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Greater Than Guilt/3 You can remain righteous even when you are weak. And listen without having heard
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/02/2018
The Master said,  
“Those who make virtue their profession are the ruin of virtue.”
Confucius Quotes
There are many people on earth who are called and answer "here I am" even if they don’t know how to recognize the source of the voice that calls them by name. Yesterday, today, always. They are called by different and unknown inner voices lifted up by the love and pain of the world. It is really important to respond to these vocations that happen every day in all environments of the human race. But it is marvellous when there is an "Eli" next to us that first sends us back to bed and then reveals the name of the one who continues to call us. 
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“Now the sons of Eli were worthless men... when any man offered sacrifice, the priest's servant would come, while the meat was boiling, with a three-pronged fork in his hand, and he would thrust it into the pan or kettle or cauldron or pot. All that the fork brought up the priest would take for himself” (1 Samuel 2:12-14). And what’s more, as if these bribes on sacrifices were not enough, “they lay with the women who were serving at the entrance to the tent of meeting” (2:22). But “the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favour with the Lord and also with man” (2:26). With its strong and colourful tones, making use of very ancient materials, this image makes us immediately enter into the great theme of the Bible and life. That is, the coexistence of guilt and grace, the dialectic between the temple and prophecy. The figure of Eli, the priest and head of the temple of Shiloh, also carries some ambivalence. The text - which is the result of different traditions and the work of many theological political "hands" - condemns above all his children, but does not exempt Eli himself from guilt (“you...honour your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering” 2:29).
The night of Samuel's call is a grand episode, in which Eli plays a beautiful and decisive part. It is not necessary to be morally perfect to recognize the spirit of God in the world, nor to tell a young person, “It is the Lord”. One can remain righteous even if weak; one can be honest even if part of one’s soul has gone bad. Even the score of a morally dubious life may contain some beautiful parts. And the world is full of true and stupendous words uttered by sinners, of beautiful actions carried out by those who seemed capable only of wickedness - Cain wasn’t able to erase the image of Elohim from his children, either.
Samuel's vocation is prepared by a very suggestive verse: “And the word of the Lord was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision” (3:1). Samuel's time is a miserable time of the word and visions, that is, of prophecy (which is the two together). Samuel arrives to end this silence and this eclipse of God. Prophets, yesterday and today, are often the "flowers of evil", the earth's response to the famine of the word, words and visions. In a biblical world where the Word of God is the mother of all true human words, the rarity of YHWH's word translates into the fog, smoke, vanitas (havel) of human words. Adam does not know how to speak if God remains silent, he is a civilly and spiritually blind and dumb man.
“Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel, and he said, ‘Here I am!’ and ran to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call; lie down again.’ So he went and lay down. And the Lord called again, ‘Samuel!’ and Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ But he said, ‘I did not call, my son; lie down again’” (3:3-6). The voice calls twice, Samuel does not recognize it. It calls a third time: “And he arose and went to Eli and said, ‘Here I am, for you called me.’ Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy” (3:8). It’s one of the most beautiful and deepest trialogues of all sacred literature. Here we find the grammar and semantics of that decisive anthropological event that we call vocations (religious, artistic or secular), especially in their auroral and therefore crucial phase. At the beginning there is a young man who carries his own destiny into his story, from that first vow made by his mother Hannah. He slept in the temple, next to the Ark of the Covenant, since he was consecrated to God and his worship ever since he was a small child. Religion was his environment, the temple his house, sacred words his language. However, “Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him” (3:7). His was a spiritually miserable time, we know. But even in the rare times of abundant words, to know God and his word it is not enough to be immersed in a religious life. You can spend a whole life in sacred places, be consecrated and wear the linen dress every day without knowing God - like Eli's children, like the many religious professionals.
Unlike the vocations of Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah or Moses, in Samuel's call we find a human mediator, an intermediary, a third party appearing on the scene. In those other great biblical calls (Hagar’s, Mary’s), God reveals himself directly, or through his angel. Those who are called express doubts about their ability to perform the task, but they recognize the voice. And when they do not recognize it (Saul’s "who are you?") it is the voice itself that says its name. Samuel, however, does not recognize the voice, until its name is revealed to him by Eli.
