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The soul and the harp/30 - True freedom is freeing oneself from misery, not from the «perfect joy» of poverty
 By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 25/10/2020
"The righteous, in whom the Lord has created the desperate need for joy, will have joy"
Sergio Quinzio, A commentary on the Bible (Un commento alla Bibbia)
There is a different form of joy that can only come from a certain kind of poverty. The psalms and the prophets know this well, and liturgy reminds us of it every day.
Joy is not only a desperate need in every human being; it is also a right. A right to joy that is not written in any kind of Constitutional Charter but in the soul of people. A fundamental right that must be defended especially during times of great crises, when it is threatened to the point of being denied. Every empire, not only the Egyptian one at the time of Moses, tries every once in a while to deny its subjects their right to feast and celebrate, because in order to kill hope in a different future, the temptation to deny the right to experience joy is too strong: it never completely succeeds, but it is always attempted insistently. However, there is also a duty to joy, and it is an essential one. Because when joy disappears in a community or society, hope and faith in life disappear right along with it. Sometimes there is more agape in safekeeping the ultimate joy than in loving pain, because a joy guarded by the increasing sadness of years and years and events is a collective good, a blessing for all, a tenacious announcement that we in fact are greater than our destiny.
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In general, children and young people are the ones to bring this special gift to families and communities alike. However, if there aren’t any, or too few of them, so called "Cyrenians of joy", adults guardians of the flame, are needed to perform the function that children carry out by nature, out of love, with a difference, the agape joy of adults and the elderly has a certain scent of heaven and perhaps the greatest power and ability to convert those who touch it. Much like gladness/letizia (from laetus: manure: fertility), this biblical joy is not simply happiness, nor is the right to this joy the right to the simple "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Philadelphia of 1776. This form of joy is not something you seek, but kept safe once it arrives, without having been sought after because we were too busy seeking the happiness of others. It should be kept as a precious gift, like the last sip of the last bottle of wine from your grandfather's cellar, like your wedding ring. It is not happiness, because this joy is not expressed with a plethora of smiles. Just one smile is more than enough, but when it blooms, it manages to pierce the sky enabling us to catch a glimpse of God.
Liturgy is a collective exercise in the safekeeping of joy. A community practice that ensures that joy will not be lacking in the community even when, individually, no one experiences it anymore, or does not yet experience it. Even during the days when no one guarded it, or found any reason to sing of joy, we arrive in the choir, open the book of Psalms, begin to sing, and joy is born right there out of the nothingness of our individual joys. Like all gifts, even liturgical joy may end up not being accepted; but, just like any gift, this refused gift nevertheless still remains a gift, it is right there, alive, and in a mysterious way, it works and changes things. This joy is a common good, of which no one is the master, no one produces it on his or her own, but it serves and loves everyone, and must therefore be safeguarded by everyone, if we wish it to continue to live on. Liturgy, then, is a multiplier of joy in the world, a device that ensures that the joy present every day is greater than the sum of the individual joys of both women and men. Liturgy, in particular the liturgy of the hours and the prayer of the Psalms, is the gift of a vicarious kind of joy; it is the manna of gladness when we have run out of bread in the desert. Another and different opus operatum that guarantees us a joyful presence in our communities even when, due to neglect or pain, we would not be individually capable of it. If we are faithful with our appointment with liturgy, its joy is faithful to its appointment with us, even when we welcome it with tears in our eyes.
There is a different kind of joy that can only come from a certain kind of poverty
The psalms and the prophets knew this well, and liturgy reminds us of it every day
This is the way it is been for millennia, and it will continue to be so, as long as a community capable of singing its joy remains on Earth, as long as there is a single man or woman left capable of singing a psalm. Because the Bible is not only the gift of a repertoire of words, offered to us when we have finished our own or have not yet found them, it is also a gift of joy not only replacing ours but multiplying it. The psalms of joy are always propitious, but their most propitious time is when we feel beggars for joy, when we are crossing a desert, when we would no longer find the strength to sing on our own. Oh, how much less happiness there would be in the world without the Psalms! «Praise the Lord. Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise in the assembly of his faithful people. Let Israel rejoice in their Maker; let the people of Zion be glad in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with timbrel and harp. For the Lord takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with victory. Let his faithful people rejoice in this honor and sing for joy on their beds» (Psalm 149,1-5).
A new song. It is the hymn to joy, the penultimate of the five Songs of the Hallelujah that close the Psalter. A psalm written in all probability after the exile, when that "remnant" that had returned from Babylon had to relearn their faith in their God. And it began with joy, because after a long exile, faith can only be reborn: when exile ends there is no "going back" to the faith that was there before, you "move on". Israel had done everything in order not to lose its faith of the patriarchs, of Moses and of the prophets, but when the exiles returned to their homeland that ancient faith was only going to be able to generate a future by first being resurrected. Passions and Golgothas are not enough to continue living. It is not enough to remember, to safeguard the memories and the past: a new covenant, a new promise is needed. And therefore also a new source of joy, the first energy needed to restart, the first resource required when, after an exile, a new reason to continue the race is necessary.
This is why the voice of the so-called Third Isaiah can be heard so clearly in this psalm, the anonymous prophet who lived just after the Babylonian exile, the author of the last chapters (56-66) of the book of Isaiah, the great cantor of the new promise and of the resurrection of the people after exile. This prophet, monumental as a prophet and immense as a poet, did not celebrate joy and hope because he was unable to see the sins and evils of his present. Actually, he saw them quite clearly and denounced them in no uncertain terms. The exercise of the duty of joy however was stronger, because a prophet knows that without a new source of joy there is no restarting after any kind of exile. The author of these psalms of joy, perhaps a direct or indirect disciple of that great prophet, executed the same exercise, and sang the same song.
The prophets are hence the prime ministers of biblical joy, revealing its true nature and mystery to us. Telling us that this is a different kind of joy. When we think of Isaiah, Hosea or Jeremiah, we do not think of happy people or revelers. On the contrary, tradition and their texts offer us extremely solemn and serious images. Yet the prophets, all true prophets, are essentially the midwives of joy. Precisely in that they unmask the illusions of all, especially of communities in times of great crises, when a desperate need for joy becomes increasingly stronger, often invincible, becoming so desperate that the demand ends up generating the offer – regarding the false prophets, professional dispensers of a cheap, false kind of joy. True prophets do not offer us fake forms of joy they do not possess. They can only offer us the only true joy they know, the kind that arises during and after an exile, the kind that has nothing cheerful over it while still being fully joyful at the same time. Their promised land is the land of the yet-to-be, not because they are creators of utopic ideas but because they are, quite simply, true honest prophets. And a prophet is in fact an announcer of the yet-to-be, because no "land of the already here" can ever fully satisfy him or her fully, because every "already" is always smaller than the promise, which while originating in that small unsatisfactory "already", is loved precisely while it announces its yet-to-be.
A joy similar to that of Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, when after all the tragedies and wickedness of others the last scene is delivered to the music and to the different smile emerging on the lips of a poor and deceived woman, to celebrate the joy of live, to believe again, despite everything. The prophets tell us that we die a hundred times over, but that the ability to resurrect a hundred and one times is part of the human repertoire, and that the very last time it will in fact be another hand that will resurrect us - and then we will understand that that hand was present in our other hundred resurrections as well, and we did not know it: this is the most important "invisible hand" on earth.
Finally, Psalm 149 is a song of the poor, of the anawim or faithful remnant of YHWH. Among the many un-false joys of the Bible and of life, that of the poor is the most sublime and stupendous. It is a joy that we can still experience to this day, if we have the great gift of being friends with someone poor. The Holy Spirit - tradition tells us - is the "father of the poor". It is also their father because it nourishes them with a different kind of joy than we, who are not poor, have (even if we increasingly would like to become poor). This kind of joy is the closest to that announced by the Psalms, to the kind that needs the exiles, the kind of joy of those who know that sooner or later liberation will come, and that, perhaps, it has already begun.
During my lifetime, I have had the gift of attending psalms sung by various poor communities. If there is a paradise - and there must be - its songs and harmonies will be very similar to those I heard during those encounters. Where joy is not born because we are under the illusion that poverty will soon end, but because we truly feel loved and saved within that poverty. Poor people who know how to praise overcome the curse of poverty and even end up calling it "sister". And a liberation begins in that moment, sometimes from the curse of misery, it must however never become the liberation from joy, from the perfect contentment of poverty.
