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The Dawn of Midnight/15 - God’s highness saves us from talking only about our dreams.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/07/2017

"From the aimed image / I am keeping watch on the instant / With imminence of wait / And I am not waiting for anybody:
In the lit shade / I am spying upon the bell / Which, imperceptible, is spreading / A pollen of sound – / And I am not waiting for anybody:
Between four walls / Astonished of space / More than a desert / I am not waiting for anybody:
But he must come; / He will come, / if I resist, / To blossom not seen, / He will come all of a sudden, / When I least realize:
He will come almost pardon / Of what he makes die, / He will come to make me certain / Of his and my treasure, 
He will come as a relief / Of my and his pains, / His whisper / Will come, perhaps it is already coming.”
Clemente Rebora, Dall’immagine tesa  (From the Aimed Image, English translation by Roberto Filippetti)
False prophecy in good faith is perhaps the most abundant thing under the sun, and it’s among the most dangerous phenomena in the world. There have always been and there are still false prophets in bad faith, who do not give voice to any voice and they know it well. But there are also false prophets in good faith, who don’t give voice to any voice and do not know it, and confuse the "voice of God" with their own fantasies, emotions and thoughts. False prophets are not all scoundrels and swindlers, some of them are convinced to be prophets even though they aren’t.
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Communities, movements and ideal-driven organizations abound in false prophets in good faith, to be found at all levels and in all roles of government, even among the founders. In fact, their subjective good faith just makes it more difficult to exercise discernment of the spirits for those around them, because the sincerity of their feelings often creates a "curtain effect" that prevents them from seeing the vanity of their words. And it makes the role of true prophets unpopular and difficult as they seek to identify this kind of false prophecy by vocation because, almost always, the people, confused by their genuine emotions, defend false prophets in good faith. Blunders caused by self-deception are very common; they are perfect traps from which it is very difficult to escape because the good faith of the deceivers and the deceived reinforce each other. How to be saved?
Jeremiah has just finished prophesying the end of Israel and the ruin of its corrupt kings, using ever stronger and harder tones – “Therefore thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: »They shall not lament for him (...) With the burial of a donkey he shall be buried«” (Jeremiah 22:18-19) – and he immediately astonishes us with the announcement of a great hope: “Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. (...) neither shall any be missing” (23:3-4). True prophets are like this: today they announce death, tomorrow life, because they are the mouth of another mouth that they do not command and control.
In chapter 23 of his book, Jeremiah reaches the culmination of his teaching on false prophecy. He has already spoken about it several times, but now, with the passing of years, the prophet has come to a great synthesis and offers us an authentic spiritual and anthropological masterpiece, which may well have been unsurpassed ever since. Only a true prophet is able to recognize and unmask the false prophets: “In the prophets of Samaria / I saw an unsavoury thing: / they prophesied by Baal / and led my people Israel astray. / But in the prophets of Jerusalem / I have seen a horrible thing: / they commit adultery and walk in lies; / they strengthen the hands of evildoers, / so that no one turns from his evil”. (23:13-14). There is an interesting first note here: the prophecy in the name of other gods (Baal), more common in the realm of the North (Samaria), where contaminations of cults were more frequent, seems a less serious problem than that of the prophets of the Temple of Jerusalem: though they (often) prophesy in the name of the God of the Covenant (YHWH), they have completely fallen and been perverted. The first strategy he uses to expose them is the most commonly used one at any time: to incriminate their perverse moral conduct by stating that they cannot be true prophets because their concrete life says the opposite of the words of their mouth.
But the moral strategy alone is not enough to detect false prophecy because there have always been, and there are, prophets of a dubious moral conduct saying true words. The morality of the instrument of the voice can be a clue, but it is never the experimentum crucis (a decisive, crucial experiment, Lat. - the tr.) to prove the falsehood of a prophetic word. The prophet is not chosen because he is better and more honest than the others: he almost always has the average morality of his people, sometimes he is better and at others he is worse. It is not the moral consistency of his conduct that is the first and most convincing proof of the truth he says - indeed, many times showing the morality of one's own person as a proof of the truth of their own words is a sure indication of false prophecy. The greatest fatigue faced by those facing prophetic words pronounced by those who have turned morally corrupt is to understand whether this moral conduct is unworthy as a symptom of false prophecy or it is just a sign of fragility and/or sin of the instrument of the voice. It’s a great fatigue, which usually leads to condemnation, but sometimes depends on a quick discernment confused by the turmoil of feelings and the heart. Prophets, like all men and women, have weaknesses, illnesses, sometimes even neurosis - and these coexist with their vocation; they affect it, sometimes too much, but remain different things, although we almost always end up making a vocation only a matter of ethics.
In fact, after the moral accusation, Jeremiah passes on to a different, more complex, deeper level, directly touching the heart of the question, that is, the nature of the prophetic vocation: “Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord” (23:16). Here we can see another decisive point in the phenomenology of prophecy: those false prophets announce only "visions of their own minds," and not what comes “from the mouth of the Lord.” Here Jeremiah shows us something new: false prophets who may be in good faith, but simply announce their own ideas, perhaps honestly convinced of speaking God's words. Some verses later Jeremiah makes us see a variant of this form of false prophecy, too, the dreamlike one: “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying, »I have dreamed, I have dreamed!« How long shall there be lies in the heart of the prophets who prophesy lies, and who prophesy the deceit of their own heart?” (23:25-26). In order to understand this judgement by Jeremiah we must place it in the Middle Eastern world, inhabited by a large number of dream-readers, soothsayers, sorcerers and magicians who were often regarded by the people as prophets - a typical form of suffering of the true prophets is to be equated with the many tricksters whom the people consider their colleagues: “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word speak my word faithfully” (23:28). Here too we are dealing with people who confuse the "visions of their own minds" with YHWH's different voice, although the two things are different and must remain distinct.
It is increasingly clear that what matters to Jeremiah is not so much the good or bad faith or the morality or immorality of the people who declare themselves or are declared prophets. So what is really important, what comes before everything else? Jeremiah has already provided some criteria for the discernment of prophecy in his book, but now he is about to lead us to the heart of the matter. He tells us that in fact, there is only one criterion, but it is so simple that it may not satisfy us: false prophets - of any type - are false because they do not have the prophetic vocation: “I did not send the prophets, / yet they ran; / I did not speak to them, / yet they prophesied” (23:21). It’s all very simple and it’s all very complex. But the only truly important question is still the one on vocation when we want to (and we always have to) distinguish true prophecy from false, in all its many forms, in the life of the spirit, but also in art, science, professions and families. You may be a more or less creative and good Franciscan, but first you have to be a Franciscan, that is, one who has received the same vocation of Francis. An artist can be great, insignificant, immense; but first they have to be an artist, that is, someone who has received an artistic vocation. No morality, no good faith can replace the absence (and essence) of vocation. We do not know what this vocation truly is, and we have to accept to live with this lack of knowledge, about others and about ourselves, which is at the origin of the greatest surprises and the greatest pains.
However, Jeremiah tells us something important: the essential element to recognize an authentic vocation is the awareness of the otherness, the consciousness that is, before and different from the other voices that inhabit the soul there is another voice, or at least a whisper. Being aware that that voice, though intimate and present inside of him since his mother's womb, is not his own voice. That there is another who speaks, one that Jeremiah calls YHWH, other prophets with other names, others do not name him but know that he is there and he speaks: “Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away?” (23:23). It’s a voice that comes and goes, disappears and returns, which is always a gift and a surprise, to the very end. An otherness that coexists with the experience of the greatest intimacy of the bowels. It is the close and the faraway togetherness that makes a prophet. The prophet who loses the intimacy of the word (the "God at hand") has no depth, poetry or pathos; but if the prophet loses the otherness and transcendence of the voice (the "God far away"), he can only tell his own fantasies and dreams, and become himself the source of the words he says. Some true-born prophets become false because they consume the "deviation" between their own voice and the other voice, and one day the first dialogue of voices becomes a song by a single voice.
