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The exile and the promise/28 – There is always a piece of sacred land that is not for sale, and hence priceless
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/05/2019
«The price of life stems from things that are priceless. It is within the context of charitable acts, of giving away what he owns and what he is, that man reaches his highest level of dignity»
François Perroux, Le capitalisme
We have reached the end of the comments on the book of Ezekiel. His last words regard the city, reminding us that the meaning of prophecy is to talk to us about heaven in order to do things better on earth.
He who fears charity and giving does not seek, in general, to do away with them. No, instead he cunningly covers them with words of esteem and praise and then locks them away in a small and narrow room, so that, tied up and imprisoned, they cannot disturb the regular business of things going on outside. The name of these attempts at ideological confinement today are: no profit, volunteering, third sector, religion. There are false prophets who are willing to do everything to convince us that giving and fraternity can only be good and of use if the remain docile within the realms of a well-defined and limited territory, because they know that if these concepts should free themselves and get out, they would put their business in a profound crisis. Great innovations come about when, thanks to an honest prophet, charity exceeds its boundaries and breaks into the city, transforming and changing it forever.
«This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “You are to divide it equally among them. Because I swore with uplifted hand to give it to your ancestors, this land will become your inheritance» (Ezekiel 47,13-14). At the end of the book of Ezekiel we find the land again, which in the Bible is much more than a mere juridical or political issue. To the prophets the land is always sacred land, especially to the prophets of the exile, when land was no more and the promise seemed to have vanished forever. One of the great and principal tasks of the prophets, maybe the most precious one, is keeping the promise alive when everyone and everything insist that it’s finished – talking to us about the future during destruction, of beauty in the middle of ugliness, of health in sickness, of life while we are dying. One cannot overcome the great crises of the world without prophecy.
The Promised Land belongs to the profound spiritual DNA of biblical humanism. It is an essential part of the gift from its different God, true because of the truth of His promise. This is also why the Jewish people have been (and continue to be) tempted and tried on their possession and non-possession of land. But the view of the prophets differs from that of the Law regarding this matter as well. Ezekiel says that the portions of land of the twelve tribes must all be the equal, and hence that they should not be assigned according to the size of the population. Telling us that if there is justice in proportionality, there is also a different kind of justice that recognises equal rights to different realities. Being smaller or a smaller number of people does not always justify a smaller share, because sometimes size and force are not the first words to be mentioned in the social pact. They are many times, but not always. There are moral and social aspects that cannot be measured or weighed. Sometimes the criteria for fair treatment and equity precede those of equality, but there are times when the principle of equality must be absolute, especially in matters regarding human rights – dignity, respect, freedom, are not assigned on the basis of quantity and numbers. And to the prophets the Promised Land does not belong to the kingdom of quantity but to that of the spirit and hence of quality.
The Law had also repeatedly stated that foreigners were not like the Jews, that they did not have the same rights (Deuteronomy 23, 3-4).The prophet however changes, rectifies and overturns this: «So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the sojourners who reside among you and have had children among you. They shall be to you as native-born children of Israel» (Ezekiel 47, 21-22). The Torah Law relegates the different rules regarding the seventh day to the Shabbat alone, doing everything possible so that they may continue being only an exception, prophecy however tends to extend the jubilee law of the seventh day to every day of the week. Because the sabbatical exception to the Law is and must remain an exception (equality between citizens and foreigners, between man and nature, between free men and slaves…), while to the prophecy this is the rule of the Kingdom that is to come. Jesus’s controversy towards the Sabbath is a prophetic criticism of a system which jealously defended the Sabbath to stop it from eluding the boundaries of the seventh day – the prophecy of the Gospels is an eternal Sabbath, where cosmic fraternity is the golden rule of the new law.
Communities that do not have prophets or prophecies discriminate between native citizens and foreigners, between different categories of children. The Law makes distinctions, assigns priorities and excludes; in the name of a different law, the prophets unify, include, level and bring equality. It is from the dialogue, meeting and confrontation between the Law and Prophecy that the actual and changing rules of civil society and coexistence were born. But these will not be anything but inhuman and unjust if the different reasoning behind the prophets thinking is missing in the civil debate – or when it is silenced, killed, or converted.
Ezekiel then continues: «Alongside the territory of the priests, the Levites will have an allotment (…) They must not sell or exchange any of it. This is the best of the land and must not pass into other hands, because it is holy to the Lord» (Ezekiel 48,13-14). There is a portion of the Promised Land, the central part is assigned to the tribe of Levi, which is governed by yet another different statute: this strip of land cannot be made an object of trade. Here, the land does not follow the rules of supply and demand, and hence, thanks to this sliver of land the entire earth still remains promised even if it’s already been attained.
This land is not the land of a contract but of a pact it needs to remember. A strong and clear language to differentiate between pacts and contracts and set a limit to commercial exchange, stating that not everything in that relationship is for sale, that there in fact are things and values that are literally non-negotiable. In the Bible business is not, as in Latin languages, the negative of ozio = leisure, (nec-otium), but the negative of sacred: “because it is sacred to the Lord”. A pact is not a contract because it does not include a reserved price which once attained will turn the good in question into a commodity. Even if some lawyer wanted to call it that, a matrimony is not a business transaction for it is founded on a piece of sacred land that is not a commodity, but merely and only a good; because that strip of common land is our promised land, and hence does not have a price, and that lack of price makes its value infinite.
Ezekiel’s last vision ends with the New Jerusalem: «The gates of the city will be named after the tribes of Israel» (Ezekiel 48, 31). And then the book ends with this phrase: «And the name of the city from that time on will be: the Lord is there» (Ezekiel 48, 35).
The book of the prophet Ezekiel, the prophet who spoke to us about heaven the most, of visions, of angels, ends with the vision of a new city. In great novels, the first and last words are not like the rest. They have a different weight and a different meaning, and they should often be read together. «In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God». This is the first verse of the book of Ezekiel, with which we began this long journey, almost six months ago. The heavens opened, and there were divine visions, many of which are described in his book. And, in the end, his last word is a secular and humble word: “city”. These last couple of months, Ezekiel has given us a great number of words of beauty and hope, but maybe the most beautiful one is this one last word of his. A marvellous message to those who, like us, do not have the privilege to see the heavens opening, do not have visions, but wish to and should see the city, our city, its politics, its economy, its people, therein finding our paradise. Ezekiel’s visions and heavens have at the same time also become ours. The prophets tell us of their visions so that they may become our heritage and hope while we fight the same battles they fought, despite note being able to hear “so said the Lord”. Here, we have a strange but real legacy: continuing their fights without having their light, creates a real fraternity between us and the prophets.
And so the time to say goodbye is upon us once again. We must leave Ezekiel, with the same nostalgic feeling with which we leave a dear friend who has welcomed us as guests during a few months in his beautiful home. In his company, we have encountered both the lights and shadows of our time, its joys and its hopes. Many things remain engraved in our soul, but above all, a few immense and infinite pages. The story of his prophetic calling in exiled lands, a minister without a temple who inherits a temple as great as the whole world. The silence that accompanied his calling and made it even more real and human, because no one knows himself to own his own words like a prophet does, that each word is a gift that breaks the silence. And then the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple, that he had prophesized from the very first day of his calling: a mysterious destiny for a prophet who received the task to announce the destruction of the holy city, “delight of his eyes”. Then, the new heart of flesh, and the great vision of the withered and resurrected bones, the Pentecost of the Old Testament. And then the new temple which becomes the fountain and a source of water that spreads from there to inundate the earth, to sanctify the profane and the whole world. And finally the city. His and our cities. But first, last and always: the exile and the promise. Ezekiel is an incredible prophet because he knew how to keep his faith in the promise constant during the Babylonian exile, the hardest time in the history of Israel. Teaching us that the promise can be kept alive even when the great dream is dying. That God is still real even if He has been beaten, that success is not a good indicator of truth. That even if a story has ended it does not mean that it is the end of the story. What would religion be without the prophets? Without life? Without us?
Thank you to those of you who have accompanied me during these months, in an assignment that keeps becoming increasingly choral. Thank you to Marco Tarquinio, director of this publication which is one of the great blessings of this season of my work and of my life. Following a Sunday break, we will continue our dialogue with the Bible on the 2nd of June, with a comment on the Books of Kings, hence on the story of Solomon and Elia. Once more, ready to allow ourselves to be surprised by the Bible and through it by life.
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The exile and the promise/28 – There is always a piece of sacred land that is not for sale, and hence priceless
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/05/2019
«The price of life stems from things that are priceless. It is within the context of charitable acts, of giving away what he owns and what he is, that man reaches his highest level of dignity»
François Perroux, Le capitalisme
We have reached the end of the comments on the book of Ezekiel. His last words regard the city, reminding us that the meaning of prophecy is to talk to us about heaven in order to do things better on earth.
He who fears charity and giving does not seek, in general, to do away with them. No, instead he cunningly covers them with words of esteem and praise and then locks them away in a small and narrow room, so that, tied up and imprisoned, they cannot disturb the regular business of things going on outside. The name of these attempts at ideological confinement today are: no profit, volunteering, third sector, religion. There are false prophets who are willing to do everything to convince us that giving and fraternity can only be good and of use if the remain docile within the realms of a well-defined and limited territory, because they know that if these concepts should free themselves and get out, they would put their business in a profound crisis. Great innovations come about when, thanks to an honest prophet, charity exceeds its boundaries and breaks into the city, transforming and changing it forever.
