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The Dawn of Midnight/29 - Generated for ever: the world will not be abandoned
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/11/2017
The Bible is not my sacred text, even though I also feel its sacredness, which I derive from its capacity to absorb the screams of the world. Jeremiah's cry of pain is almost fully let out as a scream. Job screams. Isaiah, too. So it is a strange sacred text composed of despair, failure and an implacable faith in a God who does not answer".

Guido Ceronetti, from a 2013 interview
“The word that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah, when he wrote these words in a book at the dictation of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: »Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: You said, ‘Woe is me! For the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.’ (...) Thus says the Lord: (...) And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord. But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go«”. (Jeremiah 45:1-5).
    [fulltext] => 
It is very nice that a biblical tradition (the Greek text of the Septuagint) chose to conclude the Book of Jeremiah with this blessing on Baruch. Jeremiah leaves his book with a word of YHWH for his disciple. We do not know much about Baruch. This notary-secretary appears in the Book of Jeremiah within the great story of the purchase of the field at Anathoth (chapter 32). Then he became much more than a scribe-secretary. He accompanied Jeremiah during the tremendous hours of the taking of Jerusalem, he transcribed his words twice in the scroll (chap. 36), read them to the community in the temple, and then followed him in Egypt. The text dates this blessing more than twenty years before the Babylonian occupation. But the final editor of the text - perhaps Baruch himself -, violating the chronological succession of facts, places this blessing given in Egypt at the end of Jeremiah's life. It’s like a testament, which can be written at any time in life, but which becomes effective and reveals itself only at the end. Like vocations, which take place in the chronos-time but are understood only at the end, in that kairos-time which is different and unique. Perhaps Baruch had to wait more than twenty years, passing through the tests of Jeremiah and his own, to understand the sense of that blessing. Understanding these different words always requires a lifetime, and sometimes one life is not enough.

Baruch is an image of the good disciple of a prophet. He was the pen of the voice. He learned the words of YHWH by listening to Jeremiah's words. But his sufferings and anxieties have been similar ('I am weary with my groaning'), perhaps, at certain decisive moments, they were the same. This association reveals to us some typical dynamics of the relationship between a prophet (or the one who received a charisma) and his disciples. At first there is an encounter with the prophet, in different contexts. Perhaps Baruch gets to know him while at work, doing his job as a transcriber-scribe of a contract. That very secular contract became a sacrament of another decisive call, which upsets his life and work.

The call of the disciple of the prophet is a distinct vocation, and it is united with that of the prophet. The prophet receives the word directly from YHWH. The disciple also receives a direct and personal word, but understands it only in a dynamic relationship with the prophet. Baruch knows that he can't carry out his task, he can't understand his word and fulfil his destiny, he can't flourish without a deep, mysterious but essential bond with Jeremiah’s task, destiny and flourishing. But the disciple's life is also a personal ’skin to skin’ experience; he is not only a follower of the prophet. He is a follower on multiple levels: that of the prophet, the voice that speaks in the prophet and the voice that speaks in his soul. The fatigue and beauty typical of prophets’ disciples lies in remaining and growing in this specific trialogue. For certain prophets a dialogue can be sufficient, for the disciples there is a need for an extra number, two are not enough. For this reason, the typical and most common mistake of those who follow a prophet is to reduce the trialogue to a dialogue: either because they cancel the voice in their own conscience, or because they skip the prophet to draw directly from the source of words without the prophet ("do you seek great things for yourself?"), or because - in the most common case - they identify the voice of the prophet with that of YHWH (and the prophet becomes an idol). You become an adult disciple if you do not reduce three to two.

The disciple, then, has an active, dynamic, responsible and creative role. A disciple who is only a disciple is not a good disciple. Baruch with time became a companion, partner, counsellor and perhaps even co-author of the words that came from Jeremiah but when they became written words they were also those of Baruch. The Bible - like life - is great because it is bigger than the words of its main protagonists. Who knows if in the long periods of waiting for the word, as during those very long ten days in the Bethlehem camp (42:7), Jeremiah did not dialogue with Baruch, if they did not share the sense of that silence, their uncertainties, fears and hopes. There is perhaps also a trace of these secret dialogues in the accusation that those survivors address him with: “Baruch the son of Neriah has set you against us, to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans” (43:3).

Those who have been or are disciples of a prophet know these silent dialogues well, the painful accompaniments of the soul, the search for their own non-light in the eyes of the other, and sometimes they have also touched the co-writing of donated words with their hands. If Jeremiah’s Baruch had only been a mere secretary, his name would not have been chosen later for a biblical book and other apocryphal and apocalyptic writings.

If, therefore, it is true that the disciple has an absolute need of the prophet, it is also true that the prophet needs his disciples, at least one. Who knows how many prophets have left no trace because of the absence of Baruchs, or because their Baruchs were not as adult, faithful and resilient as their prophets. There is this mysterious reciprocity at the heart of the charismatic life of the world, which makes prophecy, which is perhaps the most individual experience that exists under the sun, a collective experience, too, which transforms an inner voice into a social reality.

But in this relationship between Jeremiah and Baruch there is also a splendid image of every fatherhood and parenting. Our son gathers our words, writes our name. He assists and accompanies our sufferings, our failures, our fidelity and infidelity. He seals the purchase of our camp, and eventually sees that we don't return home, because the camp we had bought wasn't for us. He compiles our will. The son cannot enter that intimate sphere of consciousness where everyone listens to his voice alone, but helps us to understand and interpret it with his mere presence. One day, then, he receives our last blessing, and we realize that we could not spare him the suffering and anguish of all, and that the only true gift, 'prey' and inheritance was, simply, life. And then we exit the scene, hoping that we have simply done our duty, to the end. Every child writes our promise and is a witness, an inheritance and a notary of our will. The dawn of midnight.

We don't know much about the historical Jeremiah, but we know a lot, almost everything, about the Jeremiah of his book. And that is enough for us. His book does not tell us about the very last days of Jeremiah or about his death. He disappears like Moses or Isaiah. They do not die like heroes, because they did not live as heroes. They received a vocation, a task, a mission, and they have only carried it out, until the end. By living it, however, they have taught us what a vocation means, the meaning of a word that has now been forgotten and erased by our generation: forever. And then they leave, just like our friends, parents and teachers leave. And we are left alone.

This Jeremiah, seduced by his God, has seduced us. We have become a bit like Baruch. Perhaps we also met him while at work - what could be more vocational than work? -, and then he seduced us with his immense and infinite words, and we freely decided to follow him. We have witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and our temples - Jeremiah does not seduce us nor change us unless we read him sitting on the ruins of our religions, our people and our greatest dreams. And then we saw him carrying a yoke, breaking a jug, tortured and jailed, and we rejoiced when a eunuch freed him. Then we followed him to Egypt, we were deported with him, ending up surrounded by golden and shimmering idols. Once again we listened to his condemnation of idolatry, understanding that the temptation of idolatry was within us and we have tried to believe to that naked, invisible and different word again. And today we listened to this last blessing, and we heard that it was, it is a blessing for us, too: “But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.” Also to find out that this blessing of Baruch is very similar to the other blessing given by Jeremiah to the Ethiopian eunuch (39:18), a rejected one, a stranger, a victim. The blessings of the prophets are above all blessings for the victims, the poor, the persecuted, the meek and the afflicted. These are the only beatitudes they know. They repeat them, and they will always repeat them to us, eternal beggars of our listening, which will always be too little.

We, too, must now let Jeremiah leave the scene. Not without that typical and great pain of those who take leave of a real friend. Knowing and hoping that he will come back, but detachment always hurts. And even this time, at the conclusion of the commentary on the sixth biblical book in Avvenire, my last word wants to be a multiple, great, sincere and emotional thanksgiving. To the Bible, because it continues to feed me without satiating me. To Jeremiah, an immense master of life, a companion necessary to learn the art of living. Thank you, readers who, like Baruch, have followed Jeremiah with me on this long journey, which lasted six months. They have flown by, because ‘one day with the prophets is like a thousand years elsewhere’. And as always and more than ever, thanks to Director Marco Tarquinio who continues to give me the gift of his generative trust.  