 
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    [metadesc] => The good faith of the person is not a guarantee of genuine vocation, nor is the morality of their life-style. Jeremiah introduces us into the secret of the mystery of every true vocation, which has to do with the simultaneous experience of intimacy and the otherness of the voice.
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The Dawn of Midnight/15 - God’s highness saves us from talking only about our dreams.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 30/07/2017

"From the aimed image / I am keeping watch on the instant / With imminence of wait / And I am not waiting for anybody:
In the lit shade / I am spying upon the bell / Which, imperceptible, is spreading / A pollen of sound – / And I am not waiting for anybody:
Between four walls / Astonished of space / More than a desert / I am not waiting for anybody:
But he must come; / He will come, / if I resist, / To blossom not seen, / He will come all of a sudden, / When I least realize:
He will come almost pardon / Of what he makes die, / He will come to make me certain / Of his and my treasure, 
He will come as a relief / Of my and his pains, / His whisper / Will come, perhaps it is already coming.”
Clemente Rebora, Dall’immagine tesa  (From the Aimed Image, English translation by Roberto Filippetti)
False prophecy in good faith is perhaps the most abundant thing under the sun, and it’s among the most dangerous phenomena in the world. There have always been and there are still false prophets in bad faith, who do not give voice to any voice and they know it well. But there are also false prophets in good faith, who don’t give voice to any voice and do not know it, and confuse the "voice of God" with their own fantasies, emotions and thoughts. False prophets are not all scoundrels and swindlers, some of them are convinced to be prophets even though they aren’t.
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The Dawn of Midnight/13 - How God nourishes and changes our existence for ever
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 16/07/2017
“My soul always retreats to the Old Testament and Shakespeare. There at least one feels something: there are men who speak there. There is hate there! There is love, there is the killing of the enemy, cursing the other’s posterity for all generations; there are sins committed.”
Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Scipio Slataper, Ibsen
The Book of Jeremiah marks a new stage of human consciousness, a leap in the process of humanization, a true anthropological and spiritual innovation. His entire book and especially his confessions. And if we allow these to enter the intimacy of our conscience and are willing to sustain the great costs it means, that ancient innovation can still be accomplished here and now.
From the first chapter of his book, Jeremiah alternated the contents of his prophetic mission with his intimate confessions, revealing his soul, his hopes and anguish to us. Now, at the height of his inner diary, we come to chapters 19 and 20, when the narrated facts and his poetry reach an absolute summit.
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Here the prophet and the man of Anathoth deeply intertwine, YHWH's word and Jeremiah's word vanish into one another, forming a plot of life and poetry that represents a true human heritage. We must therefore approach these chapters by taking our sandals off before listening to the voice that comes from this different burning bush, as what is burning this time is not a shrub but Jeremiah’s very bones.
At the beginning of this wonderful diptych we find another gesture, one of the most famous and strongest gestures of the Bible. We are still inside the absolutely secular scene of the potter's workshop when we discover a new command: Jeremiah receives the order from God to buy a flusk and to go to the “Valley of the Son of Hinnom”, which is a dumping ground of the city (Jeremiah 19:1-2). We are led out of the city, into an environment that immediately reminds the reader with biblical literacy of Job, as he too was led by God and life to a heap of rubbish - the most famous one of the Bible. Jeremiah buys the jug from the potter, takes the most authoritative witnesses of the people with himself and explains the sense of that trip taking them to the waste of the city with his words: God will send a great misfortune on Israel because it has been prostituted to the Canaanite cults and the sacrifices of children (10:3-9). And then YHWH adds: “Then you shall break the flask in the sight of the men who go with you, and shall say to them, »... So will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter's vessel«” (19:10-11).
Everything is clear and strong, and the consequences are clear and strong, as Baruk, Jeremiah's secretary tells us, who appears here in the book and will not leave any more: “Now Pashhur the priest, the son of Immer, who was chief officer in the house of the Lord, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things. Then Pashhur beat Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks that were in the upper Benjamin Gate of the house of the Lord” (20:1-2). That broken jug worsens the situation greatly: there are not just slanders and conspiracies - Jeremiah is also lashed and tortured now. The obedience to the command to break the pot to a thousand pieces marked a turning point in Jeremiah's life and flesh. We do not understand his song in chapter 20, which is perhaps the most famous - and most ambiguous - one of the whole book, unless we see Jeremiah with the jug in his hand and then in prison as we are reading. And it is at that point that the most beautiful de profundis sounds, the one we should only sing along with the many prophets who continue to be tortured, imprisoned, killed only for being faithful to the voice of their conscience: Jeremiah sings for them, too: “O Lord, you have deceived me, / and I was deceived; / you are stronger than I, / and you have prevailed. / I have become a laughingstock all the day” (20:7)
We must not allow any of the sentimentalism and romance that have too often clung to these tremendous lines. Here, the "deception" Jeremiah speaks about is that of an adult who adores a minor person, a strong one who charms and deceives a child to abuse them. The dramatic context and the Hebrew verb used here leave no room for misunderstanding, everything is clear and simple: From the bottom of his prison Jeremiah accuses God of having fooled him in his age of enthusiasm in youth and having - simply - ruined his existence. Strong words that can only be understood by those who in order to follow a call have had a taste of the same night as Jeremiah. These are adult words, and only wonderful as such because they open us to the tremendum of true vocations.
Without the dumping ground of the crocks, the shackles and tortures of the community leaders, vocations cannot be understood: we just enter their antechamber, we stay with the wrapping of the pack unopened, and we are held back enchanted in the early days of the dawn of spiritual life. Anyone who wanted to understand true prophetic vocations has always gone through broken crocks, prisons, exiles, and it is there that we must return even today if we want to meet the prophets. But since those who are in these places do not make spiritual speeches, sermons or miracles and visions but are silent, and when they say a few words those are often curses of God and life - and they can only occasionally pray with these words that are incomprehensible to us -, true vocations remain hidden and strange, or we confuse them with those who speak a lot of God and religion, perhaps with nice music in the background and images of colourful sunsets. And so we miss the true and desperate kind of prophecy, the only one that can save: “Cursed be the day / on which I was born! / The day when my mother bore me, / let it not be blessed! / ... Why did I come out from the womb / to see toil and sorrow, / and spend my days in shame?” (20:14-18). There are no greater vocational words than these under the sun. Only a few lines of the Psalms, Qoheleth, the Passion according to Mark and the words of Job's sisters compare to them.  
But Chapter 20 tells us something more intimate about the nature and the mystery of a vocation. At the heart of Jeremiah’s confession, we find these words: “If I say, »I will not mention him, / or speak any more in his name,” / (but) there is in my heart as it were a burning fire / shut up in my bones«” (20:9).
“If I say”: Jeremiah tells us that he thought about shutting up the voice, not lending his body or mouth again, to retiring quitting his prophetic task, throwing his cloak on the nettles. From what he says it seems he thought about it seriously, he really tried to change his life, it was not just a temptation left in the realm of thoughts. But as he was trying to escape and perhaps ran away from it, too, he noticed that he wasn’t able to do it: the vocation had become his bones and his flesh, which kept burning. And it is at this point that the prophet senses a new kind of tiredness, which is something different from physical or moral exhaustion: “and I am weary with holding it in, / and I cannot” (20:9). It is the experience of being encircled, the grip that grabs and clings inside of us, leaving no escape. While it is true that nothing more than a vocation can say freedom, because following the voice you realise that you are following the most intimate of your bones, Jeremiah also tells us another thing: there is nothing less free than a true vocation, because there is no way to escape it - because you cannot escape from your marrow.
This is the real drama of those who encounter a real, true voice in life. One day they realize that the life they are living is not what they thought in their youth. Everything speaks to them only of this deception that made them make choices that now feel like violence or being forced to do things by God, by people in his name - those who seduced the prophets -, or by idealized ideals they believed in when they were young and innocent. And they start dreaming and thinking of different words from those suggested by the voice, new words in which they believe more, their own words that appear more sincere than what they tend to say and repeat by vocation.