There is a kind of joy in the feasts and celebrations of the poor that the rich do not know, and this ignorance is one of their greatest poverties. Those who know and have lived with the poor have tasted that special kind of joy, and have never forgotten it: «This is the glory of all his faithful people. Praise the Lord» (Psalm 149,9).
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The soul and the harp/30 - True freedom is freeing oneself from misery, not from the «perfect joy» of poverty
 By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 25/10/2020
"The righteous, in whom the Lord has created the desperate need for joy, will have joy"
Sergio Quinzio, A commentary on the Bible (Un commento alla Bibbia)
There is a different form of joy that can only come from a certain kind of poverty. The psalms and the prophets know this well, and liturgy reminds us of it every day.
Joy is not only a desperate need in every human being; it is also a right. A right to joy that is not written in any kind of Constitutional Charter but in the soul of people. A fundamental right that must be defended especially during times of great crises, when it is threatened to the point of being denied. Every empire, not only the Egyptian one at the time of Moses, tries every once in a while to deny its subjects their right to feast and celebrate, because in order to kill hope in a different future, the temptation to deny the right to experience joy is too strong: it never completely succeeds, but it is always attempted insistently. However, there is also a duty to joy, and it is an essential one. Because when joy disappears in a community or society, hope and faith in life disappear right along with it. Sometimes there is more agape in safekeeping the ultimate joy than in loving pain, because a joy guarded by the increasing sadness of years and years and events is a collective good, a blessing for all, a tenacious announcement that we in fact are greater than our destiny.
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Greater than our heart
The soul and the harp/28 - From our inhabited intimacy we learn that the whole universe is inhabited by God
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  11/10/2020
"If there is an Other, whoever he is, wherever he is, and whatever his relations with me are, even if he does not act with regards to me in any other way than with the simple appearance of his being, I have an outside, a nature; my original sin is the existence of the other".
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Psalm 139 is a great poetic message on the essence of faith and on the mystery of the person, who when discovering itself being watched comes to understand a deeper and greater kind of beauty.
There is a secret and very deep place within the soul where a subtle and delicate melancholy lives. It is what emerges when we realize that even communion with those who love us stops at the door of a secret intimacy, the one where the most beautiful and true part of us is found. We know that our friends, parents, wife, children, really love us and really know us, but the loving knowledge they have of us cannot reach the inner wine cellar of our heart. Only if they managed to reach it would they truly know us, because they would then see an unknown beauty, if someone could reach us in that depth they would understand that we are better than we appear, that we are even more beautiful than the person they have known so far. If it is true that the other is "the one who looks at me" (J.P. Sartre), it is even more so that the other never looks at us enough, and does not see the best part of us. Others know something, some even know what is essential, but what is essential is not enough for us, when it comes to these things, the essential is not enough.
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This is also where our innocence lives. In those depths of the depth of our soul there is an invisible purity, the one that we lost while growing up but was never truly erased even by the greatest of errors, the one that believes in us when no one believes in us anymore (starting with ourselves). It is the garden of the Adam that we still are, it is the Indians' hut, which we built as children and where we took refuge when escaping from ghosts, it is our dollhouse. And we return to that small house, which has been growing smaller and smaller while we were growing up, during the dark days of our life, when we feel chased and condemned by everyone but we know that there is a better corner of the universe than man and woman that others can see. This invisible refuge is what makes life possible while in exile, in prison, in great sin. Then one day we understand that this gap between what we really are and what others recognize will always remain unbridgeable, and that that most intimate beauty will be the secret and the gift that we will bring to our very last appointment. Hence, a new kind of peace is born, a new reconciliation with life and with others, and we stop complaining for never being loved enough. Because we understand that it is the very existence of this core of beauty, protected by the gaze of others, that makes the experience of reciprocity and recognition always insufficient. We must always ask a lot of the reciprocity in our life, but we must not ask too much.
The Bible did not know about the unconscious or about psychoanalysis, and it did not know, unlike us, that a great variety of different things is accumulated in that hidden corner. It knew men and women, however, and it knew God. And so, it told us something important, which remains true even now that we have come to know the other invisible "inhabitants" of our intimacy. It told us and continues to tell us that that unexplored land is inhabited by a good guest, who has always lived there, who knows it better than we think that we know it. It tells us that that certainty of being better than we have become is all love, it is God's first gift to us, the device with which he continues to save us every day: «You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain» (Psalm 139,1-6).
The knowledge mentioned in this Psalm, one of the highest and most poetic of the Psalter, does not concern an abstract knowledge or omniscience of God. The "wonderful" knowledge that interests the psalmist here is the knowledge that God has of us, that he has of the author of the psalm himself, that he has of me, and of you. It is the experience of being known by a friend, a deeper gaze than that of any other, friendlier and deeper than our own gaze: "inaccessible to me". A deep root of biblical faith is being given to us here. Faith is first of all the experience of being seen from within, of being at the centre of a good kind of intelligence. I am loved because I am looked at, loved while I am looked into that depth where my mystery resides. Hence, before being a set of norms and truths in which to believe, biblical faith is the personal experience of that profound gaze. Religion can begin with worship and with the law, but faith begins when one feels looked upon, seen and called upon by name.
Man has always sensed that he was watched by God and his spirits, that he lived under an invisible gaze from above. Generally, however, it was a distressing experience. Ancient man was afraid of the gaze of the gods. He hid himself, wanting to escape it, because being seen was also the experience of the unveiling of his sins and therefore of guilt. It was the gaze of a judge, the eyes of those who want to see us in order to condemn us. "God sees you" was an instrument of fear and terror. The Bible also brings about a revolution here. God's gaze is first of all a gaze of love, it is liberation and joy. God also sees sins, but first of all he sees that we are children; he sees the gesture of Cain, but first he sees the gesture of Elohim who created Adam in his image and likeness. Here lies the biblical anthropology of Adam's primacy over Cain, because Adam lives in a corner of the heart that is more intimate than the one where his fratricidal son resides. Starting from this inhabited intimacy, we learn that the entire universe is supported and inhabited by God, as well: the starry sky inside me enables me to see the starry sky above me. An experience that immediately turns into song: «If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,” even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you» (Psalm 139,8-12). Amazing!
If the encounter with God is being seen inside, from within, then that gaze was there even before we knew about it. It was there, invisible, but always present: «For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be» (Psalm 139,13-16). Verses that closely recall those of Job, but also the "bones" of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 20,9) and the story of his prophetic vocation. Faith begins in just one day, but it has really always been there. One day you become aware of something that pre-existed that consciousness that emerges at a precise moment, when you understand that the sentence we are writing on that day is part of a "book". One of the greatest gifts that the gift of faith brings with it, in the dimension explained by Psalm 139, faith is truly and authentically a gift, even before being a virtue (if only to protect it), is that admirable exercise that follows the beginning of faith. When we go back in our history and, as with an old photo album, we leaf through page after page of our past and finally understand it; we understand the same photos of yesterday that now light up with immensity, differently. Those who believe have always believed, they just did not know it.
And so, in these verses we also find a splendid synthesis of what a vocation truly is. In the beginning there is a gaze, feeling seen by an eye that looks at me and sees me as no one has ever seen me before. A gaze that immediately becomes a voice, because while he looks at us he pronounces our name, reveals our mission and our place in the world, makes us glimpse and see that the episodes that have marked our life have a meaning; they are the chapters of the "book” that we were already writing, but we did not know it. It is at this intimate and deep level that the destiny of a vocation is at stake. It is not a matter of happiness or unhappiness, (the Bible and life itself are filled with unhappy and yet immense vocations). Nor of cost-benefit calculations (which currency should we use?), nor much less, of being in the subjective and objective conditions of being able to succeed in the task, (most authentic vocations are not "successful", they are stories of failure). In these vocations, a person does only and simply what he or she is, what he or she saw while being seen, what he or she discovers he or she has always been and will be: «Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there» (Psalm 139,8). This is not a fatalistic or static view, as it would be if the role of the person were only to interpret an already written and ready score - without even the executive freedom of a jazz score. A vocation moves between maximum freedom - because there is no greater freedom than those who obey the truest and most beautiful part of themselves - and maximum non-freedom, because that gaze follows us everywhere and reminds us every moment who and what we really are. You can leave a community or leave a wife, but you cannot leave the action of that gaze.
The impossibility of getting out of the scope of God's pupils offers no guarantee that we will not make bad, sometimes dreadful choices. The good news of the Bible is another: even if you make "your bed in the depths" to escape from yourself, there too you continue to be watched and seen. And every time you "arise on the wings of the dawn" to flee far away, wherever that crazy flight may take you, when you touch your most intimate intimacy there will be someone there waiting for you and reminding you that you too are greater than your heart.
