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Greater than Guilt/17 - In the end, Saul’s ways are dusty, just like ours
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/05/2018
Saul: 
“Oh my children!... 
I was a father. - See thyself alone, 
Oh king; of thy so many friends and servants
Not one remains. - Inexorable God, 
Is thy retributory wrath appeased?”
Vittorio Alfieri, Saul (English translation by Charles Lloyd)
In every authentic reading, the reader has an active and creative part to play. He is not a spectator of the stories he reads, but a co-screenwriter and actor of them. In the special form of reading we call biblical reading, therefore, the one who reads receives the mysterious but real faculty to transform the characters into people, who, like all living people, grow, change, move and make some unexpected encounters. So it happens that biblical people begin to interact among themselves, to compose relational plots that are different from those thought and desired by their first author. And so the necromancer of En-dor becomes a friend of the father of the prodigal son, Jeremiah discovers himself as David's brother, and Saul becomes Job's travel companion in his misfortune, as he also ends up on the pile of manure, by a God who wants (Saul) or allows for (Job) their misfortune. Struck by divine punishment that’s greater than their (possible) sin, Both Saul and Job are wrapped in the silence of a mute God, who has no words of life for them - perhaps because, quite simply, he is waiting for ours.
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David continues his war alongside the Philistines (1 Samuel 29), but on the eve of the final attack on Saul the leaders don’t let him participate in the battle. In the meantime, the Amalekites - another historical enemy of Israel and Saul, also linked to his repudiation by God (chap. 15) - have seized the city of Ziklag, where David’s family and wives, who had been made prisoners, were also staying. David and his men set out in pursuit of the Amalekites, and thanks to a (providential) meeting with an Egyptian slave, he manages to defeat the enemy army with an ambush: “David recovered all that the Amalekites had taken, and David rescued his two wives” (30:18). He also endeavours in quite some looting: “David also captured all the flocks and herds” (30:20). Not all of David's six hundred men took part in the venture, because two hundred of them were "too exhausted to cross the Besor Valley" (30:10b), and they stopped along the way. When David returned to the camp, “all the wicked and worthless fellows among the men who had gone with David said, »Because they did not go with us, we will not give them any of the spoil that we have recovered«” (30:22). The "wicked and worthless" have never stopped excluding the weaker ones from the distribution of wealth. But we no longer attribute these words and these acts of exclusion to the "wicked and worthless"; instead, we praise them, we clothe them with virtues and fine words such as merit and meritocracy, and then we discard the poor and the “worn out” in their name, after having called them idlers and lazy. 
The Bible, on the other hand, follows a different logic: “David said, »You shall not do so, my brothers, with what the Lord has given us. (...) For as his share is who goes down into the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the baggage«” (30:23-24). Wealth is a "gift of the Lord”, and its nature as gift-providence prevails over the reasons for individual merit/demerit (which, however, sometimes exist, even if they are almost always overestimated). So the solidarity that comes from being part of the same community comes before productivity and efficiency, because we are not the real owners of our wealth. Before we could produce it, we receive wealth as a gift. This gives rise to that gratuitousness and gratitude which should accompany our grateful gaze on our riches and on those of others. We have built democracy, rights, pensions, public assistance, universal education, unemployment aids, contributions and the tax system on the idea of wealth-gift, a society where the “exhausted” can legitimately have a share of wealth. These are ancient and great truths that the neo-pelagian ideology of incentive and meritocracy has made us forget in a couple of decades.
But now let us be touched and wounded by the last episode of Saul's life: “And the Philistines overtook Saul and his sons, and the Philistines struck down Jonathan and Abinadab and Malchi-shua, the sons of Saul. The battle pressed hard against Saul, and the archers found him, and he was badly wounded by the archers” (31:2-3). Then Saul said to his armour-bearer, “»Draw your sword, and thrust me through with it, lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and mistreat me.« But his armour-bearer would not, for he feared greatly” (31:4). The scene is narrated without any moral or religious condemnation for Saul. The final editor of the books of Samuel does not read Saul's death as the deserved end for his sins. Instead, what we see is that in accompanying the sad fate of the first king the text tenaciously keeps up a benevolent view. And it gives him a dignified and heroic death: “Therefore Saul took his own sword and fell upon it. And when his armour-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he also fell upon his sword and died with him. Thus Saul died, and his three sons, and his armour-bearer, and all his men, on the same day together” (31:4-6). The story of this tragic fated king ends with a suicide of honour. He did not deserve and he did not have a cowardly death. 
The Philistines then cut Saul and his sons’ head off, paraded his armour and sent it around the city to "to carry the good news" to their temples (31:9), and "they fastened his body to the wall of Beth-shan" (31:10). But when the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead, whose right eye had been poked out by the Ammonites and who had then been saved by Saul (ch. 11), learned of the facts, they “went all night and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons... And they took their bones and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh and fasted seven days” (31:12-13). It’s a fair homage paid to express the people’s gratitude. People remember, their memory is different from the official one of politics and religion. And, only to honour this memory, they are ready to walk all night, recover his body, and assure their defeated friend a worthy burial. Here, under the tamarisk tree, just where Saul used to stay with his spear stuck to the ground, sitting among his standing soldiers. This is a true and profound expression of that law of gratuitousness inscribed in the DNA of the soul of peoples and individuals - no economic law explains why we take trains and planes to go to a friend's funeral, but on the day when the individual cost-benefit calculation prevents us from performing these economically inconvenient acts for the dead, we start gradually forgetting the grammar of economics and reciprocity among the living, too.
David also learns of the deaths of Saul and Jonathan - from an Amalekite coming from the battlefield, who will have a sorry end: “Then David took hold of his clothes and tore them, and so did all the men who were with him. And they mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son” (2 Samuel 1:11-12). And it is in David’s act of mourning that we find what for many is his most beautiful song, The Song of the Arc:
“How the mighty have fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon...
Saul and Jonathan, beloved and lovely!
In life and in death they were not divided;
they were swifter than eagles;
they were stronger than lions.
You daughters of Israel, weep over Saul,
who clothed you luxuriously in scarlet,
who put ornaments of gold on your apparel.
How the mighty have fallen
in the midst of the battle!
“Jonathan lies slain on your high places.
I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan;
very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was extraordinary,
surpassing the love of women.
How the mighty have fallen...” (1:19-27).
There is no need to add comments. Tell it not... In Greek: Euangelizein. Do not bring this bad news, do not proclaim this anti-gospel. Jonathan, "beloved and lovely," and Saul, also, "beloved and lovely," to the very end. If the Bible wanted to preserve this funeral song (taken from very ancient material, from The Book of the Righteous), it is to tell us something about David (who did not rise to the throne by killing his rival). But it also wants to tell us something important about Saul. You don't sing a wonderful song for a bad and evil king. The Bible knew that amidst all the drama Saul preserved his mysterious innocence and purity, earning him this song of David, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all. And if David could sing these words to a repudiated king dominated by a bad spirit who somehow still remained honest, then even the repudiated and the rejected, if they remained sincere in a small corner of their hearts, are worthy of the psalms of David - and ours. The Bible not only reserves blessings for the blessed and the victorious, its most beautiful songs are for Saul's friends, therefore also for us. There are many ways to get into the Bible. Some are reserved for those who seem to be righteous and blessed, but they are very few. The ways of Saul are different and more numerous, these are popular roads, dusty, winding, dark, but where we can all walk. 
David had begun his relationship with Saul by playing the lyre for him and singing psalms to chase his "bad spirit” away, because Saul found peace listening to David’s voice and chords. In the end we find another one of David’s songs - the text says that David "sang" this lament. The entire story of David and Saul is positioned between two songs, therefore in a song that has never stopped. The story of Saul does not end with the sword that pierced him through or with his worthy burial under the tamarisk tree. It ends with the song of David, which is a song of resurrection. Every time we start to sing it, Saul, thanks to us, too, becomes a tall and beautiful young man again, we see him looking for his lost donkeys, being in a mystical ecstasy among the prophets, still docile under the consecrating hand of Samuel. For the Bible to continue to live and to rise again, the marvellous song of David is not enough: our song is also needed. All the protagonists of the Bible are “characters in search of an author”, and of a reader who allows them to live again, freeing them from the narrow interpretation of the script that official religions have assigned them. Of a reader shouting: "Come out", and bringing them out alive from their tombs.