The test Jeremiah is going through is not simply that of the persecutions, chains and torture. It is much deeper and more tremendous. A prophet does not scream against God and life until he believes in the truth of his own story and mission: instead of martyrdom, what pushes a vocation into crisis is rather exaltation and fulfilment. Jeremiah's test is of a different kind: he no longer believes in the truth of the beginning, he feels like he is in a plot of deceit and rage. It's the experience of a young man plagued by an ideology or a sect who at one point wakes up and wants nothing more than to escape and return to the real life he abandoned because of believing in lies, illusions and false promises.
We lose almost all of the strength of this immense confession by Jeremiah unless we read it in all its radical nudity and scandal. Jeremiah does not question the truth of the voice that speaks to him and had spoken to him the first day - other prophets have done and still do so. However, he questions the truth of his own mission and life, which he feels totally futile and wrong. And he wants to run away, take back control over what's left of his life. But here we can find one of the most splendid paradoxes of life and its mystery: while fleeing from illusion, it is the most intimate experience that we can have on this earth: discovering another hidden truth inside one’s very bones. Just as he wants to silence it, that voice seems true to him - it's so true that it is impossible to escape. What he now feels burning in his bones is the voice of the first day that says, on this other, adult day of life, that what we once encountered was so true that today it is impossible to flee from it, as it is impossible to escape the truth of our bones and marrow. However, we could not know this before trying to escape.
We do not know how Jeremiah overcame the crisis, he does not tell us. Perhaps because the crises cannot be overcome, they enter the marrow of our life, feed it and change it forever.
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    [metadesc] => Jeremiah's Chapter 20 is among the most beautiful, well-known and badly interpreted ones of his book. It is the story of the seduction of youth, which, however, has nothing romantic in it, but burns in the bones and encloses one of the most tremendous and real truths of every true vocation.
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The Dawn of Midnight/13 - How God nourishes and changes our existence for ever
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 16/07/2017
“My soul always retreats to the Old Testament and Shakespeare. There at least one feels something: there are men who speak there. There is hate there! There is love, there is the killing of the enemy, cursing the other’s posterity for all generations; there are sins committed.”
Soren Kierkegaard, quoted in Scipio Slataper, Ibsen
The Book of Jeremiah marks a new stage of human consciousness, a leap in the process of humanization, a true anthropological and spiritual innovation. His entire book and especially his confessions. And if we allow these to enter the intimacy of our conscience and are willing to sustain the great costs it means, that ancient innovation can still be accomplished here and now.
From the first chapter of his book, Jeremiah alternated the contents of his prophetic mission with his intimate confessions, revealing his soul, his hopes and anguish to us. Now, at the height of his inner diary, we come to chapters 19 and 20, when the narrated facts and his poetry reach an absolute summit.
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The Dawn of Midnight/11 - The landscape of the land found is not that of the promised land
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 02/07/2017
“No-one who reads the Bible can avoid the impression that Jeremiah's coming is as if a dam had given way at a decisive point. You feel something new, a dimension of pain so far unknown.”
Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology 
“The word of the Lord came to me: »You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place.«” (Jeremiah 16:1) Here is another narrative and spiritual turning point in Jeremiah's song and life, which is gorgeous and tremendous. By vocation Jeremiah will have no wife, and he will have neither sons nor daughters. The double command marks and strengthens Jeremiah’s two radical solitudes: he must live without a wife and without sons and daughters (the joy, the splendour and the pains that girls and daughters give us are not substitutes for those of boys and sons, and vice versa). In this procession - wife, sons and daughters - we can perhaps read a concrete, non-generic look taken at those different though equally concrete joys that he will not know because of a special vocation.
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Other biblical prophets have also had similar experiences to those of Jeremiah. The lives of Isaiah and Hosea have been total, global signs, words made flesh-symbol. Their vocations also deeply involved their family.
Isaiah calls his son "a remnant will return", and the heart of his prophecy becomes his son's name. Hosea receives the command from God to marry a prostitute, and that, too, so as to say - to be a message to the people: you have been prostituted to other gods. These are tremendous things and actions when the pain and sorrow become too great and mere words, even the immense ones of the prophets, are not enough anymore.
In Jeremiah’s case, however, the voice asks for something even more radical: to be a sign and an omen by completely renouncing the most blessed and sacred things. In his world, the choice of not marrying and not having children was a scandalous act and, above all, it didn’t make any sense. In Hebrew there is no word to say "celibacy". It was just a folly, a stupid, ridiculous thing. So much so that this request to Jeremiah has no parallel in the Old Testament.
To grasp something about the paradox of that command, it takes the whole Bible and the experience of a lifetime. We must return to Abraham, the promise made to him of having as many children as the stars of heaven. To Sarah's infertility, to Hagar and Ishmael, and then to Isaac, Rachel and Leah, to Job, to the Covenant, to the Canticle, and to the bridal language in the Bible, much loved and also used by Jeremiah. In that world, the primary blessing is the blessing of having sons and daughters, no land is the promised land unless there is at least one of our children living and nourishing off of its milk and honey. In biblical humanism, the only desired paradise is to be able to continue living in our children and in their memory for many generations. The other, better life in which we hope is not our own in heaven but that of our children on earth. And then we should return to the first chapters of Genesis. To that adam created "male and female", who, together, can really show the image of God in the only way allowed on earth, which is so beautiful that all the others disfigure the image of Elohim because they disfigure the image of the adam. When, awakening from his numbness, that first man’s gaze crossed the eyes that were like his own for the first time, and perhaps tuned the first song of the earth: "This at last..." I finally found an ezer kenegdò: eyes in my eyes, eyes like mine and yet all different. The woman comes as a gift and answer to one of the first phrases of Biblical Anthropology: "It is not good that the man should be alone."
So in this great chapter of the Book of Jeremiah and his story, God asks him to return to the sad solitude of the world's aurora before the "two or more". Jeremiah must, because of a word of YHWH, deny and contradict one of his most beautiful and eternal words. That "it is not good" applies to every human, but not to Jeremiah.
And the amazement does not end here: “For thus says the Lord: »Do not enter the house of mourning, or go to lament or grieve for them«” (16:5) Participating at funerals, crying, visiting the family of the deceased one during the long mourning period were primary social practices that created and strengthened social ties, increased solidarity and fraternity. Failing to perform these practices meant isolating oneself and being seen by others as bizarre and inimical. But Jeremiah's list of prohibitions is still not complete: “You shall not go into the house of feasting to sit with them, to eat and drink” (16:8). So God wants a life in total solitude for him: without a family, without children, without friends, without celebrations, without a community, without consolation. Why? The text provides us with an interpretation: Jeremiah has to anticipate with his body, with his social relations and his flesh the condition that will soon be of all the people who are about to be deported, entering a phase where banquets will end, where not only the dead cannot be properly buried but no mourning rites can be performed either. He has to become a symbol incarnated.
But this explanation is not enough. What sense has it to embody a total ruin, anticipating with one’s own life the misery that will be the share of all the people? And what good is it to be a sign if no one understands it, but everybody just laughs at it and ridicules it? Let us not forget that the overall message of the Book of Jeremiah does not suggest that the purpose of strong signs is the conversion of the people. Neither can it suffice to think that the purpose of the Book of Jeremiah might be an ex-post theological reading of the disastrous events of the deportation to Babylon, which, to save the righteousness of God, attributes all the blame of misfortune to the corruption and idolatry of the people. It's all too little, too simple, not up to the grandness of his book.
It is then worthwhile for us to let Chapter 16 talk and enter our lives today, and to enter into dialogue with Jeremiah, making ourselves his contemporaries. And if we face this chapter naked and free, we may perhaps see some of the paradoxical - but real and essential - dimensions of the mist that we find in many lives lived as a vocation.