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Greater than our heart
The soul and the harp/28 - From our inhabited intimacy we learn that the whole universe is inhabited by God
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  11/10/2020
"If there is an Other, whoever he is, wherever he is, and whatever his relations with me are, even if he does not act with regards to me in any other way than with the simple appearance of his being, I have an outside, a nature; my original sin is the existence of the other".
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Psalm 139 is a great poetic message on the essence of faith and on the mystery of the person, who when discovering itself being watched comes to understand a deeper and greater kind of beauty.
There is a secret and very deep place within the soul where a subtle and delicate melancholy lives. It is what emerges when we realize that even communion with those who love us stops at the door of a secret intimacy, the one where the most beautiful and true part of us is found. We know that our friends, parents, wife, children, really love us and really know us, but the loving knowledge they have of us cannot reach the inner wine cellar of our heart. Only if they managed to reach it would they truly know us, because they would then see an unknown beauty, if someone could reach us in that depth they would understand that we are better than we appear, that we are even more beautiful than the person they have known so far. If it is true that the other is "the one who looks at me" (J.P. Sartre), it is even more so that the other never looks at us enough, and does not see the best part of us. Others know something, some even know what is essential, but what is essential is not enough for us, when it comes to these things, the essential is not enough.
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The soul and the harp/26 - There is also a good form of wasting of time and things, for the sake great and true relationships
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  27/09/2020
"Maximum restoring and relief came to me from the comfort of my friends ... the talks, laughing together, the exchange of affectionate courtesies, the occasional disagreements, without rancour, like every man has with himself, and the more frequent agreements, untainted by the same very rare disagreements; being each other's sometimes teacher, sometimes disciple, the impatient nostalgia of those who find themselves far away, the festive welcome offered to those who return".
Augustine, Confessions, IV
Psalm 133 is known as the psalm of fraternity, which while it speaks to us of the beauty of the fraternity of blood tells us of a different kind of fraternity of the spirit.
Fraternity is a great word of the Bible because it is a great word of life. It is simply another name for happiness. Brothers and sisters are part of the ordinary landscape of home. They are an essential component of our life. The love for a brother or a sister does not have any connotation of Eros or of philia (we may not always be friends with our brothers or sisters, yet we love them very much). It is another kind of love, different and special, which uses the language of flesh and guts (and thus resembles our love for our parents). A typical note of fraternity is that visceral pain we feel when a sister or a brother falls ill, when he or she suffers, when he or she is offended or humiliated - seeing a sister suffer is one of the greatest pains we males can experience. There is, moreover, a typical and very special kind of joy involved, perhaps one of the greatest on earth. This is what parents, especially mothers, feel when they see that their children love each other. When they see them esteem each other, bless each other, console each other, defend each other, help each other, and celebrate together.
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It is not surprising then, that in order to express Job's greatest blessing of happiness, the Bible should speak of his sons and daughters eating together: «His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them» (Job 1,4). The reference to the sisters is important here, because if it is already nice enough to find yourself celebrating among brothers, it is downright wonderful to find yourself between brothers and sisters, when girls and women with their typical grace enhance the charis and the feast in a home. This typical joy for the harmony of children increases with the years, because if it is nice to see your children and young people love each other, and it is even more beautiful to see them love each other as adults, when distances and reasons for disagreements and divisions naturally grow. Perhaps there is no more beautiful end-of-life for a parent than seeing daughters and sons who have truly cherished their mutual love; how great that love is, taking on all the different tones and shades of agape. The love of a child who would prefer to give up his or her own personal legitimate interests just to avoid this special suffering for his or her parents.
Hence, we can easily imagine that the beautiful Psalm 133 was composed, or at least sung, by a mother. On a feast day, perhaps on the evening of Pesach, a woman looked at her children sitting around the table, and in the depths of her heart this prayer was born, one of the most beautiful prayers there are: «Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!» (Psalm 133,1). The psalm of fraternity. The Hebrew word that the psalmist uses to describe this special beauty and sweetness is twb, the same word we find in the first chapter of Genesis when creation was completed: "God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (twb)" (Genesis 1,31). Perhaps to tell us that when brothers and sisters "sit together" the family returns to stroll in the Garden of Eden, a certain primal innocence and purity returns, death is overcome again, we eat the fruit of the tree of life and we live an eternal youth - as long as someone calls us "son" or "daughter" we will always be young. The two metaphors that the psalm uses to develop the theme of fraternity are very beautiful indeed and deeply rooted in biblical language and symbolism: «It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down on the collar of his robe. It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion» (Psalm 133,2-3). The oil was a sign of the consecration of priests (Aaron), but also of kings, of prophets, and it was the gesture that welcomed the arrival of a guest, who was honoured by having his weary body anointed with scented oil. An overflowing of oil that drips from the head to cover the face, the beard and then continues down the robe.
An image that speaks of the surplus or excess of fraternity. Fraternity is the opposite of avarice, if you do not hand your brother a cloak, he is handed a tunic either, because it is what we do not have to give and instead chose to give anyway that expresses what a brother or sister truly is. It is the oil that a woman poured on Jesus' feet, which was worth ten times more than the price of betrayal. An economist would never understand this waste, and would instead continue to blame the inefficient excess. There are no interest bearing loans among brothers, not even at the inflation rate needed to, at the very least, recover the expenses. One simply gives to a brother: lending is a good business verb but it is not a verb of fraternity - "here is the money you needed: you will give it back to me when and if you can". A brother has the same dignity of a king, a priest or a prophet, not an ounce less; and when he comes to visit us at home we must honour him as guests are honoured in the Bible. As Abraham and Sarah welcomed the three men at the Oak of Mamre, as Solomon welcomed the Queen of Sheba, as the good shepherd of Psalm 23, as the two sisters welcomed Jesus in Bethany. Like the widow who hosted Elijah in her house and gave the prophet the last handful of flour and the last drop of oil she had left. Prophets and brothers, and sisters are not given what is superfluous, they are given what is necessary, for them you would go amiss of your last bread. Our daily bread is a gift from the Father, but it almost always arrives at the hands of a brother, or a sister. When we leave our common home as grownups and a brother comes to visit our new home, you should honour him as the Bible honours its guests. And even if he comes to visit often, the day of his visit is the day of bringing out the most beautiful tablecloth, of setting new flowers. Time stops, touching eternity. The hours spent with your brothers and sisters last longer, fraternity extends our life. All guests are a blessing, but the blessings that brothers and sisters bring, honoured as angels, are infinite.
The second image is that of dew, another beloved word from the Bible. The dew of the highest mountain that mitigates the long droughts. It is always surprising to find grass wet with dew upon waking up during our torrid summers, a gift of a different kind of freshness when there is no water. Dew is a great image of gratuitousness, a gift that is there for us, for everyone. Like dew, fraternity needs a clear and calm windy night in order to light up the field of our lives. Like dew, fraternity is that given freshness that accompanies the aridity of life, arriving without giving a second glance at our virtues and merits. Fraternity is anti-meritocratic, both when it is looked at from the perspective of the parents, and when it is observed with the gaze of your other brothers and sister - even if the elder brother in the parable is there to remind us that meritocracy is a temptation and threat to fraternity, that if not overcome every day generates various forms of fratricide.
The oil dripping from Aaron's beard then reveals another fundamental element of fraternity, which is the other side of the surplus: a good kind of waste. As with other first words of life, there are two sides to the word waste, a good and a bad side. The good one belongs to fraternity, which also thrives on waste: the passing of time, words, food. The waste of time drives away haste, the enemy of all primary relationships. The waste of words is the blessing of endless evenings and nights spent saying with a hundred words what we could say with only ten, because those wasted ninety words in excess are the words that we give to each other when freed from the slavery of efficiency. Moreover, there is no family celebration where food does not exceed what is necessary, where what seems a waste is only the celebration of a greater good, an archaic and deeply profound language to say that those hours spent together are worth more than the national GDP, that this relational good is the greatest form of good. In fraternal meals, if you do not eat too much, you just have not eaten enough. And even when poverty offers us only five loaves of bread and a couple of fish, eventually we will still have to take home seven stores of leftovers.
