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The soul and the harp/16 - The of accumulated goods and the way of fraternity
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 12/07/2020
"Dantes, who three months earlier aspired for nothing but freedom, was now no longer content with freedom and aspired for wealth; it was not Dante’s fault but God’s who, by limiting man's power, aroused infinite desires in him!"
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Psalm 49 leads us to reflect on the nature of wealth and its promises of eternal life, which, if interpreted the right way, are not entirely false.
We desire wealth because it increases our freedom. Among the freedoms "bought" by wealth, the most fascinating and tempting is the freedom from death and suffering. Here lies the root of the religious nature of wealth, which has the potential of becoming a sort of idol to us, because of its traits that make it resemble a divinity. In the Gospels, Jesus himself was the one to put wealth directly in competition with God, because it promises a different kind of immortality than he does. Elohim did not forbid Adam the fruits of the tree of life in Eden because that prohibition would have been ineffective, that is how strong the desire for immortality is in men and women. Wealth attracts us because it seems like the closest thing to the elixir of eternal youth that exists on earth. Eros (love) and Plutus (wealth) are the two gods who, each in his own way, never stopped fighting Thanatos (death).
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In fact, the promise of wealth exerts an almost invincible attraction on us because, like the promise of the snake, it is not entirely false. A rich man is less exposed to the vulnerabilities in life, he tends to live in safer homes and has access to better care. This is also the reason that being rich is considered a blessing from God in the Bible and in many cultures - it is no coincidence that we use the expression "goods", that is, good things.
The religious power of wealth grows in line with how many aspects of social life that are covered by the market and money, and it was always vast to begin with. Even in a pre-modern society, wealth flowed from what a strictly economic sphere to the point of reaching paradise and purgatory (the market of indulgences). In fact, we must not think that wealth is only important within a market economy: money was already a deity well before the spreading of capitalism. Because in a world with a scarce circulation of money, and with wealth concentrated to a few zealous hands, the supernatural power of money was even greater than it is today. If on the one hand, the increase in the social areas that are covered by the markets increases the importance of a currency, (if you can buy almost everything with a currency, the currency will become almost everything). On the other hand, its wider diffusion into a greater number of hands reduces it; hence, it is not easy to calculate the algebraic sum of these two opposite sign effects. Greed, avarice and envy towards the rich were no less frequent in the Middle Ages than they are today and the social dynamics behind Judah's coins, behind the drachmas and the talents were not too different from those behind our euros - market development does not reduce social envy, but directs it in less harmful directions. This is why biblical economic ethics to this day has lost none of its ability to speak to us about our work, our wealth and our poverty: «I will turn my ear to a proverb; with the harp I will expound my riddle…Those who trust in their wealth and boast of their great riches? No one can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for them - the ransom for a life is costly» (Psalm 49, 4-8).
Psalm 49 leads us to reflect on the nature of wealth and on its promises of eternal life, which, if interpreted the right way, are not entirely false 
In yet another of the absolute masterpieces of the Psalter, the psalmist, son of prophets and Job’s and Qohelet’s teacher, teaches us through a universal song addressed to all humanity: «Hear this, all you peoples; listen, all who live in this world, both low and high, rich and poor alike» (Psalm 49,1-2). The riddle concerns the relationship between wealth and death, the proverb can be found in the chorus of the psalm: «People, despite their wealth, do not endure; they are like the beasts that perish» (Psalm 49,12). The central theme of the psalm is redemption. In ancient Israel the Law of Moses (Exodus,21) foresaw that in the case of some crimes, a death sentence could be commuted into money and therefore redeemed. The Psalm knows these legal norms very well, and knows that its reader knows them too. Hence, it also knows that money surely can redeem you from death. The psalm, however, intends to say that wealth can only delay death; it cannot redeem the mortal condition of being human, because Socrates is as mortal as he is man. The psalmist skips the penultimate victory of wealth and focuses on its ultimate defeat.
