And the time comes to give it back.
Every time that book was opened and read, its words went back to where they had come from.
To give them a further interpretation would mean hindering them, trying in vain to stop them on their course.
Instead, you have to make the voice vanish, be gone, light or heavy or terrible or consoling, these words must go away as if they were vanishing from the page as you read them.
Once I understood this, I began to experience a genuine pleasure.
Which has never since left me.
I paid only intermittent attention to the rest of the mass, immersed as I was in other thoughts and looking around me or above me, toward the ceiling of the church; when I was little, mass was said in Latin, but then when they changed it to Italian, it became even more incomprehensible, at least beforehand there had been something mysterious, like those songs in English that you learn without understanding.
At a certain point they introduced guitars and bongo drums, to accompany the singing, which became noisy and rhythmic, that new type of mass known as a beatnik mass, which I found even harder to take seriously.
So similar to the junk you could hear on the radio, only much much worse.
In this, you have to admit that the priests at SLM were true innovators.
They wanted to keep up with the times, open up to the outside world.
On Sunday an intelligent and learned priest came to say mass. His name was Don Salari, he delivered sermons in which he invited everyone to engage in dialogue. The priests at SLM rubbed their hands in delight because it brought in a lot of people, some from outside the Quartiere Trieste, and everyone was astonished and filled with admiration at how progressive the school had turned out to be.
I STOPPED going to mass once and for all when the custom was introduced of turning to your neighbor, after the Our Father, and shaking hands. It turned into a sort of mandatory thing. The priest would order, “Exchange a sign of peace,” and you had to turn to your right and your left, and toward the pew behind you, and say hello and smile at everyone who was around you, extending your hand or even exchanging hugs. To do it was embarrassing, not to do it was offensive, if you didn’t shake hands it seemed as if you had it in for whoever was there, or as if you had a black soul, curled up like a porcupine. At school during mass, we SLM students found ourselves exchanging gestures of peace between classmates or even deskmates and the first few times we’d shake hands firmly with a deep bow like oriental ambassadors, all of it accompanied by smiles and mocking glances. Or else the extended hand could suddenly snap into an almost face-slap. Barracks humor triumphed over all. I won’t conceal the fact that the moment, if spared the arrows of sarcasm, could be touching, literally speaking, that is, the touch might have a strange effect, like an electric shock. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be forced into something we’d be ashamed to do in a spontaneous manner. In any case, if among ourselves, we classmates exchanged the sign of peace in a buffoonish or threatening way—so that it wound up resembling its diametric opposite, a promise to exchange punches—with strangers it was more of a source of uneasiness and it left a bitter sense of hypocrisy. Pretending to love or be reconciled with someone you never actually had a fight with makes you veer automatically toward vile thoughts such as, “Actually, I don’t give a flying fuck about you,” thoughts that would never have crossed your mind if it hadn’t been for that paradoxical invocation: “Exchange a sign of peace.” The fact is that for me, the sign of peace was the end of my practice of religion.
WHEN I ATTENDED mass this morning at SLM, after all these many years, on a warm, excessively warm February morning, I noticed that all the trees are dwarf trees. You practically have to bow down to avoid poking yourself in the eye with a branch. And then there’s no one in sight. Not a living soul—and it’s not like it’s sunrise, it’s eleven a.m. Via Tolmino, the asphalt repaved, echoes only to the sound of my heels, which are those good English ones, purchased on Corso Trieste where my father used to buy his. Sunday shoes, according to a concept of Sunday that has been obsolete for a long time now. Made in Northamptonshire, where Church’s and Grey’s shoes are manufactured, to come all this way to tread the dark and odorous asphalt, under the dwarf trees of Via Tolmino, sticky and black in spite of the illusory arrival of springtime.
TO MY ENORMOUS SURPRISE, Don Salari is still there, saying mass. Old, very old, but still perfectly lucid. Practically a soothsayer, a seer. And what I have tried to transcribe in the following chapter was his sermon. Or at least the part of it that struck me.