Yet, despite all this beauty, the Bible presents us with natural brotherhood as something ambivalent, and generally problematic. Abel, the first brother is a murdered brother. Jacob and Esau fight, battle and separate, then Leah and Rachel, the two rival sisters, then the story of Joseph sold by his brothers, Jephthah chased away by his half-brothers, Amnon's violence on Tamar, up until the brother of the prodigal son. In the Bible, the cases of brothers and sisters who love each other like those of Psalm 133 are few and far between. Perhaps to tell us that the brotherhood of blood, however great and often wonderful it can be, is not enough to understand biblical humanism, the new people, the Covenant, and the new and different universal biblical and then Christian brotherhood. Therefore, in order to show us its new brotherhood not connected by blood, the Bible is not content with praising natural brotherhood, and instead highlights its insufficiency. We too know that that first natural fraternity will never be full and true humanism if it does not eventually flourish into a second kind of fraternity. One does not remain brothers and sisters for life if at a certain point that bond of blood, already great and beautiful, does not become even greater and more beautiful, blooming into agape.
Brothers and sisters remain brothers and sisters until the end, if one day they also become friends, and mother and father of each other. Fraternity is dawn; it is dew, but that sun will not be able to keep all the light of dawn shining all thru noon, if the blood does not also become spirit, and if we are not reborn in this spirit. The Bible, however, also wanted to give us Psalm 133 with its splendid words because, while it reminds us that fraternity is fulfilled by dying in the flesh and rising in the spirit, those brothers and sisters sitting together are among the most beautiful things under the sun: «For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore» (Psalm 133,3).
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The soul and the harp/26 - There is also a good form of wasting of time and things, for the sake great and true relationships
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  27/09/2020
"Maximum restoring and relief came to me from the comfort of my friends ... the talks, laughing together, the exchange of affectionate courtesies, the occasional disagreements, without rancour, like every man has with himself, and the more frequent agreements, untainted by the same very rare disagreements; being each other's sometimes teacher, sometimes disciple, the impatient nostalgia of those who find themselves far away, the festive welcome offered to those who return".
Augustine, Confessions, IV
Psalm 133 is known as the psalm of fraternity, which while it speaks to us of the beauty of the fraternity of blood tells us of a different kind of fraternity of the spirit.
Fraternity is a great word of the Bible because it is a great word of life. It is simply another name for happiness. Brothers and sisters are part of the ordinary landscape of home. They are an essential component of our life. The love for a brother or a sister does not have any connotation of Eros or of philia (we may not always be friends with our brothers or sisters, yet we love them very much). It is another kind of love, different and special, which uses the language of flesh and guts (and thus resembles our love for our parents). A typical note of fraternity is that visceral pain we feel when a sister or a brother falls ill, when he or she suffers, when he or she is offended or humiliated - seeing a sister suffer is one of the greatest pains we males can experience. There is, moreover, a typical and very special kind of joy involved, perhaps one of the greatest on earth. This is what parents, especially mothers, feel when they see that their children love each other. When they see them esteem each other, bless each other, console each other, defend each other, help each other, and celebrate together.
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The soul and the harp/24 – Rather than a simulacrum of God, each human being is a spark of his mystery
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  13/09/2020
The question how I came to such an archaic subject has not yet been answered. Various circumstances influenced it, interconnected through the years, with the passing of time. Ripeness is all. As a man and as an artist I had to somehow find myself in a state of "receptivity"
Thomas Mann, Appendix, Joseph and his brothers
There are themes of great human and religious significance involved in the prohibition of reproducing images of God. Psalm 115 reveals some of them.
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We should thank the Bible if only for having guarded the intimate mystery of God over the centuries, and protected from our theological and ideological manipulations. The Babylonian exile was not only the place and time where some of the greatest biblical books were born and where immense prophets such as Ezekiel and the Second Isaiah spoke and wrote. That exile also generated some of the most beautiful psalms. Songs and prayers flowed from the soul of a humiliated people, offended in their national identity, struck at the heart of their religion. The exile was many things, but it was above all a great religious test. Finding themselves in a land rich in religion, surrounded by many gods each with its own sanctuary, represented by shining statues and carried in spectacular processions, forced Israel to rethink their faith deeply. The harsh biblical anti-idolatrous controversy also developed during the exile. The absence of the temple and the images of YHWH gave birth to the question that the Babylonians ironically addressed to the Jews: "Where is your God?"
In those ancient cultures, a God without his own place or sanctuary was a nonexistent god. The great biblical idea prohibiting any representation of God came to maturity as an answer to that terrible question (Exodus 20,4). A single ban, based on a decisive event: «You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire» (Deuteronomy 4,15). The experience of the encounter with YHWH had been the encounter with a voice, with something real but invisible. Neither Abraham nor Moses nor the prophets actually saw the image of God - Moses saw it pass from behind, as if to say that he did not see it. Instead, they heard his voice, his whisper (Elijah). Hence, every alleged image of God can only be a false one, because that voice cannot be represented.
«Why do the nations say, “Where is their God?” Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see.  They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. They have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but cannot walk, nor can they utter a sound with their throats» (Psalm 115,2-7). The fight against idolatry of the Bible has two components: an external criticism of the images of the gods of other peoples and an internal criticism of Israel, which has always been tried to recreate images of its God. The criticism of Psalm 115 seems, at first glance, to be completely centered on the first component of idolatry, that is the ridicule of other people who adore silly pieces of wood. This, however, is not the most interesting and profound dimension of the biblical controversy, because if it had been formulated in the presence of the Babylonian priests and prophets, they could have replied that those images were only symbols and signs of their gods who, like the God of Israel, really "dwelt in heaven". They could have responded with arguments similar to those with which Catholics defended statues of saints from the iconoclastic fury of some movements of the Protestant Reformation. The biblical criticism of images is present to this day, when we tend to forget that statues and icons are the signs of a God that we do not see and that we recognize merely from a voice pronouncing a name: "Mary".
The second criticism, aimed at the Jews, is of far greater importance. Israel has been accompanied throughout its biblical history by the temptation to have a simple religion like that of other peoples, with the same statues and the same processions, with the same natural fertility rites. The golden calf under Mount Sinai is condemned and then destroyed by Moses because it is the image of their God - the name that the people gave to the golden calf was in fact: YHWH. Representing an invisible God can only produce the wrong images. The most important anti-idolatrous school of thought is hence the one that Israel developed not to criticize other people, but as a mechanism of self-protection of its own faith. A faith that was not only threatened (especially before the exile) by attempts to import foreign gods (the cults of Baal or the goddess "wife" of YHWH) and to place them in their temple, but from the temptation to simplify their faith. The most important idolatry is in fact a religious reductionism that becomes anthropological reductionism.
The background to all the anti-idolatrous reflection in the Bible is in fact Genesis, and in particular those wonderful verses on Adam created in the "image of God" (Genesis 1,27). If we humans are the image of God, if we reduce God to an inevitably wrongful image of him, then we are reducing ourselves even more, ending up as a reduced image of that reduced image. Keeping YHWH up there, in the sky, invisible but speaking to us, means holding the dignity of both women and men high; all the while saying that the image of God that we carry impressed inside belongs to the kingdom of the spirit and being, and not to that of appearing. Whoever sees a man, a woman or a child, does not see a statue of God, but a true spark of his invisible mystery. The truly essential aspect of the image is invisible to the eye. Sight is not the sense that is needed to truly see this image. The beginning of the Psalm is particularly important: «Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness» (Psalm 115,1). A theme very dear to the Bible returns: the Name. As the Christian era approached, the Jews spoke less and less of the name YHWH (Exodus 20,7). While often writing the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) they really pronounced "Adonai", Lord. The Name YHWH was pronounced by the priests and only in the temple, perhaps only on the feast of Kippur. However, with the second destruction of the temple in 70 AD the memory of the pronunciation of the Name revealed to Moses was also lost. But what lies behind the Name?
Those exiles felt a great nostalgia for the experience of God they once had at home, when YHWH still "lived" in his now destroyed temple. They struggled to rediscover the experience of the sacred without their sacred place. This tremendous effort of their, however, generated even more extraordinary things. First of all, the absence of the sacred temple invented the concept of a sacred time: Shabbat was born. Time became more important than space. The Shabbat became the temple of time, and remains one of the greatest prophecies found in the Bible to this day - without a new culture of Shabbat we will never get out of the environmental and social crises of capitalism, the anti-Shabbat. While in exile, they also discovered a new dimension of the Name, which they learned thanks to the prophets acting as sentinels during exile (there is a lot of Ezekiel in Psalm 115: «This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I acted for My name’s sake»: (Ezequiel 20,5-9).