«This is what the Sovereign Lord says: “You are to divide it equally among them. Because I swore with uplifted hand to give it to your ancestors, this land will become your inheritance» (Ezekiel 47,13-14). At the end of the book of Ezekiel we find the land again, which in the Bible is much more than a mere juridical or political issue. To the prophets the land is always sacred land, especially to the prophets of the exile, when land was no more and the promise seemed to have vanished forever. One of the great and principal tasks of the prophets, maybe the most precious one, is keeping the promise alive when everyone and everything insist that it’s finished – talking to us about the future during destruction, of beauty in the middle of ugliness, of health in sickness, of life while we are dying. One cannot overcome the great crises of the world without prophecy.
The Promised Land belongs to the profound spiritual DNA of biblical humanism. It is an essential part of the gift from its different God, true because of the truth of His promise. This is also why the Jewish people have been (and continue to be) tempted and tried on their possession and non-possession of land. But the view of the prophets differs from that of the Law regarding this matter as well. Ezekiel says that the portions of land of the twelve tribes must all be the equal, and hence that they should not be assigned according to the size of the population. Telling us that if there is justice in proportionality, there is also a different kind of justice that recognises equal rights to different realities. Being smaller or a smaller number of people does not always justify a smaller share, because sometimes size and force are not the first words to be mentioned in the social pact. They are many times, but not always. There are moral and social aspects that cannot be measured or weighed. Sometimes the criteria for fair treatment and equity precede those of equality, but there are times when the principle of equality must be absolute, especially in matters regarding human rights – dignity, respect, freedom, are not assigned on the basis of quantity and numbers. And to the prophets the Promised Land does not belong to the kingdom of quantity but to that of the spirit and hence of quality.
The Law had also repeatedly stated that foreigners were not like the Jews, that they did not have the same rights (Deuteronomy 23, 3-4).The prophet however changes, rectifies and overturns this: «So you shall divide this land among you according to the tribes of Israel. You shall allot it as an inheritance for yourselves and for the sojourners who reside among you and have had children among you. They shall be to you as native-born children of Israel» (Ezekiel 47, 21-22). The Torah Law relegates the different rules regarding the seventh day to the Shabbat alone, doing everything possible so that they may continue being only an exception, prophecy however tends to extend the jubilee law of the seventh day to every day of the week. Because the sabbatical exception to the Law is and must remain an exception (equality between citizens and foreigners, between man and nature, between free men and slaves…), while to the prophecy this is the rule of the Kingdom that is to come. Jesus’s controversy towards the Sabbath is a prophetic criticism of a system which jealously defended the Sabbath to stop it from eluding the boundaries of the seventh day – the prophecy of the Gospels is an eternal Sabbath, where cosmic fraternity is the golden rule of the new law.
Communities that do not have prophets or prophecies discriminate between native citizens and foreigners, between different categories of children. The Law makes distinctions, assigns priorities and excludes; in the name of a different law, the prophets unify, include, level and bring equality. It is from the dialogue, meeting and confrontation between the Law and Prophecy that the actual and changing rules of civil society and coexistence were born. But these will not be anything but inhuman and unjust if the different reasoning behind the prophets thinking is missing in the civil debate – or when it is silenced, killed, or converted.
Ezekiel then continues: «Alongside the territory of the priests, the Levites will have an allotment (…) They must not sell or exchange any of it. This is the best of the land and must not pass into other hands, because it is holy to the Lord» (Ezekiel 48,13-14). There is a portion of the Promised Land, the central part is assigned to the tribe of Levi, which is governed by yet another different statute: this strip of land cannot be made an object of trade. Here, the land does not follow the rules of supply and demand, and hence, thanks to this sliver of land the entire earth still remains promised even if it’s already been attained.
This land is not the land of a contract but of a pact it needs to remember. A strong and clear language to differentiate between pacts and contracts and set a limit to commercial exchange, stating that not everything in that relationship is for sale, that there in fact are things and values that are literally non-negotiable. In the Bible business is not, as in Latin languages, the negative of ozio = leisure, (nec-otium), but the negative of sacred: “because it is sacred to the Lord”. A pact is not a contract because it does not include a reserved price which once attained will turn the good in question into a commodity. Even if some lawyer wanted to call it that, a matrimony is not a business transaction for it is founded on a piece of sacred land that is not a commodity, but merely and only a good; because that strip of common land is our promised land, and hence does not have a price, and that lack of price makes its value infinite.
Ezekiel’s last vision ends with the New Jerusalem: «The gates of the city will be named after the tribes of Israel» (Ezekiel 48, 31). And then the book ends with this phrase: «And the name of the city from that time on will be: the Lord is there» (Ezekiel 48, 35).
The book of the prophet Ezekiel, the prophet who spoke to us about heaven the most, of visions, of angels, ends with the vision of a new city. In great novels, the first and last words are not like the rest. They have a different weight and a different meaning, and they should often be read together. «In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God». This is the first verse of the book of Ezekiel, with which we began this long journey, almost six months ago. The heavens opened, and there were divine visions, many of which are described in his book. And, in the end, his last word is a secular and humble word: “city”. These last couple of months, Ezekiel has given us a great number of words of beauty and hope, but maybe the most beautiful one is this one last word of his. A marvellous message to those who, like us, do not have the privilege to see the heavens opening, do not have visions, but wish to and should see the city, our city, its politics, its economy, its people, therein finding our paradise. Ezekiel’s visions and heavens have at the same time also become ours. The prophets tell us of their visions so that they may become our heritage and hope while we fight the same battles they fought, despite note being able to hear “so said the Lord”. Here, we have a strange but real legacy: continuing their fights without having their light, creates a real fraternity between us and the prophets.
And so the time to say goodbye is upon us once again. We must leave Ezekiel, with the same nostalgic feeling with which we leave a dear friend who has welcomed us as guests during a few months in his beautiful home. In his company, we have encountered both the lights and shadows of our time, its joys and its hopes. Many things remain engraved in our soul, but above all, a few immense and infinite pages. The story of his prophetic calling in exiled lands, a minister without a temple who inherits a temple as great as the whole world. The silence that accompanied his calling and made it even more real and human, because no one knows himself to own his own words like a prophet does, that each word is a gift that breaks the silence. And then the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple, that he had prophesized from the very first day of his calling: a mysterious destiny for a prophet who received the task to announce the destruction of the holy city, “delight of his eyes”. Then, the new heart of flesh, and the great vision of the withered and resurrected bones, the Pentecost of the Old Testament. And then the new temple which becomes the fountain and a source of water that spreads from there to inundate the earth, to sanctify the profane and the whole world. And finally the city. His and our cities. But first, last and always: the exile and the promise. Ezekiel is an incredible prophet because he knew how to keep his faith in the promise constant during the Babylonian exile, the hardest time in the history of Israel. Teaching us that the promise can be kept alive even when the great dream is dying. That God is still real even if He has been beaten, that success is not a good indicator of truth. That even if a story has ended it does not mean that it is the end of the story. What would religion be without the prophets? Without life? Without us?
Thank you to those of you who have accompanied me during these months, in an assignment that keeps becoming increasingly choral. Thank you to Marco Tarquinio, director of this publication which is one of the great blessings of this season of my work and of my life. Following a Sunday break, we will continue our dialogue with the Bible on the 2nd of June, with a comment on the Books of Kings, hence on the story of Solomon and Elia. Once more, ready to allow ourselves to be surprised by the Bible and through it by life.
download 


    

pdf


 article in pdf

(311 KB)



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Exile and the promise/26 – Before being a merit richness is a gift. We are surrounded by gratuity
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/05/2019
« You will not violate the foreigner’s or the orphan’s rights and you will not take the widows robes as collateral. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that you were saved by the Lord, your God. When you were harvesting your fields, you might have forgotten a sheave or two.They will go to the foreigner, to the orphan and to the widow »
Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 24
Ezekiel’s words, which also serve as taxation measures, provide us with a good opportunity to reflect on the reciprocal nature of taxes and on the respect with which they should be elaborated and above all applied by those in power. .
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I’ve been commenting and reflecting on the Bible for years and yet I still haven’t managed to get used to the impression of reading about weight measurements and coin names, next to descriptions of angels and God, or to the stupor of seeing the word becoming economic and commercial flesh, to the beauty of the prophets who while looking at the skies and speaking “face-to-face” with God in the same breath are capable of speaking of money and public finances. Reminding us that there are few words more spiritual than: budgets, taxes, ephah (22 litres, used for cereal), bat (22 litres, for liquids, homer (unit of donkey load), oil, sheep. For the prophets know that these humble words are those in which the dignity and contempt for the poor are written, and if faith wishes to speak with the words of life then God must also learn how to speak with the words of economy and finance. When experts on religious life and theology begin to think that the only things that are really important are “spiritual”, considering economic matters too earthly and basic, and hence begin to disinterest themselves leaving the “management of the canteens” entirely in the hands of lay people, religion begins to loose its contact with the real life of people and economy becomes both the mistress and tyrant of faith, the temple and its ministers.