Therefore, seen from the perspective of his mortality, man is truly just like the animals, the rich are just like the poor, the wise like the foolish, and we find ourselves within a horizon of cosmic equality: «Do not be overawed when others grow rich, when the splendour of their houses increases; for they will take nothing with them when they die, their splendour will not descend with them» (Psalm 49,16-17). Many wise men have understood this vanity of wealth. But we can understand it too, as the poor understand it when they see rich unhappy people getting sick and die, and the rich understand it when they experience that their riches are not needed for those few really important things - the sincere rich are aware of many of the vanitas that are ingrained in their riches. The reason for the impossibility of the redemption of life is beautiful indeed: "The ransom for a life is too costly ". Human life cannot be redeemed because the price to pay would be too high. Once again, economic language returns when speaking of faith, which generally leads us on the wrong path. Here, however, the economic metaphor may actually suggest something good. The value of human life cannot be redeemed in exchange for money because having infinite value would also require paying an infinite price. This is the anthropological basis of the non-marketability of human life: there is no market for human life because the meeting between supply and demand would take place indefinitely; the equilibrium point would be too high to be able to find it on Earth: it would take Paradise. What if we could find a good sense to the metaphor for the "price" paid by the crucified Christ here? The value of gratuity can be found here: gratuity does not have a price because it is in fact priceless, because its actual price would be infinite. Hence, whenever a monetary price is placed on a human life, every time we try to buy a person or parts of him or her, we are denying Psalm 49, which actually has its root in Psalm 8 – «You have made them a little lower than the angels» – and in our being made in the "image of God". If God is infinite, each of his images is infinite as well.
If we took these words seriously, then we would have to say that wages are not a true measure of the value of our work. A part of infinity remains infinite, and an infinity of a lower order is still infinite. Our work is worth infinitely more than our wages, which therefore should be interpreted as a counter-gift, as a sign and symbol of gratitude. Hence, they should not be too different or unequal - I probably sound both naive and idealistic, (I am, and I am doing everything to continue to be so), but I still can't get used to a market that pays the work day of a consultant as much as a month worth of work of a labourer.
Yet in the universal equality in the face of death sung by the psalm, there must be something even more profound. In the consciousness of its poets and scholars, humanity has always sensed that, underneath (or above) the spectacle of true inequality and true injustice created by wealth and poverty, there is also an equally true dimension of equality amongst men. Certainly, in being born and dying, in terms of pain and suffering, but not only. Economist Adam Smith, (The theory of moral sentiments, 1759), also had an idea on this subject, when he said that if we were to add up all the joys and sufferings we would find that the rich and the poor are more similar than we generally think. Because the rich have sources of happiness that the poor do not know, true, but there is also an unhappiness in great opulence that is unknown to the poor, as there are sources of joy, that only the poor with their different freedom experience and which the rich envy them. It is a good thing that this strange equality between the rich and the poor, Smith added, is known only to philosophers, because, if it were evident to everyone, people would value wealth much less, they would stop working to increase it, and economic development would stop, which in his opinion is based on a sort of "providential illusion". In many things in life, well before wealth and poverty, we ​​are truly equal. Both the rich and the poor fall in love, and are left and abandoned, betrayed and deceived, wounded and blessed, all afraid of pain and death. It is thanks to this "first-hand equality" that all we need, in to in order to bend down and look at those we meet lying "half dead" along our way, is to recognize them as "a fellow man". We would seize to be human if before rescuing him, we asked him for the size of his bank account.