With that first verse, the psalmist is saying to God: I am not asking you to show your glory for us here. No, we have not earned this (the people lived in exile as a punishment for their infidelities). Instead, show your glory out of faithfulness to yourself, out of faithfulness to your Name. Do not do it for us: do it for yourself. This is one of the most beautiful expressions of gratuitousness found in faith. The psalmist knew that we cannot take our advantage out of our prayers, but we can pray to God to not take it into account. Perhaps this is the maximum possible gratuitousness under the sun: God, I cannot set aside my own interests, you know this, but please do not take them into account while I pray to you. Here faith clearly distinguishes itself from commerce, prayer from magic. We pray to God for God. One of the greatest religious and human fruits born out of the exile experience: the gratuitousness of prayer, man's ability to transcend himself, to be greater than his own needs.
A final comment on idolatry. The biblical prohibition to represent divinity with statues or drawings generated as collateral beauty a great production of literary and narrative images about God. The Bible forbade ‘plastic’ images of God, but it lead to the production of an endless quantity of intellectual images. Rabbinic Midrash, Jewish legends, and then the immense, both in quality and in quantity, literature inspired by biblical episodes. That limit to the image impoverished the Jewish world of visual arts but, like Leopardi’s Hedge, it generated an infinite wealth of literature. God was not painted, but was deeply thought about and beautifully narrated. Greek philosophy thought above all of man, biblical wisdom pondered above all about God. But the Bible, perhaps, was not sufficiently aware of the great danger of intellectual representations of God (L.A. Schoekel). The Bible forbade the image (and the pronunciation of the name) of God to save God in his mystery and intimacy, to protect him from our many manipulations. The most powerful images, however, are not the visual ones, but the ones in our minds. Idolatry does not only manifest itself though figures, statues or puppets, the most pernicious puppets are the intellectual ones. That word, heart and profound soul of the Bible, is much more capable than any human hand to produce fetishes, and creating golden calves.
The real name of intellectual idolatries is ideology. And among the very harmful ideologies we find the religious ones, because they often forget the prohibition of "making oneself the image" of God. The temptation of theology is to violate the commandment of the prohibition of making images of God. A good scientist or a good economist know that the model they use to describe the world is not the actual world, (for example, perfect competition is not the actual market). A theologian, on the other hand, (except the very great, among them St. Thomas), is easily tempted to believe that the models he built to describe God are in fact the actual image of God. Therefore, once they have built a model thought of as an image, theologians believe that they have captured God within that image. We killed thousands of people, and burned heretics because they were too sure that the idea we had created of God was his image. Only by recovering the biblical sense of the prohibition of image to preserve the mystery of God, will we be able to learn the art of dialogue with those who have other ideas of God.
The last line of criticism of idols is both evocative and very beautiful: «Those who make them will be like!» (Psalm 115,8). Over time, we have learned that the subjunctive ("become") can be replaced by the indicative: becomes. We become the objects and images we adore. Without realizing it, we are becoming more and more similar to our goods, and increasingly similar to the idol of consumption. The Psalm ends with a splendid series of blessings. They are for us, we will not miss a single one: «May the Lord cause you to flourish, both you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind» (Psalm 115,14-16).
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The soul and the harp/24 – Rather than a simulacrum of God, each human being is a spark of his mystery
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  13/09/2020
The question how I came to such an archaic subject has not yet been answered. Various circumstances influenced it, interconnected through the years, with the passing of time. Ripeness is all. As a man and as an artist I had to somehow find myself in a state of "receptivity"
Thomas Mann, Appendix, Joseph and his brothers
There are themes of great human and religious significance involved in the prohibition of reproducing images of God. Psalm 115 reveals some of them.
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The soul and the harp/22 - Like God, we too, at least once, can love those who do not deserve it
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  30/08/2020
«Priests cannot accept gifts», said Don Paolo. The woman protested: «Then it will not apply», she said. «If you do not accept the hen, grace will not apply, and the child will be born blind». «Grace is free», said Don Paolo. «Free grace does not exist», the woman replied.
Ignazio Silone, Wine and bread (Vino e pane)
The Bible teaches us to be grateful, for the salvation we receive, entirely free and not given to us due to our merits.
Gratitude is an essential word. It is the first word in our family, in our communities, less so in modern businesses, where gratitude with its closely related words recognition and thankfulness does not find the space it deserves because of its fragility. Gratitude - from gratia, charis - is very closely linked to "thank you", an expression we learn from our parents as children and which from then on never leaves our relationships again. Even those "thank you" that we say, several times a day, out of respect for social norms, bear at least some trace of gratitude, which however is more fully manifested in other "thank you", those that we expect and desire, not those that are demanded or claimed. They are the decisive ones in our most important relationships, those delicate signs of gratitude, more feminine than masculine in nature, more whispered than spoken, which appear in the crucial moments of our life. That thank you from that colleague on the last day of work, both identical and yet different from all the others, written on that note with the farewell gift. That "thank you" from the student who struggled the most, who on the last day of school leaves you a post-it on the desk, saying "Thank you Professor". Or the one on the day of leaving our home, to follow a voice, that we were unable to tell our parents because it was left stuck in our throat, and which then many years later we discovered to be similar to those ineffable signs of gratitude that are whispered every day at our bedside.
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The beauty and drama of this gratitude lies in its gratuitousness. Not being a contract, gratitude only has value when it is gratuitous (gratitude and gratuity are almost the same word). However, it also contains an aspect of duty and obligation. Because, if on the one hand the most precious qualities of gratitude are freedom and giving freely, on the other hand there are some forms of gratitude that, when they are missing, help to generate ingratitude, one of the strongest passions and bearers of suffering. Gratitude is in fact a form of reciprocity (of thank-fulness, of re-cognition), and hence, it includes an aspect of restituting something that you have already obtained. The presence of ingratitude alongside gratitude makes giving thanks a complex experience. Because with gratitude, we are at the center of the semantic paradox of gift and reciprocity, and therefore of those emotions and actions that are an intertwining of expectations and demands, freedom and obligation, between what is free and what is dutiful. We cannot demand that our next-door neighbor invites us over to say thank you for the plants that we watered for her during many summers in the past, before moving, yet if she does not, we will not be happy, and that lack of gratitude will ruin something important in that relationship. And perhaps there are very few adjectives that hurt us more than "ungrateful", especially when pronounced by the people we care about.
As it is true that we truly know and recognize people only at the end of a relationship, when their capacity for gratitude is truly manifested - sometimes even extending beyond life. It always strikes a chord with me to see the grateful fidelity of many and above all many women who for years, decades, look after the graves of their loved ones. We suffer a lot from ingratitude, also because there is a tendency in everyone to overestimate their credit of gratitude towards others (and hence to also underestimate their debt), and so we are accompanied by a constant feeling of not being thanked enough. Gratitude, then, is a feeling that needs time and duration. It is only born within stable and lasting relationships. It manifests itself today while maturing yesterday, and is therefore an exercise in memory: it is while remembering what you have been for me that gratitude now is born in my heart. This is why the icon that accompanied the depiction of gratitude in classical antiquity was the stork, because its legendary reputation for taking care of parents who had become old.
The Bible teaches us to cultivate and express our gratitude towards God too: «Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever» (Psalm 107,1). The community of believers is also a community of the grateful, because it is a community of the saved. Psalm 107 is in fact a hymn of thanksgiving (there are many in the Psalter) that comes from the experience of salvation. There are four paradigms of salvation in the psalm: salvation from on hunger and thirst: «Some wandered in desert wastelands... They were hungry and thirsty, and their lives ebbed away» (Psalm 107,4-5), salvation from prison: «Some sat in darkness, in utter darkness, prisoners suffering in iron chains… and he saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness… and cut through bars of iron» (Psalm 107,10-16), from fatal diseases: «They loathed all food and drew near the gates of death. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress» (Psalm 107,18-19), from the dangers of the sea: «Some went out on the sea in ships; they were merchants on the mighty waters… He stilled the storm to a whisper; the waves of the sea were hushed» (Psalm 107,23-29). And after each and every scene, a verse of gratitude is repeated four times: «Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love and his wonderful deeds for mankind» (Psalm 107,15). It is the concrete experience of salvation that generates thanksgiving, which in turn makes gratitude flourish. A concrete salvation, from the evils of the body, which recalls the salvation by the historical Jesus, who while announcing a spiritual salvation freed people from concrete evils, by feeding and healing them. The salvation that produces gratitude is always punctual; it is always a question of concrete, actual resurrection.