The prophets, however, continued to mention these words because they knew to understand it as economy the sister: «Keep your budgets right, your ephah right, and your bat right... This is the offer for which you will extract: a sixth of ephah for each homer of wheat and a sixth of ephah for each homer of barley…Ten bat correspond to one homer. And from the herd, on the fertile meadows of Israel, one in two hundred sheep. This will be given for the meat offerings, for the burnt offerings, for communion» (Ezekiel 45,10-15). The Bible is also the story of the development of social and economic ethics. Many of the economic and fiscal principles that we find in the Bible are similar to those in nearby regions; others are different, and some are unique, caused by the many elements of diversity and uniqueness of the Jewish people, due above all to their special religion.
The first experience Israel had of its God-Yahweh was the liberation from slavery, so important and fundamental that it ended up determining its different vision on economy as well. The Shabbat, which we only see in Israel, is the translation of the liberation from Pharaoh into the liberation from the slavery of the temple, the slavery of work, and of the need for social hierarchy and status. The ban on interest loans, another biblical exemption, is the economic incarnation of a theology of liberation in which a poor man does not need to become enslaved to his creditor due to insolvency. And if, despite all the precautions, the poor continue to fall in disgrace and become slaves to the mighty, they turn free men again during the sabbatical year and the great jubilee: in biblical humanism no man must stay a slave forever, for liberty is the greatest gift on earth, which no fault can permanently erase. Hence, taxes should be read together with the Shabbat, the jubilee, the gleaning, Egypt and the open sea.
In fact, this liberation becomes a liberation from the harassment and abuse of the mighty as well. One of the main tasks of any prophecy has always been to defend the people and the poor from the abuse of civilian and religious leaders (this is also one of the reasons behind the prophetic diffidence towards the institution of monarchy). The prophets remind kings that they are not God, and during times when there are no prophets (or when they are killed) a major sign of this dearth is the tendency of leaders to feel like gods and act accordingly.
The Bible also tells us that princes have a tendency to not want to listen to the prophets. Not even the power of their words is sufficient to stop the delusions of omnipotence and grandeur of the mighty and their crimes against what is lawful and right. In conserving the different words of the prophets, the Bible, however, has enabled each generation to start afresh from its books and criticize those in power and say “enough”: «Thus says the Lord God: Enough, O princes of Israel! Put away violence and oppression, and execute justice and righteousness. Cease your evictions of my people» (Ezekiel 45,9). We can clearly see here, that these taxes are not particularly high (1.66% of each ephah of wheat and barley and 0.5% of the heard). The tithe itself, which was the main direct income taxt (not wealth) back then, was an important tax but it wasn’t unbearable. It was half of what Joseph established in Egypt, for instance: «Then Joseph said to the people: and it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own…And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part» (Gen 47, 24-26). The great experience of the liberation of Egypt suggested the introduction of lower taxes than the ones that were being applied, for the Promised Land is also characterised by its fiscal and redistributive justice, which clearly is very different from the one found in the land of slavery. The new land is also one in which God only keeps one tenth of its richness to himself, and leaves nine tenths to his people: the God in the Bible does not wish misery upon his people, but shalom. He is also a different God because he doesn’t ask his faithful to set aside too much of their wealth for religious worship. He is not a consumer of his own people, nor a God who is jealous of the welfare of men, but a Father who enjoys the goods of his children.
From these chapters one deducts, furthermore, that these taxes were linked to the temple and destined for the supply of a number of public goods which were essential to the life of the people, for the management of the temple (offerings, the livelihood of the ministers and activities for sustaining the poor), and for great celebrations: «In the first month on the fourteenth day you are to observe the Passover, a festival lasting seven days… On that day the prince is to provide as a grain offering an ephah for each bull and an ephah for each ram» (Ezekiel 45,21-24). We will never cease to stress the importance of the celebration of feasts. Israel managed to survive during millennia, surrounded by destruction, Diasporas, unfaithfulness, deportation and persecution, partly because it took care of and preserved the great feasts of its people. In a time in which we are experiencing a form of capitalism which is erasing the tradition of celebrating feasts (deemed too subversive in their nature of unnecessary waste and gratuity) only too replace them with thousands of forms of mainly individualistic entertainment, we mustn’t forget the essential symbolic nature of our feasts. You cannot survive exiles and collective persecutions without the ability to celebrate a feast, without celebrating them together, because feasts are the root and pre-condition of each common public good. The first public places were places of worship and hence for celebration, if the celebration of feasts ends then the commons and public places will soon disappear too, to be occupied by business and its paid for “feasts”. The safeguarding of the commons and the common good today, needs to become the collective safeguarding and protection of the feasts and the celebration of popular feasts for all.
Taxes where therefore the main means for supplying public goods and property. They weren’t, hence, a wealth levy to fill the private coffins of princes (Ezekiel 46,18). The book of Ezekiel calls these taxes “votive offerings”. And this is of great importance. The religious nature of these taxes made a fundamental aspect, maybe the most significant one, immediately clear. In Israel, and in the ancient world in general, taxes were the primary way through which people gave back part of the wealth they had received to God and to the community. In the Bible «the whole world belongs to Yahweh», and so it was only natural to return part of the wealth generated form that world which they possessed without being its owners – not surprisingly only agricultural products were tithed and taxed for practically all taxes. All is grace, all is providence, what we are and have is first and foremost a gift. The taxes were hence an expression of the golden rule of reciprocity. And they continue to be so today, even if we have forgotten it. Taxes weren’t, taxes aren’t, a question of altruism or usurpation, but merely a reply, restitution, recognition, gratitude – altruistic acts by common citizens become necessary when the taxes exit the registry of reciprocity and turn into an instrument of usurpation by those in power.
The fiscal compact, the heart of any social pact, can be written only within the realms of this horizon of reciprocity and providence which precedes any question of merit and incentives. The Bible and the prophets still reminds us of this today that we, having lost the meaning of providence and gratitude, see taxes as mere usurpation, abuse and pure coercion, and try in any which way possible to avoid or evade them. Even if the meritocratic ideology tries to make us forget it, before being a merit, the wealth that we generate and possess is a gift. We are surrounded by gratuity. We were not born because it was due onto us, but because a generous and kind hand welcomed us on this earth. We weren’t welcomed on the first day of class because of our merits, but because those who preceded us wished to give us a heritage of culture, art, religion, beauty and art. Then we learnt a trade, often times by “stealing” it from someone who allowed it to be stolen from him, in that spirit of generosity and reciprocity which vitalizes and fertilizes the earth each day. And then one day we found ourselves in the position to earn an income, as the fruit and result of the cooperation of thousands of people, who enrichened us with their mere presence. Our achievement, our virtues and our commitment, were naturally also there in the midst of this game of reciprocity. But before and above all there was so much providence, a great gift, an infinite generosity.
These are humble secular truths of which the prophets remind us and gift us with. They remind us, that we have to go back to seeing our taxes and the taxes of others differently and with more esteem. And they remind our governments, that they must view our taxes with the same dignity and with the same respect with which the Bible viewed all the offerings that the people made to God in His temple.
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Exile and the promise/26 – Before being a merit richness is a gift. We are surrounded by gratuity
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/05/2019
« You will not violate the foreigner’s or the orphan’s rights and you will not take the widows robes as collateral. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that you were saved by the Lord, your God. When you were harvesting your fields, you might have forgotten a sheave or two.They will go to the foreigner, to the orphan and to the widow »
Book of Deuteronomy, chapter 24
Ezekiel’s words, which also serve as taxation measures, provide us with a good opportunity to reflect on the reciprocal nature of taxes and on the respect with which they should be elaborated and above all applied by those in power. .
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The exile and the promise/24 – In the absence of physical spaces and confines we learn how to worship God “in spirit and in truth”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/04/2019
« To the religious person space isn’t homogenous. This non-homogeneity manifests itself in a veritable contraposition between the sacred space, the only thing that is truly real, that truly exists, and the vast formless expanse which surrounds it. »
Mircea Eliade, The sacred and the profane
The great trials in life often work as a purification of our spirituality and moral principles, because they teach us that the things that are really necessary in order to continue living and growing are actually very few and rather simple. In a positive evolution of our spiritual life, we start simple, become complex, and end up coming back to being simple, when the wisdom of the old person we’ve become encounters the purity of the youth we once were, and in the midst of it all that remains is an immense appreciation and gratitude. While crossing vast stretches of deserts you learn that, in addition to water and bread, only a handful of things are actually truly essential – it is on brief and comfortable trips that we tend to carry a load of heavy and to a large extent unnecessary luggage. Elijah the prophet had to find himself in the desert, with a desire to die in his heart, in order to discover the voice of God in a “faint breeze”, after having imagined and searched for Him in vain in earthquake and fire (1 Rev 19,12). Thirsty for life and paradise, we spend many a year searching for God in temples and sacred places, only to finally realize, that what we seek was, simply, just around the corner.