From next Sunday we will resume the discourse on Ideal-Driven Organisations (IDO), with the sure knowledge that the words donated to us by Jeremiah will help us to discover better the grammar of ideals that become organizations and communities. 
“And the Lord said unto me: ‘(...) the world will not be given over to oblivion’”. (The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch the Son of Neriah)

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    [text] => 
The Dawn of Midnight/29 - Generated for ever: the world will not be abandoned
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/11/2017
The Bible is not my sacred text, even though I also feel its sacredness, which I derive from its capacity to absorb the screams of the world. Jeremiah's cry of pain is almost fully let out as a scream. Job screams. Isaiah, too. So it is a strange sacred text composed of despair, failure and an implacable faith in a God who does not answer".

Guido Ceronetti, from a 2013 interview
“The word that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah, when he wrote these words in a book at the dictation of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: »Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: You said, ‘Woe is me! For the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.’ (...) Thus says the Lord: (...) And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord. But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go«”. (Jeremiah 45:1-5).
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The Dawn of Midnight/27 - Beyond the seduction of useful faith and mutual consumption
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire Avvenire on 22/10/2017
“A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. (...) it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices... (...) Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence ... is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (English translation by: H. L. Mencken)
In certain decisive moments, faith and hope become the same thing in fact. This happens when the question ‘Do you believe?’ seems too small and incapable of grasping the richness of the mystery of our heart. When we lose faith simply because we wanted to become adults and our first, child's faith failed to grow together with our love and with our own and others' pain, faith can still return home, taken by the hand by hope. Hope is more resilient than faith, because even under a sky that has become uninhabited we can always hope that the good words that they had told us about there being a greater love in the world were true - that some of them were true, or at least one of them was true. Even when we can no longer believe in God we can always continue to hope in him, we can hope that although on the day we stopped praying we made the greatest mistake, that day we could not know it. And this humble and gentle hope already becomes a true new prayer, and fills the utterly human and restless waiting for the not-yet.
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“So Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers and all the people disobeyed the Lord’s command to stay in the land of Judah. (...) And they took Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah along with them. So they entered Egypt in disobedience to the Lord..."(Jeremiah 43:4-7). The survivors bring Jeremiah and his disciple Baruch to Egypt. They take him with them, like a new ark of the Covenant. They do not listen to his words, but the covenant with that different God, the tales of patriarchs and liberation through the sea were still alive in their moral and spiritual chromosomes, and in some way continued to determine their actions. As it happens to those who have forgotten the faith of their parents and all the prayers they have learned as a child, but feel real pain if an earthquake destroys the church in the village where they heard good words as a child. This faith may not only be nostalgia for childhood or culture. It acts on a deeper level of our psychology; it works without our knowledge and sometimes, in our spite, as an instinct or destiny. We may not listen to the prophets, we may kill them, but there is a ‘remnant’ of the soul that can be tuned to their voice. For this reason we want them with us, we do not listen to them but we would like them to be close to us, because of the need for life and truth that even the evil ones have. We remain human even when we are bad. We are Adam before being Cain, and we remain Adam even after Abel. We remain the image and resemblance of those who we cannot listen to with our ears but who we cannot help but listen to with the medulla - this is biblical anthropology.
Jeremiah, who arrived in Egypt with the caravan, simply continues to do his ‘job’, to fulfil his destiny. To prophesy in the name of YHWH, to speak with his mouth and gestures: “In Tahpanhes the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: ‘While the Jews are watching, take some large stones with you and bury them in clay in the brick pavement at the entrance to Pharaoh’s palace in Tahpanhes’” (43:8-9). The meaning of the gesture is clear at once: “I will send for my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and I will set his throne over these stones I have buried here; he will spread his royal canopy above them” (43:10). They have fled to Egypt, but they cannot escape their sad fate. Even in Egypt YHWH continues to speak to Jeremiah, giving him messages to the people. And Jeremiah obeys. He has done so throughout his life, and he continues to do so even in the exile, without his homeland, without the temple. This nomadic and wandering voice, which speaks without a temple, among deportees and in the midst of new gods, once again speaks the radical secularism of biblical humanism: to find the divine spirit on earth nothing else is needed than human persons, voices of men and women, hands, eyes, bodies. We are the only temple under the sun - so, perhaps, in our time when God speaks less and less in temples, we can hope to hear his voice again if we meet and recognize at least one prophet.
Jeremiah continues to prophesy, and his people continue not to listen to him: ‘Now this is what the Lord God Almighty, the God of Israel, says: (...) Why arouse my anger with what your hands have made, burning incense to other gods in Egypt, where you have come to live?” (44:7-8) At the end of his mission and life, Jeremiah finds himself in the same battles of the early days in Anathoth. Above all, we can rediscover his eternal and continuous struggle against idolatry, the great illness of Israel and all religions, of which the prophets would be the only cure if they were listened to: “Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present – a large assembly – and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, ‘We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord! We will certainly do everything we said we would: we will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem’” (44:15-17). They seem consistent and sincere to the end in their rejection.
Finding the (futile) fight against idolatry even at the end of Jeremiah's book and prophecy, him being deported, tired and old, is something of extreme importance. On the day when Jeremiah received his vocation, YHWH told him that kings, priests and all the people “will fight against you but will not overcome you” (1:19). Why did his enemies not “overcome” him? Actually, if we browse through his entire book again, we realize that Jeremiah knew by vocation that the people were too comfortable to convert, and he always announced the end to them. Where is Jeremiah' s ‘victory’ then? First of all prophets do not want to win, they only want to respond to their vocation, resist to the end in failure and frustration, not to have their voice extinguished which continues to shout out in the desert of listening. In this sense Jeremiah ‘won’.
The prophets know that they cannot win their battles against idolatry. Idolatry is invincible, because we humans love to construct idols too much. And to its very end Jeremiah's book explains and reflects the nature of idolatry, and hence its inescapable nature: “...ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine” (44:17-18).
The root of idolatry is our radical tendency to transform the relationship with the divinity into a commercial exchange. We believe in a god if and until it is convenient for us, if and until that particular divinity best satisfies our needs; and we change gods as soon as we think that a new ‘god’ serves our interests better. And when we change a god for another, cheaper one we are clearly saying that both the old and the new god were simply idols, i.e. experiences of consumption to seek our profit. The relationship of idolatry is a mutual consumption, a consuming of each other: the idol consumes its believer, and the idolater consumes the idol, up to the pint of total reciprocal holocaust.
Idolatry comes back every time the dimension of consumption of spiritual goods, the search for strong emotions, or the satisfaction of one's own interests and pleasure prevails in a religious or ideal experience. Men and women have always done so, and continue to do so, inside and outside religions, inside and outside the church, movements and religious communities. It is natural, it is human to seek a relationship of convenience with God as well. But it is not the experience of God that the prophets give us and defend. The relationship with the biblical God is best suited to man, but it is a convenience that must be found on a different level from the economic, consumer and pleasure level - this is the great teaching of Job, the Gospels and the prophets. It is not the convenience of power and wealth. The convenience of the biblical God is Job's powerlessness, the defeat of the prophets, the ‘power’ of the Sermon on the Mount, the ‘weakness’ of an all-powerful God who cannot convert even his people. Every time, and many times, that we measure the convenience of faith with the measure of our consumption and our pleasure, we are already within an idolatrous relationship, even if we give our convenient idol the name of God. It should never be forgotten that on the slopes of Sinai the name given to the golden calf, the paradigm of every idol, was “YHWH”: “Then they said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, ‘Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord’” (Exodus 32:4-5). Perhaps the main reason that makes idolatry invincible is the very name: today's idol often has the same name as yesterday's God, and we celebrate it under the same mountain, on the same altars, with the same prayers.