Salvation, a decisive word if any in the Bible and later in Christianity, and closely related to the paradoxical dynamic of gratitude. On the one hand, on the side of God, it is all gift, and cannot be explained within the context of conditionality, of do-ut-des. No, we are just saved and that is it. Salvation is not something we can earn by way of our virtues and merits - perhaps by crying out: «Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress» (Psalm 107,13). Salvation is a response to a cry or calling out, but it is not a response to an action that justifies it: crying out is an expression of faith, and the justification for that salvation is faith (here we can clearly see, among other things, how much the theology of St. Paul was anchored in the Old Testament). However, it is also very beautiful and consoling that the saved men in this entire Psalm are not the people of Israel, they are not the elect: they are just men and that is it. This salvation is universal: it is enough to shout out - and perhaps we do not do it enough. At the same time, the Bible asks the saved for gratitude, inviting them to thank God for their salvation. Herein lies another great meaning of prayer: we do not only pray (or pray a lot) to obtain salvation (the biblical cry is a strange form of prayer), but we should pray above all to give thanks. Jesus himself shows that he is sensitive to both gratitude and ingratitude. People have often learned to pray precisely to say thank you: they do not ask for anything, then experience salvation, and give thanks. And from that thanksgiving prayer is born. The most beautiful birth of them all, completely free, freed from any residue of commercial faith.
It is difficult to remain in a state of gratitude, it is difficult to remain in the condition of one who gives thanks because he knows that what he possesses is all a gift, that the salvation he experiences every day is completely gratuitous. It is especially difficult for men of faith. Because, once salvation has been experienced and gratitude learned, the need and want to deserve and earn future salvation arises progressively and naturally in men (less so in women), in order to feel that there is also something of our own in the salvation that comes to us every morning. That we also contributed to it, that there is a share of co-financing in that mortgage of infinite value that is being offered to us, that we deserved that mercy, that faithful love (hesed) if only just a little. Thus, the experience of "being saved" is transformed little by little and without realizing it, into "saving oneself". And every time that saving ourselves steals ground from under the feet of being saved, the value of gratitude inevitably is being reduced.
It is human, it is very human. Because we men do not like to depend entirely on the gratuitousness of others, we like to earn our salvation with the sweat of our hard work and our merits, we too love that reciprocity where we alternate between the motion of giving and receiving. In part because we have also seen how much injustice the lack of reciprocity produces, how much inequality, how many poor people there are who are kept in a condition of perennial subjection due to depending entirely on their masters. The idea of ​​a God who gives us everything and on whom we totally depend has also produced a political-economic theology that has certainly not helped the poor to free themselves from their condition of inferiority, and a wrong, one-way and obligatory gratitude, which has left infinite suffering all over Europe and the world. The salvation of the people also turned into a question of saving them from theologies that were using a certain idea of ​​God to legitimize profoundly unjust structures of power, by making them sacred, Hence, the wonderful civil, economic and political movement that in recent centuries has worked to link the rights to nature or to an original egalitarian social pact, and salaries to the concept of work.
And while this great ethical movement of the people was taking place, and continues to unfold, the Bible is still there, faithful to itself, to remind us that these logics, essential and blessed in inter-human relationships, should not be applied to God, who instead should be held above our merits. Because if there is no principle of absolute gratuitousness in the foundation of our life to remind us that before and after merits there is an infinite gift, every meritocracy runs the very real risk of becoming a dictatorship of the strong over the weak. The biblical God does not love us because we deserve it - or because we deserve it more than others do - but because we are, simply, his sons and daughters, and son ship is not a meritocratic relationship, despite the protests of the elder son in the parable. We have to be thankful, this is our duty, but our saying thank you today is not the meritorious pre-condition for being saved tomorrow: God would still save us even if we were ungrateful. Knowing and remembering this absolute gratuitousness of God tells us, then, that somewhere in our being, made in his image, we are greater than reciprocity, and we too, at least once, can love those who do not deserve it, we too can love an ungrateful person.
The stork is also the one who brings us our children. The civilizations of the stork are those that have been able to keep up and combine the gratitude towards the elderly with the love for the children. The Fourth Commandment, which associates honoring the father and mother with the "prolongation of our days on earth", knew this very well. Only children know how to extend our lives.
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The soul and the harp/22 - Like God, we too, at least once, can love those who do not deserve it
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  30/08/2020
«Priests cannot accept gifts», said Don Paolo. The woman protested: «Then it will not apply», she said. «If you do not accept the hen, grace will not apply, and the child will be born blind». «Grace is free», said Don Paolo. «Free grace does not exist», the woman replied.
Ignazio Silone, Wine and bread (Vino e pane)
The Bible teaches us to be grateful, for the salvation we receive, entirely free and not given to us due to our merits.
Gratitude is an essential word. It is the first word in our family, in our communities, less so in modern businesses, where gratitude with its closely related words recognition and thankfulness does not find the space it deserves because of its fragility. Gratitude - from gratia, charis - is very closely linked to "thank you", an expression we learn from our parents as children and which from then on never leaves our relationships again. Even those "thank you" that we say, several times a day, out of respect for social norms, bear at least some trace of gratitude, which however is more fully manifested in other "thank you", those that we expect and desire, not those that are demanded or claimed. They are the decisive ones in our most important relationships, those delicate signs of gratitude, more feminine than masculine in nature, more whispered than spoken, which appear in the crucial moments of our life. That thank you from that colleague on the last day of work, both identical and yet different from all the others, written on that note with the farewell gift. That "thank you" from the student who struggled the most, who on the last day of school leaves you a post-it on the desk, saying "Thank you Professor". Or the one on the day of leaving our home, to follow a voice, that we were unable to tell our parents because it was left stuck in our throat, and which then many years later we discovered to be similar to those ineffable signs of gratitude that are whispered every day at our bedside.
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The soul and the harp/20 - The art of counting our days is an essential yet rare spiritual craft
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  9/08/2020
"Back in the day when God created all things, he created the sun. The sun is born, wanes, dies and returns. And he created the moon. The moon is born, wanes, dies and then returns... He also created man. Man is born and dies and then never returns."
Sudanese song by the Dinka people
Psalm 90 reminds us that the fleetingness of existence can be overcome by tuning our hearts to that of the universe. And then, every morning, continue our work.
At the origin of spiritual life, there is an experience of the absolute. A rare experience that can happen, at any age, when we sense that we are just a grain of sand in an infinite sea, that there is a sense to the sea and to ourselves, and it is the exact same sense. If philosophical life begins with the wonder of existing-in-the-world, spiritual life begins with the wonder of this double-single sense; when we understand that we really are like an ephemeral butterfly, born to fly only for just one day, but the thrill of that "mad flight" is the same thrill of the universe. A photograph that captures a single moment can be as beautiful as the best of films, even brighter. Our time is a mere moment in time, but it has the same quality as God's time. Because the absolute has entered our time, and we into his, and they have become one and the same. And when we manage to tune our hearts to the heart of the universe we feel the same beat, and we discover that they both beat in unison – perhaps, prayer is nothing more than this.
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The psalms are full of this awe, sung in many different notes and tones, as many as there are human emotions and feelings. Different notes, that do not always harmonize, because while we carry out the exercise of living we are aware that it will "shortly be evening", praise is therefore intertwined with sadness, the gratitude of being alive and loved also touches on the envy of God and of his eternal dawn. We cannot understand much about prayer without also taking the suffering that arises from the envy of God seriously. This typical and paradoxical form of suffering of religious man is even more terrible in the psalms because in that humanism, death is not a different continuation of the same flight under God’s wing, but merely a sunset without a new dawn – «Do you show your wonders to the dead? Do their spirits rise up and praise you?» (Psalm 88,10). It takes a lot of theological imagination to find anticipations of the Christian resurrection of the dead in the Psalter, in Ecclesiastes or in Job. The great gift of the Old Testament lies in this radical absence of consolation, which, by not placing a paradise beyond our death, invites us to find it down here instead, where it truly exists. If this flight under the sun is our only flight, if we in fact will not have a second chance, then our story is as brief as it is serious and important. Faced with the experience of the vanitas of life, the Bible knows that a real disappointment is preferable to a false illusion, that despair can be a good point of access to existence, certainly better than any invented consolation. The resurrection of Jesus was announced within a humanism in which it was not supposed to exist, and its wonder lies in that it was announced to us by a Bible that did not know of it until that very "first day after the Saturday".