The day Jeremiah received his first call he did not know that this second call would also come (in the narrative of his vocation in the first chapter there is no hint of not marrying). Today, however, when someone responds to a religious vocation, they know right away that they will not marry or have any sons or daughters. But even today, on the day of the call, wrapped up by the dazzling light of the voice, even though we are able to give up of a wife/husband, sons and daughters in the abstract sense, we are actually not giving up anything real yet - though many vocations are obstructed because, out of fear, they stop at that first abstract renunciation, and they do not know the generativity that only concrete renunciation can obtain. But when life works, it is very likely that the day of Jeremiah’s Chapter 16 comes when that abstract idea becomes concrete and incarnate. It comes when you get to know a concrete man who could really become a husband, when one day, looking at a child you feel the so far absent urge for fatherhood in the flesh, even though you are surrounded by a hundred sons and daughters, but yours are not there among them though they could be. It is at that point, not on the day of the first bright enchantment ten or thirty years ago, that the word reaches to us clear and strong: "You will not marry, you will not have sons or daughters." And you can answer it again and differently: yes.
If we truly follow a vocation and do not give up life for a disappointment or illusion, sooner or later we will inevitably reach the milestone of Chapter 16. We become like Jeremiah, but we do not notice it, because the process is slow and long. We find ourselves incarnating messages we are not masters of. We can rebel, or say "yes," and lend our body and life to write a chapter of a book, albeit not knowing either its plot or its ending. In his world and in his time, Jeremiah could not understand the sense of the terrible things that the voice asked of him. The Book of Jeremiah gives us some interpretation, but Jeremiah the man from Anathoth had probably much less interpretations of the final edition of his book, perhaps he did not have any. He only heard, very clearly, a voice that asked him something paradoxical, and he said: "all right". Symbols do not perform their job because they know their own meaning: sometimes they have some gleam of a meaning, but the symbol is almost never a good interpreter of itself. The great symbols of the Bible and the life of each and every one are never explained and revealed once and for all, and therefore they continue to speak and interpret themselves in time and at all times. We are not, in our world and in our time, the best interpreters of the symbols we are called to become.
The Bible is also revelation because sometimes it takes away the veil that separates us from the sense of its words and from that of our most important experiences. It takes it away for a while and then puts it back, re-veiling them, to guard the intimacy of the great stories of love and pain, and to guard the mystery of our heart. It is not necessary to know and explain all the meaning and all the senses of the paradoxical commands of Chapter 16, because those words will continue to sing as long as their meanings are greater and more numerous than our questions and answers can be. The Bible can regenerate as long as its meanings are beyond our own interpretations.
The landscape of the land found is not that of the promised land. So many things that we thought were there are actually not - there is no community we imagined but only what we have, there is no happiness we were looking for, because throughout life we realized it is too little. But we have found many surprises, such as the gift of discovering the beauty where everyone sees bad things and people, a deep and sober fraternity with the earth, with animals, with plants, blossoming like a flower in a non-chosen but humbly accepted solitude. A vocation is alive as long as it remains free enough to constantly revise the image of the first promised land. And when it realizes that the disappearance of the last surviving element of the dreamed landscape is near, it is capable of singing the song of great blessing.
 
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    [metadesc] => With Chapter 16, one of the most beautiful and mysterious chapters of the Book of Jeremiah, we enter the heart of the mystery of his life and vocation. And of every vocation which is to become a living symbol with its own flesh, without ever understanding the full meaning embodied.
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The Dawn of Midnight/11 - The landscape of the land found is not that of the promised land
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 02/07/2017
“No-one who reads the Bible can avoid the impression that Jeremiah's coming is as if a dam had given way at a decisive point. You feel something new, a dimension of pain so far unknown.”
Gerhard Von Rad, Old Testament Theology 
“The word of the Lord came to me: »You shall not take a wife, nor shall you have sons or daughters in this place.«” (Jeremiah 16:1) Here is another narrative and spiritual turning point in Jeremiah's song and life, which is gorgeous and tremendous. By vocation Jeremiah will have no wife, and he will have neither sons nor daughters. The double command marks and strengthens Jeremiah’s two radical solitudes: he must live without a wife and without sons and daughters (the joy, the splendour and the pains that girls and daughters give us are not substitutes for those of boys and sons, and vice versa). In this procession - wife, sons and daughters - we can perhaps read a concrete, non-generic look taken at those different though equally concrete joys that he will not know because of a special vocation.
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The Dawn of Midnight/9 - The seed breaks the earth crust, the petals colour the flower field
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/06/2017
“Almost all the ideas introduced by Jeremiah in this time period are related to the law; almost all the images he uses are drawn from the same heritage of biblical prophecy - which by then turned secular. All this is but an exercise, a learning process.”
André Neher, Jeremiah 

“Thus says the Lord to me, »Go and buy a linen loincloth and put it around your waist, and do not dip it in water.« So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it around my waist. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, »Take the loincloth that you have bought (...) go to the Euphrates and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.«” (Jeremiah 13:1-4)
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Go. Prophets receive orders from God that are precise, detailed and meticulous. Words that call objects, rivers and stones by name. They are instructions to carry out a special mission, a map for a journey to an unexplored territory, a testamentary execution. A mandate to do, not only to say: the mouth of the prophets is their body. They speak by saying, they speak by doing. They speak with their mouths, with their hands, their feet, their legs and their backs.
Attaining the experience of the truth of the word that speaks to him and the ability to distinguish it from the non-truth of the false prophets is, however, a slow and often long process, which sometimes can take decades or years, perhaps the whole life of a prophet. The flowering of these vocations follows a path marked by precise steps, which the study of the Bible and life can teach us to get to know and recognize.
At the beginning there is a community where the prophet is born, where good and bad people, true and false prophets live. Real communities are always mixed and spurious. A prophetic vocation can only grow and develop inside one or more communities, starting with the first community of the family. Even though nothing speaks of individuality and personal dialogue between two instances of "you” more than prophecy does, even prophecy is a practice, and therefore a social and community affair. Prophets are sent to concrete communities, they are incarnated in the land and in the history of a place and time; their criticism, care and questions are embedded in the daily lives of their own people.
It is within this first community that the first call, the vocation reaches them, which is a fundamental and absolutely individual event. After the vocation, however, we find the community again, sometimes that first one, and at other times a new prophetic community, where the young man gets training, seeking one or more masters, companions of his vocation. The idea that prophets are lonely men who come to the world already trained and perfect to carry out their mission or that they are taught by God only in secret belong to artistic representations or novels, not to historical reality. In the real training of prophets, the voices and words of the Baptist and Ananias are necessary allies of YHWH's voice. You can be born a prophet, you can become a prophet, learning with time to be what you were already in your mother’s womb.
This temporal and diachronic dimension of the prophetic vocation explains why the first chapters in the Book of Jeremiah are not so original, despite some bright lightnings of his genius. Van Gogh learned to draw: he was Van Gogh from the beginning by vocation but still did not know the techniques of painting. In his first brush strokes, his great genius could already be seen, but years had to go by before his masterpieces were made. Jeremiah also learned how to be a prophet, because prophecy is flesh and blood, living amidst humanity’s laws and times. Thus, in the first phase of his activity, as a young prophet, Jeremiah begins to get to know the great Bible prophets who preceded him, studying the Torah, the tradition of the Covenant, the stories of the patriarchs. The young prophet is still finding his own identity and begins to discover his specific profile that he will find in maturity. Therefore, to understand and touch the depth of the prophetic books that take place and are written over time, we must learn to wait, we must accompany the prophet in his growing up. The word grows together with its writers, and we grow together with the prophets if we can wait for them. Prophetic writing is a mother, it is a bride; but it is also the daughter of those who know how to wait while it grows, and ask their questions at the right time, neither before nor after - too many times we find no answers in the Bible because we ask them at the wrong time (kairos), out of time.