The prophets' tenacious struggle against idolatry, which the Bible has always preserved and still does, helps us to become aware of our idolatry (however, we are usually better at seeing that of others), and then gives us hope that one day we will hear a different voice beyond the many idols that fill our house. Biblical faith, every faith, is authentic until it helps us become aware of our natural and inevitable idolatrous condition, and therefore makes the desire for something truer be born in our soul. And because it repeats it to us a hundred, a thousand times in the course of life. Until the end, when, if we have not stopped attending and listening to it, it will help us to distinguish the good angel of death from the last idol we still don’t know. And it will be our last thanks to the Bible, to the prophets, to life.
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The Dawn of Midnight/27 - Beyond the seduction of useful faith and mutual consumption
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire Avvenire on 22/10/2017
“A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. (...) it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices... (...) Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence ... is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (English translation by: H. L. Mencken)
In certain decisive moments, faith and hope become the same thing in fact. This happens when the question ‘Do you believe?’ seems too small and incapable of grasping the richness of the mystery of our heart. When we lose faith simply because we wanted to become adults and our first, child's faith failed to grow together with our love and with our own and others' pain, faith can still return home, taken by the hand by hope. Hope is more resilient than faith, because even under a sky that has become uninhabited we can always hope that the good words that they had told us about there being a greater love in the world were true - that some of them were true, or at least one of them was true. Even when we can no longer believe in God we can always continue to hope in him, we can hope that although on the day we stopped praying we made the greatest mistake, that day we could not know it. And this humble and gentle hope already becomes a true new prayer, and fills the utterly human and restless waiting for the not-yet.
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The Dawn of Midnight/25 - The risk of the encounter and the moral climb of the world
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/10/2017
“Greet the banks of the Jordan
and Zion's toppled towers.
Oh, my country so lovely and lost! 
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!” 
T. Solera e G.Verdi, Nabucco/Nabucodonosor (English translation by Norman Tucker and Tom Hammond
We can imagine the ending of a story a thousand times and have a certain idea of it because the end was already inscribed in the many signs that we have found and interpreted. But when that ending really arrives it's always different. We knew that little Marco would grow up to be a man, and when one day we realized that that beautiful "child" of ours was no longer there, our emotions and tears were all different, and beautiful. We have predicted and said endless times that our bad actions would lead us to the end, but the day we really took the books to court, it was all different, with pain and real tears that we had not been able to foresee. We had prepared our last day in community until the last small detail, but when we really closed the door of the room behind us for the last time and crossed the doorway forever, what happened in the depths of our hearts was totally new; we could not know either the taste of the last bread eaten with our companions, or the nostalgia for heaven that accompanied us throughout our life. We didn't know, we couldn't know, we didn't have to know it in order to try to make that impossible flight. We can and must prepare for it, we can and must accept the idea of the certain arrival of the angel of death with gentleness, but when it really happens the angel of death will not be as we have dreamt, and we will be surprised that while living our life we have also learned to die. But we could not know this in advance, otherwise it would not have been the greatest gift.
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For forty years Jeremiah had seen, heard and said that Jerusalem would be destroyed, her citizens killed and all survivors deported. But the day that the Babylonian army really entered the city, when the temple was destroyed, women, men and children were really killed, was surely a different day for him, a certainly more painful one. The prophets, unlike us, do not rejoice in seeing the corpse they have announced floating in the river, they do not say "I told you” with malignant satisfaction. They die twice: when they announce the end, and when they see it accomplished before their eyes, experiencing it in their own flesh. “In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came against Jerusalem and besieged it. In the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, a breach was made in the city. (...) The Chaldeans burned the king's house and the houses of the people, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem” (Jeremiah 39:1-2;8). After the city fell, King Zedekiah tried to escape to save his own skin (39:1) - how many times we have seen it again throughout history! But he is captured near Jericho, and subjected to the most atrocious torment. “The king of Babylon slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah at Riblah before his eyes, and the king of Babylon slaughtered all the nobles of Judah. He put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains to take him to Babylon” (39:6-7).
In the general chaos, Jeremiah ended up in prison again, among the Jews destined for deportation to Babylon. After capturing Zedekiah, the Babylonians left a Jew, Gedaliah, who was not of the Davidic dynasty, as governor of the "rest" who remained in the country: “Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, left in the land of Judah some of the poor people who owned nothing, and gave them vineyards and fields at the same time” (39:10). It’s one of the not so rare cases when being poor becomes a sign of providence. The humble are exalted and the rich are sent away empty-handed. As for Jeremiah, whose fame as an anti-resistance prophet was also known among the Chaldeans, “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon gave command ... saying, »Take him, look after him well, and do him no harm, but deal with him as he tells you«” (39:12). The captain of the guard said to Jeremiah: “»Now, behold, I release you today from the chains on your hands. If it seems good to you to come with me to Babylon, come, and I will look after you well, but if it seems wrong to you to come with me to Babylon, do not come. See, the whole land is before you; go wherever you think it good and right to go. If you remain, then return to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, son of Shaphan ...« So the captain of the guard gave him an allowance of food and a present, and let him go” (40:4-5). Jeremiah is liberated and he also receives a gift. We don't know what this gift was, but it is still significant to encounter the gift at the end of a central episode in Jeremiah’s story. Gifts are very serious things, they are at the heart of life and death. The Bible knows this, and places a gift inside a liberation, as a sacrament of a decisive choice. We have confined gifts to the field of the non-necessary and, often, useless; the Bible doesn’t: it places it in its rightful place, at the crossroads between freedom and slavery.
Jeremiah is now in full freedom to choose where to go. His recognition by the Chaldeans had earned him the privilege of being able to decide about his own fate. Going to Babylon would have meant protection and security, perhaps a place in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. However, “Jeremiah went to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, at Mizpah, and lived with him among the people who were left in the land” (40:6). Jeremiah decides to stay; he uses the privilege of freedom to remain among his own people, among the poor. Why? Maybe he hoped in Gedaliah, a member of a friendly family of his (26:24). Or perhaps he stayed because his conscience or the voice simply told him to remain in the devastated country, among the remnant made up by the poor - the true prophets are at home only among the poor. The only way you can decide to stay in a devastated and desolate land is because you feel that you have to stay in it. Many people flee, others are "deported" elsewhere by life. Someone, one person, however, remains. When all that remains of the community that had been the great dream of youth, the promised land is but a heap of rubble, there are always many who flee, but someone decides to stay. He cannot explain the reasons that make him stay, he only knows that he must remain - imperatives of the soul exist on earth. Perhaps he doesn't even choose to stay: he just stays and that’s all. Perhaps because of that strange fidelity to the land, inscribed in the chromosomes of the heart, which he inherited from his parents and grandparents, who had taught him with the magisterium of dignified poverty that fidelity is more destiny than choice, it is a mutation of the flesh, it is a call of origin. Because life is a serious thing, and you have to get to the end, learning the magnificent art of the "Stabat". He doesn't know why, but he remains, he doesn't leave like and with the others, when, being Jeremiah, he could have done so. Staying when one could leave has an immense moral and spiritual value, it is a very precious common good. Cities would remain destroyed and in ruins forever if there was no one who decides to stay even if they could leave - if there wasn't at least one such person. It’s among these people who are capable of remaining in the destroyed cities that the true prophets of our time should be sought: in the long and silent faithfulness in the middle of ruins.
