Christ Against Nothingness

The Mystery is not unknown; it is the unknown that makes itself the content of a sense experience. This is a very important concept. This is why we speak of the mystery of the Incarnation, the mystery of the Ascension and the mystery of the Resurrection.
God as Mystery would be an intellectual image if we were to stop at the phrase as it is, “God is Mystery.” The living God is the God who revealed Himself in the Incarnation, in the death and Resurrection of Christ. The true God is He who came among us, became a sense experience, tangible, visible, audible.
It is quite true, however, that the Mystery cannot be possessed–it is the object of experience, but it cannot be possessed, that is, measured, comprehended, embraced in its totality. But, at the same time, it is true that it is possessed. The Word of God, having become a seed in Our Lady’s womb, was possessed by Our Lady; He became a child, a youngster, a man, and, as a mother, Our Lady possessed Him; as the woman who was His mother, she possessed Him. It is an inexorable possession and, therefore, cannot but be lived in humility, that humility which was to reverberate–and it is the only source from which it can reverberate–between the human “I” and “You”–between one person and another, because the other arises from God. (...)

But let’s tackle this morning’s theme, which is the detailed examination of the word “Mystery” we used yesterday evening. The Mystery, as we just said, is the Mystery in as much as it becomes experienceable, by becoming a presence in man’s history. Let’s try to think of what we said at Lauds: “God is telling everyone everywhere that they must repent, because He has fixed a day when the whole world will be judged in uprightness by a man He has appointed. And God has publicly proved this by raising Him from the dead.” The Resurrection is the summit of the Christian mystery. Everything was made for this, because this is the beginning of the eternal glory of Christ: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son.” Everything and all of us have a meaning in this event: the risen Christ. The glory of the Risen Christ is the light, the coloring, the energy, the form of our existence, of the existence of all things.
The centrality of Christ’s Resurrection is directly proportional to our fleeing, as if from something unknown, to our forgetfulness of it, to the timidity with which we think of the word, and we are, as it were, driven away; to this is directly proportional the decisiveness of the Resurrection, as the proposition of the fact of Christ, as the supreme content of the Christian message, in the content of this message that salvation, that purification from evil, that rebirth of man for which He came will take place. In the Mystery of the Resurrection lies the summit and the highest intensity of our Christian self-awareness, and therefore that of my new awareness of myself, of the way in which I look at all people and all things. The key to the novelty in the relationship between me and myself, between me and others, between me and things is in the Resurrection. But this is what we most run away from, what is most left to one side, albeit most respectfully, respectfully left in the aridity of a word perceived intellectually, perceived as an idea, precisely because it is the summit of the Mystery’s challenge to our measure. (...)

Christianity is the exaltation of concrete reality, the affirmation of the flesh, so much so that Romano Guardini says that there is no religion more materialistic than Christianity.8 It is the affirmation of the concrete and tangible circumstances and, for this reason, one has no nostalgia for greatness when he sees himself limited in what he has to do; for what he has to do, even though it be small, is great, because inside it vibrates the Resurrection of Christ. “Immersed in the great Mystery…”9 If we do not feel immersed in this Mystery, in the great Mystery, the Resurrection of Christ, then we waste something of Being, we strip Being of its greatness, of its power and its lordship; we slowly empty Being, God, the Mystery, Origin and Destiny of content and make it wither. We must be immersed like the “I” is immersed in the “You” pronounced with all one’s heart, like a child when he looks at his mother, like a child hears his mother. We need to acquire once more a childlike intelligence. Human intelligence, when it remains in the poverty of its natural origin, and is all filled with something else, is called faith–since in itself it is empty, like arms opened that have still to grasp the person they are waiting for. I cannot conceive myself if not immersed in Your great Mystery. The stone rejected by the builders of this world, or by everyone who imagines and plans his own life, He has become the cornerstone on whom alone we can build.10 This Mystery–the Risen Christ–is the judge of our life. He, who will judge everything at the end, judges it day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, without interruption. I want to stress that this “seeing Him” as the Risen One, this acknowledging what has happened to Him, when already dead, is a judgment: you are dead and risen, O Christ. “Christ is risen” is a judgment and therefore an act, an act of the intellect that breaks through the normal horizon of rationality and grasps and witnesses a Presence that surpasses on all sides the horizon of human action, of human existence and of history. (...)