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    [text] => 
Greater than Guilt/17 - In the end, Saul’s ways are dusty, just like ours
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/05/2018
Saul: 
“Oh my children!... 
I was a father. - See thyself alone, 
Oh king; of thy so many friends and servants
Not one remains. - Inexorable God, 
Is thy retributory wrath appeased?”
Vittorio Alfieri, Saul (English translation by Charles Lloyd)
In every authentic reading, the reader has an active and creative part to play. He is not a spectator of the stories he reads, but a co-screenwriter and actor of them. In the special form of reading we call biblical reading, therefore, the one who reads receives the mysterious but real faculty to transform the characters into people, who, like all living people, grow, change, move and make some unexpected encounters. So it happens that biblical people begin to interact among themselves, to compose relational plots that are different from those thought and desired by their first author. And so the necromancer of En-dor becomes a friend of the father of the prodigal son, Jeremiah discovers himself as David's brother, and Saul becomes Job's travel companion in his misfortune, as he also ends up on the pile of manure, by a God who wants (Saul) or allows for (Job) their misfortune. Struck by divine punishment that’s greater than their (possible) sin, Both Saul and Job are wrapped in the silence of a mute God, who has no words of life for them - perhaps because, quite simply, he is waiting for ours.
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Greater than Guilt/15 - The art of life can be learnt by tasting the small instants of peace
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 29/04/2018
“God is, in a sense, the other, par excellence, the other as other, the absolutely other - and nonetheless my standing with this God depends only on myself. The instrument of forgiveness is in my hands. On the other hand, my neighbor, my brother, infinitely less other than the absolutely other, is in a certain way more other than God: to obtain his forgiveness ... I must succeed in appeasing him. What if he refuses? As soon as two are involved, everything is in danger. The other can refuse forgiveness and leave me forever unpardoned."
Emanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (English translation by Annette Aronowicz)
Every day millions of people do and say bad things and, shortly after or shortly before that, they say and do good things in all honesty. Because the human condition is simply the interweaving of evil and goodness. The Bible knows this ambivalent mystery of the person – perhaps the greatest mystery – very well. We can become intrigued or lost, we may lose the golden thread of life, but until our last breath we are still capable of goodness, because we are made in the image and likeness of an endless dance of mutual love, which no sin can stop. Cain killed his brother Abel, but he did not kill the Adam, the first (and last) man. And while Cain continues to kill Abel, the Adam continues, stubbornly, to resurrect him, every day. No wickedness of the fratricide within us is capable of destroying that original imprint of good engraved deeper into our being. In this sense, evil can be trivial, good can never. Evil has its own resilience, which can also be very big, but it is always smaller than the resilience of good. And it is this good that resists stubbornly to make us more beautiful than our many faults. That’s where the radical anthropological optimism of the Bible lies, which has saved the West after and amidst its most heinous sins – and which continues to save us.
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The Bible offers us another symphony for the last meeting between David and Saul. To tell us about his consecration to be king and the change of his heart, Samuel's first book needed three stories. Now, to tell us about his departure from the scene, the text offers us two stories that are similar and different at the same time. This narrative abundance and surplus tell the richness of Saul, who continues to do evil but also to repent and be moved, honestly. The truth of Saul's wickedness does not cancel his blessings and repentances.
After the wonderful encounter with Abigail, David resumes his nomadic and fugitive journey. After getting to know where Saul, who had set out in pursuit of him, had made his camp, David, together with his companion (Abishai), enters the enemy camp at night: “And there lay Saul sleeping within the encampment, with his spear stuck in the ground at his head” (1 Samuel 26:7). David enters his tent, arrives at Saul's bedside, but takes only his spear and Saul's jug of water, and, again, not listening to the counsel of his companions, spares his king.
Saul and his army slept deep. The Hebrew word "tardemà" (slumber, deep sleep) is rare in the Bible. We find it twice in the book of Genesis. The first is to say the different sleep into which Adam fell when God took a rib from him to "make" the woman (Genesis 2:21-22). Then to indicate Abraham’s slumber, when in the great scene of the covenant, God reveals to him the future of his descendants in his sleep (15:13). Therefore, there is a theological slumber to mark two crucial interventions of God in some founding and decisive moments at the origin of the two fundamental pacts: the one between man and woman and the one between God and his people. Words and verbs in the Bible are never chosen randomly – in that kind of humanism of the word and words it would not be possible. This "deep sleep" means that something important is about to happen, an act that will mark the nature of the kingdom of David, the quality of his relationships. For the second time, David had the chance to kill Saul. He could have done it, but he didn't, he chose life and renewed the horizontal and vertical pact.
At the root of the founding pacts of our life there are many acts, choices and facts. There are many words, many "yes"-es, like those pronounced together and reciprocally on a wedding day, where the legacy of the ancient performative capacity of the word is still alive (while we say those special words a new reality is created, generated by our words). But, almost always invisibly, there are also many non-acts, non-facts, non-words: actions that we didn't do when we could have and should have done. There are many silences and unspoken words that have saved lives, honour and dignity. The moral quality of a life is also measured by actions we have not taken and words that we have not said, when common sense, friends, social norms, the law and even religion told us to do and say them. These "no"-s that express negation in grammar are verbs in life that become our flesh and that of those who live with us.
This non-killing of Saul is told twice by the Bible, not only to tell us about Saul and make him speak to us to reveal that corner of his heart which remained good and hidden - this double account is also a language that the Bible uses to tell us who David is, with generous redundancy. So far David is the anointed one, the king "according to God’s heart", the singer of psalms, the loved one; but David is also the one who could have killed his father-enemy on two occasions but did not do so. David is doubly non-patricidal, he is the double non-Oedipus, he is twice the anti-Zeus.
David leaves the camp and starts shouting from the opposite hill. Saul, unlike his soldiers, recognizes David's voice: “Is this your voice, my son David?” And David said, “It is my voice, my lord, O king” (26:17). From his hill, Saul answers David: “I have sinned. Return, my son David...” (26:21). The father, the anointed of the Lord, recognizes his sin, and implores David, "his son," to return.
This story of the "reverse prodigal son" is really powerful and suggestive. The son, David, was merciful to his father, saving his life. That mercy generates the repentance of the father, who asks his son to return. It is not uncommon for children to be merciful, and for fathers and mothers to repent and ask their wounded and abused son to "return". And when they return, sons and daughters regenerate their parents, becoming fathers and mothers of their own fathers and mothers. And while in Luke's parable, the first subversive act is that of the father (who grants the advance and the liquidation of the inheritance while he is still alive), here it is the son who transgresses the codes of war and spares his enemy. These imprudent and risky transgressions have the power to generate and regenerate fathers and children.
Saul acknowledges his guilt: “I will no more do you harm, because my life was precious in your eyes this day. Behold, I have acted foolishly, and have made a great mistake” (26:21). And then he concludes: “Blessed be you, my son David!” (26:25). These are Saul's last words to David, luminous and true words of blessing. In that last meeting Saul will have seen the singer again, the one that soaked his heart with his lyre, the one that beat Goliath, the pure and handsome young man (like all young people). Like us, when we see a friend or a son for the last time and before closing our eyes we see them as beautiful and pure, just like on the first day.
The psalms that tradition attributes to David are splendid. But these short, intense, sincere psalms of Saul are no less beautiful and true: although dominated by his evil spirit, in these moments he manages to rise above his sins and intone some verses of blessing. We readers know that these songs of Saul are temporary, provisional and fleeting, and that soon he will be possessed by his evil demon again. We know that these reconciliations are transient, short and as ephemerous as intense.
But we also know that the psalms of reconciliation we are sometimes able to sing or welcome are more similar to these brief and unstable ones of Saul than to the eternal ones of David. We are also capable of reconciliations that generate the healing of relationships that lasts forever, but it’s more frequent to exchange embraces taking the form of an oasis within a desert of difficulty and conflict that remains there. After years of pain and struggle, we too, like Jacob and Esau, can discover that we are capable of embracing each other and crying together. Also, almost always, we let misunderstandings return, old and new, the small and big battles of yesterday and today. But the non-stability of peace and reconciliation do not cancel the truth and beauty of those embraces and tears which remain true and beautiful even when they last a few moments only. Although it is short-lived, the rose is no less true and beautiful than the pine and the olive tree.
We also know that our children sometimes return, and then we make a great feast. But, unlike the younger son in Luke's parable, at the end of the feast those same children often leave again for other forms of freedom; they return to the pigsty and we return to the door of the house to wait for them, without knowing if, when and how they will return again, or if this time the elder brother will celebrate with us.