In the very first few months, Jeremiah sees his prophecy fulfilled. Gedaliah showed himself to be a wise leader. His new residence became a meeting place for the dispersed Jews and a centre of rebirth: “And they gathered wine and summer fruits in great abundance” (40:12). A hope that lasted very little, however, because Ishmael, a member of the royal house of David's lineage, plotted a conspiracy against Gedaliah: “Ishmael the son of Nethaniah and the ten men with him rose up and struck down Gedaliah” (41:2). The "basket" had some rotten figs in it (24,8), and everything got rotten. However, the tragic story of Gedaliah is very important and beautiful. The text presents him to us as a truly wise and righteous man. Johanan, an officer, warned him that Ishmael was arriving to kill him on behalf of the Ammonites. Johanan tells him, “Please let me go and strike down Ishmael ... Why should he take your life...?” But Gedaliah replies: “You shall not do this thing” (40:15-16). Johanan, however, was right. Ishmael came, Gedaliah welcomed him as a guest, and was murdered by him while “they ate bread together” (41:1)
There have always been cases of hosts killed by their guests. But much more numerous are the hosts who were blessed and made better by their guests. Humanity became more human every time when the pain and fear for the murderer guest in the neighbouring house did not kill our freedom to open our door with confidence and generosity to the unknown guest arriving. Throughout history, the real winners were not the Benjamites from Gibeah (Judges 19-21), nor Polyphemus, even if their shadow keeps reappearing and threatening people all too often. When we welcome a guest into our house, we open our hearts and our table, we cannot always know if those entering are "angels" (Hebrews 13:2) or Ishmael the murderer. Gedaliah paid with his life for his choice of hospitality. He preferred to risk his encounter with the other, he was not prudent, he did not believe what Johanan had said. But that sacrifice of his allows us to indignate ourselves, to condemn Ishmael and to strengthen the good reasons for hospitality.
It is not the good stories with a happy ending that strengthen the deepest collective moral conscience of peoples. The most important ethical norms are formed in the continuous exercise of approval and indignation of people and characters that we have never met, starting with the fairy tales of childhood (the flesh and blood people around us are not enough to form our feelings: we also need a reality intensified and extended by the great biblical word and literature). The people that stops reading and telling their great stories is navigating itself towards the greatest kind of famine: that of empathy and indignation, the pillars supporting every good and righteous common house, and every human heart. A mortal wound of a righteous person brought about by an agapically imprudent act becomes a nail driven into the rock wall to continue the moral climb of the world, to a height that the sum of a thousand prudent actions without wounds does not reach or even touch - Christianity did not invent the agape: it recognized and exalted it. We were able to perceive the special resurrection of Christ because the Bible had resurrected many righteous people by cherishing their crosses and narrating them for centuries under the tents. Gedaliah did not die forever: he re-lives every time we read the Bible, smell his innocent blood, and recognize him in the victims of the earth. And then we continue to open the door.
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The Dawn of Midnight/25 - The risk of the encounter and the moral climb of the world
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/10/2017
“Greet the banks of the Jordan
and Zion's toppled towers.
Oh, my country so lovely and lost! 
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!” 
T. Solera e G.Verdi, Nabucco/Nabucodonosor (English translation by Norman Tucker and Tom Hammond
We can imagine the ending of a story a thousand times and have a certain idea of it because the end was already inscribed in the many signs that we have found and interpreted. But when that ending really arrives it's always different. We knew that little Marco would grow up to be a man, and when one day we realized that that beautiful "child" of ours was no longer there, our emotions and tears were all different, and beautiful. We have predicted and said endless times that our bad actions would lead us to the end, but the day we really took the books to court, it was all different, with pain and real tears that we had not been able to foresee. We had prepared our last day in community until the last small detail, but when we really closed the door of the room behind us for the last time and crossed the doorway forever, what happened in the depths of our hearts was totally new; we could not know either the taste of the last bread eaten with our companions, or the nostalgia for heaven that accompanied us throughout our life. We didn't know, we couldn't know, we didn't have to know it in order to try to make that impossible flight. We can and must prepare for it, we can and must accept the idea of the certain arrival of the angel of death with gentleness, but when it really happens the angel of death will not be as we have dreamt, and we will be surprised that while living our life we have also learned to die. But we could not know this in advance, otherwise it would not have been the greatest gift.
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The Dawn of Midnight/23 - Accepting the truth is reconciliation, not resignation
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/09/2017
Cassandra: “Has my arrow hit the mark or has it missed? Or am I a false prophet, a chatterer beggar? Swear an oath that you have not heard these things before and that I know well all the ancient sins of this house. (...) And yet again! Ah! The dreadful pain of prophecy fulfilled spins me around and – there! It begins to shake me!”
 Aeschylus, Agamennone (English translation by George Theodoridis)
When we cultivate a great illusion in life, the management of disappointment is always very complicated and extremely painful. Furthermore, if the time of illusion has been lived in good faith and for many years, when we can already glimpse the day of disappointment, we almost always prefer to remain deceived. Because calling the illusion its true name means having to say words that are too painful to say out loud: failure, (self-)deception, immaturity, manipulation. Yet, it would be enough to understand that disappointment is the only good flowering of illusion, live it as a blessed passage to bring good fruits, and then conclude our journey under the sun in truth. In the struggle between illusion and disappointment - and we are talking about real agony, especially in case of righteous and honest people - the outcome depends decisively on whom we stand next in the struggle. If we have one or more false prophets as companions, we remain imprisoned in the illusion, we continue to deny reality, even when it is obvious and evident to everyone. Because the false prophets are masters of presenting facts contrary to their ideology as the last test to pass in order to finally be ready for true salvation. If, however, we meet a true prophet in the struggle, the age of illusion can end at last, and the evil and oppressing pain can be transformed into the good labour of liberation. Faced with the total and definitive collapse of what seemed to us for so long to be the most beautiful and true life on earth and in heaven, the only possible salvation is to embrace disappointment. And to invite her to dinner, put the most beautiful tablecloths and cutlery, and open the best bottle of wine from the cellar. And then, together, to celebrate, inviting the few real friends and the very few prophets. Without this dinner of reconciliation we cannot discover one day that that life was really beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful than we had imagined.
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“Jeremiah set out from Jerusalem to go to the land of Benjamin to receive his portion there among the people. When he was at the Benjamin Gate, a sentry there named Irijah the son of Shelemiah, son of Hananiah, seized Jeremiah the prophet, saying, »You are deserting to the Chaldeans.« And Jeremiah said, »It is a lie; I am not deserting to the Chaldeans.« But Irijah would not listen to him, and seized Jeremiah and brought him to the officials. And the officials were enraged at Jeremiah, and they beat him and imprisoned him in the house of Jonathan (...). …Jeremiah had come to the dungeon cells and remained there many days” (Jeremiah 37:12-16). We arrived at the last part of Jeremiah's story, narrated by Baruch. It is the cycle of the so-called "martyrdom of Jeremiah". Of his ordeal, his passion. And there are many important and most vivid analogies of the passion of other righteous people to be found. The beatings, interrogations, secret nightly dialogues, the dungeon and the mud. We can become familiar with the Gospels, the life, passion and death of Jesus Christ without ever having read the Bible, the prophets, Job or Jeremiah. We can, so many have done so, so many still do so. But we can read the Gospels together with the whole of "the Law and the Prophets", and thereby learn to know another kind of Christianity, we begin another spiritual life, and perhaps we meet another Christ.
In a moment of a loosening grip of the Babylonian siege - as they were busy on the Egyptian front (37:11) -, Jeremiah, who is still free to move (37:4), leaves the city perhaps for the purchase of that land in Anathoth, of which the grandiose episode of Chapter 32 informs us. He is arrested and accused of collaborating with the enemy, and they throw him into a cistern. Like Joseph, another righteous one, the first prophet of salvation history - he was also accused by his brothers for his different words, for his prophetic dreams that were true and uncomfortable. He, too, was saved and not let to die in the cistern: “King Zedekiah sent for him and received him. The king questioned him secretly in his house and said, »Is there any word from the Lord?« Jeremiah said, »There is.« Then he said, »You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon«” (37:17).