The link between the youth and maturity phase of Jeremiah (and prophets in general) is represented by the conflict and emancipation (liberation – the tr.) from the first community. Indeed, as his vocation develops, Jeremiah begins to have doubts not only about his family (chapters 11 and 12), but also about his own prophetic community. The people are oppressed by drought and hunger, and Jeremiah asks God: “Ah, Lord God, behold, the prophets say to them, ‘You shall not see the sword, nor shall you have famine, but I will give you assured peace in this place’” (14:13). We are not yet in the actual battle that Jeremiah will engage in against the false prophets in the successive chapters of his life and his book. His words, however, suggest a young, still confused prophet who finds himself in the community which has brought him up and trained him, the one he trusts, but he asks God about a new inner contrast that he begins to notice. The contrast between the words that are born in him and those he can hear from the other prophets.
This is a crucial stage of prophetic vocations, especially of the greater ones - like that of Jeremiah. We can understand it if we keep in mind that prophecy was also a kind of profession in Israel. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of the nabi (prophets) who went around the country telling their visions, performing bizarre acts, and prophesying about scary and apocalyptic scenarios. They had a typical outfit (e.g. the mantle), and were well-known in the midst of the people and around the temple. Not all these prophets were "false" or impostors. Most of them were merely prophets by profession who merely repeated some verses of Isaiah or Amos, and on the basis of their knowledge of the wisdom of prophetic tradition they also managed to give some good advice or, in any case, to find some listeners and disciples. In the first phase of his life Jeremiah was probably one of these nabi, mingling with many others of whom we no longer have any trace of. One day, however, that already different prophet begins to realize that his words are not like those of his "colleagues", because the things that the voice that speaks to him tells are different from what he can hear from the others: “And the Lord said to me: »The prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I did not send them, nor did I command them or speak to them. They are prophesying to you a lying vision, worthless divination, and the deceit of their own minds.«” (14:14) That’s when Jeremiah becomes aware of his being a different prophet. A diversity that in order to acquire all its strength recurs to the words synthesized by the expression false prophecy. Historically, it is difficult to imagine that all the nabi of Jeremiah's time were false prophets, inventors and singers of lies - even though that’s what Jeremiah writes. As in all professions, the good and the bad prophets would live side by side in his time, too.
Here, however, the issue is different and very important. It is not just the Law to play the function of the pedagogue (Saint Paul), which must leave space to the Spirit in adult age. The prophetic community is also a pedagogue, and if it does not know how to disappear when the youngster faces adulthood, it prevents young people from blossoming. At the same time, the community can only counteract this blossoming, like the seed that finds itself to be in contrast to the land that has nurtured it, but if it is not forced and pierced, there will be neither ear (of wheat - the tr.) nor fruit. There is a day, a moment when those who have received a prophetic vocation may feel the urgency of leaving the community of the prophets-by-profession to become something different that he/she does not even know yet. A new and completely different stage starts for them, and almost always they are alone in it. This "flight" often takes the form of a hard judgment on the community, which can assume the same words as Jeremiah: falsehood and lies. In history, the falsehood and lies of the first community are not always real, but they are real in the subjective experience of those who must take on that crazy flight.
That is how great innovations are born, even spiritual ones. A creative destruction that in the prophetic experience takes the form of the "destruction" of the prophecy of others in order to "create" one's own.
All the other fellow prophets of Jeremiah did not feel the need to destroy the words of others simply because they had nothing to create. Great prophetic innovation needs the ruins of tradition to build its own cathedral. This is another analogy between prophecy and charisma: both of them innovate by "destroying" their institutions and their words. But - and this is a decisive problem - alongside a true prophet who destroys in order to create there are a thousand fake ones or buffoons who destroy things and that’s that.
When in a prophetic community a young man gets into a conflict with the words of others to the point of feeling and calling them "false" and "liars", it is possible that we are facing the blossoming of a genuine prophetic vocation. In fact, in order to carry out his task and his mission of salvation he can only destroy and then create, tear up the earth so it can flourish following the law inscribed in its spiritual genetic code.
Many vocations do not blossom and go bad just because there is no way or time for the conflict to generate. The original community doesn’t manage to see the blessing in the wounding of its land, they cannot see it. But the prophet can still blossom if he succeeds in staying in this painful conflict until he settles in it, if he does not give up the temptation to return to the community of the ordinary and harmless nabi. There are too many prophets who cannot blossom because persisting in the state of creative destruction is very painful: “Let my eyes run down with tears night and day, / and let them not cease” (14:17). But every time a vocation dies after being submerged, colourful petals disappear from the flower fields of the earth.
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The Dawn of Midnight/9 - The seed breaks the earth crust, the petals colour the flower field
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/06/2017
“Almost all the ideas introduced by Jeremiah in this time period are related to the law; almost all the images he uses are drawn from the same heritage of biblical prophecy - which by then turned secular. All this is but an exercise, a learning process.”
André Neher, Jeremiah 

“Thus says the Lord to me, »Go and buy a linen loincloth and put it around your waist, and do not dip it in water.« So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it around my waist. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, »Take the loincloth that you have bought (...) go to the Euphrates and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.«” (Jeremiah 13:1-4)
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by Luigino Bruni
published in  Avvenire on 04/06/2017
How then could I unite with this wild idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth — pagans and all included — can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Prophecy is a radical critique of religions and cultures. Of every religion and every cult that has an intrinsic tendency to turn into idolatrous practices. Also, and above all, it offers a criticism of biblical revelation, a systematic and tremendous criticism, to prevent the biblical word from becoming a simple religion - a faith that becomes only religion is already idolatrous worship. The Bible is much more than a sacred book of a religion, also because it has welcomed and kept safe in its bosom the books of prophets, which, together with Job and Qoheleth, prevented it from becoming an idolatrous object. The prophets, therefore, by ridding the religious world of idols, try to liberate our landscape from our religious artefacts to create an environment in which we can - perhaps - only hear a bare voice. They are the great liberators from the gods that fill the earth and our souls.
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Therefore the first necessary step for those who begin a journey of faith is a-theism, the liberation from the many totems and fetishes that fill our existence. The prophets know that the natural condition of man is not atheism, but idolatry, the systematic and increasingly sophisticated production of material artefacts and ideals to worship, to which they then turn in search of false and easy salvation. Because if the biblical God becomes simply another idol to be added to our pantheon, our slavery will only increase. The biblical God can be different from the idols only in an empty temple - because at some point it has been emptied.
And so, in order to make us understand the difference between idolatry and his faith, the prophet has to carry out a work of spiritual cleansing and bring us back to the slopes of the Horeb where "there was only a voice". Until we engage in playing with the religious toys that our relatives handed down to us or that we have learned to create with our hands, we cannot start a genuinely spiritual life - youth is the propitious moment to begin a true walk of faith also because we are freer from the wrong gods then. That’s where almost all the necessity of prophecy in every age and everywhere lies, because without being held firm by its force which can unmask and devour the "wood" that surrounds us, we are in dialogue with artefacts for all our lives, even when we call them God or Jesus.
Hence, paradoxically (the Bible is a great and unique vital paradox, and can be opened only within this paradox), the honest atheist’s existential condition is more appropriate than the one in which the religious person is, when it comes to starting an authentic experience of biblical faith, because it is easier to hear a subtle voice of silence in a desolate and empty land. But, unfortunately, many of those who look and believe to be atheists are faithful devotees of some ideology, or perpetual worshippers of the greatest idol: their own ego.