The maturity and the profession of living are acquired by learning to taste the small, transient instants of reconciliation intensely, to celebrate with our children between a return and a new departure of theirs. Because if they are true and sincere encounters, they are perfect in their own way even if they are temporary. They are infinite because they are unstable and transitory. And to the voice of the past whispering in our ears: “It won’t last long” while we are in the embrace, mixing our tears with the other we should answer: “It isn’t so, go away, it doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is paradise in this true embrace”. Because it is within these temporary embraces that we reach and touch the eternal, it is there that we can experience the sublime and feel the deepest heartbeat of life. This is the only possibility we have to experience here on earth: eternity (or the thing that most resembles it). The deep and true desire and nostalgia of the final banquet of the definitive reconciliation must never take away the true joy of the short and temporary banquets that, almost always, are the only ones that we are able to prepare and consume together under our mobile tent. And so, trying to learn the gentle art of temporary hugs, in the end, perhaps, we will understand that the desert and the oasis were the same thing. And that we did not miss anything, because, even if we did not know, we had never come out from those brief true embraces. 
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Greater than Guilt/15 - The art of life can be learnt by tasting the small instants of peace
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 29/04/2018
“God is, in a sense, the other, par excellence, the other as other, the absolutely other - and nonetheless my standing with this God depends only on myself. The instrument of forgiveness is in my hands. On the other hand, my neighbor, my brother, infinitely less other than the absolutely other, is in a certain way more other than God: to obtain his forgiveness ... I must succeed in appeasing him. What if he refuses? As soon as two are involved, everything is in danger. The other can refuse forgiveness and leave me forever unpardoned."
Emanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings (English translation by Annette Aronowicz)
Every day millions of people do and say bad things and, shortly after or shortly before that, they say and do good things in all honesty. Because the human condition is simply the interweaving of evil and goodness. The Bible knows this ambivalent mystery of the person – perhaps the greatest mystery – very well. We can become intrigued or lost, we may lose the golden thread of life, but until our last breath we are still capable of goodness, because we are made in the image and likeness of an endless dance of mutual love, which no sin can stop. Cain killed his brother Abel, but he did not kill the Adam, the first (and last) man. And while Cain continues to kill Abel, the Adam continues, stubbornly, to resurrect him, every day. No wickedness of the fratricide within us is capable of destroying that original imprint of good engraved deeper into our being. In this sense, evil can be trivial, good can never. Evil has its own resilience, which can also be very big, but it is always smaller than the resilience of good. And it is this good that resists stubbornly to make us more beautiful than our many faults. That’s where the radical anthropological optimism of the Bible lies, which has saved the West after and amidst its most heinous sins – and which continues to save us.
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Greater than Guilt/13 - Do not to kill, but save the name and cut the edge of the robe
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 15/04/2018
«Caro male, 
non ti chiedo ragioni
è questa la legge dell’ospitalità…
ti do riparo
proprio a te che mi scoperchi.
Non ti voglio bene male
ti so sapiente ti tengo d’occhio
e nido sono
di te che mi assapori
e poi sputi il nocciolo »
Chandra Livia Candiani, Fatti vivo

There are many forms of conflict. Each era adds new ones, leaving those inherited unchanged. The Bible also knows several cases. The conflict between Cain and Abel, where a vertical frustration (between Cain and God who rejected his offerings) becomes horizontal violence (against Abel). The conflict between Joseph and his older brothers, where envy leads to the elimination of the envied one, sold to camel drivers on their way to Egypt. Or that between Abraham and his nephew Lot, due to the abundance of resources in a common space that is too small, which is solved by separation, thanks to Abraham’s generosity who leaves Lot the choice of land ("Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left”; Genesis 13:9).
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The conflict between David and Saul takes on another form. It is the paradigm of that typical conflict that is created between those who, usually being the younger one, have received an authentic call to perform a task and are faced with hindering someone who is already performing the same task for a call received earlier, and who reads the arrival of the new as a threat and a fatal message for his own vocation. This type of conflict is particularly painful for both sides, because it is a necessary clash of identities where everyone thinks they are legitimately in their place (because they really are). These conflicts can only be resolved or prevented by the surrender of one of the two sides, which can take many forms - fear or weakness, or obedience to a new voice calling us elsewhere. In most cases, we are unable to resolve these conflicts, or we resolve them too late and with serious mutual damage, which ultimately makes us worse and distorts our hearts. The biblical account of the war between Saul and David is also important because it offers us a paradigm of a possible good handling of these conflicts that are so devastating and so common.
From Adullam's caves David went to Moab, where he asks the local king to host his father and mother. Moab immediately evokes Ruth and her wonderful story. The Moabites were friends of the Jews, and so they hosted David's parents. But another prophet, Gad, enters the scene and says to David: “»Do not remain in the stronghold; depart, and go into the land of Judah.« So David departed...” (1 Samuel 22:5). Samuel's books show us David as a friend of priests and, above all, a friend of prophets who listens to them. The beauty of David’s person lies also in his ability to listen to the prophets. At the same time, serves as an explanation of the love that the Bible shows for this re-messiah in abundance.
David continues his escape journey from Saul, and puts up his tent in the desert of Ziph. Here his friend Jonathan joins him, and the two renew their 'covenant of salt': “Do not fear, for the hand of Saul my father shall not find you.” And so they “made a covenant before the Lord” (23:17-18). David sets out again, and settles in the mountainous desert of Engedi, towards the Dead Sea, where a decisive encounter awaits him.
Saul, warned of David's presence in those mountains, takes three thousand soldiers and departs to hunt him down. Along the way, Saul enters a cave to relieve himself, but at the bottom of the same cave, in a more internal room, David, too, was hiding with some of his companions: “And the men of David said to him, »Here is the day of which the Lord said to you, ‘Behold, I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as it shall seem good to you’«” (24:4). David's companions want to be the interpreters of God's will and of the feelings of the ancient listener of this tale, and so they invite David to seize this opportunity of Saul’s absolute vulnerability (as he is alone and with his back to him) to eliminate him. But David does not consider the vox populi as vox Dei. He gets closer to Saul and instead of hitting him he “stealthily cut off a corner of Saul's robe” (24:5). But not only David ignores the advice of his men, “afterward David's heart struck him, because he had cut off a corner of Saul's robe” (24:5). Therefore he scolded his men with very serious words and “did not permit them to attack Saul” (24:7). And he said to them: “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord's anointed, to put out my hand against him, seeing he is the Lord's anointed” (24:6). Here we have a complex narrative, very effective and full of pathos, which, among other things, illustrates what Freud called 'the taboo on rulers' or the untouchability of the sovereign. In many archaic civilizations (and not only in these) the king is surrounded by a prohibition of 'touchability', which stems from the deep desire of the people and their heirs to kill him (expressed by the advice of David’s companions in the text). But that strip of cloth in David’s hand is even more beautiful: to those who have followed Saul’s epic from the beginning, it immediately recalls the strip of Samuel's cloak that remained in Saul’s hand when he tried to stop the prophet on the day of his repudiation.
After Saul relieves himself, he leaves the cave, and David approaches him there, holding the cut corner of his robe in the hand. The dialogue between the two men is very beautiful and sincere. After prostrating himself in front of Saul, David says to him: “...some told me to kill you, but I spared you. I said, ‘I will not put out my hand against my lord, for he is the Lord's anointed.’ See, my father, see the corner of your robe in my hand” (24:10-11). Saul replies to David: “»Is this your voice, my son David?« And Saul lifted up his voice and wept. He said to David, »You are more righteous than I, for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil. And you have declared this day how you have dealt well with me, in that you did not kill me when the Lord put me into your hands«” (25:16-18).
Once again Saul is able to feel authentic feelings of repentance and to cry aloud for the evil he is doing. He calls David 'my son', recognizing his mistake and wickedness. And it stirs sincere compassion in us, and the same piety as David had. The whole tragic story of Saul continues to be sprinkled with these fleeting but intense good gazes performed by the text, which seems to want to attribute Saul's wickedness to the evil spirit of God who one day took possession of his heart (an effective and deeply humane way of redeeming something of this first sad and unfortunate king). As soon as this evil spirit leaves him, Saul becomes capable of saying good and beautiful things again: “So may the Lord reward you with good for what you have done to me this day” (24:19).