4
WHY DID JESUS go into the desert to fast? Forty days . . . immersed in His most profound thoughts. Does God need to reflect in order to decide what to do? Isn’t everything already clear and luminous in the divine mind, isn’t everything already written? It’s in that exact moment that Jesus is about to undertake the path that will lead Him to become the Christ. The fact that He feels the need to withdraw and to meditate shows us that this line of action is not the only one possible, it would not be inevitable, and that the decision still entails a doubt, many doubts, as well as sacrifices that will have to be accepted as the price of excluding all other possibilities.
“Just as the Jews had to wander for forty years in the desert before reaching Israel, and just as during their stay in the desert they fall into temptation and on many occasions are on the verge of retracing their footsteps, it is likewise right that Jesus should face up to and overcome the same obstacles that stand in the way of Him attaining His destiny. Careful, however: if for the Jews at the end of their long wandering lies the Promised Land, for Jesus there is death. And while what was tempted by the devil was a people’s human weakness, with Jesus what was tested was His boundless divine power. He must fast and suffer, then, not in order to save Himself, but to degrade Himself.
“Let this be clear: it isn’t the human part of Christ that is being tempted, or it isn’t only the human part; it is in fact the divine part. It is God, not man, who is uncertain. In order for God to accept His own diminution, for Him to accomplish fully the plan that He Himself conceived, the necessary amount of time must pass in order to make the scope of its daring fully understandable. It takes courage, in other words, a quality that is by no means as instinctive as is commonly thought, but which instead requires reflection and ripens with time: a product of patience and doubt. A quality that springs not from the fullness of strength, but rather from its lack—which indeed courage fills in for. God does not possess it: being courageous is not part of his endowment, that would be an admission of inferiority, a man can be courageous, God cannot. Courage is required to achieve things that loom far above us, that are greater than us. Jesus instead has to find that courage in order to face up to a fate too puny and squalid for His divine nature: suffering and death.
“Hence the fasting, which is the mortification of his energy.
“Hence the temptations of the devil, who is actually subordinate to Him, as Holy Scripture tells: and he promises Him realms that the devil has received from God to manage. Ridiculous, offensive: it’s as if a servant offered hospitality to the master of the house.
“Jesus goes into the desert to find His own humanity, whole and complete, to perfect its imperfection, and in fact, at the end of His fast, He is hungry. Real hunger, a hole in His stomach. He has fully become a man and now He is ready, capable of dying. From unconscious divine sovereignty, He has passed into conscious human precariousness. Clearing up His mind with His meditation in the desert, His ideas have become smaller, so that they can transform themselves into words and actions. We humans, too, when we are able to define our objectives, it’s because we’ve reduced them. To choose means setting limits, eliminating alternatives, destroying possible worlds. An undecided man is infinitely richer, and that is why he hesitates, because he does not want to give up his riches. Human life feels the insult of partialness. Life is short, we receive little, we know even less, we understand almost none
of it. And then it all ends. In the desert, Jesus comes to know and experiences this nightmare of partialness. The relativity of existence becomes palpable, physical in the desert, there is nothing but sand in all directions, rough rocks, the monotony of the landscape and the sky, never changing, dominated by the blazing sun. The desert is the place where the solitary voice of every prophet is born, as he attempts to inhabit, to animate the nothingness. Even a shout is enough to populate that void, and it is likely that even the hermit’s profound meditations are nothing more than a muttering, a stammering, a little ditty sung in the silence, maybe even a snatch of doggerel. The sole consolation of a sentry abandoned in a solitary place is the singsong that keeps him company. In the desert, Jesus experiences the relativity of human life, first with suffering, then as a precious glint of the entirety of the divine life. He no longer suffers over it, He enjoys it. It’s a revelation. A valid announcement for all humans. To be destined for death and not to possess the truth in its entirety, instead of being cruel privations, qualify as signals of eternal life and fundamental truth. That breath of life need no longer feel guilty for the fact that it is merely a breath.