    [fulltext] => 
One day in Jerusalem, on the Mount Zion, Ezekiel once again carried away in a vision: «In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth of the month, in the fourteenth year after the fall of the city—on that very day the hand of the Lord was on me and he took me there » (Ezekiel 40,1). After seeing the resurrection of the withered bones of his perished people in chapter 37, now the prophet sees the resurrection of the temple, having been destroyed fourteen years before. Ezekiel had envisioned and foretold the destruction of the temple years before it happened, and had built his entire prophetic life in exile around this “theological” destruction. And so one day, by now near the end of his life’s mission, he received the gift to see the new temple in the new Jerusalem, as a token of the coming end to the exile and the restoration of a new Israel of a «new heart».
To Ezekiel the temple of Yahweh, the true and different God, was something of extreme importance. Ezekiel is an old-world, Middle Eastern man, a clergyman. In his world, he would not have been able to profess a faith in which « the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth» (John 4,23). The glorification of God needed its place of worship. But between Ezekiel and the prophets and clergymen who preceded him, a decisive historical event took place: the Babylonian exile.
Ezekiel carried out his entire mission along the rivers of Babylon, and therefore in the absence of the sacred place of a temple. Hence, he had to learn a very essential form of faith, where not even attending a temple or the holy sacrifices where fundamental any longer. Life taught him at huge expense to simplify religion; the enforced absence of the material requirements for worship induced him to a more spiritual and abstract faith. Being a minister without a temple forced him to rethink what the temple really constitutes in relation to faith – and the true nature of ministry (as in the case of those who find themselves relearning priesthood while being constricted to a hospital bed powerless for months and years without a congregation or the ability to practise).
And so, exiled in a land without a temple but not without God, servant of a defeated but still true God, Ezekiel receives the vision of a new temple. He has carried out his entire mission while recalling, with increasingly faint colours, within his soul, the temple of Salomon where he studied in his youth; and now, at the end of his life, he sees it with prophetic eyes, as a “reward” for having completed the race and kept the faith in a God stripped of his temple alive: «In visions of God He took me to the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, on whose southern slope was a structure that resembled a city. So He took me there, and I saw a man whose appearance was like bronze. He was standing in the gateway with a linen cord and a measuring rod in his hand» (Ez 40,2-3). Under the guidance of a celestial being, Ezekiel sees an immense construction, describing all its architectural and religious characteristics in three long and very detailed chapters, which among other things give us the possibility to immerse ourselves in our minds in the biblical man’s experience of the sacred.
In a desecrated and disenchanted world, where by now the only remaining traces of the sacred are those marked by the consumption and corporate rituals of capitalism, we have completely lost contact with the ancient world to be able to understand what the manifestation of the sacred meant in that world, the hierophany. The first and immediate experience ancient man had of the world was that of chaos, a blurred and irrational whole where the only possible, inaccessible and incomprehensible, “order” was that run by demons. The religions of the world have also been an attempt to bring order to the chaos, through the identification of a few diverging spaces, holy places, equipped with a certain rationality and predictability, within the ordinary disorder. The altars and the sanctuaries, and in the Bible the veil, the arc, and finally the temple of Jerusalem, constitute the way in which those spaces have been managed, through the fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane. In fact, the conclusion of the architectural description of the temple by Ezekiel is indicative: «So he measured the area on all four sides. It had a wall around it, five hundred cubits long and five hundred cubits wide, to separate the holy from the common» (Ez 42,20).
Even in the Bible, which has its own special relationship with the sacred, the temple is needed to separate the sacred from the profane. The sacred was made of time and space. The threshold of the temple delineated the space, separating it from the entire surrounding area, which on the surface may have appeared similar but was substantially different; however by crossing that border of space one entered a different time zone, and a different timeline began, (cronos became kairos), following a different rhythm, while a different clock showed a different time. Hence, in the general chaos of nature and social relationships, both at the mercy of forces and irrationality, when ancient man stepped over the threshold of time and overcame that threshold of time, he tasted eternity, and in that time-temple he beat death, the fear of which is one of the main origins of religion. In that eternal place he communicated with time, the cloud of fire was still descending over Mount Sinai, and there, beyond ordinary time and space, Moses was still and truly speaking with Yahweh, the people could not hear the voice but believed and saw something extra-ordinary. The temple is the new Sinai, where the ascension towards the top of the sacred mountain has become the procession towards the centre of the temple (the "Holy of Holies", the secret heart of the temple accessible to the high-priest only once a year, is the mountain top of the Sinai).
Maybe, all of this could be found in the heart of every Jew who stepped over the threshold of Salomon’s Temple, as well as in Ezekiel’s heart. The uncertain and chaotic passing of time and harshness of everyday life was interrupted, and in the hours of the temple you returned to the slopes of Mount Sinai, saw Moses once again, the sea parted once more, and you no longer felt like a slave. A marvellous experience, which turned that different space into Eden, where God was still walking in the «breeze of the day». The Jews did not feel the need to believe in paradise beyond life, because the touched it every time they went to the temple. This is why they were so madly in love with that place, and why they still shed tears over it.
Therefore, when Ezekiel towards the end of his vision, sees «the glory» of Yahweh returning to the temple from which it had disappeared before it was destroyed due to the unfaithfulness of the people, he relives the same experience of his prophetic calling by the Chebar river: «And the visions were like the vision that I saw by the river Chebar; and I fell upon my face. And the glory of the Lord came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east» (Ez 43,3-4). The return of the Glory in the temple provokes the same theophany in Ezequiel which he felt during his first calling, it makes him relive the most divine moment of his entire existence. Because to him and to his people nothing was as divine as the temple.
But we still have one more aspect left to add. The historical development of biblical faith has also constituted a great education on the concept of the sacred and the real location of God. During the most archaic phase the sanctuaries in Israel in which one could find Yahweh were more than one. Later, the House of Yahweh was redefined and limited only to the temple of Jerusalem. With the destruction of the temple and the exile, the people of Israel understood, thanks to the prophets, that God continued to be present in Babylon as well, and that experiencing the presence of the glory of God was not limited to the sacred boundaries of the temple. And even if the temple of Jerusalem was rebuilt after the exile, the idea that the presence of God had been liberated from the perimeters of his house, had marked a point of no return in the collective soul of the people, which forever changed the nature of religious experience. Having been able to feel the same presence of God far from their land and outside of the temple represented a deep mutation in biblical faith, maybe the most important one in the entire story of the salvation.
The criticism towards the temple which we find in the words of Jesus of Nazareth, which turned out to be decisive in his death sentence, would not have been possible without the previous experience of the exile and the religious revolution regarding the “sacred place” which during that time developed in the minds of the prophets and hence of the people. A part of the soul of Israel was able to recognise “the son of God” in that “son of man” who was crucified on Golgotha, hence outside of the realms of the sacred city, because centuries before the prophets had experienced and then taught everyone about the presence of Yahweh in exiled lands, without having a temple and finding themselves “outside of the walls”. They couldn’t know it then, but in Babylon the Jews began to worship God “in spirit and in truth”.
The gospels do not tell us of any apparitions of the Risen Jesus within the temple. Instead they talk about a house, a garden, the banks of a river, of two discouraged travellers on their way from Jerusalem. We can continue searching for Him in sacred places, visiting, building and rebuilding temples, and maybe, every once in a while we will feel His presence there as well. But the places where we certainly will feel it are the homes, gardens, river banks, talking to the disheartened and discouraged people who walk on our streets. Happy Easter.
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The exile and the promise/24 – In the absence of physical spaces and confines we learn how to worship God “in spirit and in truth”
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/04/2019
« To the religious person space isn’t homogenous. This non-homogeneity manifests itself in a veritable contraposition between the sacred space, the only thing that is truly real, that truly exists, and the vast formless expanse which surrounds it. »
Mircea Eliade, The sacred and the profane
The great trials in life often work as a purification of our spirituality and moral principles, because they teach us that the things that are really necessary in order to continue living and growing are actually very few and rather simple. In a positive evolution of our spiritual life, we start simple, become complex, and end up coming back to being simple, when the wisdom of the old person we’ve become encounters the purity of the youth we once were, and in the midst of it all that remains is an immense appreciation and gratitude. While crossing vast stretches of deserts you learn that, in addition to water and bread, only a handful of things are actually truly essential – it is on brief and comfortable trips that we tend to carry a load of heavy and to a large extent unnecessary luggage. Elijah the prophet had to find himself in the desert, with a desire to die in his heart, in order to discover the voice of God in a “faint breeze”, after having imagined and searched for Him in vain in earthquake and fire (1 Rev 19,12). Thirsty for life and paradise, we spend many a year searching for God in temples and sacred places, only to finally realize, that what we seek was, simply, just around the corner.
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The exile and the promise/22 - Words for this time and age of destroyed temples and disappeared promised lands
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 07/04/2019
«How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!“.»
Gospel of John, Chapter 3
Prophets are experts and teachers of the spirit. They recognize it when it blows in the wind on earth, whether it blows outside or inside of them. Among the many types of wind, they know how to intercept it as a different kind of breeze. They have a vital need to respond to their calling. Without the spirit, the prophets would not be able to understand the words they hear and then refer to us. It is the exegete of the words that they receive. They wait for it, they pray to it, they implore it and they know how to stay silent when, despite receiving the words, they do not receive the spirit. In the Bible, the spirit is closely intertwined with the word. Both give life, both create, transform, fertilize, bathe, generate and regenerate. Elohim, Word, Ruah; Father, Logos, Pneuma. The unity and multiplicity of the biblical God were already present in the Bible and in the historical experience of that faith. The prophets are, furthermore, essential to be able to discern spirits, to distinguish the wind of vanity, havel, from the breeze of the spirit, ruah. The Bible knows them well, and the prophets know and recognize them both very well too.

