lyon 4,20,7). But as far as the gift of the passionate and generous friendship, all this goes far over the human ingenuity, in spite of its value for being set in time.

So, Easter leaves us in our chaotic and disorganized days, a call of our awareness of ourselves, from the very bottom layers of our perception. To not silence.