It is at this level that the universal reach of the prophetic word that speaks to and loves all inside and outside religions is to be grasped, because the idolatrous universe is much wider than the explicitly religious one. To all, the true prophets repeat, here and now, with their strong tenderness: “Fear not”. "Learn not the way of the nations, / nor be dismayed at the signs of the heavens / because the nations are dismayed at them, / for the customs of the peoples are vanity. / A tree from the forest is cut down / and worked with an axe by the hands of a craftsman.” (Jeremiah 10:2-3). Nothing more than idolatrous struggle can reveal the liberating nature of prophets to us. Liberation from the idols, and liberation from the fear because of the idols we have created. The idols are vanity (that is, nothing - the tr.), Jeremiah repeats, but if we attribute some existence and consistency to them, they become something, and that something frightens us. Yesterday and today, the idolatrous man is always a man full of fears. Above all he fears death, because he realizes that those fabricated objects are not alive, they cannot defeat death; and we are reminded of that every moment, and death becomes scarier every moment because it gets closer and closer.
In chapter 10 - a complex text as the long editorial shows, but fundamental for the economy of the entire Book of Jeremiah - the prophet gives us an actual theory of nature and the development of idolatry, within the community and among the people who had a non-idolatrous faith. At the beginning of the conversion to the idols we find the charm of "conduct", the "way" of other nations, their lifestyles. Day after day the cults of other peoples become more interesting, attractive and seductive than our own. It is an interest, an attraction-seduction that is never just a religious thing because it acts at a more general and profound level. The processions of the great, tall and splendid Babylonian, Assyrian or Egyptian gods fascinated the Jews because they were the expressions of a "winner" culture, the emblems of those great political and cultural powers. Political and military powers become empires when their culture and religion begins to be desired and imitated by the defeated peoples. They become perfect and invincible empires when their symbols and values ​​are internalized by their new subjects. It is precisely in this seduction of the soul that a profound reason for the ruthless critique pronounced by the prophets on the deities of other peoples can be found. They know by vocation that no political occupation, no deportation totally reduces us to slavery until we begin to worship the new gods, until their symbols mark our soul.
Then, once seduced, the new worshippers become the makers of their own new idols. The biblical God is unique and therefore not reproducible. Idols aren’t so: they can and should be reproduced, multiplied, serially built and become mass-produced consumer products. Adorers, after having cut the trees in the woods, after having killed the living tree to make a dead object (at the origin of the totem there is this violence that the ancient man felt and understood much more than us), "They decorate it with silver and gold; / they fasten it with hammer and nails / so that it cannot move." (10:4). And businesses are proliferating, because, yesterday and today, there is no commodity that men love more than the idols.
Jeremiah has experienced a real voice; he has been called by name by something alive. So the contrast between his different God and those carved, painted and decorated pieces of wood spreading in his country must have appeared immense. “There is none like you, O Lord” (10:6). The idols “cannot speak; / they have to be carried, 6 for they cannot walk. / Do not be afraid of them, / for they cannot do evil, / neither is it in them to do good.” (10:5) They are simply harmless, empty, just a breath, nothing, hevel: “They are both stupid and foolish; / the instruction of idols is but wood! ... They are worthless, a work of delusion” (10: 8,15). In this context, his famous and ingenious definition of the idol resounds: "Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field" (10:5).
But it is here that we have to start a new discourse. Jeremiah says, sings and keeps repeating the different nature of YHWH also because the encounter that Israel was having with new and ancient peoples and their many gods of wood would have perhaps, even in the prophet, raised the question: and what if our God, too, were, in fact, just a breath of air and empty like all these other idols? The unmasking of the vanity of idolatry puts those with an unpolluted faith in crisis, too, because the disgust they feel for the worshippers worshipping nothingness also makes their beliefs different.
When, by vocation or gift, on a blessed day we can understand that most of the cults we see around us are more or less sophisticated forms of idolatry and illusion, a banal, consolatory nothing covered and decorated in various forms, our first experience is the birth of a persistent internal question: but why should my faith be different from other illusions? Will it be true that "But the Lord is the true God; / he is the living God and the everlasting King"(10:10)? Or was the voice that I heard just a sound of dead wood, too? It is an honest question that grows and becomes inevitable. And so, many people lose their faith upon discovering the deception of the idolatry of others, to which their own is also attracted, appearing too much like the wrong and deceitful one. This question becomes very acute in the prophets, and to exorcise it they end up saying harsh words about the gods of others, denying that even those cults worshipping wood or the stars could contain something authentic, some breath of that true spirit blowing where it wants. Prophets also fear the idols differently.
Today we must not, therefore, read the radical critique that Jeremiah and the prophets address to the idols as a denial of all truths of all faiths other than the biblical one. If we did, we would not understand either the nature of the religious phenomenon or the profound spirituality of Jeremiah's words. Two and a half millennia of history of religions and Christianity have strengthened and confirmed the spiritual and human value of Jeremiah's anti-idolatry argument: our capitalist cities of consumption are increasingly similar to Babylon and Nineveh, and the idolatrous transmutation of the ancient faiths is more and more evident every day. At the same time, we have learned that not all gods that are different from ours are idols and scarecrows, and that perhaps in those coloured wood logs there may be less nothingness and stupidity than in our ever-more idolatrous hyper-technological goods. And perhaps, the spirit of God that lives mysteriously but truly in the heart of every man and woman can recognize its own breath even in a tree trunk. The prophets and the Bible grow with our lives and learn new things thanks to our honest and generous reading of their ancient, splendid words.
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by Luigino Bruni
published in  Avvenire on 04/06/2017
How then could I unite with this wild idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth — pagans and all included — can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Prophecy is a radical critique of religions and cultures. Of every religion and every cult that has an intrinsic tendency to turn into idolatrous practices. Also, and above all, it offers a criticism of biblical revelation, a systematic and tremendous criticism, to prevent the biblical word from becoming a simple religion - a faith that becomes only religion is already idolatrous worship. The Bible is much more than a sacred book of a religion, also because it has welcomed and kept safe in its bosom the books of prophets, which, together with Job and Qoheleth, prevented it from becoming an idolatrous object. The prophets, therefore, by ridding the religious world of idols, try to liberate our landscape from our religious artefacts to create an environment in which we can - perhaps - only hear a bare voice. They are the great liberators from the gods that fill the earth and our souls.
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The Dawn of Midnight/5 – Staying strong not to manipulate reality and not to use God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/05/2017
“And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart: They understand me not: I am not the mouth for these ears. (...) And now they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too.  There is ice in their laughter.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (English translation by Thomas Common)
The biblical God does not speak in the first person singular on the earth, his words reach us only as words of men and women. The one who descends from Mount Sinai with the tablets of law is Moses, a man. YHWH speaks to him in the tent of the meeting, dialoguing only with him, "mouth to mouth", and telling him words that the people may know. If we want to hear the word of God in the world all we have to do is simply learn to listen to men and women like us. It is a word that is communicated by looking into a pair of eyes at the same height as ours. We do not find it either higher or lower: it's only there in front of us. Man is the place where God knows how to speak to mankind. Only men and women can resurrect the Bible and the Gospel every day, saying the words: "come outside". Without people calling them by name, here and now, even the biblical words remain dead in their graves.
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Prophets are men and women who make God speak in the world - even when they do not know it or when they do not call him God. But we don't manage to meet them because we are looking for them in the wrong places. Perhaps we think that they live only in temples or sanctuaries, that they talk of God using the language that we think must speak of a god who is respected; that they are learned theologians, experts in liturgy, or, at least, in catechism. We look for them among professional prophets, and so we almost always find false prophets who are in constant search for customers for their commerce. True prophets, however, are almost never in the places where we want them to be, they don't do the job of prophets and they do not possess the typical traits and gestures. Because almost all of them live on the outskirts of the empire, they do not attend the temples, they rarely speak the religious languages (sometimes neither know them nor are attracted to them), and they are almost always poor and neglected: shepherds of flocks, a young brother who is a dreamer, a baby in a manger. Being a human voice, the voice of the prophets is always misty, impure, imperfect, and therefore we do not recognize it as a voice of God because we think that should be pure, perfect and uncontaminated - exactly like that of the false prophets.