This play of voices is particularly beautiful and important, a paradigm of the good process of discernment of spirits and vocations. First of all, Eli also needs three "calls" to recognize the nature of the voice. Perhaps, knowing Samuel very well, he had recognized the symptoms of his own prophetic call already in the first waking-up, but he wanted to wait. Being able to wait is the first precious art of the interpreters of the voices of others (and their own). Always, but especially in times of famine of God, when his memory is far away, and hunger and thirst generate frivolous morganas and voices. When the long-awaited and opportune time comes, Eli recognizes the signs of YHWH's voice in the voice calling Samuel. The text does not tell us the "technique" of this discernment, but it tells us something more important: Eli knows how to recognize the voice that calls someone else. A vocational hermeneute is someone who knows how to interpret the signs of a good and different voice among the many voices of life. This is, perhaps, his most rare and precious skill, precisely: being able to say "it is the Lord" without being able to listen directly to the voice. Like Joseph in Egypt, Eli becomes the interpreter of the "dreams" of others - every true vocation begins in a dream, because the time of vigil is too short to make us hear these voices of infinity. Eli was not a prophet, probably he had never heard himself being called by name. You don’t have to be a prophet to accompany a prophet; "only" a charisma, some experience, and much honesty are needed. Eli didn't know the voice but he knew the word of YHWH. He was familiar with the narratives of the great calls of salvation history. Having experienced the word allowed him to recognize a voice that he had never heard but had listened to in the temple and under the tent by the fathers. A life spent listening to the word allowed him to get prepared for the more important appointment with a voice speaking to a young man. To recognise it and, at the right time, to be able to say with certainty: "It is the Lord”. His was a life dedicated to the knowledge of the word in order to be able to recognize the voice speaking to a young person as an old man, because the word that he had heard so often resounded inside him as if it were a voice. Spiritually active communities are made up of a few prophets called by name and many other listeners of a word that does not call them by name but becomes a voice in their soul. The word allows many non-prophets to experience something similar (if not identical) as the prophets called by name - this is a real equality under the sun, beyond the diversity of charismas and talents. It is eminently the biblical word that allows for this, but so do true listening and serious frequentation of every great human word, too. And we can recognize real poets without being poets. We may not be virtuous, but we may recognize virtue in others. And then we would have learned the wonderful art of living. At this point Eli can give Samuel the most valuable piece of advice, and conclude his task: “Go, lie down, and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant (firned/ally) hears’” (3:9).
Finally, that "if he calls you” is very important. An experienced and honest companion can recognize the signs of a vocation, can be sure of the authenticity of the voice that broke into the night, but cannot know if the voice will return to call for the fourth, decisive time. There are people who listened to their name being called three times, an Eli said to them "it is the Lord", they went back to sleep and they have been asleep for years waiting for the fourth call that does not arrive. There are others who have not slept for a long time because a real voice keeps calling them inside and does not leave them in peace. However, they found a dishonest interpreter along the way who responded “Yes, it’s me” to the question: “Did you call me?”, and became their “inner priest”. Others still have a hermeneute by their side who is dishonest (and/or impatient and/or inexperienced and/or lacking charisma) in a different way, and responded: "It is the Lord”. Thus they listen to and follow a banal or wrong voice that they call "the Lord", and find themselves in vocational lives without vocations. There are very few manipulations, done more or less in good faith, that are more devastating than vocational ones. If Samuel arrives, at night, and asks us the question: “Did you call me?” and we are not Eli the only answer we should give is: “I don’t know who is calling you. All I know is that it isn’t me. But keep listening.”
In times of the famine of voices and visions, Hannahs and Samuels are needed. But there is also a great need for the honest humanity of Eli: “So Samuel went and lay down in his place. And the Lord came and stood, calling as at other times, ‘Samuel! Samuel!’ And Samuel said, ‘Speak, for your servant hears’” (3:9).
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Greater Than Guilt/3 You can remain righteous even when you are weak. And listen without having heard
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/02/2018
The Master said,  
“Those who make virtue their profession are the ruin of virtue.”
Confucius Quotes
There are many people on earth who are called and answer "here I am" even if they don’t know how to recognize the source of the voice that calls them by name. Yesterday, today, always. They are called by different and unknown inner voices lifted up by the love and pain of the world. It is really important to respond to these vocations that happen every day in all environments of the human race. But it is marvellous when there is an "Eli" next to us that first sends us back to bed and then reveals the name of the one who continues to call us. 
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Greater Than Guilt/1 - The breathless words of the victims are worth more than any other
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/01/2018
“The Bible knows lament. Lament is an extremely critical moment in the relationship with God, until God consoles man and man consoles God. Prophecy and liturgy bring laments back and forth between heaven and earth.”