Psalm 90 is a peak, an eight thousand meter peak in the Psalter. Poetry is intertwined with wisdom, prophecy with theology: «Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn people back to dust, saying, “Return to dust, you mortals.” A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night» (Psalm 90,1-4). You are always and forever, we sentinels on a single watch, prophets for one night only (Isaiah 21).
And there, in that one brief moment, we truly meet God, and we truly are able to touch. You wound us, we wound you, to the point of nailing you to a cross. This is the mystery, this is the amazement, this is the drama of human life: «They are like the new grass of the morning: In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it is dry and withered… All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan. Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away» (Psalm 90,5-10). And the song of the second Isaiah, poet in exile, is heard once again: «A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field… Surely the people are grass» (Isaiah 40,6-7).
The psalmist does not really know the origin or the root of this sad and ephemeral human condition. In some verses, he seems to tell us that it is a consequence of Adam's guilt and sin, winking at the first chapters of Genesis - "children of Adam, return to the dust" («For dust you are and to dust you will return»). A line certainly present in the Bible, certainly not the one that shines the brightest, even if it is very rooted in the people and in the temples of all times. The spiritual line of this psalm is different. It is a sapiential text, a meditation on the human condition, on how to live our brief passage here, well. We find it in one of the central and most suggestive verses: «Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom» (Psalm 90,12). The wisdom of the heart comes from learning to number or count our days. Because knowing how to count the days is a gift, it can come from a prayer, like the wisdom asked by Solomon as his only charism. The psalm tells us that the biblical art of counting the days is not the natural and spontaneous counting of our days, which is not enough to acquire this wisdom. A clock and the calendar are not enough here. We need a different kind of teaching, a pedagogy, someone that reveals something to us that we cannot do on our own.
Because human history display above all our errors in counting the days. We count them the wrong way when we are young, when they appear infinite and death is something that only affects others. We count them the wrong way, when we reach old age and the sadness for the end that is drawing near does not enable us to live the moments that we are still living, well. And we count them in an even worse way when, while enchanted by wealth and power, we believe ourselves invincible and immortal, and repeat to ourselves: «You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry» (Luke 12,19). The art of counting our days is a spiritual craft as rare as it is essential. The first lesson in this apprenticeship is the evidence of a great waste, when the powerful and true impression that we have invested our lives in the wrong places suddenly envelops us, and we become certain that the time for living has flown by and our life has remained tied to a pole. The psalmist will have received and learned this first lesson. Because if he prayed for the wisdom of knowing how to count the days, that gift must already have reached him - the first (and perhaps only) gift of prayer is the consciousness of needing what we are asking for, so prayer gets what it asks for in the moment we begin to pray: beginning to pray is already received grace.
The psalmist, however, did not stop at that first lesson. We can see it in the verse that immediately follows it: «Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days. Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days» (Psalm 90,14). Here, is the second lesson of the wisdom offered: while we understand, that we have miscounted our days, that we have not even seen them while we were actually living them, a new and different prayer begins to blossom. The sadness for the waste of our past days disappears, the pain for the wrong accounting of yesterday goes away, and a new hunger is born: "Satisfy me now with your grace-love-fidelity (hesed). Satisfy me in the morning, and from today onwards it will always only be morning: the morning of God". Something, similar to the paradoxical joy that Qoheleth found beyond illusion fought with disappointment, is born: «This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labour under the sun during the few days of life God has given them - for this is their lot» (Ecclesiastes 5,18).
Reading the last verse of the Psalm is therefore full of beauty and of hope: «Establish the work of our hands for us - yes, establish the work of our hands» (Psalm 90,17). A phrase repeated twice, as in a liturgical game of choirs - "the work of our hands, the work of our hands; establish, establish". It is a splendid thing that at the end of a song of high meditation on the human condition, as the conclusion of a psalm that revealed the transience of our life and prayed for the wisdom of our heart, we find a verse on the work of our hands: we find work being mentioned. Perhaps because this new morning always comes as part any regular day, within the same line of work, the same family, in the same community as always. A new morning that finds Sisyphus in the same exercise of pushing the same boulder towards the same mountain. When that tragic hero, who is all of us, finally becomes aware of his destiny, and proceeds to thank his boulder, because he understands that it was that very boulder that pushed him up the summit every morning. We learn to count our days well when, one morning, we go back to the office and immersed in the same documents as always, surrounded by the same colleagues, we feel the same vibration of the universe on our desk, we see the same reflection of the ordering gesture of Elohim in the early morning of creation.
Psalm 90 is the only psalm that the Psalter attributes to Moses: «A prayer of Moses. The man of God» (Psalm 90,1 NLT). We do not know in what moment in the life of Moses the editor imagined him composing this song. For some, on Mount Nebo, at the end of his life, far from the Promised Land, waiting for God's kiss on his lips. Maybe, we do not know. I like to imagine Moses singing the last lines of this hymn to life while he blessed and praised the work of the artisans who built the Ark (Exodus 35). He looked at them and prayed: "Establish the work of our hands" and the people answered: "Establish it".
Hence, who knows if whoever composed this Psalm did not start from the end? While he was finishing one of his works, he felt the sadness for the vanity that would have swallowed up even that work of his, and he felt the typical sadness of someone who is faced with the ephemeral essence of life. And right there a new prayer was born: "Give substance to this work, so that it too does not pass by like the wind: save it, even if you cannot save me". From there, from that SOS to protect that work from a sea of ​​nothingness, that ephemeral poet came to the Absolute and asked him to teach him to count his days. And while he was making that prayer he discovered that he was already counting one day well, the one during which he was finishing his work. As we work, morning after morning, we do our job and finish our flight. Ephemeral, infinitely brief and utterly beautiful.
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The soul and the harp/20 - The art of counting our days is an essential yet rare spiritual craft
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  9/08/2020
"Back in the day when God created all things, he created the sun. The sun is born, wanes, dies and returns. And he created the moon. The moon is born, wanes, dies and then returns... He also created man. Man is born and dies and then never returns."
Sudanese song by the Dinka people
Psalm 90 reminds us that the fleetingness of existence can be overcome by tuning our hearts to that of the universe. And then, every morning, continue our work.
At the origin of spiritual life, there is an experience of the absolute. A rare experience that can happen, at any age, when we sense that we are just a grain of sand in an infinite sea, that there is a sense to the sea and to ourselves, and it is the exact same sense. If philosophical life begins with the wonder of existing-in-the-world, spiritual life begins with the wonder of this double-single sense; when we understand that we really are like an ephemeral butterfly, born to fly only for just one day, but the thrill of that "mad flight" is the same thrill of the universe. A photograph that captures a single moment can be as beautiful as the best of films, even brighter. Our time is a mere moment in time, but it has the same quality as God's time. Because the absolute has entered our time, and we into his, and they have become one and the same. And when we manage to tune our hearts to the heart of the universe we feel the same beat, and we discover that they both beat in unison – perhaps, prayer is nothing more than this.
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The soul and the harp/18 - The space of the prophet is profane and goes from the valley of tears to the threshold of the temple
 By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 26/07/2020
"The dryness that springs up, the wall that breaks so that God appears without appearing is the wonderful lesson of Psalm 84".
Guido Ceronetti, The book of psalms (Il libro dei salmi).
A great religious innovation of the Bible, as psalm 84 reminds us, was to learn that God is not tied to his temple or sacred places.
Homo viator. For tens of millennia Homo sapiens was a nomad and a traveler. We followed the rhythm of the seasons and the blooms, we chased the tracks of the deer and the bison, we returned thirsty to the oasis and the source, experts of transhumance. We did it to survive, we ran to escape death. Then, at a certain point, in that territory furrowed and marked only by the natural hours of life, we began to discover different spaces, to recognize special places; and we started to mark rocks, to erect stems, to build altars. The sacred was born. Along those ancient tracks, we thus began to stop, not only, to gather, hunt, repair, and drink; we began to stop in other places too because we were attracted by a spiritual presence that manifested itself and changed the landscape. Space became quality. From that moment, it was no longer enough to just eat, repair, drink and reproduce. It was no longer enough for us to walk along the deer trail. We wanted to know the mystery of the deer and its paths, find out where those we loved ended up after death, to know who moved the sun and the other stars. We started asking new questions about things, and so we began to see the gods. The world changed forever, filled with silent words, with new languages, with symbols. We spoke basic languages ??among us, and they were enough to coordinate the hunting and raising our children. However, we also learned new languages in order to speak with nature, with demons and angels – but we forgot many, if not almost all of them, while turning inter-human language increasingly powerful, because those other languages could only live on the weakness of our language.