Jeremiah's faithfulness to the word is extraordinary and impressive: we have seen this many times by now, but he continues to amaze and leave us breathless each time. The king sends for him to the prison, in search of words other than those of the prophet, perhaps thinking that the change in the geopolitical context and the reappearance of the Egyptian empire would produce another prophecy and another outcome. These tricks, however, don't work with Jeremiah, not even amidst general despair. And from the bottom of his cistern, old and exhausted, he offers the king the same words as always: the only salvation is surrender, the Chaldeans will return, and they will occupy Jerusalem and the temple. End of story.
This is another episode that says a lot and very loudly, telling us many things. One of them is the radical ambivalence of this king (and of power in general), who on the one hand seems to give credit to Jeremiah and asks him for a new oracle, and on the other hand would like to suggest him what words to say, which are of course different from those that Jeremiah has always said. The king seeks consolation; Jeremiah obeys the truth. Zedekiah acts as those who in the face of a decisive choice feel the need for a "prophet" to advise and consult them, but does not have the moral strength to go to someone honest and true because he may offer some uncomfortable advice; and so he seeks, sometimes unconsciously, a spiritual father or a manipulable spiritual coach who will advise him the very choice that he has already made in his heart. Fake discernment without a love for truth is the typical form of deception always cultivated by false prophets. In fact, Jeremiah adds: “Where are your prophets who prophesied to you, saying, »The king of Babylon will not come against you and against this land«” (37:19). As if to say: if you want the usual consoling lies, turn to your court prophets, to the adulators who have always told you what you wanted to hear, and have pushed you into the abyss. But Jeremiah resists until the end: he doesn't become a servant of power and its fictions. Jeremiah is great for many things, but he is immense for this unconditional faithfulness to the word and to his own dignity. Faced with the imminent defeat of the king and the people, he could give in to human pietas and say a word of consolation - as the one who, at the bedside of a dying friend, tells him with love, “You'll see that you’ll get better”. We tend to do it, Jeremiah does not: so as to repeat the absolute value of the truth of the word, in every circumstance, even in the most dramatic situation. Even when truth seems to conflict with the demands of charity, Jeremiah tells us that the only way to surely betray charity is not serving the truth of the word. Discounts, sales, remissions... the prophets leave these to our businesses, yesterday and today.
The secret dialogue between the prophet and the king continues: “Jeremiah also said to King Zedekiah, »What wrong have I done to you or your servants or this people, that you have put me in prison? (...) Now hear, please, O my lord the king: let my humble plea come before you and do not send me back to the house of Jonathan the secretary, lest I die there.« So King Zedekiah gave orders, and they committed Jeremiah to the court of the guard. And a loaf of bread was given him daily from the bakers' street, until all the bread of the city was gone” (37:18-21).
In this dialogue, the words of Jeremiah are not preceded by “Thus says the Lord” or "The oracle of the Lord". We are faced with a dialogue between two men, a sovereign and a prophet, a king and his prisoner. Jeremiah's words in the Book of Jeremiah are not all words of YHWH. There are also many words of Jeremiah himself, which are no less beautiful and important - like the story of his vocation, his trials, his intimate songs. This plea that the old prophet, exhausted by imprisonment, now addresses to the king is neither a prophetic gesture nor a command of God. It’s only a word of Jeremiah from Anathoth. A word like the many words that the sufferers shout out to the powerful who can liberate them. Perhaps all the "oracles" received in the course of our existence have made up a capital that we will spend when we have to reach the top of our Golgotha, where we will remember only one of those words heard and spoken, and we will compose our psalm of abandonment.
In the chapters of his martyrdom narrated by his scribe Baruch, Jeremiah also appears increasingly defenceless, alone, at the mercy of the leaders of his enemies. The words he repeats are those he has always said: “Thus says the Lord: He who stays in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live. He shall have his life as a prize of war, and live. Thus says the Lord: This city shall surely be given into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon and be taken” (38:2-3). He has no other words to say. And so the ministers and generals, still captured by nationalist and warrior ideology, ask the king that Jeremiah be arrested again. And King Zedekiah answers: “Behold, he is in your hands, for the king can do nothing against you” (38:5). Pilate could not be missing from this story of passion - he is almost always there in the true passions of men and God: “So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king's son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud” (38:6).
Jeremiah sinks into the mud. We can see him sinking while we continue frittering our time away in our illusions. Or we can decide to sink with him, and wait for salvation in the cistern, but without knowing if an Ethiopian eunuch will come to save us. Because there are not enough "Ethiopians" to save all Jeremiahs who continue to sink into the mud of the world.
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The Dawn of Midnight/23 - Accepting the truth is reconciliation, not resignation
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/09/2017
Cassandra: “Has my arrow hit the mark or has it missed? Or am I a false prophet, a chatterer beggar? Swear an oath that you have not heard these things before and that I know well all the ancient sins of this house. (...) And yet again! Ah! The dreadful pain of prophecy fulfilled spins me around and – there! It begins to shake me!”
 Aeschylus, Agamennone (English translation by George Theodoridis)
When we cultivate a great illusion in life, the management of disappointment is always very complicated and extremely painful. Furthermore, if the time of illusion has been lived in good faith and for many years, when we can already glimpse the day of disappointment, we almost always prefer to remain deceived. Because calling the illusion its true name means having to say words that are too painful to say out loud: failure, (self-)deception, immaturity, manipulation. Yet, it would be enough to understand that disappointment is the only good flowering of illusion, live it as a blessed passage to bring good fruits, and then conclude our journey under the sun in truth. In the struggle between illusion and disappointment - and we are talking about real agony, especially in case of righteous and honest people - the outcome depends decisively on whom we stand next in the struggle. If we have one or more false prophets as companions, we remain imprisoned in the illusion, we continue to deny reality, even when it is obvious and evident to everyone. Because the false prophets are masters of presenting facts contrary to their ideology as the last test to pass in order to finally be ready for true salvation. If, however, we meet a true prophet in the struggle, the age of illusion can end at last, and the evil and oppressing pain can be transformed into the good labour of liberation. Faced with the total and definitive collapse of what seemed to us for so long to be the most beautiful and true life on earth and in heaven, the only possible salvation is to embrace disappointment. And to invite her to dinner, put the most beautiful tablecloths and cutlery, and open the best bottle of wine from the cellar. And then, together, to celebrate, inviting the few real friends and the very few prophets. Without this dinner of reconciliation we cannot discover one day that that life was really beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful than we had imagined.
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The Dawn of Midnight/21 - Truth of life and salvation meet on the way
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/09/2017
“Even if you don’t read it, you are in the Bible .“ 
E. Canetti, Il cuore segreto dell'orologio (The Secret Heart of the Clock)
When a community is experiencing a deep, long and uncertain crisis, what is really at stake is the past-future link. Because if it is true that the only good future is the one that turns the past into a blessing, redeems it and frees it from the trap of nostalgia, it is equally true that without a good history of yesterday there are no new words today to talk about a good and credible tomorrow. Individual and collective crises are famines of the future and famines of the past, because it is the friendship between the past and the future that makes the present beautiful and fruitful in every stage of life. Even when the sunset is approaching, and the shadow of the past becomes very long, memories feed us and accompany us at all times. The past alone is not enough for the present, no matter how great and wonderful it was. We should wait for a new word, to see the face of a daughter again who will come today, too. We should hope to see, in the end, the face of God that we cherished in our heart’s desire for a whole life. In order to live the time of crisis well, it is therefore essential to have an exciting future that blossoms from a reconciled present with a past lived as a gift and promise, beyond wounds, disappointments and failures. It is in the right reciprocity between roots and gems, between bereshit and eskaton that you really find the opportunity to continue generating life and future in the now.