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Even Qohelet's havel - havel havalim: vanity of vanities - is breath, is wind; it is the type of wind that we know as well, the kind that reveals the inconsistency of things, the ephemeral aspect of life, which reminds us that everything passes, and passes quickly. Havel is also the name of the brother killed by Cain, and the name of the idols (in the Book of Jeremiah), of that which is empty, void, nothing. The havel-wind resembles the ruah-wind, sometimes they are even on friendly terms. Because without the breath of the spirit, we would not be able to recognize the dimension of vanitas, though present in the very heart of things, we would just be deceived by wealth and goods, trapped forever in self-consolation and illusions. Because the ruah-spirit gives us that typical intelligence that knows how to see that which is ephemeral and, beyond it, how to celebrate life, which in order to be understood and truly lived, first needs to be grasped in all its fragile and fleeting dimension. However, if once you have experienced the vanity of everything (an essential stage of existence), you do not also discover that other breeze of the spirit, if ruah does not take the place of havel, only the nothingness of pessimism and depression will remain in adult life. There are lives that do not come to full bloom because they never reach the havel/vanity phase, and remain trapped inside illusions, including religious ones; and there are others that regress because once touched by the wind of havel they find themselves unable to fly with the new breeze of ruah. The prophets know by vocation how to tell us that "ruah will beat havel", that the life-giving and renewing breath is in fact more powerful and truer than the nihilistic one. Here, we have another reason to why prophets are needed.
Ezekiel is the prophet of the ruah-spirit, in part because he also came to know the havel-spirit well. The word ruah is mentioned in his book more than in any other text in the Old Testament. The heart can only change in spirit. Elohim's breath gave life to the first man, and a mysterious spiritual breath continues to generate and regenerate life in the universe. And so, after having announced the miracle of the new heart made of flesh, Ezekiel shocks us with one of the most original and wonderful scenes in the whole Bible: «The hand of the Lord was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones… and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”» (Ezekiel 37,1-3). We find ourselves inside another one of Ezekiel’s visions. In a valley in Babylon, perhaps the same one where the young Ezekiel had been transported in a vision when his calling began (Ezekiel 3,22) - it is not uncommon for the tremendous callings in the adult life of a prophet to occur in the same enchanted places as their very first one. Ezekiel now sees the great valley all covered with bones, withered, dry, old, devoid of any flesh or nerves. God says to him: «Prophesy to these bones and say to them, "Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life"» (Ezekiel 37,4-6). A scene of infinite narrative and lyrical power. Ezekiel executes the command, and prophesies: «As I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them» (Ezekiel 37,7-8).
Only he who witnessed the scene and had an active part in it could write about it and describe it to us like this. The Bible is not a work of fiction. And if we want to avoid turning it into a film, we have to believe in the words of Ezekiel; to believe that he "saw" those bones and then "heard" a noise – the biblical prophets are like trusted beggars who hardly ever receive anything from us readers, who instead continue to deride and mock them together with their contemporaries. We need stand next to him and see those bones move and regroup, hear their creaking; to then, at the same time as he does, realize that the essential spirit is missing: «Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live". So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet - a vast army» (Ezekiel 37,9-10).
The spirit is the great protagonist of this vision. Ancient man was able to see more things than we do. Alongside the wind that was blowing, he could also feel a different kind of breeze that made things alive. And he recognized it, and celebrated it. The Bible is also a vast and far-reaching pedagogy teaching us that the spirit of life is not only the spirit of the mountains and the forests, but that another name of the true and invisible God is found in its essence, true because it is spirit. And to assert the spiritual nature of God, the Bible engaged in a radical fight against idols that, while presenting themselves as the source of the divine breath on earth, took away the breath of man, who can only breathe in an infinite wind. It was this absolute custody of the mystery of the spirit that one day enabled Christians to be able to call him God.
These bones coming back to life are the Pentecost of the Old Testament. A frightened church that died on Golgotha coming back to life and collectively rising; a people destroyed and humiliated who still had hope in a new ancient promise. An epiphany of the spirit, alive and giver of life, in both.
The transformation of those bones into living humans takes place in two stages. First, the bones become skeletons on which flesh and tendons are recreated and recomposed. This first miracle, however, will only create corpses, if the spirit does not come as well.
This work of Ezekiel’s in two acts contains a precious message for the communities that are spiritually dead and hope for a new life.
Jerusalem had been destroyed. The people exiled and discouraged: «Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel». Faith faltered, hope was dying out. The people kept repeating in tears: «Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off» (Ezekiel 37,11). Within this immense tragedy, Ezekiel suggests a grammar for us, to enable us to rise again after a great crisis. And in this time and age of destroyed temples and disappeared promised lands, we need to learn how to listen to him.
Whenever a charismatic community realizes that its "bones have dried up ", that hope "is gone", and that it has been "cut off", there is still a possibility of being born again if a prophet manages to prophesy and invoke the spirit. There is, however, a pre-condition: the community in question must intone its funeral song, it must realize that its bones have withered - many dead communities are unable to rise again because they continue to operate under the false belief that they are still alive. We cannot exclude that the vision was a response to the prayer of lament of the exiled people. Acknowledging and observing mourning is the first necessary prayer for resurrection.
Then, we need a prophet, who survived the persecutions, and who has not been expelled or turned into a false prophet (in good or bad faith). Not all withered-bone communities have prophets; all too often, they end up dying during the destruction of their cities and temples. However, when at least one is saved - the prophetic "critical mass" is equal to 1 - the first part of his prophesying consists in reassembling the skeleton, and then reviving the flesh and tendons surrounding it. After dying and realizing that they have in fact really expired – whether for lack of vocation, or because they aged within liturgies and forms that eventually became older than them, or due to serious scandals, schisms, due to not being able to write a new charismatic narrative after the death of their founder, which is always a mystical death of the community itself, or due to having spent all their residual energy pursuing the wrong battles... – these communities start over again. New people arrive, economic resources, projects, structures, new spurs of energy, activities and work all come back again. The scattered bones recompose and create a proper skeleton with flesh and nerves forming around it. The community takes shape and gradually begins to resemble the one that became extinct.
Nevertheless, Ezekiel tells us that, however necessary, this phase is not sufficient to really enable the community to come back to life again. The spirit is missing. The people are there, but the vocation is missing; there are stories but not charismatic stories; there are words but not the verb that binds them; there are works but the vital breath is missing; there are plans but the big dreams are missing; there are prayers but they cannot speak. The resurrection of Christ was not merely the reanimation of a corpse. And if the resurrection of Lazarus is not interpreted as a sign and announcement of the different resurrection of Christ, it is nothing more than the exhumation of the body of a man who had the sad fate of dying twice. The rebirth of a community cannot happen (or if it did, it would only be like that of Lazarus) if the skeleton and the external signs of life are the only things that are restored. A true prophet, returning to the valley of that first calling now turned into a valley of bones, needs to be able to invoke the spirit while it, softly, arrives. We call some of these vocations or callings reforms.
Ezekiel tells us that these resurrections are possible. That cemeteries can turn into gardens of Eden. That we can go to sleep as old people and wake up as children again.
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The exile and the promise/22 - Words for this time and age of destroyed temples and disappeared promised lands
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 07/04/2019
«How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!“.»
Gospel of John, Chapter 3
Prophets are experts and teachers of the spirit. They recognize it when it blows in the wind on earth, whether it blows outside or inside of them. Among the many types of wind, they know how to intercept it as a different kind of breeze. They have a vital need to respond to their calling. Without the spirit, the prophets would not be able to understand the words they hear and then refer to us. It is the exegete of the words that they receive. They wait for it, they pray to it, they implore it and they know how to stay silent when, despite receiving the words, they do not receive the spirit. In the Bible, the spirit is closely intertwined with the word. Both give life, both create, transform, fertilize, bathe, generate and regenerate. Elohim, Word, Ruah; Father, Logos, Pneuma. The unity and multiplicity of the biblical God were already present in the Bible and in the historical experience of that faith. The prophets are, furthermore, essential to be able to discern spirits, to distinguish the wind of vanity, havel, from the breeze of the spirit, ruah. The Bible knows them well, and the prophets know and recognize them both very well too.

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The exile and the promise/ 20 - Salvation (even of the political and economic kind) cannot fail to come
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 24/03/2019
«After praying at home, I was sitting on the sofa when a man of magnificent appearance, dressed as a shepherd, came in. He greeted me and I greeted him. He immediately sat down next to me and said: 'I was sent by the most venerable of angels to live with you the remaining days of my life’»
The Shepherd of Hermas, Revelation V
«Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock» (Ezekiel 34,2-3).
Jerusalem had fallen. In his desolate land of exile Ezekiel, the sentinel-prophet, sees a flock dispersed by the neglect of his shepherds: «You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals» (Ezekiel 34,4-5). They are not shepherds but "mercenaries" (John 10:12), because they exploit the fattest sheep to gain profit for themselves.