“Certainly, human existence is only a clue, but it’s a very precious one. In its paltriness, in fact, it serves to indicate, to announce, and for that reason it must be exemplary, and an example means nothing unless it refers back to a significance that transcends the mind, and therefore can never be comprehensible as a whole, but rather only in fragments, through allusions, parables, enigmas. Our way of thought, enslaved by partialness, yearns to redeem it, aspiring to the absolute dominion of matter, through an exercise that we call reason. It does not know how to yield to an obstacle. Quite to the contrary, it ought to treasure partialness. It illuminates us in an eloquent fashion about the nature of things, starting with our own nature. And for that matter, a point of view is certainly not mistaken just because it is partial.
“Let me offer you the example brought by an ancient thinker.
“We are in the Christian East. Imagine a Byzantine church. Observing from a distance the golden cupola that rises atop its bell tower, I receive a particular image of it according to my location, which will be different for another observer looking at the bell tower from the opposite side as me. If I myself change my position, if I move closer to the bell tower or farther away, or if I circle around it, my new view will change from the previous view, and in some sense I will find myself different, uncertain, I will find myself in conflict with myself, uncertain as to which image is more significant or real among the various images I have seen. In other words, I and some other observer will have different and partial views. This difference is certainly irreconcilable, there is no discussion or openness to dialogue that can remedy it. The distance remains intact, even among willing interlocutors. A person might even make a special effort and in his enthusiasm renounce his own point of view in order to embrace and take as his own the other person’s point of view: however admirable in and of itself, the sacrifice wouldn’t change the difference, and in fact, this renunciation might even strike some as cowardly.
“In other words, I will always have a different view from another observer. That doesn’t change the fact that we are looking at the same bell tower, the same cupola that glitters in the distance. Its gold is no less splendid for the fact that I see only a sliver of it. The partialness, the relativity of the experiences that we can have does nothing at all to undermine their overall significance. The gold doesn’t lose its value, it isn’t divided up into sections, if you multiply the points from which it is seen, indeed, everyone can glimpse a reflection of it, the gleam that would otherwise be lost if it weren’t seen and enjoyed from there, from that exact spot, and only from there, from that particular angle . . .
“Often we mistake this relativity for relativism, the conviction, that is, that one idea is as good as any other, and that there is no foundation for stating that anything has universal validity. Contradicting its own underlying concept, relativism confidently states that no absolute bond exists between the truth and statements that concern the truth. One statement, in the final analysis, is equivalent to another. Relativity is quite another thing. Full awareness of the constitutional weakness of our being and the need to revise and update our point of view on things oblige us to a never-ending quest. During this migration, no answer given at any specific moment can ever be all encompassing in its validity because, in the meantime, the question itself has already radically changed. Or perhaps we should say, the point from which that question is asked. Question oneself, verify, reformulate the questions.
“That is why even Jesus, God on earth, needs forty days in the desert to update His point of view, multiply it, revealing its relativity. And that is why He allows himself to be subjected to the temptations/hallucinations, like any human who stays too long with nothing to eat or drink. His power could easily sweep away all misunderstandings in an instant, but it would be a shortcut that would contradict the meaning of the incarnation. This is His supreme sacrifice: He immolates the truth itself, its divine entirety, and from this point forward He will only express it in an allusive form, through enigmas, as is inevitable when you pass through the locks and channels and the clauses of human language, and as the prophets did before Him. However deadly its precision, the language of the Gospels does not represent the mastery over being, but instead its emergence in so violent a manner as to leave one stunned, breathless. The phrases of Jesus loom up with dazzling precision, at the limit of comprehensibility or well beyond it. The parables explain nothing, they don’t even explain themselves . . .”