This wonderful encounter between Saul and David ends with these words of Saul: “»Swear to me therefore by the Lord that you will not cut off my offspring after me, and that you will not destroy my name out of my father's house.« And David swore this to Saul.” (21:21). Saul feels that his end is near and, like the great biblical characters, he immediately thinks of his (fore)father(s) and children. In that kind of humanism the most important salvation is not one's own but that of our children and parents, who are, at the same time, our true name. At that brief moment of spiritual lucidity, Saul therefore mentions the name of the father and the name of the children. He does not want the failure of his vocation to become the failure of the past and future. When we realize that our life hasn’t worked out, that it hasn’t become what it could and should have, we can still save something good and true if we protect the name, if we try to prevent our mistakes and sins from contaminating the root and the buds, because we know that they are innocent, and we want them to remain so. In these efforts for the salvation of the name we regenerate our children and become fathers of our parents, and sometimes we can hear their 'thanks' that reaches us in the darkness of our abysses, illuminating them. There are families saved by a final act of love of those who had made a mistake but managed to save the innocence of the name.    
After this intense encounter, David resumes his flight. He does not give up because he cannot renounce his vocation. He escapes but does not renounce becoming the legitimate king of his people. And while fleeing, suffering and seeing Saul's evil deeds, he still respects him, calls him 'my father', 'my lord', and recognizes him as a legitimate sovereign. And when he could kill him and thus put an end to his suffering, he does not. He prefers remaining in conflict to an easier but less sincere solution. And so the Bible sends us yet another message of life: learning to inhabit contradictions, to handle conflicts, to prefer a difficult but more sincere non-solution to a solution that appears simpler only because it is less sincere. To approach those who hurt us in silence, to cut only a strip of their robe, and to find ourselves standing with a humble piece of torn cloth instead of the murderous knife in our hand. Because vocations mature also by remaining, with loyalty and meekness, in a conflict in which we found ourselves without seeking or wanting to, when we choose to use the knife only to cut a strip of cloth. One can only save oneself from certain conflicts by using the weak kind of strength of a shred of cloth.
David had been chosen and consecrated king when he was still a youth. One day he became king, and the greatest of all. That costly and generous loyalty learned and exhibited in the conflict with Saul made him the most loved king, despite his many faults. Even after great sins and infidelity we can hope to be forgiven by life, by God, by our friends, by the angel of death if we have been able to respect an enemy possessed by a bad spirit, if we did not abuse his vulnerability, if we called him 'father' or 'friend' even when he no longer deserved it. If we have done so at least once.
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Greater than Guilt/13 - Do not to kill, but save the name and cut the edge of the robe
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 15/04/2018
«Caro male, 
non ti chiedo ragioni
è questa la legge dell’ospitalità…
ti do riparo
proprio a te che mi scoperchi.
Non ti voglio bene male
ti so sapiente ti tengo d’occhio
e nido sono
di te che mi assapori
e poi sputi il nocciolo »
Chandra Livia Candiani, Fatti vivo

There are many forms of conflict. Each era adds new ones, leaving those inherited unchanged. The Bible also knows several cases. The conflict between Cain and Abel, where a vertical frustration (between Cain and God who rejected his offerings) becomes horizontal violence (against Abel). The conflict between Joseph and his older brothers, where envy leads to the elimination of the envied one, sold to camel drivers on their way to Egypt. Or that between Abraham and his nephew Lot, due to the abundance of resources in a common space that is too small, which is solved by separation, thanks to Abraham’s generosity who leaves Lot the choice of land ("Separate yourself from me. If you take the left hand, then I will go to the right, or if you take the right hand, then I will go to the left”; Genesis 13:9).
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Greater than Guilt/11 - Love is one, but loves are many: eros, philia, agape...
di Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/04/2018
“Peter..., do you love [agape] me...?” - “Yes, Lord; ... I love [philia] you.”
(...) “Peter..., do you love [agape] me?” - “Yes, Lord; ... I love [philia] you.”
(...) “Peter..., do you love [agape] me?”
The Gospel According to John 21:15-17
Love is one, but there are many loves. We love many people and many things, and we are loved by many, in different ways. We love our parents, children, girlfriends and wives, brothers and sisters, teachers, grandparents and cousins, poets and artists. And we love our friends a lot, too. Human love is not limited to human beings. It reaches the animals, touches the whole of nature, even God. To say love, the Greek world had two main words, eros and philia, which did not exhaust its many forms, but offered a semantic register that was richer than ours to decline this fundamental word of life. A lexicon that was able to distinguish the 'I love you' said to the beloved woman from the 'I love you’ said to a friend, and at the same time recognize that the latter was neither inferior nor less true than the former.
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Christianity then added a third Greek word to express another tonality of the same love, already present in the Jewish Bible and, above all, already present in life. This third and wonderful word is agape: love that knows how to love those who are not desirable or the non-friends. These three dimensions of love are often found together in real and important relationships. Certainly, in friendship philia is never alone, because it is the one with the strongest need of friends. It is accompanied by a desire-passion for the friend and is sprayed with agape that allows it to last forever, to rise again from our failures and fragilities. A friendship that is only philia is not warm and strong enough to not leave us alone on our paths. But it is philia that binds eros and agape together, and ties them together - Jesus also needed the register of philia to communicate his love to us. In those very few friendships that accompany us for long stretches of life, sometimes to the end, philia also contains the colours and flavours of eros and agape. The ones involved are those friends whom we have forgiven and who have forgiven us seventy times seven, those who when they did not return were awaited and desired as a bride or a child. Those we have embraced, kissed like or differently from other hugs and kisses, those with whom we have mixed tears many times until they melted in the same salty drop. Few pains are greater than the pain of a friend's death - on that day, a piece of the heart stops beating, and it never starts again. The Bible, an expert in humanity, knows the grammar of human relationships and feelings very well and offers us some wonderful passages on friendship. And so it uses the same word - ahavah - to describe the love between father and son, the erotic and sensual love between a young man and a young woman, and also the love between two friends.
With Jonathan, son of King Saul, friendship makes its appearance in the Bible. And it is a beautiful appearance, a true song of love-and-friendship. Jonathan is a prince, he is a warrior, but above all he is a friend. The text introduces him to us as someone who is also conquered by David’s charm: “Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul” (1 Samuel 18:3). A solemn pact was made between them, perhaps a 'covenant of salt', where the non-corruption of salt was a symbolical expression of 'forever’ in the Bible. The Bible knows what a covenant-pact is, and if it uses this word to talk about friendship to us, then it is saying something important. Something important that Matteo Ricci, the missionary from Macerata, also said (Lì Mǎdòu (利瑪竇)), whose first book in Chinese was on friendship (1595).
As if to serve as a background to the friendship between David and Jonathan, after introducing this pact of friendship, the text takes us back to Saul, who is increasingly persecuted by his evil spirits. David returns home after defeating Goliath, and the women of the city go to great him, singing and dancing to the sound of their drums: “Saul has struck down his thousands, / and David his ten thousands” (18:7). Women, another element that will be a constant in David's life, make their solemn entrance dancing, in a row, one after the other, with the typical prettiness and grace of their body movements. They celebrate David's victory, but above all YHWH's victory. Like Miriam, Moses' sister, who sang playing the tambourine for the women's dance after crossing the sea. Saul said: “»They have ascribed to David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed thousands, and what more can he have but the kingdom?« And Saul eyed David from that day on” (18:8-9). And then, under the action of his evil spirit, he throws the spear at David: “»I will pin David to the wall.« But David evaded him twice” (18:11).
There is a strong contrast between the good gaze of Jonathan and the cross-eyed look of Saul. Envy and jealousy are a matter of eye contact. Jealousy and envy are twin feelings that feed one another, although the latter has a binary structure (Saul envies David's success), while jealousy is ternary (David can take the kingdom away from him). As the tragedy of Saul develops, the text continues to show him to us as the victim of YHWH's evil spirit, at the mercy of his sad fate as a chosen king who was then discarded. It is a high form of mercy that writers show towards their characters, which makes mercy on earth greater than that of flesh-and-blood men and women (and in this the artists resemble God a little, because they can love, forgive and save their creation, in an act of absolute freedom). 