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The profession of being a shepherd is a complex art, and very much loved by the Bible, the prophets and many ancient civilizations. It centers on a relationship of reciprocity with the flock, a composite and varied entity. Next to the fat and healthy sheep, there are five categories of fragile animals, categorized through an equal number of adjectives: weak, infirm, wounded, scattered and lost. The greater part of the flock is hence made up of sheep in need of special and specific care by the shepherd. There are those that are weak, perhaps because they are still lambs, those that are permanently infirm due to impairments and accidents, or wounds from the attack of wolves or wild boars, some that are lost after a bad storm or an assault, and some sheep that have no longer been able to find their way after a difficult nighttime crossing. A good shepherd is a shepherd who has developed an ability to watch the whole flock, who has widened his gaze to include them all, starting with the last ones. In 1971, the philosopher John Rawls defined the maxi-min criterion, in which when faced with a series of possible social alternatives, the one where the last ones fair the best is the one that should be preferred above all, as the cornerstone of a democratic, fair and fraternal society. Long before this happened, the shepherds had already known for millennia that the quality and goodness of their work depended on the ability to take care of their most disadvantaged animals. The first indicator of the goodness of a shepherd is not in fact the milk or the wool he obtains from the sheep, but the balance and harmony of the flock as a whole, and hence how he treats the most vulnerable sheep. How many wounds he has healed, how many scattered sheep he has been able to find again, and how many of the weak animals he has managed to strengthen.
The kind of leadership waged by a shepherd is unique and different, when compared with that of a general in battle, the captain of a ship during a storm or, today, with corporate leadership. Its goal is not to maximize individual interest or economic profit, because if this were the case, it would not make sense to devote energy and special care particularly to the most fragile and sick animals, to the 'rejects'. The management culture of a shepherd is a culture of the common good, that is, the good of each and every one - of the whole flock and of each individual sheep. A leadership based on the maximization of economic interests however centers on efficiency, and therefore to the neglect and discarding of the less productive elements in order to focus on the best and most deserving ones instead. The care that comes with the common good cannot exclude anyone, because each individual is linked to all the others, and the loss of a single sheep would be seen as a general failure. Hence, the care of the flock follows the rule of the weak link: the strength of a chain depends on the strength of its most fragile link, and neglecting it, in order to focus on the strongest links instead, makes the whole process extremely vulnerable. The good shepherd takes care of the weak links in his flock, because he knows that the quality and the good performance of all his work depends on them, including the quality of the performance of the strongest elements. The kind of leadership waged by the good shepherd is therefore capable of wasting time on long night searches, of slowing down the march of the whole flock if only one is suffering; it knows how to set the rhythm of everyone's journey based on the pace of the slowest. It is anti-meritocratic, because the logic that guides the shepherd's action is not one of merit but one of need, dictating his orders, priorities and the hierarchy of his interventions. A fat and robust sheep does not have more merits or value than a scattered and wounded one, and even if it had more value, it would still not be preferred due to its merits; the weak sheep attracts more care merely because it has greater and more needs than the stronger one.
The image of the shepherd as a paradigm of good governance and management of communities has deeply inspired western humanism, which over the centuries has given rise to a political culture centered on the priority and objective of not losing its most fragile components - welfare is nothing more than a mature translation of the humanism of the good shepherd. The 21st century, however, is writing a different story, also in Europe. The corporate culture of leadership, heavily focused on the aspects of efficiency and meritocracy, is steadily becoming a universal paradigm, slowly leaving the mere economic sphere of society, and entering the civil and political spheres of the world as well, (and soon perhaps also that of religions). It is convincing everyone that the care for the weak and fragile should be subordinated to the more important aspects and constraints of efficiency, hence becoming meritocratic - we will throw away the last residues of social welfare the day a hospital begins to wonder if a patient who arrives at the emergency room really deserves treatment.
The prophet's judgment and condemnation are not limited to religious and political leaders. He also includes the economic elites, who have used their strength and power to crush and oppress the weakest: «Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture? Must you also trample the rest of your pasture with your feet? Is it not enough for you to drink clear water? Must you also muddy the rest with your feet? Must my flock feed on what you have trampled and drink what you have muddied with your feet?» (Ezekiel 34,18-19). The more robust members of society have abused their dominant position to increase their advantages, making the lives of those below them even harder and poorer.
Here, we must take note of an aspect of extreme importance. In order to describe the moral and spiritual decadence of his people and the breaking of the Covenant with their different God, which is the cause of their tragedy of defeat, Ezekiel does not resort to religious or worship related arguments. He does not invoke theology or idolatry. Instead, he speaks of good governance, politics and economics, the betrayal of the vocation of the shepherd, and the denial of the law and economic justice. This is the great secularism of prophecy and of the Bible: in the most terrible de profundis of Israel's religious identity, he finds no other topics more 'religious' than politics and economics; he does not find words of greater impact than the very humble ones of the shepherd's profession. Just as another Good Shepherd did, who while taking up these words by Ezekiel revealed (Matthew 25) his criteria and his spiritual indicators to us, all enclosed in a few secular words: hunger, thirst, bareness, prisons, diseases, and strangers. It always affects and moves me when I reread it, that in the most 'heavenly' and eschatological text in the Gospel there is no reference to the practices of religious worship but only to practices of human fraternity, where the bare facts matter more than the intentions: 'you did it for me'.
Suddenly, however, a ray of sunshine penetrates into this desolate landscape, and everything brightens up: «For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I myself will search for my sheep and look after them…  I myself will tend my sheep and have them lie down. I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy. I will shepherd the flock with justice» (Ezekiel 34,11-16).
Great words. In those dark and terrible days, with the temple destroyed, their God defeated, the people deported to Babylon, in a foreign and idolatrous land the prophet sings of hope and prophesies that the "bars of their yoke" will be broken (Ezekiel 34,27), intoning the salvation that is coming because it cannot fail to come. This is what the real and great prophets are like. In a time of illusions, they announce the harsh and bitter truth of the imminent defeat; but when the day of devastation comes, they become the voice of a possible good future, singing of life in the midst of the rubble of death, rekindling tomorrow in the extinction of today. And while they sing of the future they pray to it, asking for it to their God, hoping that the words of those songs become true while saying them.
But his new song does not end here: « I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd… I will make a covenant of peace with them and rid the land of savage beasts so that they may live in the wilderness and sleep in the forests in safety… I will send down showers in season; there will be showers of blessing. The trees will yield their fruit and the ground will yield its crops; the people will be secure in their land» (Ezekiel 34,23-27).
And so, David, the little shepherd, the king according to the wishes of the heart of God, returns. And with him the messianic expectation of a new David who, finally, will be a good shepherd as well. Isaiah, the Immanuel, the prophecy of eternal and universal peace, the end of suffering and fear, returns. It is a promise of a new covenant of peace - berit shalom - a pact of prosperity, which will include animals, trees, the entire creation. When the prophets have to announce a great salvation in the midst of the darkest of tragedies, they tend to feel that the human sphere alone is insufficient. After the flood and the ark of salvation, the animals, all creatures, the rainbow and the entire cosmos must also find a place in the Covenant. In the days of great resurrections, the words of human beings are too poor. We remember the faces and words of those magnificent times, but we also remember the sounds and flowers, and we remember the light.
What if we were capable of a new covenant of prosperity today, celebrated with new policies, new economies and new management cultures. However, the trees, the animals, the air, the sky, the light would also be part of it. And if we should prove ourselves capable of fraternity with them as well, 'you did it for me' will become the song of both heaven and earth.
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The exile and the promise/ 20 - Salvation (even of the political and economic kind) cannot fail to come
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 24/03/2019
«After praying at home, I was sitting on the sofa when a man of magnificent appearance, dressed as a shepherd, came in. He greeted me and I greeted him. He immediately sat down next to me and said: 'I was sent by the most venerable of angels to live with you the remaining days of my life’»
The Shepherd of Hermas, Revelation V
«Woe to you shepherds of Israel who only take care of yourselves! Should not shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with the wool and slaughter the choice animals, but you do not take care of the flock» (Ezekiel 34,2-3).
Jerusalem had fallen. In his desolate land of exile Ezekiel, the sentinel-prophet, sees a flock dispersed by the neglect of his shepherds: «You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and when they were scattered they became food for all the wild animals» (Ezekiel 34,4-5). They are not shepherds but "mercenaries" (John 10:12), because they exploit the fattest sheep to gain profit for themselves.
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The exile and the promise/ 18 - The honest words we must say sometimes and the hope we harbor

By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire10/03/2019
«ln the middle of the town square and on both sides of the river there is a tree of life that bears twelve fruits every month; the leaves of the tree serve to heal the nations»
The Book of Revelation
In any form of self-legitimation of power, the gifts received are considered to be the fruits of one's own personal merits, and the power in question to come from an external source (God or the people). Hence, the gratuitous nature of any talent received is effectively canceled, and the logic of the crocodile or monster returns, and sooner or later we end up repeating: "The Nile is mine, I made it for myself ".
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«I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, you great monster lying among your streams. You say, “The Nile belongs to me; I made it for myself"» (Ezekiel 29,3). Egypt in the Bible is the expression of many things. Its first images are of slavery, forced labor, plagues, and then liberation and Easter. The Egyptian pharaohs were also a symbol of the most radical form of idolatry, due to their status of divinity. The root of the sin of Egypt lies in fact in the religious attitude of its pharaoh, who claimed to be the master of the Nile. The crocodile-Leviathan of the Nile feels like God himself, and therefore the creator and master of the world.
