It will be difficult for the pilgrim – as long as he wants to do it – to forget that slab of virgin rock that protrudes almost two spans from the floor in the basilica of the Agony, at Gethsemani. It is a rock which, although cold, is boiling: it is the place where Christ – who was now close to dying alone like a dog – knelt down the night he was released. “And this is still nothing: you should have seen the indolence of your friends, how they abandoned it” the eight ancient olive trees – ramshackle, intertwined, worn by time – which probably attended Jesus’ prayer seem to betray the agricultural secret. they, more than the apostles, the silent witnesses of what happened that night.
If they had the voice to tell what they saw! Gethsemani means “oil mill”: and just like an olive the Son of God was pressed. Here it appears of a human who leaves stunned, stunned, frightened: here, for the first time in such an explicit way, Christ warned all weakness, unhappiness. “It looks like my brother – the pilgrim seems to say to himself as he listens to the verses of Isaiah proclaimed in the Eucharist:”He has no appearance or beauty to attract our gaze (…) A man of pain who knows suffering well“(Cf. Is 52) -: I would like to be able to shake his hand, pat him on the shoulder, talk with him a little so that he would not feel alone”.
This, in the end, he had asked his cowardly friends: that they should stay a little awake and keep him company. Instead, like dormice with a deep sleep, they behaved: “Have you not been able to stay awake with me even for an hour?“. The end of the illusion of Christ, the beginning of the friendly disappointment: this is how men are made. Thus Christ suffers like a sheep to be slaughtered: he is the loneliest of all the loners down here.
When you leave, head straight to the Holy Sepulcher. Between the choleric singing of the muezzin, the chatter of the spice sellers, the noise of the tractors on the pavement of the old city, we celebrate the Via Crucis. A mix of indifference, spirituality, agony and indifference: Christ, even today, is little more than an appearance in the heart of a city. Scanning the stations as if they were stages in a slaughter, everyone realizes that he is an actor and protagonist of the last crusade in history: the one against our effort to believe. The enemy has become our spirit which has become exhausted, bored, disheartened. The human heart is a burning ground, it is always in tension for the possibility of some shot to stab him. “Imagine Christ close to us today, walking alongside us – a pilgrim confides to me between one station and another -. See him hanging on the cross, then! “
I contradict it. I am not so convinced: if Christ returned today – of this I am convinced – we would no longer put him on the cross. They did it then, which was the time of the great passions. We, on the other hand, are intelligent, we reject torture and the death penalty: today we would send him to the gallows, we would put him “in quotation marks”, we would pity him for tenderness. No cross (in sight) for Christ: better indifference so the hands remain clean. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, “osculo Filium hominis tradis?”
Just inside the tomb, on the right, is wedged what was once a climb: today they are only steps, then it was the slope of Golgotha. The hand, inside an iron hole, touches what remains of the rock on which they placed the gallows. Then again steps, to go down, at breakneck speed: it is the way of the cross downhill made by Mary, without her Son anymore. The stone of the deposition anticipates, announces the Holy Sepulcher. You have to hunch over to get into it. This, in the Holy Land, is a trademark: we are too haughty, too giants, too wise to understand such a weakness.
In the tomb, then, a great void is there to open his arms to the pilgrim who has reached the source. Who left home to go to the cemetery to pray to his God but, once he passes the gate, he realizes that the tomb is there, but it is empty. Lately we have become experts on empty spaces: empty squares, streets, churches. The void has horrified us to the point that, as soon as we notice a void, we try to fill it. Without realizing that our faith rests on a sepulcher empty: there is an emptiness to sustain us, we have an emptiness as a root: “I have no faith, it is faith that holds my hand” I think while the monk beckons me to enter. The air of the East was needed to rediscover emptiness as a friend. While in the cemeteries, despite the flowers, it is never spring.
The pilgrim who precedes me, in the meantime, has rested his head on the unadorned stone of the tomb: this is why we have gone all the way down here.
To lose the (ab) use of the word.
(7 – continued)
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DIARY OF A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY LAND / 7. Holy Sepulcher, emptiness is a friend