By now Saul is obsessed with David, and begins to plot plans for his elimination. He promises to give his eldest daughter (Merab), to him but “at the time when Merab, Saul's daughter, should have been given to David, she was given to Adriel the Meholathite for a wife” (18:19). But Saul's other daughter, Michal fell in love with David, and Saul was happy, because he thought, “Let me give her to him, that she may be a snare for him” (18:21) - this episode echoes that of Jacob with Laban's two daughters, Rachel and Leah. Saul asks for “a hundred foreskins of the Philistines” (18:25) as a bride-price from David, and he gets it with great surplus (two hundred foreskins).
Michal, however, did not become a 'snare' for David. Instead, she saved him from Saul's murderous madness, helping him to escape on the night when her father wanted to kill him: "Michal took an image [idol] and laid it on the bed and put a pillow of goats' hair at its head and covered it with the clothes. And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, »He is sick«” (19:13-14). David is protected by the love he generates in those who are close to him.
In fact, in the other story of his escape from Saul, David, in agreement with Jonathan, does not appear at the banquet for the feast of the new moon. When Saul noticed the absence, and Jonathan gave the (false) explanation for David's absence (he went to Bethlehem), the king’s "anger was kindled against Jonathan. He said to him, »You son of a perverse, rebellious woman, do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame...?« (...) Then Jonathan answered Saul his father, »Why should he be put to death? What has he done?« But Saul hurled his spear at him to strike him” (20:30-33). Jonathan openly confronts his father, defending David's reasons, thus risking his own life. He could have not done so. But he was loyal. Loyalty is an essential component of any authentic friendship. It takes on the costly consequences of a relationship when they could be avoided, too. Often it consists in speaking up, sometimes it is silence, at other times it manifests itself in not reporting the bad words of others to a friend which had the sole purpose of hurting him. It is acting as if the other were always present.
David and Jonathan depart from each other renewing their pact of friendship and unity: “And as for the matter of which you and I have spoken, behold, behold, the Lord is between you and me forever” (20:23). In the Covenant with Abraham, God passed among the slit animals. In these friendship pacts, God passes 'among' friends (Matthew 18:20). It is therefore a pact that cuts through space and time. It involves our descendants, our children we have and will have, our parents and grandparents. Friendship pacts, unlike wedding pacts, are usually not celebrated with words. They are almost always silent pacts. Sometimes, however, in a maturing friendship there can also be explicit pacts, celebrated even with words. Such are, for example, those friendship pacts that form the basis of new communities and movements, whether civil or religious, generated by two or more friends who say special words at a special time. The context of the account of the friendship between David and Jonathan is that of a sacred covenant, of a solemn pact, of a spiritual fraternity. It makes us think of Francis, Clare and Elijah, Kico Arguello and Carmen Hernández, Francis of Sales and Joan of Chantal, Chiara Lubich and Igino Giordani, Basilio and Gregorio, Don Zeno and his mother Irene, Gandhi and his first companions in the 'Salt March', and the many friendship pacts, implicit and explicit, which have generated unions, cooperatives, companies, political parties, resistance groups and liberations. Affectionate and chaste pacts, all intimate and inclusive, bound and free, never jealous, always generous and immensely generative.
Before greeting him, Jonathan had told David: “Come, let us go out into the field” (20:11). This is not the first time the Bible reports this sentence. It is what Cain had said, too (4:8). The friend is the anti-Cain, someone who invites you to go to the fields to save yourself. The invitations of Cain, the fratricidal, and those of Jonathan, the friend co-exist on earth, they live side by side, they tend to cross each other. Sometimes we discover that the other is not Jonathan but Cain only when, arrived in the fields, we see his hand becoming different. And those are our saddest days. At other times we discover that the one we thought was Cain was actually Jonathan. Humanity continues its history because the 'invitations of Jonathan' are more numerous than the 'invitations of Cain', because there are more friends than murderers.
On another day, another friend, the greatest of all, was put on a cross by another fratricidal hand. Under the cross there were women - and a friend. That time, the women and the friend could not save him. But those friends saw him alive again, and we, his friends, continue to wait for him, in the company of Abel and all the victims of history. We are waiting for him because he promised us that he would come back, and a friend's promise is true.
Happy Easter.
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Greater than Guilt/11 - Love is one, but loves are many: eros, philia, agape...
di Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 01/04/2018
“Peter..., do you love [agape] me...?” - “Yes, Lord; ... I love [philia] you.”
(...) “Peter..., do you love [agape] me?” - “Yes, Lord; ... I love [philia] you.”
(...) “Peter..., do you love [agape] me?”
The Gospel According to John 21:15-17
Love is one, but there are many loves. We love many people and many things, and we are loved by many, in different ways. We love our parents, children, girlfriends and wives, brothers and sisters, teachers, grandparents and cousins, poets and artists. And we love our friends a lot, too. Human love is not limited to human beings. It reaches the animals, touches the whole of nature, even God. To say love, the Greek world had two main words, eros and philia, which did not exhaust its many forms, but offered a semantic register that was richer than ours to decline this fundamental word of life. A lexicon that was able to distinguish the 'I love you' said to the beloved woman from the 'I love you’ said to a friend, and at the same time recognize that the latter was neither inferior nor less true than the former.
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Greater than Guilt/9 - Work is never an obstacle to our vocations
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/03/2018
Rabbi Bunam once prayed in an inn. Later he said to his disciples, ‘Sometimes you think you can't pray in one place and you look for another. But this is not the righteous way. For the abandoned place will complain to him: »Why did you not want to pray on me? If there was anything that disturbed you, it was a sign that you had the obligation to redeem me«.’ 
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim 
Saul’s decline intersects with the rise of David, the bright star of the Bible, perhaps the brightest of the Old Testament. He is the biblical character whose heart we know best - a word that, not by chance, appears already in the first account of his vocation ("Humans see only what is visible to the eyes, but the Lord sees into the heart"; 1 Samuel 16:7).
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Abraham and Moses are immense figures of the Bible, even more central than David in the history of salvation. We know their undertakings, words, above all their faith, and these are sufficient to make them the pillars of their people and the covenant. We do not know Abraham or Moses’ heart, however, or we know very little about them. Mount Sinai and Moria are places of great dialogues, perhaps the greatest of all, but the biblical text does not tell us what really happened in the soul of Moses and Abraham. It lets us imagine it, and it is for this reason, too, that writers and artists over the centuries have been able to "complete" the intimate stories of these men of God, who were only evoked or whispered in the biblical text.
The Bible opens David’s heart to us; it makes us enter his inner life, emotions, his feelings and tragedies. Thus the narration of his story offers us some of the most exciting and sublime pages of ancient literature, and David becomes a much loved king although more sinful and "smaller" than other biblical characters. David resembles Jeremiah: both are called young, both are seduced in their heart, both are great for their accomplishments and gestures, but loved above all for the pages of their diaries of the soul, for their songs and the intimate psalms of their heart. With David the sound, song and friendship become the word of God, human values and feelings acquire the right of citizenship in the heart of the Bible, which is the great code of our civilization not only and not so much because it speaks to us differently about God, but because it speaks to us differently about men and women, because it speaks to us differently about ourselves, to tell us who we are.
“The Lord said to Samuel, »How long are you going to grieve over Saul? I have rejected him as king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and get going. I’m sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem because I have found my next king among his sons«” (1 Samuel 16:1). The new word of God for Samuel begins with a reference made to Saul. Samuel cries for Saul who has been repudiated. The text does not tell us why Samuel is crying. We can think, however, that the repudiation of Saul by YHWH caused Samuel pain. He had sought him out and consecrated him; he had kissed him, and then he had participated in the joy at the celebration of his enthronement. Saul's failure was also Samuel's failure, as happens in life when the failure of those we choose for a task becomes our failure, too. Those who lead communities and organisations know that we cannot break away from the failures of the people we have entrusted ourselves to. Even if the objective responsibility for failure is not ours, that pact which created that task and that task is reciprocity embodied. And, as in all pacts, the failure of the other is my failure, too. It is true that Samuel, a judge and a prophet, acted and spoke on YHWH's command. But the honest prophet, when he pronounces the word he has received, becomes personally supportive of the word he says. Always, but especially when things go wrong.