The oracles against Egypt were pronounced by Ezekiel a few months before and after the siege by the Babylonian troops of Nebuchadnezzar II, which lasted for about a year and a half. During these months, there was a great hope among the leaders of the people of Jerusalem that they would be saved by a military intervention from Egypt, in particular by its young pharaoh Hophra (Apries), who had just come to power. Just like Jeremiah, however, Ezekiel is convinced that the long-awaited help from Egypt is only an illusion, a vain consolation that prevented the people from accepting the only possible outcome: the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple and the exile of the people Judah. Instead, the leaders of the people, inspired and supported by the constant preaching of false prophets, continued to wait for the arrival of the Egyptians and thus ended up exhausting themselves in a long, unnecessary and wearing siege.
In order to understand, or at least capture some aspect of these oracles against Egypt, we must try to imagine and see Ezekiel proclaiming them in the streets of this land of exile. A land in which families were busy rationing the last remaining cereal and very little water they had left, and cooking their loaves of bread while feeding the ovens with dung (as Ezekiel himself prophesied at the beginning of his book, Chapter 4). From that land of exile, Ezekiel announced to an exhausted people that Nebuchadnezzar's hand was led by YHWH, that nothing good would come from Egypt, and that the only right choice was to surrender. It is not impossible then to imagine the profound and radical dissonance between the words of Ezekiel and the feelings of his people. He would have been criticized, silenced and hated by the very people, to whom his calling had sent him.
But Ezekiel does not stay silent, he cannot keep quiet; it does not change his prophecy, which he had been repeating for at least five years, when he first began his activity as a prophet in exile. It cannot change it. True prophets do not adapt their prophecies to the needs of the "consumers", they do not have a commodity to sell, but only a voice to listen to and obey. They have no choice, and there is no escape. A prophetic calling is one of the most terrible vocations under the sun – as true back then, as it is today. It always operates ‘counteractively’. People were seeking comfort and consolation and Ezekiel revealed their illusions and false hopes: «Then all who live in Egypt will know that I am the Lord. You have been a staff of reed for the people of Israel. When they grasped you with their hands, you splintered and you tore open their shoulders; when they leaned on you, you broke and their backs were wrenched» (Ezekiel 29,6-7). For the faltering people of Judah, Egypt is a crutch, which breaks under the weight of its body, injuring it. Nothing more or different from this. Ruthless and harsh words indeed.
Among these prophecies against Egypt, we also find an oracle dated many years later (571), which appears to be the last of Ezekiel's public activity, which in total lasted around twenty-two years. An original and controversial prophecy, but particularly important because it speaks of a failed prophecy, of a prediction that has not come true: «Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon drove his army in a hard campaign against Tyre; … yet the king and his army got no reward from the campaign he led against Tyre» (Ezekiel 29,18). Many years earlier (Chapters 26-28), Ezekiel had prophesied the fall of Tyre and its destruction at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. He now notes that the Babylonian king had recently completed his long siege, but Tyre had not been destroyed or pillaged.
The power and truth of a prophecy lies in its source. Unlike false prophets, a true prophet bases his legitimacy on the true voice that speaks to him and that he / she in turn refers to the people. The oracles are not theological speculations nor ethical treatises, but quotes from YHWH. The predictive aspect of any prophecy was important, because it was one of the tests used to distinguish it from false prophecies. Hence, both prophets and people held it in high esteem. However, it was not and still is not its most essential aspect. In his oracles against Tyre, Ezekiel finds himself having to announce a destruction, suggested to him by God, years later he has to admit that that destruction has not occurred. Here, Ezekiel shares a fate similar to that of Jonah, who was sent to prophesy the destruction of Nineveh, which did not end up happening; or to that of Christ, who announced the Kingdom of the Beatitudes to us, which we are still waiting for, together with His return. We know that the biblical God is a God capable of changing his mind. He is not afraid of showing himself a repentant God, who threatens punishment which he then withdraws, who asks to offer a son on an altar and then sends the ram. We know this. We also know, however, that something else extremely important could also be hiding behind these wrong predictions by the prophets.
A prophet is not the master of the words that he proclaims. If he actually believed this, he would be too similar to the crocodile-Leviathan-pharaoh. It is precisely this non-possessive aspect, which makes it right and, at the same time, radically fragile and vulnerable. He announces a word that knows how to be true, as true as his calling; but he has no way of knowing if that voice will say different things tomorrow than the equally real and true ones today, if it will change its mind. Because the words he announces, are the words of a voice that is an eternal present, and therefore the present of tomorrow could change both the present of today and that of yesterday. For this reason, no honest prophet relies on the future to base the truth of his present, and when he does (true prophets do this too: it is one of their most common mistakes) he will face sensational denials. Knowing how to live with this lack or need of tomorrow is part of the profession of being a good prophet, which is not true because it makes prophecies come true, but because it listens to and transmits a voice.
Somewhere in his soul, perhaps Ezekiel also feared that even his great prophecy about the fall of Jerusalem might end up being disproved by the facts one day, that YHWH could change his mind and save her from destruction. Perhaps he desired and hoped for it, as an exiled priest perhaps he prayed that his words would be denied by a repenting act by his God. Perhaps, until the day before the end of the siege, while still prophesying the end of the holy city, at night he prayed to YHWH secret that his words would not come true. Only those who do not really know life or the Bible can think that true prophets truly like their prophecies of doom. They are only the announcers of words of which they have no control, words which they sometimes do not love and sometimes in their depths hope and pray will eventually be denied. Just like us, when we sometimes have to say words of misfortune to those who ask us for our opinion, (about a disease, about the end of a relationship, about a possible call…). We pray in our depths that life will deny those honest words that we must say, but that we cannot not say if we want to remain true. Any faithfulness to the word requires a love greater than our happiness, even when that word takes the name of a friend, a wife, a son, or even when it takes our own name. Like yesterday, when we heard a clear word that called us by name and entrusted us with a task, and today when we hear another equally clear voice telling us the opposite. Even in these cases, either we can force that voice into the frame of our needs for consistency, or we can love the truth of those words more than ourselves and continue to walk on new roads, with a newfound freedom.
The oracles about Egypt end with a funeral song (Chapter 32), where we find one of the few references in the Old Testament to life after death. Unlike Egyptian culture, biblical humanism is not interested in paradise because it is too fond of life and the God of the living. Once again, Ezekiel shows his literary talent and his great culture and knowledge on the traditions of his neighboring people. The mythical image of the cosmic tree is particularly beautiful and evocative, Ezekiel uses it to describe the beauty and power of Egypt, which like an immense cedar tree rises in the center of Eden: «I made it beautiful with abundant branches, the envy of all the trees of Eden in the garden of God» (Ezekiel 31,9). An immense and beautiful tree, so tall its top branches reached into the clouds, and for this very same reason ends up suffering the same end as the Tower of Babel: «Because the great cedar towered over the thick foliage, and because it was proud of its height, I gave it into the hands of the ruler of the nations, for him to deal with according to its wickedness. I cast it aside» (Ezekiel 31,10-11). The myth of the cosmic tree is found in many cultures, from China to Babylon. We also find it in the Christian Middle Ages, when a Franciscan tradition (The Lignum vitae of San Bonaventura and Ubertino of Casale) wanted to make the tree of the cross coincide with the tree of life of Eden. And while we continue to follow our crucifixes on our own cavalries, no one can take away the hope of one day seeing those wooden arms in bloom, and in that moment realize that, without knowing it, while we were crying out in abandonment, we were actually leaning on the tree of life.
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The exile and the promise/ 18 - The honest words we must say sometimes and the hope we harbor

By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire10/03/2019
«ln the middle of the town square and on both sides of the river there is a tree of life that bears twelve fruits every month; the leaves of the tree serve to heal the nations»
The Book of Revelation
In any form of self-legitimation of power, the gifts received are considered to be the fruits of one's own personal merits, and the power in question to come from an external source (God or the people). Hence, the gratuitous nature of any talent received is effectively canceled, and the logic of the crocodile or monster returns, and sooner or later we end up repeating: "The Nile is mine, I made it for myself ".
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The exile and the promise/ 16 – Love can save us from almost any evil, but it is not the tree of life
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  24/02/2019
«Where is that life that I could have had but did not live...
Where is the anchor and the sea, 
where is the oblivion of being who I am?... 
Furthermore, I think of my partner 
Who was waiting for me 
and maybe is still awaiting me »
Jorge Luis Borges, That which is lost (Ciò che è perduto)
When the veils of illusion fall away and we finally see the bare truth, ours and of life, a time of veritable providence begins, almost always hidden under an initial layer of pain. An intimate and immediate one-on-one with your own soul and its inhabitants (including its skeletons and demons) begins. All ambivalences, ambiguities, large and small compromises and sins of the past impose themselves with their own and invincible strength. They speak to us and, with a hitherto unknown authority, ask and demand the truth of us. We suddenly wake up from the deep sleep in which we had fallen without knowing or wanting it, and a new, often better, phase of life opens up to us. Because in order to touch upon true salvation one must reach beyond the illusions and consolations that usually shield the ordinary conditions of life. In some existences these moments come only once, and it is a decisive moment, because it is the last one and only call. In it we are called by our first name; we turn around and answer again, knowing however that it will be the last time, because that first name is dying in order to be able to rise again.