It is by grace that we can acknowledge Christ risen and that we can immerse ourselves in His great Mystery; it is by grace that we can acknowledge that, if Christ were not risen, everything is vanity, our faith is vain, as St. Paul said; our positive, sure, joyful affirmation is vain, vain is our message of happiness and salvation, and “you are still in your sins,”13 that is, in falsehood, in non-being, in being unable to be.
Without Christ’s Resurrection there is only one alternative: nothingness. We never think of this, and so we pass our days in that spinelessness, that pettiness, in that thoughtlessness, in that dull instinctivity, that repugnant distraction in which the “I” is dissolved. And so when we say “I,” we say it in order to affirm a thought of our own, a measure that is our own (also called “conscience”), or an instinct of our own, a desire to possess, an arrogant, illusory possession. Were it not for Christ’s Resurrection, all would be illusion, a game. Illusion is a Latin word that has the word “game” (ludum) as its root. We are being played with, tricked. We can easily look at that endless flock of people in our society; the great endless presence of people who live in our cities, the people who live near us, in our parish, in the Church, people living nearest to our homes. And we cannot deny that we ourselves experience this pettiness, this meanness, this thoughtlessness, this distraction, this total loss of the “I,” this reduction of the “I” to the relentless and arrogant affirmation of the thought that comes to us (calling it the “voice of my conscience”), or of the instinct that claims to grasp and possess a thing that it decides is pleasant, satisfying, or useful. (...)

Not indeed before men, who cannot see into the heart: but ‘before you is all my desire’ [men hear its echo, without understanding the reason for it].’ Set your desire on him [the Mystery], and the Father who sees in secret will repay you [You cannot ask, O Risen Christ, that I immerse myself in Your Mystery; give me the grace to believe in You! The Father, who sees in secret will grant my desire]. This very desire of yours is your prayer [your entreaty]. If your desire is continual, your prayer is continual, too [we understand that this is an inquiry that ends to define our life, whether it is in tension or has come to a stop, whether it is moral or immoral]. It was not for nothing that the Apostle said: ‘Pray without ceasing.’ (1Thess 5:17). Was it so that we should be continually on our knees, or prostrating our bodies or raising our hands that he says: ‘Pray without ceasing’? If that is how we say our prayers, then my opinion is that we cannot do that without ceasing. But there is another and interior way of praying without ceasing [another entreaty, an attitude of the heart], and that is the way of desire. Whatever else you are doing, if you long for that sabbath [which is the great day of Christ], you are not ceasing to pray. If you do not want to cease praying, do not cease longing. (...)

What happens before the grace that makes our intelligence and our affection capable of experiencing immersion in the Mystery of Christ risen? What happens when one immerses himself in the great Mystery of Christ risen? What happens fundamentally when grace is given to us as intelligence and affection, when grace makes us believers (loving affirmation of reality, affection open to what is valuable, passing through all our frailty with unceasing desire, with an entreaty)? What “fundamentally” happens—because everything is built on the cornerstone, which is given to us by this grace—is well expressed by a word, and that word is “light.” (“Illumine the night that is advancing.”20) So let us imagine a dark, moonless night, with the stars hidden by the clouds, pitch darkness. Imagine the sun suddenly rising. Compare the two things: the world has appeared; it was not there and it has appeared, defined in its details, in the tufts of grass, in the flowers of the field, in the bird that falls—as in the Canticle at Lauds.21 The world is born in this light shed on our experience of reality, in this light that shines out, that lights up all our living, that is, our whole relationship with reality; reality is regenerated, reality is born, is regenerated. Not for nothing was Baptism given at Easter, and Baptism is “being born again,” a new birth, a “new creature,” the true protagonist of history, though He is alone and killed: Christ. (...)