Paolo De Benedetti, La chiamata di Samuele e altre letture  (Samuel’s Call and Other Readings)
Let us begin reading and commenting on Samuel’s two books. And the time of a new joy begins, a joy that can perhaps only be delivered by an intimate connection with the immense biblical text, and only sometimes. Above all at the beginning, on the Saturday of waiting, in that auroral joy that floods the soul before knowing if and what words will come from this new encounter with the in-finite words of the Bible. Before we know if and how we will be able to make them become a discourse about our time, our kingdoms, weeping, vocations, betrayals and prayers.
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Samuel is a text that contains some of the most popular and wonderful characters and episodes of the Bible, history of art, literature and popular piety - of all the words that the human genius has been able to write. It’s enough to pronounce a single name: David, or name a single city: Bethlehem. If those distant writers hadn't kept and handed down these stories, Michelangelo, Bernini or Alfieri would have had fewer words available to embellish the world. And we would all be poorer.
To get closer to these texts and receive their blessing, however, a certain exercise and a specific intentional ascesis is needed. We must try to become capable of not fearing impurities, cross-breeds, contaminations and sins. To face the crimes that often happen in border areas, and in those insecure and dark places that are the intersections of roads, their crosses, their crucifixes. One cannot meet David without feeling his pietas for Saul in the flesh of our soul, or his wicked passion for Betsabea, his scream of pain after the parable told by Nathan the prophet. The characters of the Bible - just like and more than those of all narrative masterpieces - only change us if they get embodied in us. If we die with Uriah the Hittite, if we enter into the temple with Hannah feeling desperate and hopeful, with and like her complaining, moaning and asking for a child who puts an end to our infertility, and then, women and men, we generate the son of the promise. If we then return to the temple with Hannah and her son Samuel and sing her Magnificat with her and, on another day, we sing it again with Elizabeth the sterile and then with Mary. If one night we feel being called three times by our name, we don't recognize the voice that calls us, and a friend tells us: "It is the Lord”. We believe him and say the wonderful words: “Here I am”.
Samuel's books are populated by men and women who are neither worse nor better than we who read them: they are exactly like us. They are immense, faithful and infinite like us; and like us, they are fragile, unfaithful and sinners. Perhaps the highest human and ethical message that we can find in the Bible is the true humility of those ancient Jewish writers who wanted to lay the foundations of their sacred history: that of the highest and truest God - and flesh-and-blood men and women. Sara, Rebecca, Jacob, the deceiver, the ancestor of the tribes of Israel, sellers of a dreamy brother for profit. Moses the murderer, Aaron the maker of the golden calf. David, murderer - and image of the Messiah. The Bible was not afraid of whole men and women, and thus it gives us its most beautiful word: if you want to meet God on earth, you have to walk the dirty and spotted land of real men and women.
Samuel is a book set in an epochal passage of Israel's "theological history", between the end of the Judges' time and the birth of the monarchy (which classical chronology places around 1000 BC). It is a book on a border, a book of the border. The very figure of Samuel is a border and a passage. Samuel is the last Judge and consecrator of the first King, he is the forefather of a new prophecy in Israel and the world, but he is also heir to the archaic figure of the shaman-seer, very common among the Canaanite peoples and in Egypt. Promiscuous and mixed like all borders, an end and a beginning, sunset and dawn, a ford, a night wrestler, Jacob and Israel.
The extraordinary narrative and spiritual beauty of these books also depends decisively on the presence of many other protagonists, all masterfully described. Among them there are many women, many prayers by women, a lot of pain, many victims and a lot of beauty.
“There was a certain man of Ramathaim-zophim of the hill country of Ephraim whose name was Elkanah... He had two wives. The name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other, Peninnah. And Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.” (1Samuel 1:1-2) The book opens by depicting a rivalry between the women, a conflict of two wives: “And her rival used to provoke her grievously to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. (...) ...she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat” (1:6-7). Hannah (“the fascinating one”) and Peninnah (“the fertile one”): two women with two different kinds of richness. But in that ancient world fertility prevailed over beauty, and the sterile woman was humiliated by life, the community and religion ("YHWH had closed her womb"). The beauty of the body and heart came after the "beauty" of the womb. Children are the first paradise of the Bible, its eternal life, the truth of the Promise and the Covenant. In their faces the image of that different and unique God shines forth. To see the image of YHWH on earth, it is not enough for the biblical man to look at Adam, or even Eve. They must see him in a child, every child is an Immanuel (God with us).