USUALLY IT IS OLD PEOPLE who attend holy mass, a greater number of women than men, let’s say in a ratio of four to one, I imagine because the men (that is, their husbands) have already been dead for several years, or else because although they’re still alive, they don’t go to mass, because they consider religion to be a somehow feminine business, or else because they’re convinced that only one member of the family need practice it. In the large modern church where, among other things, my mother’s funeral was held, the ladies who attend mass have hairdos dyed an indefinable color, abstract, somewhere between ocher yellow and titian, a shade not found in nature, a hue that sparkles with a faint phosphorescence when they turn their heads or bow them as they kneel upon their return from the Eucharist. Their hairdos are swollen with hairspray and by the light that passes through it. While in everything else they constitute a model of resigned bourgeois normality, the color of their hair offers a delirious touch to their appearance, as if they were fairies or witches.
IT’S ASTONISHING just how faint collective singing can be. There’s nothing vital or joyous about it. A community gathered in church shows itself to be shy, chilled, deeply Western. Laboring under the illusion that the courage to proclaim their faith will only grow among his parishioners along with the volume of their voices, the priest tries to bolster their enthusiasm, he dogs them, thundering into his microphone, from one verse to the next, but in so doing all he manages to do is to cover up the few voices that actually rise from the pews. Once they’ve exhausted the scant impetus of the refrain, the chorus goes back to murmuring in an almost inaudible fashion. It’s not as if people simply don’t sing, quite the contrary: it’s that when they do sing they do it sotto voce, barely moving their lips, as if lip-synching. They are ashamed of letting their voices be heard, as if that were somehow unseemly or fanatical. The same thing happens during the prayers, when the priest urges the faithful to repeat a ritual phrase, such as: “We, Your faithful, full of weeping, humbly ask You, Oh Lord, to dry our tears” or else “The gates that protect Your kingdom are not locked, but only ajar” or even “We have knocked at Your door in the night and the cold and in the end, we were admitted.” Whether complicated or easy to memorize, these phrases are mumbled or even substituted by a generic grumbling in which all that can be heard is the first and last words. “The lamb which . . . mmnyuhmmnyuh nguhnguhnnnnnn awanyuhmanyuhngnuh
wanyawanya . . . nyahnyamugnognuh . . . purification!”
Sometimes one voice stands out above all the others, shameless, rising above the subdued chorus. This is usually one solitary fanatical woman, or possibly someone who’s hard of hearing and has no idea that they’re practically shouting.
I HAVE NOTICED that when people pray these days, they no longer put their hands together but instead hold them out, palms raised flat, at chest height, in imitation of the paintings on the walls where the saints receive a divine vision or else martyrdom. This posture is in fact a very lovely and ecstatic one: the worshipper does not hunch over in isolation after receiving holy communion, as if trying to protect his soul from prying eyes, but instead exposes himself to a sort of wind or light emanating from the altar.
TODAY, Easter Sunday, I have braved the pouring rain to go back to mass at SLM. I left my little spring-loaded collapsible umbrella, which wasn’t working anyway, outside the church’s bronze portal, dangling from the foot of the little boy to whom the founder of the Marist order benevolently imparts a lesson, or a benediction, but the bronze foot was wet, too smooth or slanted just that little bit too far, and the umbrella slid to the ground. I left it there and went in. There weren’t many people, and it was cold inside the church. They’d brightened the floors with carpets, and at the center of the nave they’d placed a large table lined with flowers. Around that table there was room for at least twenty people to sit for the Easter luncheon. You could hear the raindrops tapping on the roof while inside water dripped from the raincoats of the faithful, scattered among the pews, nearly all of them elderly people, stiff with the dank chill of this Easter, so grim and early. Similarly grim was the priest, his loquacious rambling had no idea what path to take, and, looking at him more closely now, I saw that he was old, a fragile little old man with white hair, who was chiefly trying to warm up his homily in order to warm himself up. But he couldn’t do it, and after a few minutes and more than one false argumentative start, he finally gave up. I expected him to justify his failure by informing his listeners that he was indisposed, but instead he moved on without delay to the subsequent phases of the ceremony. A mass, after all, is basically just a mass, period. It needn’t necessarily be aesthetically pleasing, it’s not as if we’re at the theater, or at the stadium for a soccer match. The order of the prayers really did strike me as distant and muddled, and I wound up growing completely distracted.
The Catholic School Page 36