Samuel's weeping for Saul's repudiation, which follows his cries ("Samuel was upset at this, and he prayed to the Lord all night long" 15:11), therefore, repeats the mysterious and wonderful dynamics of the word and prophecy in the Bible to us. Prophecy lives by a double pact of faithfulness: that between God and the prophet and that between the prophet and the word. At the moment when Samuel acts and speaks based on the word he received, a faithfulness-solidarity begins between the prophet and the words he pronounces, which goes as far as the ethical duty to feel pain in his flesh for a word that is not fulfilled for reasons that he cannot control. The prophet is not a machine, he is not an indifferent mediator between God and the world. Instead, he is a living and incarnate channel, and when the word passes through him to reach the earth and become effective, he becomes part of the stories and actions that the word operates, and follows its fate. If Samuel had not cried for a word of YHWH gone wrong he would not be a responsible prophet but simply a false prophet who does not suffer from the failure of the words he has said because they were just vanitas, smoke, fake news. Saul's anointing was born of an authentic word, and it operated as such, it was performative, it changed reality forever. “It will be like you’ve become a completely different person,” (10:6) said Samuel to Saul on the day he anointed him. If that word was real, it was an efficient word. God may change his mind and/or Saul may sin, but it is Samuel's weeping that tells us that words are not like the wind, and that Samuel was an honest prophet. To tell us the immense value of the word and words in the Bible - and in life.
Samuel departs, he goes to Jesse, to Bethlehem: “When they arrived, Samuel looked at Eliab and thought, That must be the Lord’s anointed right in front. But the Lord said to Samuel, »Have no regard for his appearance or stature...«” (16:6-7). Samuel still seems confused, inside a scene that reminds us too closely of Saul's calling while in search of lost donkeys. He is struck by the appearance and stature of Jesse’s eldest son (Eliab), a young man with characteristics similar to those of Saul (handsome and tall). Jesse introduces all of his seven children, but “Samuel said to Jesse, »The Lord hasn’t picked any of these«” (16:10). And here comes the turning point in the narrative: “Then Samuel asked Jesse, »Is that all of your boys?« »There is still the youngest one,« Jesse answered, »but he’s out keeping the sheep.« »Send for him,« Samuel told Jesse” (16:11). The eighth son, the youngest, the missing one, the shepherd boy joins Samuel and the rest of his family: “He was reddish brown, had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking. The Lord said, »That’s the one. Go anoint him.« So Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him right there in front of his brothers. The Lord’s spirit came over David from that point forward” (16:12-13).
It’s a splendid scene, which was most probably even more elaborated in the first ancient narrations (that are now lost). Merit in the Bible is something radically different from our meritocracy. There are some striking details here taking on a great theological and anthropological value. The narrative structure of the text shows us a dialogue between YHWH and Samuel, where even God needs to see David's face before saying to Samuel: “That’s the one. Go anoint him.” The Bible is certainly a humanism of the word, but it is also a humanism of the gaze and the eyes. From Elohim's first look at Adam when he saw that "it was very good", to the second look exchanged between two humans, finally "eye-to-eye", to that look between Jesus and the rich man: “Jesus looked at him carefully and loved him” (Mk 10:21). David is the youngest among his brothers. His father Jesse had not even invited him to the sacrificial banquet, given his young age which did not allow him to participate in the sacrifices. We are thus entering another great episode, perhaps the greatest of all, of that economy of smallness that permeates the entire Bible, and represents its deepest spirit.
The Covenant, liberation, conquest and protection of the earth, prophecy, live by a vital and fruitful dialogue between strength and weakness, greatness and smallness, law and freedom, institution and charisma, temple and prophecy. They are the weft and warp of salvation history, which only allow us to see the shapes, colours and beauty of humanity's plan together. But at the decisive moments of this story, the Bible tells us that the co-essential nature of these two principles does not go so far as to deny the existence to the primacy that belongs to the oikonomia of smallness. That of Abel, the sterile women and the mothers, Joseph, Amos and Jeremiah, that of David, of Bethlehem, the Beatitudes, Golgotha. The logic of the economy of smallness is born directly from the idea of God, that of the person and relationships contained in the Bible. It tells us that YHWH is a "subtle voice of silence", his temple is an empty temple. He is a voice, he cannot be seen or touched, and he chose the smallest of peoples as an ally. He becomes a child and then lets his own son and our children hang on a cross. But it also tells us that the spiritual life of the person really blooms on the day when they begin to realize that salvation is found in something so small that they have not even "invited to the banquet”: in those failures of yesterday, in those wounds of the soul, in those questions that we have dismissed, in those sins and shortcomings that we do not want to look at. Taking this economy of smallness seriously leads us to look at the world in a different way. To seek the kings of tomorrow among the discarded and the poor of today, to take the young and children very seriously, to find merits where the oikonomia of greatness can only see demerits.
There is one last small detail, so humble that it often remains in the background of the story. As Samuel looks on his brothers, David is “out keeping the sheep". In his family he was the only male working at that time (perhaps with his sisters and mother whom we can imagine taking turns at work with him). He was grazing the flock, like Moses did on Mount Horeb. Work is not an obstacle to our greatest calls, because, simply, the most important and real vocations and theophanies happen while "we are out keeping the sheep". This is a wonderful song about laicity and work. To discover our vocation and thus understand our place in the world, we can do nothing better than work.
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Greater than Guilt/9 - Work is never an obstacle to our vocations
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/03/2018
Rabbi Bunam once prayed in an inn. Later he said to his disciples, ‘Sometimes you think you can't pray in one place and you look for another. But this is not the righteous way. For the abandoned place will complain to him: »Why did you not want to pray on me? If there was anything that disturbed you, it was a sign that you had the obligation to redeem me«.’ 
Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim 
Saul’s decline intersects with the rise of David, the bright star of the Bible, perhaps the brightest of the Old Testament. He is the biblical character whose heart we know best - a word that, not by chance, appears already in the first account of his vocation ("Humans see only what is visible to the eyes, but the Lord sees into the heart"; 1 Samuel 16:7).
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Greater than Guilt/7 – The biblical type of covenant establishes mutual commitment and forgiveness
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire le 04/03/2018
“I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away... But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. ... I can already forgive God for allowing things to be as they probably must be. To have enough love in oneself to be able to forgive God!”
Etty Hillesum  Diary, 1942 (English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans)
In many key episodes of life, a single story is not enough; it is too little. To say what happened on the day we first met, or when we heard ourselves called by name, a single voice is not enough. The story of those decisive moments has to be told many times, by different people, and by each in their own way. Things that are repeated become beneficial, to those who tell the story and to those who tell it. When this bio-diversity is missing, denied or torn, our stories become impoverished, the mystery of life escapes us. The multiplicity of stories can protect us from ideology, which develops when the chrism of truth is attributed to only one narration, while all the others are considered heresy. This multiplicity and variety of stories tend to disturb the modern man who is in search of agreement in historical data, but for the biblical writer it is a language to say the greatness and importance of the episodes he is narrating. The lack of greed and generosity of the Bible also emerge from the abundance with which its most beautiful stories are accompanied; as in the letters of love, where adjectives add up to saying what we can't really say - the Bible is a long and unique letter of love addressed to us, which often remains closed inside the envelope. The truth is symphonic, always.
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There are at least three narrations of Saul's vocation in the Books of Samuel, each one different from the others, because they are the expressions of the various tribes and cities linked to the figure of Saul (and that of Samuel). And so, after the two stories we have already read, the text now tells us the story of another tradition on the consecration of Saul as King: “Then Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh-Gilead, and all the men of Jabesh said to Nahash, »Make a treaty with us, and we will serve you.« But Nahash the Ammonite said to them, »On this condition I will make a treaty with you, that I gouge out all your right eyes, and thus bring disgrace on all Israel«” (1 Samuel 11:1-2).
We are inside a very dense, rich and tremendous narration. The threat now comes from the Ammonites. The Jews ask for a pact of vassalage, but Nahash (i. e. the ‘serpent’) humiliates them by proposing a tremendous and outrageous pact, at a crazy price: to poke out the right eye of all Jews. In the manuscript of the Books of Samuel found in Qumran, which are more ancient and probably original, we discover that the foolish and crazy pact was actually implemented: “Now Nahash, king of the Ammonites, had been grievously oppressing the Gadites and the Reubenites. He would gouge out the right eye of each of them... (...) But there were seven thousand men who had escaped from the Ammonites and had entered Jabesh-Gilead.”