A splendid and fascinating humanism, but one that has made it difficult to understand the truth and dignity of women, of all women for millennia, prior to and regardless of whether they are mothers in the flesh. So in these first verses of Samuel we find an echo of the cry of all women crushed and mortified in a world of men who sometimes loved them, but generally did not understand them, even when they were fruitful and fascinating. But the Bible sometimes manages to puncture time and give us phrases that surprise us, that should not be there, but they are there. The prophecy of the Bible is not a monopoly of prophets. The entire Bible is sprinkled with it, and it emerges when a page rises up when its time, its idea of God, man and woman comes, and tells us about another God who is not yet there, about a man and a woman greater than their sin, their world and their religion. And these are its most beautiful, really infinite pages. Like the words of Elkanah: “Hannah, why do you weep? And why do you not eat? And why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1:8). Wonderful words, which are still repeated today, in the flow of tears mixing, in the homes of many couples who love each other with a kind of love that tears make capable of a different type of generativity.
The rivalling and antagonistic relationality, which we often find in the Bible, is not exclusive to males. The anthropological wisdom of the Bible tells us that women also have their own rivalry (Sarah and Hagar, Rachel and Lea...), which is linked to generation. Males, usually brothers, struggle for birth right and power; women compete for life, and they are not sisters. To tell us that the diversity of the woman, her special talent which in many things is greater than the male one, does not exempt her from this typical disease of living together; and that although they are really different, women and men are really equal, similar, the same, the mirror image, ezer-kenegdo of each another.
Rivalry, also here, is accompanied by another constant of biblical humanism: predilection. “Now this man used to go up year by year from his city to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh... On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to Peninnah his wife and to all her sons and daughters. But to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her...” (1:3-5).
However, her husband's passion and sincere love are not enough to console her. Hannah leaves the sacrificial banquet and goes to the temple of Shiloh, where Eli, the chief priest, worked: “She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly” (1:10). A moan, a prayer crying for a son. Recited in the heart, in an intimacy that, even here, Eli the man does not understand: “Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard. Therefore Eli took her to be a drunken woman. (...) But Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman troubled in spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. (...) ...I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation” (1:13-16). Certain kinds of pain and anxiety, everyone’s but above all women’s, cannot be said loudly, because life has taken our breath away. But the Bible wanted to record these breathless words so that they accompany our own. And so it kept for us the most intimate words of the victims, slaves, servants, the most beautiful words of all prayers: “if you will ... remember me and not forget your servant” (1:11).
There are no prayers that could be more human and real than saying “remember me” and “do not forget me”. They are the first words of everyone, but above all of the victims, of the poor, of those crushed by life and the powerful. "Hear and remember Israel" that your God has freed you from Egypt - it is only a part of life and faith. Before this "remember" addressed to Israel, which opens the first commandment of the Law (Deut 6:5), there is a "remember" shouted to God by the victims, which opens the first commandment of life.
On earth, every day, many men and women’s "remember me, oh, God" are raised, pronounced and shouted by the poor and oppressed who do not know the name of God, who have forgotten him, who had never prayed with that cry to heaven before. These cries are truer and more beautiful than all of David’s Psalms. Many people learn to pray because of "excess pain", shouting: "Remember me", "remember my child", "do not forget my brother". Many people, many humans. Especially many women, who keep the prayer of the earth alive with their many "remember"-s and "do not forget"-s.
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    [metadesc] => The commentary on Samuel's Books begins today. A reflection on our time, on our sins and corruptions, of all of us, that have been there forever. But above all on the great strength and dignity of men and women. Of Hannah and many other women who populate these biblical books.
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Greater Than Guilt/1 - The breathless words of the victims are worth more than any other
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/01/2018
“The Bible knows lament. Lament is an extremely critical moment in the relationship with God, until God consoles man and man consoles God. Prophecy and liturgy bring laments back and forth between heaven and earth.”

Paolo De Benedetti, La chiamata di Samuele e altre letture  (Samuel’s Call and Other Readings)
Let us begin reading and commenting on Samuel’s two books. And the time of a new joy begins, a joy that can perhaps only be delivered by an intimate connection with the immense biblical text, and only sometimes. Above all at the beginning, on the Saturday of waiting, in that auroral joy that floods the soul before knowing if and what words will come from this new encounter with the in-finite words of the Bible. Before we know if and how we will be able to make them become a discourse about our time, our kingdoms, weeping, vocations, betrayals and prayers.
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