All this makes non-false faith something infinitely secular, common and humble. And so something wonderful, though very difficult to understand and live because we love spectacular, visionary, extraordinary beliefs. We do not like the spirit of God touching the soul while we are eating a meal or rearranging our room, when we are teaching mathematics at school, when we are trying to speed up the usual practice in the office. No, real life is not enough, we like to be immersed in the illusion of the sensational lives sold at the stands of the false prophets. And so, at the end of our pilgrimages we find Baal waiting for us in the temples and churches, to suppress us even more into slavery.
"I have made you a tester of metals among my people, / that you may know and test their ways. (...) The bellows blow fiercely; / the lead is consumed by the fire; / in vain the refining goes on, / for the wicked are not removed. / Rejected silver they are called" (Jeremiah 6:27-30). At the end of the first period of his prophetic activity (609) Jeremiah describes his total failure with the language of silver metallurgy, a very ancient and widespread craft in the Near East. The lead containing silver was treated with fire at very high temperatures in a process known as roasting. Thanks to the introduction of air through bellows, the silver was separated from the impure waste which was later discarded. The tester had to watch over the success of the process, testing the purity of the noble metal coming out of the melting pot - because the operation of separation was not always possible due to the excessive impurities remaining in the silver.
Jeremiah's metaphor is radical: the lead remained intact in the melting pot, the lead came out of the fire and the bellows just as it entered. Not a gram of silver: just lead. The failure of his mission is absolute: the bellows of his word have blown strong, but nothing precious has come out of the lead: first some lead and later some more lead -  the craftsman's work was totally futile.
The prophets are not afraid to announce the failure of their action - false prophets, on the other hand, speak only of success. The prophet is the humble operator of the bellows and the honest tester checking the purity of the metal. He uses all his strength so that the bellows generate as much air as possible. His action is far from being passive, for the prophet is not a medium: he can make the bellows work with more or less energy, and he may even stop moving his arms - an ever-present and strong temptation. Then, when that silver craftsman, exhausted, replaces the bellows and examines the metal, he can only realize that no pure metal has come out. This is the twofold, difficult task of the prophet: he is the tireless operator of the bellows and an honest metal tester. He cannot change history, he can only record it, although he does not like it and it makes him suffer. And it is in the midst of this double effort of the arms that move the bellows and the soul that must resist the temptation to change the results to make people happy, that true prophecy lives and matures. Getting exhausted completely to blow the air, and remain strong until death not to manipulate the reality that comes out of the melting pot. True prophets become false prophets either because they do not exert enough force at the bellows, or because they manipulate the results and do not say the sad truth that nobody wants to hear. The worst ones are those who do not blow the air only to say that the silver did not separate from the lead, and only to curse it. True prophets, when they see the intact lead, will always live in the doubt that the silver did not come because they did not activate the bellows with enough strength - because while they test the metal they feel another Tester testing their heart, and they always have the feeling (or certainty) that it is lead only that comes out from their melting pot, too... but they do not stop blowing through the bellows until the very end.
From this experience of total failure, like the flower of the desert, Jeremiah's great speech on the temple flowers, some extraordinary words that could only blossom from a great and accepted failure: "The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this word” (7:1). Jeremiah cries: “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house ... and say, ‘We are delivered!’ — only to go on doing all these abominations?” (7:8-10)
Prophets are critical of temples and they are enemies of sacrifices. They know with great clarity that behind the sacrifices there lies the true enemy of true faith. The God of Abraham who revealed his name to Moses had showed himself as a different God because he had given the people the gift of a different relationship, a different faith, freeing them from the economic logic of sacrifices, promising a different kind of happiness: "For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this command I gave them: ‘Obey my voice ... that it may be well with you.’ (7:22-23) Sacrifices are not just stupid, they are extremely damaging, because they deceive and feed the unfaithfulness and the sins of the people. Sacrifices are, in fact, prices paid to buy the possibility of sinning again, transforming all sins into merchandise that can be bought at the religious market. It is in this context that we can best understand the phrase that has become famous thanks to the Gospels: "Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?" (7:11). It is not the merchants who should be called robbers (as it sometimes happens), but the entire people who are wicked because they continue to commit the most serious crimes, with the illusion of being able to expiate and re-inspire them by offering sacrifices to the temple. It is the economic and sacrificial religion that immediately transforms the temple into a den where criminals take refuge. It was this same polemic against the commercial-sacrificial religion that prompted Jesus of Nazareth, centuries after Jeremiah, to criticize the temple and its religious traditions.
Without the prophets, all religions become the trade of offerings, vows, prayers and penances that are supposed to cover our malevolence: we have always done this, we continue to do it. The more atrocious the sins become, the higher the price of the atonement, up to the point of sacrificing our children, to be able to say ‘we are saved’: “And they have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, nor did it come into my mind.” (7:31) Yesterday, today, maybe tomorrow.
The prophets, experts of God and humanity, therefore, give us a great truth. Idolatry nests inside the temples and churches, because without the hammer of prophecy, religions are inevitably the first enemies of the God they profess. Idolatrous sacrifices are not just those offered to Baal but also, and above all, those offered to YHWH, who becomes one of the many stupid Baals when we make him precipitate into the economic logic of sacrifices.
Everyone, even the most honest and true person, upon beginning an experience of faith by following a voice ends up creating a cult, blocking God and the real ideals in dead things called religious practices, craft, status, community or movement. It prevents God, or his greatest wishes, from becoming something different from the idea that we made of him. And the person creating the cult loves their own beautiful dreams so much as not to be willing to wake up any more. Without prophets, the spiritual promises of youth become idolatrous cults in adulthood. Prophets do not only liberate us from the idols, they also free us from our idea of God, our cults and our religious illusions. And then they make us poor and liberated again, on the outskirts of the empire, still looking for a cave, a baby, a mother, a carpenter.
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The Dawn of Midnight/5 – Staying strong not to manipulate reality and not to use God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/05/2017
“And all the people exulted and smacked their lips. Zarathustra, however, turned sad, and said to his heart: They understand me not: I am not the mouth for these ears. (...) And now they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too.  There is ice in their laughter.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (English translation by Thomas Common)
The biblical God does not speak in the first person singular on the earth, his words reach us only as words of men and women. The one who descends from Mount Sinai with the tablets of law is Moses, a man. YHWH speaks to him in the tent of the meeting, dialoguing only with him, "mouth to mouth", and telling him words that the people may know. If we want to hear the word of God in the world all we have to do is simply learn to listen to men and women like us. It is a word that is communicated by looking into a pair of eyes at the same height as ours. We do not find it either higher or lower: it's only there in front of us. Man is the place where God knows how to speak to mankind. Only men and women can resurrect the Bible and the Gospel every day, saying the words: "come outside". Without people calling them by name, here and now, even the biblical words remain dead in their graves.
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The Dawn of Midnight/3 - Having people more faithful than us by our side is a great gift
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/05/2017
"...he went forth into the mountain, where Moses climbed up, and saw the heritage of God. And when Jeremiah came thither, he found an hollow cave, wherein he laid the tabernacle, and the ark, and the altar of incense, and so stopped the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way, but they could not find it."
Second Book of the Maccabees
Faithfulness is one of those words that are capable of saying all that there is to say about life. An existence is made up of many words and a lot of things, but if we were to choose only one, faithfulness would be a very strong candidate. Faithfulness is almost everything; faithfulness, perhaps, is everything. Faithfulness to the foundation pacts of our existence, to marriage, our profession, to friendships, to the voice that called us one day by making us start on the greatest journey. It is faithfulness that warms our heart during the winters, that consoles the soul when everything else passes and makes us pronounce our name without shame. It is the most beautiful legacy we leave to our children.
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Even if we cannot see it or say it, the world is full of faithfulness. We do not see it, or we do not see it enough, because its most precious part is invisible. We see unfaithfulness, not faithfulness, because it takes place and is done when we could be unfaithful but are not, when we have the 'incentive' for betrayal and instead decide to remain faithful to a pact; when we could chose not to go back - yet we return home faithfully. And we do not tell about it to anyone, because if we did it would lose its charm.