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Millennia have passed since then, and we have changed a lot, but we never stopped walking. For wars, for trade, but we continued to walk, to go and see God in his place too. When we reached the threshold of the temple, we entered another time, our dead felt alive, we felt we like family members of the saints, and we were given eagle wings to fly crazy flights until we could touch paradise. That threshold was the door to heaven; just touching it meant conquering death: if only for a few hours, but still truly conquering it. We forgot the pain of living, we forgot to be poor, and in that moment, our hearts felt the thrill of being at the same altitude as the angels. Together with new fears, we learned new kinds of gratitude. The experience of the sacred was the experience of the sublime, therefore transitory, punctual, embodied in space and time, it only happened there, and therefore soon ended. And it was wonderful, sometimes scary, always tremendous. It was wonderful because it was exceptional and extraordinary. So exceptional and extraordinary that people and entire communities often ended up shipwrecked and drowned in this sea.
This is why there was no journey more beloved than the pilgrimage; we liked the elegant and imagined houses of the lords, but above all, we liked the house of God: «How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord Almighty! My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God» (Psalm 84, 1-2). How lovely, how I love, what a delight your home is: different words to express the beautiful Hebrew word that we also find in the name of David, in the love song of Isaiah (5,1), in the Canticle, in the wedding psalms (45). There is no other word in the Bible that is more intense in order to speak of the love of desire, the movement of the heart - Psalm 84 is the song of someone in love.
However, once he arrived near the temple in Jerusalem, the psalmist first of all gives us a detail in particular: «Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young - a place near your altar» (Psalm 84,3). This is one of the most delicate and surprising things of beauty in the Bible. A man who calls his God "Jehovah Sabaoth", that is, God of armies and hordes, who then arrives at the temple and shows us a sparrow and a swallow. The infinitely great retracting to make room for the infinitely small, the immense abode of God who curls up inside a sparrow's nest. The Almighty who curls up to enter the space of a manger. The first beatitude or bliss of this psalm is for the little bird: «Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they are ever praising you» (Psalm 84,4). Almost as if to confuse the praises sung by the priests of the temple with the chirping of the sparrow and the warbling of the swallow. Both permanent inhabitants of the most beautiful place in the world, ever present singers of his glory, both praised and somewhat envied by the pilgrim temporarily inhabiting that same eternal realm. But a second bliss is the true heart of the Psalm: «Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage!» (Psalm 84,5). The pilgrim's bliss immediately becomes the bliss of the path: «As they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs; the autumn rains also cover it with pools. They go from strength to strength» (Psalm 84,6-7). The pilgrim is the one who transforms the valley of tears into a spring, it is his movement that makes the arid land flourish, and it is his foot that fertilizes the desert. A splendid reciprocity between Adam-adamah (man-earth). The custody of Eden continues: we are the custodians of the earth making it flourish with our industrious hands, and we are its custodians leaving our imprints on it while we as nomads trample, moving towards the house of God. These roads are wounds of the earth through which rays of eternity every now and then peak out. They are not yet a temple, but its desire already makes them a temple. Walking is nourishment for the road ("they go from strength to strength").
These two verses are full of symbols and linguistic ambivalences, some of which we cannot quite grasp now. The Quran (Sura III, Al-'Imran: 96) sees the second name of Mekka in the Bakka valley, and Islamic tradition places the desperate pilgrimage of Hagar (Genesis, 21) and the well (of Zamzam) from which, through the intervention of the angel, Hagar drew water to save his son Ishmael, in that desert. Hagar's tears were the first "blessed rain" on that arid valley; she was the first "traveler in this arid soil" (Leopardi). This deep connection between Psalm 84 and Hagar, Sarah's slave, to whom the first angel of the Bible appeared, is very beautiful. She, the image of a poor pilgrim, and the other a wandering Aramaean, to tell us that at the end of the pilgrimage, the God who appears to a slave and a discarded child in order to save them, is one and the same.
The journey ends, reaching Jerusalem: «Till each appears before God in Zion» (Psalm 84,7). What did the pilgrim see in the temple? What can you see of an invisible God without images? What theophany could be found in an empty temple, closely guarded in its emptiness? Biblical theology has grown and become a universal common good thanks to its ability to inhabit the paradox of an invisible God who did manifest himself, but whose real glory truly lived in an empty temple because it had been completely emptied of every idol. In an ancient Middle-Eastern world populated by an infinity of gods and idols, each with its own very visible face and its own shrines full of shimmering statues, the Bible managed to show its many faithful a God without the need to really see or touch him. A different kind of place, the temple, was enough for him to show the invisible-reality to those who reached his threshold. Being in an empty space generated the first theological innovation of antiquity: not being able to see and touch a God whom you believed and knew to be true, produced an idea of ??God no longer imprisoned within the language of our senses. What did those pilgrims see then? We do not know anymore, but they certainly did not see statues or paintings: they saw the one they believed through faith. Perhaps faith arises when we, as pilgrims on the threshold of an empty temple, repeat: "I believe in you", and without hearing it we sense a true voice replying: "I am".
«Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked» (Psalm 84,10). In your courts, to be the doorkeeper: the believing pilgrim is the inhabitant of the courtyard, the companion of the sparrow and the swallow, he is the inhabitant of the threshold, a liminal woman or man, who knows how to stand on the threshold of an empty yet inhabited dwelling. That threshold, savored one in a thousand days, is the best place under the sun. Because it is the post of the "keepers of the temple", that of the sentry. The threshold is also a place of prophecy, of those who walk, arrive and do not enter, because in order to guard an empty space they also protect it from their own presence. The space of the prophet is not the sacred one inside the temple, but the profane one that goes from the valley of tears to the threshold and then back from the threshold to the valley of tears, made fertile precisely through that walking and that custody.
On another day, those pilgrims of the absolute experienced the most tremendous and dramatic of experiences. That temple, that one true home of the one true God, was desecrated and destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. Psalm 84 and the other psalms of the temple continued to be sung by the exiled people. Here we find ourselves in front of a second religious innovation, perhaps the greatest of them all: we can meet God even without a temple, even without any sacred places. YHWH became a pilgrim, just like us. Therefore, the cancellation of the sacred space, already concentrated in Israel to that one temple, enabled those tormented people to free themselves from the need for a sacred place in order to meet God, to understand that if there is a true God, he does not live anywhere because he lives everywhere: «I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple» (Revelation 21,22).
Journeys of pilgrimages are still undertaken and must continue to be undertaken, because when we stop wandering in search of God we begin to walk only looking for idols in their threshold less atria. That God who awaits us at the end of the journey is already walking in our midst (Matthew 18,20), without a nest to rest in. And once you reach his threshold, do not ask "where is God?", but "where are we"? If all the temples disappeared one day, if the whole world became a large empty temple (or is it already?), two or more pilgrims would be able to repeat the same wonderful experience of Psalm 84, they would be able to intone his song, on his very own threshold.

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The soul and the harp/18 - The space of the prophet is profane and goes from the valley of tears to the threshold of the temple
 By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 26/07/2020
"The dryness that springs up, the wall that breaks so that God appears without appearing is the wonderful lesson of Psalm 84".
Guido Ceronetti, The book of psalms (Il libro dei salmi).
A great religious innovation of the Bible, as psalm 84 reminds us, was to learn that God is not tied to his temple or sacred places.
Homo viator. For tens of millennia Homo sapiens was a nomad and a traveler. We followed the rhythm of the seasons and the blooms, we chased the tracks of the deer and the bison, we returned thirsty to the oasis and the source, experts of transhumance. We did it to survive, we ran to escape death. Then, at a certain point, in that territory furrowed and marked only by the natural hours of life, we began to discover different spaces, to recognize special places; and we started to mark rocks, to erect stems, to build altars. The sacred was born. Along those ancient tracks, we thus began to stop, not only, to gather, hunt, repair, and drink; we began to stop in other places too because we were attracted by a spiritual presence that manifested itself and changed the landscape. Space became quality. From that moment, it was no longer enough to just eat, repair, drink and reproduce. It was no longer enough for us to walk along the deer trail. We wanted to know the mystery of the deer and its paths, find out where those we loved ended up after death, to know who moved the sun and the other stars. We started asking new questions about things, and so we began to see the gods. The world changed forever, filled with silent words, with new languages, with symbols. We spoke basic languages ??among us, and they were enough to coordinate the hunting and raising our children. However, we also learned new languages in order to speak with nature, with demons and angels – but we forgot many, if not almost all of them, while turning inter-human language increasingly powerful, because those other languages could only live on the weakness of our language.
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