To get a little bit into these very hard and distant pages containing great wisdom, a very productive reading key is offered to us by the great biblical category of the Covenant (berit). The pact between YHWH and Israel, the original and founding act of that different and unique religious and social experience is described in the Bible by taking one of those Middle Eastern treaties of vassalage that the Jews had asked from the Ammonites as paradigm. The story of this absurd pact can therefore make us glimpse, albeit in backlight, something of the meaning that the Covenant has in biblical humanism. In a small people, faced with the failures of political treaties, the awareness of the existence of another unthinkable possibility gradually matures: to make a covenant with God. To find the good and reliable ally in a reality that you don't see and can't portray. An ally who does not poke out your right eye, but gives you another one to see the invisible. Living the relationship with God as a treaty with the invisible, amidst peoples who worshipped only visible and touchable (but mute) things made it possible for that small and quarrelsome people to generate extraordinary theological and spiritual innovations. What is astonishing in the biblical Covenant is not its diversity but its resemblance to the political-commercial pacts of the time, and therefore to their reciprocal structure. In the treaties, each of the two parties undertakes to respect them. It was ingenious to apply the status of ally to God, to enter into a social and perennial contract with a voice, to which we recognize the possibility of remaining within a pact of reciprocity, of mutual commitment. It is something surprising, even if today it almost completely escapes our reach. A treaty that came to the Jews as a gift. But a gift that was a treaty, and therefore reciprocity and mutual advantage, where both sides gain some benefit.
A shocking hypothesis underlying the same idea of the Covenant is that God also benefits from the relationship with people. It is a different, asymmetrical benefit, but the category of the Covenant makes it legitimate for us to call it a benefit. The category of the Covenant tells us that if YHWH gains a benefit from allying with us, our fidelity to that covenant and treaty enriches God as well, it changes and improves him. The biblical God, that of the Old and the New Testament (who is the same), is not the most perfect being, because our fidelity to the treaty makes him ‘more perfect’ (and therefore our infidelity makes him ‘less perfect’). At least this is what the biblical thought says, a theology that immediately becomes a marvellous humanism. If we were created in the ‘image and likeness’ of a God who is capable of treaties, we too rejoice in God's fidelity and suffer from his ‘infidelity’: when he ‘falls asleep’ and we remain slaves, when he leaves us on the pile of manure with Job although we are innocent, or when he abandons his son and our children on the infinite crosses in history. The logic of the Covenant also allows us to imagine the unthinkable. Like Etty Hillesum revealed to us in her lager, leaving us one of the most wonderful human pages of the twentieth century as an inheritance: even in the darkest abandonments, we can save faith in the Covenant if we learn to forgive God. Something acting like chills to the soul, giving an infinite substance and seriousness to fidelity to our treaties under the sun. And when we get betrayed and deceived in our treaties, when we forgive each other and know how to start over together, we can hope that someone ‘above the sun’ can understand us, because perhaps these joys and pains resemble his own. We should not be surprised, then, that at the end of Samuel's speech following these facts, we find a reference made to the Covenant, precisely: “For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name's sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself” (12:22).
After the request for that absurd treaty, the messengers of Jabesh went to Saul and told him what had happened: “...and all the people wept aloud. (...) And the Spirit of God rushed upon Saul when he heard these words, and his anger was greatly kindled. He took a yoke of oxen and cut them in pieces and sent them throughout all the territory of Israel by the hand of the messengers” (11:4-7).
Here we are reading a tradition about the tribe of Benjamin, and we are in the city of Gibeah. Upon encountering Saul who turns his oxen into 'messages of flesh’, the practised reader of the Bible cannot fail to immediately think about the tremendous story of the Levites narrated in the Book of Judges. On that night, which was one of the darkest nights of the Bible, in the city of Gibeah a passing Levite and his woman are hosted by an old man for the night. A group of locals burst into the house, raping the woman. The next morning, the Levite “entered his house, he took a knife, and grasping his concubine he cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and sent her throughout all the territory of Israel. Then he commanded the men whom he sent, saying, »Thus shall you say to all the Israelites, ‘Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out’«” (Judges 19:29-30). Before proceeding with the commentary, we must stop for a moment, try to overcome the pain and bafflement of such a story, and the ‘many similar things’ that unfortunately still continue to happen. And it's not easy.... Then we discover a strong affinity between the two episodes. The Ammonite outraged the request for a treaty by those Jews. The Benjaminites profane the treaty of hospitality, which is one of the most sacred. Every treaty offered is an offer of hospitality, and every denial of hospitality and a denial of a treaty. The covenants and alliances among those ancient peoples were celebrated by cutting up animals, with the language of flesh and blood. God established his Covenant with Abraham by passing like fire in the midst of cut-up animals.
These are strong, archaic and primitive languages that we do not understand. But if we can look at them in the ‘eyes’ they still can speak to us. We can read the blood and flesh of the treaties in the Bible to construct an image of a God who is thirsty for our blood and even for that of his crucified son, who is quenching his thirst with these to pacify his wrath for the world. And so we don't go very far, we are stuck inside the Middle Eastern myths, of which there is also a trace in the Bible and which continue to influence some Christian readings of sacrifice and the theology of atonement.
But from that flesh and from that blood another, very different story can also begin. One that tells us that treaties are tremendously serious things, just like flesh and blood, because they are the flesh and blood of life lived together. Those men used the strongest words they had at their disposal to express the seriousness and value of life. To tell us that promises and covenants are as important and serious as the flesh and blood of children, husbands, wives, parents and siblings. We can sign and dissolve a thousand contracts, without them leaving any sign. With treaties we cannot do so. These are made of flesh and blood, and therefore even when we decide to cut them to take exit from them, their signs remain engraved in our flesh forever. Every covenant is a wound; just as faith is a wound, that slit towards heaven which we try not to close throughout our lives, which we hope will still be open when we close our eyes and, perhaps, it is through that slit we will try to see God.
On another day or night, the Bible sent us another message of flesh. This time it was a wonderful child, the word made flesh and blood. On another day, that wonderful child, already a grown man, was hung on a cross - other real blood and flesh. Other incarnate messages, which the Bible, meekly, still has in store for us.
After Saul defeated the Ammonites, "all the people went to Gilgal, and there they made Saul king before the Lord in Gilgal. There they sacrificed peace offerings before the Lord...and...rejoiced greatly” (11:15).
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    [metadesc] =>  We have arrived at one of the hard and mysterious chapters of Samuel's first book, which however contains messages of life that say the importance of our treaties and wounds. And it helps us to understand that the truth is symphonic.
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Greater than Guilt/7 – The biblical type of covenant establishes mutual commitment and forgiveness
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire le 04/03/2018
“I shall try to help You, God, to stop my strength ebbing away... But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. ... I can already forgive God for allowing things to be as they probably must be. To have enough love in oneself to be able to forgive God!”
Etty Hillesum  Diary, 1942 (English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans)
In many key episodes of life, a single story is not enough; it is too little. To say what happened on the day we first met, or when we heard ourselves called by name, a single voice is not enough. The story of those decisive moments has to be told many times, by different people, and by each in their own way. Things that are repeated become beneficial, to those who tell the story and to those who tell it. When this bio-diversity is missing, denied or torn, our stories become impoverished, the mystery of life escapes us. The multiplicity of stories can protect us from ideology, which develops when the chrism of truth is attributed to only one narration, while all the others are considered heresy. This multiplicity and variety of stories tend to disturb the modern man who is in search of agreement in historical data, but for the biblical writer it is a language to say the greatness and importance of the episodes he is narrating. The lack of greed and generosity of the Bible also emerge from the abundance with which its most beautiful stories are accompanied; as in the letters of love, where adjectives add up to saying what we can't really say - the Bible is a long and unique letter of love addressed to us, which often remains closed inside the envelope. The truth is symphonic, always.
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Greater than Guilt/5 - Recognising the wrong roads taken in life, and reconciling with them
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/02/2018
«Vorrei passare come una tela
su cui lo sguardo crocifisso
spegne gli idoli.»
Heleno Oliveira, Se fosse vera la notte
To describe the greatest kind of moral and spiritual corruption, the Bible often uses words borrowed from the economy. And it does so because there is nothing more spiritual and theological than economics, politics and law. Faith speaks only with the words of life. And so there are no truer words to express the nature and quality of our spiritual life than wages, profit, taxes, bribes, finance, tenders, work, enterprise. These are the most theological and spiritual words available ‘under the sun’, which also give truth to the words of faith. Because if we do not know how to express spirituality with the words of economy, law and politics, it is very likely that those spiritual words are, in fact, prayers to idols, even when we say them devoutly, in temples, synagogues or churches. The Bible and its true laity knew this very well - we know it much less today, because we have forgotten the Bible and laity.