But the Bible, with its infinite human wisdom, speaks to us of unfaithfulness above all: "Lift up your eyes to the bare heights, and see! / Where have you not been ravished? / By the waysides you have sat awaiting lovers... You have polluted the land / with your vile whoredom." (Jeremiah 3:2) And if the Bible speaks to us about unfaithfulness, then we must be able to look deeper into the faithfulness-unfaithfulness binomial, because it may be more complex than we think. The Bible is not afraid to base its argument on man as it is, and call him by name: "Return, faithless Israel... I will not look on you in anger, / for I am merciful"(3:12).
Many of the experiences that appear to us and that we live as unfaithfulness are mysterious exercises to learn the art of living. There is much unfaithfulness inside what appears to be faithfulness, and there is some faithfulness in betrayal, too. One of the most sublime graces of life is to succeed, on an unexpected day, in finding our own unfaithfulness sitting next to us in the kitchen, finally greeting it like our other travel companions and then dining and partying together.
The meeting of two (or more) instances of faithfulness is called alliance or pact. When unfaithfulness takes place within a pact-alliance, it becomes stronger, because the alliance can live and grow even if one of the parties becomes unfaithful. The alliance is a rope, a fides (that is, a faith-trust) that binds people to each other. It's the rope in rock climbing. If one stumbles or gives up, he or she does not fall or sink until the rope holds and until there is someone still well anchored to the rock. There are families, communities, businesses that have been saved because at least one person held on, because one person believed when no one believed in that love story anymore, because one person persisted when everyone else gave in. There is perhaps no greater gift than being able to climb the summit of life with people who are more faithful than us. One can stay in a state of unfaithfulness for years or even for decades without getting lost because another one manages not to give up. Faithfulness, instead, precipitates into the deep when it gets removed from the rope to continue climbing alone. As long as we remain inside a story of alliance, we cannot know how many times we save ourselves because someone next to us is holding us. Even when we do not notice or think that that rope is just a shoelace tying us to the headstock of a prison. Whoever lives and survives the great crises while remaining in an alliance does not know how many times they have not fallen into a precipice just because someone was loyal to them - perhaps by praying, or by meekly accepting the pain. Few people have the gift of discovering the bailouts they had not seen there and then during their lifetime - as these are always more than we could get to know and recognize.
But by their very nature, alliances and pacts are tragic experiences, because even though we can hold on to the rope and not let it go, the other one can also cut it off and fall down. Or else, at other times, the weight of the unfaithfulness of others is so heavy that it pulls us down, too, unless we have the clarity of understanding what is the last moment when we can still cut the rope. We suffer, we suffer much, for our own unfaithfulness, and we suffer, we suffer much for the unfaithfulness of the people to whom we are bound. This is a profound reason for the cult that our civilization has developed around contracts that are much lighter and more tender than pacts and alliances: they are easily cut, but they do not save us from the precipices of life.
The great prophetic principle of the remnant is also valid for faithfulness. Salvation from unfaithfulness can be accomplished as long as there is a remnant, a small part, a sprout, a son alive in us: "I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, / and I will bring you to Zion" (3:14). An alliance story can continue if, during the moments of getting distanced, we were able to remain faithful to something, because there was at least one thing we did well and with faithfulness to the end. There are people who have been saved in situations marked by their own unfaithfulness or that of those to whom they were bound because they were able to save a living remnant in themselves, because they continued to do just one thing for decades: a job, taking care of a relationship or a garden, because they continued to recite the only family prayer they still remembered, faithfully and well. We can save a vocation and a whole life also by caring for a plant on the balcony of the house, which becomes the rope that prevents us from sinking.
After the cases of unfaithfulness, only a remnant comes back. After every betrayal there is a nation that has become smaller, entire chapters of our lives and that of others are forever lost. But the promised land can still be attained if at least one remains alive and faithful, if a piece of the lawn has not been destroyed. Just like with plants. At the end of the race not all the beauties and not all the hopes of youth will reach their destination; many good and nice things are left behind on the way, held up by other things or by others. Sometimes there is only one to finish the race, only one pearl of the gift given to us by the first voice reaches the destination; but what really matters is that a remnant, something of us remains faithful to the first pact. When we were young we wanted a pure, coherent, religious, meek and poor life. When we are grown-ups, we find ourselves in impurity, in inconsistency and with a very frail faith. But if we have remained really poor, or if we have been able to remain meek, we enter the land of Canaan, or at least we get to see it from afar - and then, sometimes, we find that in that poverty to which we have been faithful there were also all the other ideals and beauties we were looking for when we were young but we did not see them anymore because we did not realize that it was only in the 'ugliness' that we could find them as adults.
In the Bible, the Alliance is linked to the image of the ark: the Ark of the Covenant. Moses (Exodus 25) had received the order from God to build it, for keeping the two tables of law in it, together, perhaps, with a gold vase containing the manna and the flourished rod of Aaron (Letter to the Hebrews 9) . The ark resembled Babylonian and above all Egyptian objects, where it was common to build trunks to safeguard their gods and idols, which they carried around in processions during the great festivals. The ark symbolized the Covenant because of the presence of the Tablets in it, the sacrament of the covenant stipulated between JHWH and Moses on Mount Sinai. It was the greatest treasure of the people of Israel.
We find the ark again in Jeremiah's prophecy on Israel's return, having finally become faithful: "And when you have multiplied and been fruitful in the land, in those days, declares the Lord, they shall no more say, »The ark of the covenant of the Lord.« It shall not come to mind or be remembered or missed; it shall not be made again." (3:16).
The ark will not be talked about any more, it will neither be regretted nor reconstructed. After the destruction of the temple of Solomon by the Babylonians (587) there is no sure mention of the ark any more (according to some traditions it was destroyed, according to others it is still buried under the remains of the Temple of Jerusalem, others believe it is in Ethiopia or in a number of other places).
Jeremiah does not mourn the loss of the ark, perhaps because he knows that even the ark, made by God's command, can become an idol. The prophets know that idolatry can touch the heart of true faith, too. If mankind has the tendency to make idols of what is not God, they even more radically seek to transform God into idols. The cases of idolatry with no return are not those of Baal but those of God.  If there were no prophets (or if we did not listen to them), the tabernacles of our churches would become totems, and Jesus our greatest idol.
After the destruction of Jerusalem, in the second temple the former place of the ark was taken by a simple stone, which indicated a void, an absence. As long as the temples and churches can enshrine the absence of God, we may remain alive in his desire and dream. And, maybe one day, we can meet him as we graze a flock, or as we gather the nets, when we set out on a walk, disappointed, to a village. Or when, finally at home, we recognize him in the face of those who have been waiting for us faithfully.
Dedicated to Marco Tecilla, first focolarino
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    [metadesc] => Loyalty is one of the most significant words in human life. But often it is hidden in experiences of unfaithfulness, from which only a "remnant" can come back. Jeremiah tells us very eloquently about this, and the ever-present risk of transforming our tabernacles into idols.
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The Dawn of Midnight/3 - Having people more faithful than us by our side is a great gift
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/05/2017
"...he went forth into the mountain, where Moses climbed up, and saw the heritage of God. And when Jeremiah came thither, he found an hollow cave, wherein he laid the tabernacle, and the ark, and the altar of incense, and so stopped the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way, but they could not find it."
Second Book of the Maccabees
Faithfulness is one of those words that are capable of saying all that there is to say about life. An existence is made up of many words and a lot of things, but if we were to choose only one, faithfulness would be a very strong candidate. Faithfulness is almost everything; faithfulness, perhaps, is everything. Faithfulness to the foundation pacts of our existence, to marriage, our profession, to friendships, to the voice that called us one day by making us start on the greatest journey. It is faithfulness that warms our heart during the winters, that consoles the soul when everything else passes and makes us pronounce our name without shame. It is the most beautiful legacy we leave to our children.
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