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«In the ninth year, in the tenth month on the tenth day, the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, record this date, this very date, because the king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem this very day"» (Ezekiel 24,1-2). The days are not all the same. Some look alike, but there will never be two identical days. Then there are very few days that mark and break the arc of our life - our birth, wedding, the calling, our last day and the last day of the ones we loved so dearly. The day of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem is perhaps the most important day in the history of Israel. It marks the end of an era, the wonderful one that began with David and Solomon five centuries earlier, and inaugurates a new phase of humiliation and defeat, but also of blessing and maturity of the people and a new way of conceiving and living faith, life, God-YHWH. Ezekiel (together with Jeremiah) had been heralding the arrival of this terrible day for years. This is why they scorned him, calling him a prophet of doom, a clown, a circus acrobat, a bizarre seer, never considering him someone to be taken seriously; in part because he spoke in the name and on behalf of YHWH who, while in exile and at home, had been joined, challenged and beaten by the more spectacularly performing and striking Babylonian gods.
And so, in a Jerusalem that could already see Nebuchadnezzar arriving with his troops on the horizon, the Jews celebrated while feasting on rich meals, deluded as they were by false prophets that their holy temple and the city of David could never be desecrated or defeated: «Put on the cooking pot; put it on and pour water into it. Put into it the pieces of meat, all the choice pieces - the leg and the shoulder. Fill it with the best of these bones; take the pick of the flock» (Ezekiel 24,3-5).
On the eve of a tragedy there is always someone who does the opposite of what he should be doing, who confuses the quail of the desert with the frogs of Egypt, the manna with the locusts, the banquet for the return of the prodigal son with that of the rich glutton. False prophets are regular attenders of wrongful banquets. They do it many times, they very frequently do it; but they won't always be able to do it, because sooner or later the day and moment of truth will come. Everything changes, and the banquets reveal their real and different nature: those who are good and fraternal will be evident in the light of the sun and will pass judgement on the wrong and bad ones.
On this different and terrible day Ezekiel calls his Jerusalem a "bloody city". Its inhabitants shed blood and did not cover it. They left it in full sight on the ground, and Ezekiel, while saying it and writing it, left it uncovered forever: «For the blood she shed is in her midst: She poured it on the bare rock; she did not pour it on the ground, where the dust would cover it» (Ezekiel 24,7). In general, the earth ends up covering the blood that we shed due to our wrongful doings, because if it didn't, our pain would be unsustainable. But, in a few terrible episodes, rather than being hidden, the blood in the Bible remains exposed on the ground. The message it contains is too important, and its power overcomes the intensity of the pain involved. The earth did not cover the bloodshed in Jerusalem, just as it did not cover that of the mild Abel before that (Genesis 4,10), or Job’s innocent blood: «Earth, do not cover my blood» (Job 16,18). The lands and earth in the Bible left these bloody places uncovered, for us to see and learn about the smell of innocent blood, so that we can recognize it when we find it elsewhere in the Bible (where it is often recurrent) and in life (where it is often, much too often recurrent).
While the text now brings us into the heart of the very serious political and religious events in Jerusalem, there is a twist, one of the most unexpected and powerful ones in the whole book. That terrible date marked not only the history of Jerusalem but also the personal biography of Ezekiel, imparting the deepest of wounds onto his life: «The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes"» (Ezekiel 24,15-16). Since the day of his calling, Ezekiel has been a sacrament, an incarnate symbol, a sign and total message: every true prophet is. He always spoke with his whole body and with his flesh. Now, having reached the heart of his book, Ezekiel also speaks to us through the flesh of his primary relationship: the spousal one. Our relationships are flesh, they are substance, and they are people (as Christianity will tell us). So I am body. Here, for the first time, Ezekiel prophesies with another kind of flesh: that of a relationship. He speaks to us using a body which is larger than his own - as Hosea and Jeremiah did: one marrying a prostitute, the other remaining a celibate to become a message of exile.
Ezekiel had said in so many ways that Jerusalem, «the delight of your eyes» (Ezekiel 24,25), would be destroyed and the people deported and exiled in Babylon without even having time to mourn (Ezekiel 24,22). Now, on that terrible day, he has one last resort left, and God allows him to use it. This is what prophecy is, in the Bible and in life. It's tremendous, it's beautiful, and it’s dramatic: «So I spoke to the people in the morning, and in the evening my wife died» (Ezekiel 24,18). A terrible sentence. Even that spousal blood becomes exposed blood and is left uncovered in the Bible, because, even here, we will learn to recognize the smell.
An episode, which is probably historical, and hence should not be read as a sacrifice that God asks of his prophet as a way to prove some form of faithfulness. The God of the prophets does not ask for these things. Ezekiel is not like Abraham, whom no ram reaches in time to save, saving a loved one. The story of Ezekiel only tells us, with the absolute power and certitude of prophetic language, where the real essence of a true calling can be found. When we reply in the affirmative to a true voice calling us and then set out, we know that we will no longer be the masters in control of any of the most important things in our lives, including our most intimate relationships. We lose control of our assets, because they all turn into the task, the destiny and the message. Our primary relational goods can also be found among these assets. This is also one of the deeper reasons behind the choice of celibacy that some prophets make. On the day of their calling, they come to realize that the gift of their entire body cannot involve a future wife, husband or children; and so they do not marry for a higher and unique form of responsibility. Others, like Ezekiel, get married (or were already married at the time of their calling), and their loved ones mysteriously enter their vocation as well, even when not actively choosing it (there are very few important things that we actually choose).
But this tragic event in Ezekiel's life also tells us something more. Widowhood, especially when young (Ezekiel was about 35 years old in 598 BC), is always to find yourself in exile, the destruction of a beautiful temple, the end of a great dream and a wonderful kingdom. It is therefore a great message about the human condition. Even though spousal love is the clearest symbol of heaven on earth, the food that most tastes of eternity, and yet not even this love can set us free from the ephemeral nature of life. Love can save us from almost any evil, but it is not the tree of life; and while it makes us wonderful, it still leaves us mortal. Outside of Eden, human love can and has at times touched eternity, but it has not truly equalled it.
Along with his wife Ezekiel also loses his voice, he becomes silent. The episode that the final editor of the book decided to place at the beginning of Ezekiel's calling, «I will make your tongue stick to the roof of your mouth so that you will be silent» (Ezekiel 3,26), it is probable that the prophet's biography dates back to the moment of the death of his bride - even if the choice to put that mutism in the first days of his calling makes sense in the economy of Ezekiel's prophecy, because it tells us that the loss of his spouse was a decisive event in the entire mission and "word" of the prophet. Ezekiel remained for many months with his tongue attached to the palate, perhaps for the entire duration of the exile of Jerusalem (a year and a half): «And you, son of man, on the day I take away their stronghold… on that day a fugitive will come to tell you the news. At that time your mouth will be opened; you will speak with him and will no longer be silent. So you will be a sign to them, and they will know that I am the Lord» (Ezekiel 24, 25-27).
Son of man... The phrase with which Ezekiel describes his wife ("delight of my eyes") would be enough to say that his being is truly and thoroughly "son of man". Only those who know the heart of the human condition can call a wife with these wonderful words. Ezekiel is all voice of God, but he is also all voice and flesh of man, like us. And therefore, just like it would happen to us, that day his voice died in his mouth as well, and he was unable to say anything. From being a true master of the word he found himself silent, with his words consumed by a strangled mourning «Groan quietly; do not mourn for the dead» (Ezekiel 24,17). During days like that you can only sigh, as long as you have a little bit of breath left; all words, even those of God, seize to speak. We have seen this, we still see it, and we will see it again. By continuing to brush against eternity, hoping to be able to touch it in the end, reaching a bit higher.
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The exile and the promise/ 16 – Love can save us from almost any evil, but it is not the tree of life
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  24/02/2019
«Where is that life that I could have had but did not live...
Where is the anchor and the sea, 
where is the oblivion of being who I am?... 
Furthermore, I think of my partner 
Who was waiting for me 
and maybe is still awaiting me »
Jorge Luis Borges, That which is lost (Ciò che è perduto)
When the veils of illusion fall away and we finally see the bare truth, ours and of life, a time of veritable providence begins, almost always hidden under an initial layer of pain. An intimate and immediate one-on-one with your own soul and its inhabitants (including its skeletons and demons) begins. All ambivalences, ambiguities, large and small compromises and sins of the past impose themselves with their own and invincible strength. They speak to us and, with a hitherto unknown authority, ask and demand the truth of us. We suddenly wake up from the deep sleep in which we had fallen without knowing or wanting it, and a new, often better, phase of life opens up to us. Because in order to touch upon true salvation one must reach beyond the illusions and consolations that usually shield the ordinary conditions of life. In some existences these moments come only once, and it is a decisive moment, because it is the last one and only call. In it we are called by our first name; we turn around and answer again, knowing however that it will be the last time, because that first name is dying in order to be able to rise again.
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