    [fulltext] => 
“Now when Samuel got old, he appointed his sons to serve as Israel’s judges. (...) But Samuel’s sons didn’t follow in his footsteps. They tried to turn a profit, they accepted bribes, and they perverted justice"(8:1-3). Like it happened to Eli in the temple of Shiloh, Samuel, too, generated corrupt sons. To put an end to a collective narrative, the Bible must break the chain of generations, along which the Covenant comes undone. In order to do this, it is usually necessary to resort to the sterility of wives, but sometimes also to their children not being righteous. Both have the same functions, because traditions (whether family, spiritual, corporate or political) die because of the fathers’ infertility or the children’s betrayal. Yesterday and today.
The corruption of Samuel's children becomes the pretext for the momentous turning point in the history of Israel, the birth of the monarchy: “So all the Israelite elders got together and went to Samuel at Ramah. They said to him, »Listen. You are old now, and your sons don’t follow in your footsteps. So appoint us a king to judge us like all the other nations have«” (8:4-5). In this request that the elders of the people address to Samuel, the words that best explain the reaction of the prophet are: “like all the other nations”. Israel’s identity, on the other hand, consisted in the God who was different from those of ‘all the other nations’. They want a king like the others, like the other, idolater peoples. Samuel senses that in this desire to have a king like all other peoples there was something decisive, first of all on the theological and spiritual level, and so there was a real danger of losing their civil and religious identity. That's why these crucial chapters on the beginning of the monarchical era are introduced by yet another conversion-return of the people from the idols to YHWH: “Then Samuel said to the whole house of Israel, »If you are turning to the Lord with all your heart, then get rid of all the foreign gods and the Astartes you have. Set your heart on the Lord! Worship him only!« ... So the Israelites got rid of the Baals and the Astartes and worshipped the Lord only” (1 Samuel 7:3-4).
The Bible has a difficult, ambivalent and generally negative relationship with the idea of monarchy, because nothing and no one risks transforming or being transformed into an idol more than a king - the Pharaoh of Egypt, well known in the biblical tradition, was also a god, and the kings and rulers of other peoples were generally considered divine. Although the text offers an ethical and therefore political explanation for the end of the era of the Judges and therefore for the beginning of the monarchy, the true theological nature of the very strong anti-monarchical controversy in the Books of Samuel is to be found hiding underneath. Asking for a king is an expression of the same temptation by the many ‘golden calves’ that had seduced Israel after their liberation from Egypt.
Samuel was saddened by this request (“It seemed very bad to Samuel”; 8:6). In the dialogue between Samuel and YHWH, the truly idolatrous feature of the problem is clearly stated: “The Lord answered Samuel, »Comply with the people’s request—everything they ask of you—because they haven’t rejected you. No, they’ve rejected me as king over them. They are doing to you only what they’ve been doing to me from the day I brought them out of Egypt to this very minute, abandoning me and worshipping other gods«” (8:7-8). The problem is not with the form of government or the political leader; what the prophet glimpses in the request for a king is the idolatrous betrayal. In these pages that are really very important for biblical economy and history there is something that goes beyond the historical evaluation that the writer makes of the monarchy in Israel. Furthermore, there is a lesson on the inherently idolatrous nature of power. Corruption and idolatrous tendencies are not exclusive to the monarchy. Aaron was an accomplice of the rebellious people in the construction of the golden calf under Mount Sinai, some of the Judges and their children had been corrupted, and corruption continued even after the Babylonian exile. But the more absolute power is, the more absolute corruption becomes, because idolatry can become more absolute. The absolute becomes even more absolute if the king is YHWH’s anointed, if he assumes a sacred chrism that places him on the threshold that divides the human condition from that of Elohim. An anointed king borders too much with the idol-king of other peoples, just like the ark resembled too much the baldachins they used for carrying around the Philistine god Dagon in procession.
The text then tells us that Samuel receives an order from YHWH to accept the request for monarchy: “So comply with their request, but give them a clear warning, telling them how the king will rule over them” (8:9). Writing these stories centuries after the events, the author of the Books of Samuel knew that the Judges were followed by the monarchy, and he also knew that the Kingdom of Israel was soon divided, and that the kings who followed each other were almost all corrupt. But above all he knew that despite the many corrupt kings, starting with Saul, David and Solomon, the people were able to continue their different history of faith for centuries, the salvation that was generated by the presence, words and actions of the prophets. Samuel, then Nathan, Isaiah and Jeremiah made sure that the power of kings would not become only and always abused and idolatrous: “comply with the people’s request, but give them a clear warning”. Without the prophets who warn us, power is always and only corruption and idolatry, inside and outside religions. And when power only becomes corruption, the prophets are not there, they have fled, they have been killed, they have become false court prophets or they have been placed on the payroll of kings. It is prophecy and its typical admonition that make the yoke of all kinds of power sustainable.
Samuel obeys, and immediately gives a warning to the people: “This is how the king will rule over you ... He will take your sons, and will use them for his chariots and his cavalry and as runners for his chariot. He will use them ... to do his ploughing and his harvesting ... He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, or bakers. He will take your best fields, vineyards, and olive groves and give them to his servants. ... He will take one-tenth of your flocks, and then you yourselves will become his slaves! When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king you chose for yourselves, but on that day the Lord won’t answer you” (8:11-18). Here Samuel is not forcing or exaggerating the relationship between kings and their subjects, he is only describing the gist of what happened in the kingdoms near Israel (and in those near us). And if in Israel and in our political and economic ‘kingdoms’ the ‘sovereigns’ do not consume our children and daughters entirely, it is because there is at least one prophet who prevents them from doing so, or who prevented them from doing so in the past.
But despite the warning given by Samuel/YHWH: “the people refused to listen to Samuel and said, »No! There must be a king over us so we can be like all the other nations«” (8:19-20). They really wanted to become like the other peoples. But in reality, thanks to the prophets, they only almost became like the others. The prophets, when they are there and are not silent, are the guardians of the almost, the watchmen who prevent power from becoming perfect corrupt idolatry, and save us from losing our soul entirely in the trials of life.
Finally, in these dialogues around the request for monarchy one of the most beautiful and profound messages of the Bible can be found. The biblical writer is aware that the historical trajectory followed by his people after the liberation of Moses was less luminous, faithful and beautiful than it could have been. The pain of all could be lesser, the poor less humiliated, their faith truer. The entire Bible is crossed by this shadow line, but here, too, an anthropological and spiritual truth is suggested. When we start to write our story, and in order to do so we have to look at and read the events and choices of yesterday, there is a strong feeling of seeing a higher and brighter path that we could have followed if we had made other choices at the junctions and in the decisive appointments (which are always few). Next to our history, we see a track on the ridge and we see the spectacle of its wider horizons, which we could have travelled if we had only had a prophet close by or if we had believed in his words. Seeing or glimpsing retrospectively these higher and brighter paths that we have not walked can be the most painful moment in life, and often and for many people it is, too. The same look on the same missed trajectories can become very different and good if our eyes are accompanied by those of the Bible and its prophets. With them by our side we can embrace the mistaken junctions and lost appointments with gentleness and live them as if we had really lived them, to prepare ourselves for the last stretch of the race, finally reconciled with our regrets. Then we should also be able to witness, in amazement, the miracle of those missed ridges and the horizons we have never seen before suddenly becoming real and true - and just like the lowest and smallest ones that life has made us experience. And we give thanks. Everything is grace.
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                    [page_title] => Greater Than Guilt
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Greater than Guilt/5 - Recognising the wrong roads taken in life, and reconciling with them
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 18/02/2018
«Vorrei passare come una tela
su cui lo sguardo crocifisso
spegne gli idoli.»
Heleno Oliveira, Se fosse vera la notte
To describe the greatest kind of moral and spiritual corruption, the Bible often uses words borrowed from the economy. And it does so because there is nothing more spiritual and theological than economics, politics and law. Faith speaks only with the words of life. And so there are no truer words to express the nature and quality of our spiritual life than wages, profit, taxes, bribes, finance, tenders, work, enterprise. These are the most theological and spiritual words available ‘under the sun’, which also give truth to the words of faith. Because if we do not know how to express spirituality with the words of economy, law and politics, it is very likely that those spiritual words are, in fact, prayers to idols, even when we say them devoutly, in temples, synagogues or churches. The Bible and its true laity knew this very well - we know it much less today, because we have forgotten the Bible and laity.
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