Death has always won?
The silence of God in this hour suspended over the abyss. The overlapping of two viae crucis. The enigma of death plunged like a hawk makes us wonder peremptorily. Really defeats death, on the night of the earthquake, as at the end, in our individual lives? What is Easter , if not the memory of an empty tomb, of a God who rose from the dead? What we believe, with who we really are?
Good Friday in Abruzzo, death has prepared his table triumphant in that square unadorned. Two hundred coffins, not all the victims, but a glance before annihilating the cold geometry of a barracks. Two hundred and five coffins in a row, but also, some, white and small, above a large coffin. Absurdly small white coffins in the dark embrace. Children who died clinging to the mother, father. And kids who had written an hour before dying on Facebook: I drink a beer to the face of the earthquake and go to sleep, tomorrow.
That parade on the eve of Easter, while around among the rubble, peach trees are in bloom, seems a cruel mockery. A week ago I bought these dead doves, and chocolate eggs to their children. Where is he now seemed to say that procession of coffins, your Easter? Where is the hope of a mother to her children survived, those who have dug looking for a brother, who is alive, but only? Indeed death has set up a great testament to its power, in that yard wide and bare like an altar - the horizon the snowy Apennines, impassive.
And he clearly saw, Cardinal Bertone, this altar of death, he felt well the silence that all felt in that square. "We bow - made its debut - before indecipherable enigma of death." Before these two hundred coffins, and those small, white, the first human reaction is to keep silent, and bow - as in front of a too great enemy. "All in a moment can cease, anything can end up," said Bertone (and we continued to think of those 289, which last week bought the eggs for their children).
The silence before these coffins (and that night, after the last crash of debris) is the silence - said the Cardinal - the Calvary, after the last cry of Christ . The man's silence and the silence of God in this hour suspended over the abyss: he, therefore, death, won for ever? Harrowing, dizzying overlap with that of the Good Friday Way of the Cross of Abruzzo symmetry of the women under the cross in the mystery plays, and Italy in front of the TV yesterday. As a powerful blow, which requires at least a moment to stop.
The enigma of death plunged like a hawk makes us wonder peremptorily. Really defeats death, on the night of the earthquake, as at the end, in our individual lives? What is Easter, if not the memory of an empty tomb, of a God who rose from the dead? What we believe, with who we really are?
The faces of the people at the funeral seemed to reflect - in pain chaste, austere - often a reluctance to respond to the words of the celebrant. As children too wounded to quietly believe in a resurrection, in their own flesh that now seems so cruelly denied. And that is so deeply human. Who knows, on Calvary, the faces of those who watched, who believed in a King, and saw a poor, broken body. Who knows the infinite darkness, when Mary Magdalene was at the grave, because his Lord had died.
But the tomb was empty. Amazement, joy unheard of Magdalene encounters the risen Christ. Anything less, we believe, need to fathers and mothers who have lost their children. It is an either-or the challenge in that square of coffins - a clear either to us, we have not lost anything. We believe that death does not win?
This is for many in Abruzzo "the hour of great faith," as the archbishop said Molinari, who has called by name some of his followers disappeared - Fabio, Franca, Alessandra ... In an appeal that did come to mind the good shepherd Gospel of John, who 'calls his own sheep by name and leads them out ... and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.' In an appeal to a time when, the pope recalled the Apocalypse, "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things are passed away." When those children will be lost - really - riabbracciati. It is the Christian hope: capable, in his certainty, challenge the future.
Theologian Borel
Author: Marina Corradi