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“The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to make a proclamation of liberty to them, that everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother” (Jeremiah 34:8-9). Chapter 34 of the Book of Jeremiah contains the account of an actual event that happened in Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege. Jeremiah receives a message that touches the heart of the social and political life of his people, because it concerns the salvation and liberation of men and women who were in the state of slavery. At that time, a Jew could become a slave to another Jew essentially because of debts. They were the so-called debt slaves. The Law received by Moses on Sinai (Exodus 21) said that economic slavery could not last more than six years (in the Code of Hammurabi, the maximum is three years: § 117).
In antiquity, unsettled debts were a very serious thing, but even more serious and alive was the collective and religious conscience that slavery could not last forever, that an economic failure should not become a condemnation for life, that the economy was not the last word - an awareness that we have lost over time. The liberation of slaves was therefore one of the great precepts linked to the institution of the shabbat: in the seventh year the slaves had to be made free again. Therefore, in Israel the liberation of the slaves was a sign and a memorial of the great liberation from slavery in Egypt, always present and very much alive in the collective conscience of the people. That first liberation from slavery was supposed to teach Israel that God is a liberator, that he does not want slave people but free people, that YHWH is the God of freedom. However, as also Jeremiah reminds them: “But your fathers did not listen to me or incline their ears to me” (34:14). That is, despite the Torah, the slaves were not freed, and many Jews found themselves in a prolonged state of slavery and enslavement, private property of other Jews, used as instruments and things to satisfy the needs of others. This episode, therefore, stems from a condition characterised by the generalized desecration of the Covenant and the Law, which makes a precept that should have been part of the ordinary life of the people stand out.
From the story we learn that the people of Israel first obey and slaves are actually freed. But shortly after that there is a real twist in the story, one of those which the Book of Jeremiah is getting us become used to (but we don't have to get used to them). Those who liberated their slaves “afterward (...) turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free, and brought them into subjection as slaves” (34:11). We are faced with an upside down type of repentance, a perverted conversion that cancels the earlier good conversion. The people who had finally listened to the prophet change their mind and restore the original, unequal condition. We do not know the reasons for this reconsideration - perhaps the loosening of the siege of Nebuchadnezzar that produced a new wave of nationalistic and anti-Jeremiah ideology. What we know is that that pact of liberation had not been internalized by the people, it had remained on the surface; and so a crisis or a dimming of fear was enough to violate that promise, the Covenant and the word of Jeremiah. That good and fair collective resolution did not have enough strength to last.
Durability is the crucial element in pacts. I can sincerely repent and promise to change my life, we can even do it together, but only time is the real proof that that conversion was deep enough to last and so bring about real change. Only God (and the true prophets) can change the reality of things through the word, by saying it. We too can and must begin a change by saying it, giving each other sincere words that express our desire and need to start again. But if and as long as those words do not become actions, deeds, things, flesh, hands and legs, we can go down to the street and retake the slaves that we have just freed, at any time. As long as time does not flow through our own flesh and into the flesh of others, transforming it, we cannot know the degree of truth of the words that we have pronounced sincerely. The truth of our words and those of others is revealed only when we have said them with our sweat, with our arms, with our tears - perhaps we will never know if some of the decisive words of our lives were true, but we can continue to hope that they were true, or at least wish for it.
But the most serious and tremendous perverse reconsiderations are the collective ones, when a community, a people, an entire generation denies the words and gestures that they had said in some luminous moments of their history. That’s when they re-erect the walls that were already demolished one day, close borders that one day, listening to a word, they themselves opened up. Again, we are letting children die in a sea that has become their enemy. After this sad episode of infidelity, the Book by Jeremiah immediately adds a wonderful story of the opposite sign. It is the story of the faithfulness of the Rechabites, which shows us yet another face of Jeremiah, through his genuine prophetic gesture: “Go to the house of the Rechabites and speak with them and bring them to the house of the Lord, into one of the chambers; then offer them wine to drink” (35:2). The Rechabites were a nomadic community, which at some point in its history had joined Israel and her religion. Their founder, two centuries before this meeting with Jeremiah, had ordered the community to remain nomadic, not to drink wine, not to build houses or cultivate vineyards - perhaps the lack of cultivating vineyards and no wine drinking were connected as precepts in basically self-sufficient communities. Jeremiah knows their law, yet he offers them some wine jugs: “But they answered, ‘We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, ‘You shall not drink wine, neither you nor your sons forever. You shall not build a house; you shall not sow seed; you shall not plant or have a vineyard” (35:6-7). Jeremiah praises this faithful community, and prophesies about their future and fruitfulness. “thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Jonadab the son of Rechab shall never lack a man to stand before me” (35:19). Vocations are the sacrament of faithful communities.
At a time of widespread unfaithfulness, it is a nomadic community, immigrated to the city trying to escape a war, not belonging to the twelve tribes of Israel, to give us a testimony of faithfulness, and to offer consolation to the prophet. This praise for the Rechabites is not, however, improvisational in the Book of Jeremiah and in the Bible, narrating an ambivalent and generally critical relationship with the city. The first citizen was Cain, and the early faithful times of Israel are a tale of nomads and tents. When Israel finally lived in the promised land, the contamination of her religion also began, she suffered the influence of the contemporary cults and succumbed to the ever-present sin of idolatry. For the prophets Jerusalem is a holy city, but it is also a prostitute city. Settling down, building houses and planting vineyards was the beginning of a spiritual and identity decay of the people, which had reached the level of the widespread corruption that Jeremiah is telling us about.
Every love story begins with nomadic ways. Following a voice, we walk decisively and happily towards the future. Even if we cross through a desert we don't see it, because what we really see and hear is a mobile tent and a wonderful voice. Then we arrive at the promised land, we stop and settle down, we set up a worship, a temple, and we begin the construction of the "house, the vineyard, the fields". The nearby cultures and cults fascinate and seduce us, that voice seems increasingly distant, faint, we confuse it with the bewitching songs of idols. One night, or at times, we dream of that desert which is now far away, the first love, the poor tent, the purity of the first voice. Someone, after this very real dream, disassembles the buildings, leaves the fields and vineyards, and starts walking in a new desert, alone or with others. Others remain in the city, like Jeremiah, but they start singing the song of the desert and the bride. And they tell us that the wandering Aramean is the human condition, and that the true promise is not a land but a tent on an endless road. And when they meet a nomad, a migrant or a vagabond, they see a word of salvation in him, and they bless him.
Dedicated to Odilon Junior, pioneer and witness of the Economy of Communion in Brazil and in the world
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The Dawn of Midnight/21 - Truth of life and salvation meet on the way
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/09/2017
“Even if you don’t read it, you are in the Bible .“ 
E. Canetti, Il cuore segreto dell'orologio (The Secret Heart of the Clock)
When a community is experiencing a deep, long and uncertain crisis, what is really at stake is the past-future link. Because if it is true that the only good future is the one that turns the past into a blessing, redeems it and frees it from the trap of nostalgia, it is equally true that without a good history of yesterday there are no new words today to talk about a good and credible tomorrow. Individual and collective crises are famines of the future and famines of the past, because it is the friendship between the past and the future that makes the present beautiful and fruitful in every stage of life. Even when the sunset is approaching, and the shadow of the past becomes very long, memories feed us and accompany us at all times. The past alone is not enough for the present, no matter how great and wonderful it was. We should wait for a new word, to see the face of a daughter again who will come today, too. We should hope to see, in the end, the face of God that we cherished in our heart’s desire for a whole life. In order to live the time of crisis well, it is therefore essential to have an exciting future that blossoms from a reconciled present with a past lived as a gift and promise, beyond wounds, disappointments and failures. It is in the right reciprocity between roots and gems, between bereshit and eskaton that you really find the opportunity to continue generating life and future in the now.
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The Dawn of Midnight/19 - Together, in the pact-communion that can change history
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/08/2017

“Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness (...)”
D. Bonhoeffer, Letter written on 21 July 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)
Perhaps there is no greater gift than the gift of hope. It is a primary good. We can be satiated with merchandise and all kinds of comfort goods, but we still die in despair. The promised land seems unattainable at all times, but above all when we cross deserts, then the exile seems endless. Those who give us true and not vain hope first look our despair into the eyes, cross through it, make it their own. They fight false hopes, undergo all the consequences and wounds of the struggle. They resist that dimension of human pietas that brings so many to succumb to the temptation to offer false consolations - to themselves and to others. From the middle of the night the prophets announce to us a true dawn we still cannot see, only through their eyes. Just like when everything around us has been talking only of death and vanitas for a long time, but one day there comes a friend and talks about heaven to us. And, this time, finally, everything seems true, beyond the artificial paradises that kept deceiving us in the age of illusion. And it is, finally, all grace, all charis, all gratuitousness: “For I will restore health to you, / and your wounds I will heal” (Jeremiah 30:17).
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We have reached the chapters known as Jeremiah's Book of Consolation, a diptych that contains wonderful verses, some of the greatest of Jeremiah and the Bible. But in order to understand them, we must keep a close eye on and focus our soul around all of the first part of his book, his disappointments, his true and hard words of misfortune. We must see Jeremiah betrayed again by his relatives from Anathoth, then with the yoke on his neck, with the pitcher in his hand, chained in the prison of the temple. And getting to the banks of the Jordan only after these forty years of desert. Without the background of the preceding chapters, these songs of hope and consolation lose all their strength, they do not move us, they do not penetrate into our flesh, they do not make us exult and they do not become a completely different kind of prayer: “the Lord appeared to him from far away. / I have loved you with an everlasting love; / therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. / Again I will build you, and you shall be built, / O virgin Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with tambourines / and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers” (31:3-4).
The announcement of this new joy does not arise from the oblivion of the times of pain and anguish. Those days are always present and very much alive, because it is the truth of the pain of yesterday that makes the hope of today true and not vain: “A voice is heard in Ramah, / lamentation and bitter weeping. / Rachel is weeping for her children; / she refuses to be comforted for her children, / because they are no more” (31:15). The inconsolable cry of Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob-Israel, makes the consolation of Jeremiah truer and more beautiful, because it brings him closer to the real life of everyone: “There is hope for your future, (...) / and your children shall come back to their own country (31:17).
Rachel's tears and Jeremiah's consolation are side by side in the same song. Because the announcement of the arrival or return of a child does not erase the pain for the lost child and the real and immense types of pain are not the enemies of joy but can become its closest friends. Jeremiah's consolation is truer because he does not forget Rachel's cry for the children who are lost forever. He looks at it, loves it, assumes it and makes it flourish in hope. However it happens just too many times that, dazzled by the Easter light, we can no longer see the many who continue to be crucified, we no longer see Rachel crying without consolation. And we believe that there are no more poor people because we simply do not see them anymore, as we are well-sheltered in the comfort of our homes and in the temples of those who, forgetting the crucifixes forget the resurrection, too, or confuse it all with the spectacular ghosts generated by false prophets.
“Set up road markers for yourself; / make yourself guideposts; / consider well the highway, / the road by which you went. / Return, O virgin Israel, / return to these your cities” (31:21). The way to return home is, almost always, the same road that led us to exile. The road to slavery and freedom are the same: only the direction is opposite. It’s enough just to reverse the way, give it an opposite meaning. There are many people who never return home again and are lost in alternate winding paths because the memory of the pain of the journey to exile impedes their understanding of the new freedom being at the end of the path of slavery, which is in the opposite direction. The way to exit a big crisis is simply by changing the direction of the same road that generated it. We can return to the lost faith by walking the same path we did when losing it, but in the opposite direction. We return home by re-walking the road that took us away, and only to find out on the way that those signs that guided us in our escape had other letters and other numbers on their back side, but we could not see them until we turned back, walking backwards: “How long will you waver, / O faithless daughter?” (31:22)
This verse closes with an unexpected and wonderful conclusion, which continues to create problems for the exegetes: “For the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: / a woman encircles a man” (31:22). It’s a mysterious and beautiful phrase, like many things in life are beautiful just because they are incomplete, open, ambivalent, alive. Therefore, it is from this ambiguous opening that we can glimpse Jeremiah, who, under a special creative inspiration, returns in his thought to the days of Creation, the first breath of the spirit, to light and darkness, to Adam, to the woman, their disobedience that generated those tremendous words of Elohim: “To the woman he said, / »I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; / in pain you shall bring forth children. / Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, / but he shall rule over you«” (Genesis 3:16). The prophets have always suffered and continue to suffer when they read this sentence because they have seen it being realised in families, politics, businesses, religions; they saw it yesterday, we continue to see it today, too many times still. Perhaps, in giving us his hope at the end of the night, Jeremiah wanted to include a promise of a new and different relationship between man and woman, which he could not see, and we cannot fully see it yet, either. Every full human hope is also hope of reciprocity and communion, of the meeting of gazes, coming from different yet equal pairs of eyes.
We were just acclimated to this new and beautiful hope, and while the chapter is approaching its sunset it gives us its most beautiful colours. At the end of the vision of the promise of returning home, Jeremiah touches his prophetic-poetic peak, and the promise of salvation flourishes in the rightly-famous verses about the New Covenant. Let us read how Jeremiah has given it to us, without missing even a comma, letting ourselves be wounded here and now: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (31:31-33).
Every great and true hope of liberation is also a promise of a new alliance. When the first pact was betrayed, wounded and defamed, the promise of a homecoming must necessarily become a promise of a new covenant. These are the decisive moments when the memory and the renewal of the first pact is no longer enough: there is a need to dream of a different future together. When we left the house and did not come back, when we saw the other who did so, for the hope in a future together it is not enough to remember the days of the first love, or to open the wedding album. What’s necessary is simply to see ourselves at another altar tomorrow, as we say other words, with new witnesses, with a new kind of love. Or when the first pact that brought us into this community has become mute, the first prayers a child’s play, the first love story a deception, we cannot get saved without the promise of a new alliance, unless one day a prophet announces another covenant, other prayers, another life. Life does not come to full maturity if it does not join into a new covenant from the first moment, even if it is the one with the angel of death that makes its announcement to us as it embraces us. When we enter the time of the new covenant, what is external becomes internal, the Law becomes flesh and we begin to really obey the best part of us.
But Jeremiah tells us something even more specific, too. This new and decisive phase of people and communities is not an individual and/or solitary achievement. It is a covenant, a pact, communion. In the new covenant we can only enter together, though, once inside, it is the freedom and love of everyone that reaches a new phase. The fruits are personal, but the conquest is collective. Everyone finds themselves inside the law that they used to know from outside, but we are not the writers of this new law. We find that it is written by a hand that is not ours. And the greatest reciprocity and the greatest freedom possible under the sun are born.
But while we were in exile we could not know about it. We had to start on the way back, recognize it as the same one that had led us to slavery and continue walking. And, in the sunset, we had to meet a prophet who announced the new covenant. We believed him, and we continued to walk. We have become new creation, the true hope of the future has saved the true pain of the past. And then we understood, or at least sensed, that this new alliance was not the last one. Once again we felt alive, and we started walking again.
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The Dawn of Midnight/19 - Together, in the pact-communion that can change history
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 27/08/2017

“Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness (...)”
D. Bonhoeffer, Letter written on 21 July 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)
Perhaps there is no greater gift than the gift of hope. It is a primary good. We can be satiated with merchandise and all kinds of comfort goods, but we still die in despair. The promised land seems unattainable at all times, but above all when we cross deserts, then the exile seems endless. Those who give us true and not vain hope first look our despair into the eyes, cross through it, make it their own. They fight false hopes, undergo all the consequences and wounds of the struggle. They resist that dimension of human pietas that brings so many to succumb to the temptation to offer false consolations - to themselves and to others. From the middle of the night the prophets announce to us a true dawn we still cannot see, only through their eyes. Just like when everything around us has been talking only of death and vanitas for a long time, but one day there comes a friend and talks about heaven to us. And, this time, finally, everything seems true, beyond the artificial paradises that kept deceiving us in the age of illusion. And it is, finally, all grace, all charis, all gratuitousness: “For I will restore health to you, / and your wounds I will heal” (Jeremiah 30:17).
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The Dawn of Midnight/17 - It is decisive to recognize who uses the past to kill the future
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/08/2017
 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, / lest you be like him yourself. / Answer a fool according to his folly, / lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
Proverbs 26

Many words are used to describe work, one of them is: travail. Trabalho, travaglio, trabajo all derive from the Latin trepalium, which meant yoke (for animals). It was a shaped wooden bar, with ropes and laces attached to it. It was similar to the horizontal arm of a cross. Over time, the yoke has become a symbol of submission by animals or people and a symbol of slavery. Peoples have fought for and attained freedom and justice by breaking up the yokes of slavery, and have been freed from these travails and tribulations. No one loves being subjugated, being put under a yoke by others. Only the subversive and radical message of Jesus of Nazareth could use the image of the yoke to express the bond between him and his disciples: it is light and gentle, but still a yoke. Perhaps, in using this paradoxical image, the evangelist, here too, had Jeremiah in mind: “this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Thus the Lord said to me: »Make yourself straps and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck.«” (Jeremiah 27:1-2).
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Jeremiah receives another incarnate word, a verb by YHWH that speaks through the flesh of the prophet. It is not about rhetorical techniques, nor even tools to shock and then seduce the public. These are words of YHWH, like the others, like the pitcher, the belt, the baskets of figs, like Isaiah's nakedness, like Ezekiel’s sleeping on his side. Baruch, Jeremiah’s faithful chronicler also reports the explanation of that gesture (“Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon... All the nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson” 27:6-7), but when they saw the subjugated prophet come, perhaps everything was already quite clear to those ancient men who used the many non-verbal languages.
There were representatives of neighbouring peoples in Jerusalem who went there to make an alliance and war against the Babylonians, supported by the nationalist illusions of their “prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, »You shall not serve the king of Babylon.« For it is a lie that they are prophesying to you” (27:9-10). Jeremiah continues his battle against the illusions produced by the professionals of lies.
The confrontation with the false prophecy reaches a peak in the next chapter, which is also one of the dramatic summits of the entire book, when Jeremiah is publicly faced and challenged by another prophet:
Hananiah, an exponent of the prophets of salvation and the nationalist ideology of the temple: “Hananiah the son of Azzur, the prophet from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests and all the people, saying, »Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord's house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon«” (28:1-3).
After the many attacks on Jeremiah we have already seen, another prophet comes to face him, a 'colleague' who works in Jerusalem just like him, probably a figure of some importance among the prophets of the city. Baruch, the narrator of the episode is the one who calls him 'prophet'. For the people, therefore, Hananiah is a prophet like Jeremiah, both of them are accredited as prophets among the people and the priests. At the beginning of the story we do not know whether Hananiah is a true prophet or a false one. Certainly his contemporaries did not know it either, and we do not have to know. If we want these words to touch us in the flesh, we must go down with Jeremiah, see him fight with Hananiah, and discover who the true prophet is of the two is and why.
First of all there is something not obvious but important: Hananiah's discourse is the same as that of Jeremiah. He, too, starts his speech by the prophetic phrase ‘thus says the Lord,’ and then calls God by the name from the Covenant (YHWH). His message, however, is the opposite of Jeremiah’s - no submission to Babylon. In front of the people and the temple, the two prophets appeared as two competitors selling the same 'product', with a decisive difference: that of Jeremiah had a very high price, while that of Hananiah was offered free of charge. True prophets know how to maintain high prices without giving in to the demand of the people for discounts and sales, because prophetic dumping is the death of true prophecy.
The first dramatic turn is Jeremiah's first answer: “the prophet Jeremiah said, »Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord make the words that you have prophesied come true«” (28:6). His first word is 'amen', which in this context means 'I wish it were as you say.’ Jeremiah does not love peace and freedom less than Hananiah and the people, but he cannot tell illusions to console them. And so he continues with a complex discourse which includes something very important: “The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace (shalom), when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” (28:8-9). Jeremiah calls the ancient prophetic tradition into question, those who “preceded you and me” (another acknowledgement of Hananiah as a prophet), and reminds that those prophets were prophets of misfortune, and they were true prophets. On some rare occasions the prophets have also prophesied salvation, but it was the historical verification of their prophecy that decided on the truth of their words. As if to say that it is far more common that a true prophet prophesies “war, famine, and pestilence” than prosperity and peace. The prophecy of misfortune is most likely to be authentic, and we can confirm it ex ante, before the events predicted actually take place. That of salvation can only be validated ex post. Why? The explanation can be found in the gratuitousness of true prophecy.
When a prophet announces misfortunes and sorrow, above all to "great kingdoms," all he gets in return is persecution and suffering because, as we can see, the leaders and the people do not love prophets of misfortune. However, when a prophet envisions that prosperity and peace for the people that they want, this prophecy will most likely produce consensus, success, power and wealth - temptations that are always very strong, at times invincible. So it is far more plausible that the one who announces what the leaders of the people do not want to hear is a true prophet. This reasoning has an extraordinary sapiential force. We have no assurance that the prophet of misfortune is not false (or crazy) - certainty does not exist when it comes to such great things to decide on. With no incentives but only costs to prophesy, the prophecy of misfortune is more likely to be authentic.
The message came clear and strong to Hananiah (and probably also to the people who attended the temple). His reaction produced another unpredictable and impressive scene: “Then the prophet Hananiah took the yoke-bars from the neck of Jeremiah the prophet and broke them. And Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the people, saying, »Thus says the Lord: Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two years«” (28:10-11). It’s a violent and spectacular gesture, which had to appear like a clamorous duel victory and a clear sign to see which side was the real oracle.
At this point the text shows us a confused and helpless Jeremiah. He was used to persecutions and defeats. This time, though, the difficulty he encounters is of a different nature. Another prophet, in the name of the same God, prophesying with the same prophetic authority, with an equal and opposite action breaks the symbol of Jeremiah, denies the contents of his prophecy and proposes another one, with the opposite sign. But there is something deeper to consider here. The reader of the Bible as well as the contemporaries of Jeremiah knew that Hananiah was directly linked to the authentic tradition of the Covenant. In the Torah, in the Psalms, we find many references (Gen 27:40; Psalm 18) to the yoke broken by YHWH to free his people from slavery: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt... And I have broken the bars of your yoke” (Lev 26:13). But Ananias found great support especially in Isaiah, who had obtained the miraculous liberation of Jerusalem from the Assyrians from God about a hundred years earlier. So the conviction of the inviolability of the temple and the city was based on a great miracle by a great prophet. That historic truth from earlier days – which was older and therefore more authoritative – had become an ideology, because it prevented the acceptance of the word of another prophet saying something true but different in a different historical moment. We fall into ideology whenever the truth of yesterday becomes the eclipse of the different truth of today, because it becomes an idol. Hananiah, perhaps in good faith, was leading his people astray, bringing them to the massacre, but not in the name of a false prophet or foreign gods - he was doing it in the name of tradition and a miracle of a true prophet. He used the past to kill the future. The most powerful and infallible ideologies, whether religious or secular, are not the unfounded ones, but those that are absolutely well-founded on some true words and facts of yesterday that silence and blind the true words and facts of today.
Jeremiah does not respond to Ananias. He stays silent. Breaking and desecrating the sign of the prophet is the greatest outrage. The gesture is a flesh-word, and there is no other gesture to answer the destruction caused by it: one flesh cannot be replaced by another, nor can one child be substituted by another. If the words said in the Bible are 'forever', the prophetic gesture is 'forever and ever'. After a gesture of profanation the prophet can only be silent. To say new words the gift of a new word of God is needed, and if and until it comes, the prophet remains mute and defeated: “...Jeremiah the prophet went his way” (28:11). This is a wonderful form of the meekness and humility of heart that accompanies and nourishes the extraordinary strength of the prophets.
YHWH sent a new word, and Jeremiah answered Hananiah: “Listen, Hananiah, the Lord has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie” (28:15). Hananiah died within a year, disappearing from the Bible after this transient passage. But from the heart of the book of Jeremiah, Hananiah will always remind us of the danger of all the ideologies of tradition that kill the true prophets of today in the name of those of yesterday.
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The Dawn of Midnight/17 - It is decisive to recognize who uses the past to kill the future
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/08/2017
 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, / lest you be like him yourself. / Answer a fool according to his folly, / lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
Proverbs 26

Many words are used to describe work, one of them is: travail. Trabalho, travaglio, trabajo all derive from the Latin trepalium, which meant yoke (for animals). It was a shaped wooden bar, with ropes and laces attached to it. It was similar to the horizontal arm of a cross. Over time, the yoke has become a symbol of submission by animals or people and a symbol of slavery. Peoples have fought for and attained freedom and justice by breaking up the yokes of slavery, and have been freed from these travails and tribulations. No one loves being subjugated, being put under a yoke by others. Only the subversive and radical message of Jesus of Nazareth could use the image of the yoke to express the bond between him and his disciples: it is light and gentle, but still a yoke. Perhaps, in using this paradoxical image, the evangelist, here too, had Jeremiah in mind: “this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Thus the Lord said to me: »Make yourself straps and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck.«” (Jeremiah 27:1-2).
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