Looking at life from the perspective of its last day should therefore increase the feelings of equality among us all. However, for the feelings of fraternity to grow, something else is needed as well. The psalmist is able to forget the penultimate victories of wealth and he can neglect their second immortality in his song. We, however, cannot: we cannot forget that between the day of birth and that of death, the two days during which animals and men all resemble each other in their ephemeral and contingent creatural essence, different existences flow in very different ways. The philosopher, the poet and the theologian do their job by reminding us that wealth does not redeem death and therefore, in the end, it is not worth it. The economist, the social scientist, the politician, on the other hand, know that what happens between that first and last day is very important for the moral and spiritual quality of our own and everyone else’s lives. Therefore, wealth is worth it. Hence, after having meditated on the vanity of everything under a starry sky or during a funeral, we must not rest until every child who is born can grow up in a world where the scarcity of goods does not prevent him from living a dignified life. Where the material conditions of his family do not become too heavy a burden to enable him to spread his wings and fly. Where there are some very rich people, who will be able to live two hundred years with the help of organ transplants, and others, who will die of malaria at the age of three. Wealth does not redeem everything but it can redeem some things, at times, it could work to redeem many people from unworthy lives and therefore it must be equally distributed and shared. Life cannot be redeemed through wealth, but wealth can be redeemed through communion: «People who have wealth but lack understanding are like the beasts that perish» (Psalm 49,20).
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The soul and the harp/16 - The of accumulated goods and the way of fraternity
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 12/07/2020
"Dantes, who three months earlier aspired for nothing but freedom, was now no longer content with freedom and aspired for wealth; it was not Dante’s fault but God’s who, by limiting man's power, aroused infinite desires in him!"
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Psalm 49 leads us to reflect on the nature of wealth and its promises of eternal life, which, if interpreted the right way, are not entirely false.
We desire wealth because it increases our freedom. Among the freedoms "bought" by wealth, the most fascinating and tempting is the freedom from death and suffering. Here lies the root of the religious nature of wealth, which has the potential of becoming a sort of idol to us, because of its traits that make it resemble a divinity. In the Gospels, Jesus himself was the one to put wealth directly in competition with God, because it promises a different kind of immortality than he does. Elohim did not forbid Adam the fruits of the tree of life in Eden because that prohibition would have been ineffective, that is how strong the desire for immortality is in men and women. Wealth attracts us because it seems like the closest thing to the elixir of eternal youth that exists on earth. Eros (love) and Plutus (wealth) are the two gods who, each in his own way, never stopped fighting Thanatos (death).
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The soul and the harp /14 - Knowing how to "curl up" in God as his children, understanding what true blessing is
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 28/06/2020
"Every word is a spoken word. Originally a book is only at its service, at the service of the word turned into sound, being sung, being pronounced."
Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings
Psalm 37 makes it clear to us that wisdom is the learning of the human perspective from which to look at justice and injustice, in order to learn true meekness.
«Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong… do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes» (Psalm 37,1-7). We find ourselves within a tempting scenario. That of the righteous, poor because of their sense of justice surrounded by the wicked who instead continue obtaining success and wealth. A classic theme of wisdom in biblical literature, that is at the very centre of the Bible, of history, of life. These are the questions of Job, of Qoheleth, the questions of the poor and the victims, these are our questions. It has always been very difficult, sometimes much too difficult, to persevere in a life that we think is right when our troubles increase and the prosperity of those who we believe to be unjust grows. Sometimes we are in the wrong and believe ourselves to be more righteous than we really are. Other times, however, we are not actually wrong, it is simply a case of life "making a mistake"; and so we begin to think that God is the one being wrong and making a mistake.
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The author of the psalm is aware of this typical temptation crisis of the righteous. He starts from it, does not discard it, takes it seriously and, like any good companion, he uses the clay available to him to create a new Adam. Right away, he gives the righteous a very important command: stay innocent. Being poor is not enough to be righteous, it requires innocence as well, because saving our innocence within our misfortune is the gift that we will bring as our gift to the angel of death. Biblical innocence is not about the absence of sin - or no one would be truly innocent. Instead, it is something different and much more important. It is about remaining attached through our life to that faith-rope to which we bound ourselves in our youth. Not giving up on it through all the steering and sliding, having preferred this humble rope to the chairlifts that promised far easier, faster and more spectacular climbs. Innocence is the faithful embrace between our hand and the rope.
«Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret - it leads only to evil» (Psalm 37,8). Disdain, which is generally a good and important ethical resource because it helps to activate processes of change, can also trigger degenerative circuits, when anger and indignation generate worry and the self-injurious passions of envy and revenge, or when they bring the worst idea of ??all to our heart: "I've always been wrong, it wasn’t worth being right". It is difficult not to fall into these traps (each temptation is a trap) because we are, more or less consciously, all faithful to some economic-retributive cult or other; devotees of a religion founded on the dogma that the blessing of God manifests itself in wealth and success, and that his curse therefore takes the form of poverty and failure. In part, because the Bible itself (and not only the Bible) contains verses and books where this idea is present and active - see Abraham or Job's prologue.
Before entering into the heart of his discourse, the author of the psalm invites us to make a movement, a gesture of the body. He invites everyone, but especially the poor who find themselves in the midst of that typical and great temptation, and in particular the poor who might no longer find themselves in poverty if they imitated the dishonest: but who do not go through with it, because they would rather fail while being righteous than win and be impious.
He makes us enter a place. He asks us to "curl up in God": « Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him and He shall bring it to pass» (Psalm 37,5). The Hebrew verb galàl, as Guido Ceronetti reminds us, refers to winding, spooling; it recalls the cocoon of a silkworm, "a cloud of cotton candy around a stick", the image of a foetus curled up in the womb. The psalmist advises us to curl up in the bosom of God, and to read and interpret life from there. It is the only good position to do so.
Psalm 37 is not a prayer. Its author does not turn to God but to man. By immediately advising us to curl up in God’s womb, he reveals a fundamental aspect of wisdom tradition to us. A wise man is not a prophet who speaks to men in the name of God ("so says the Lord"); he is not a priest, a custodian of the Law, minister of the temple and all that is sacred. A wise person does not obtain his authority from private words addressed to him directly by God or from the Law-Torah. Instead, the source of authority of his words is life itself, history, human experience – «I have been young, and now am old» (Psalm 37,25) – that the wise man explores and penetrates to discover truths that take on great value in the eyes of the Bible, so much so that some of the wisdom books are among its most beloved ones. Herein lies the splendid biblical secularism. Wisdom is not prophecy, it is not prayer, it is not even theology: it is the human perspective to understand all the "Law and the prophets", in order to be able to really start praying, distinguishing the true prophets from the false ones. Wisdom is the creature that places itself in the right place, discovering it as the "seat of wisdom" and naming it its fiat.
Therefore, after placing us in the silk of that cocoon, the author of the psalm begins his discourse on wisdom. And he does so while levelling fierce criticism against remuneration centred religion and the theology of prosperity, that is, the idea of ??a God who uses the language of wealth and success to speak to us about our justice or iniquity and that of others. The psalm shows us powerful, successful and wealthy people, who have all their possessions because they are wicked: «The wicked draw the sword and bend the bow to bring down the poor and needy, to slay those whose ways are upright» (Psalm 37,14). This psalm contains a predatory vision of wealth and power. Not all wealth comes from abuse, we know it and the Bible knows it; but we both also know, the Bible even more so, that a lot of wealth comes from some form of abuse - even if many injustices today are masked by laws legitimately issued by parliaments, (the necessary principle of legality has never been sufficient for any justice). The mere fact that some wealth is certainly the fruit of impiety is sufficient to stop us from being able to read our and others' wealth as a blessing from God and poverty as his curse: «Better the little that the righteous have than the wealth of many wicked» (Psalm 37,16). From inside the cocoon we are able to see this clearly.
The discourse on loans and gifts is of great beauty and important - it is always moving to find the economy present within biblical prayer: it should not be there, and yet there it is: «The wicked borrow and do not repay, but the righteous give generously» (Psalm 37,21). Wickedness and justice are debased in financial language. Unlike many biblical passages that insist on the prohibition of lending (at interest), here we find condemnation coming from the other side of the contract. Those who ask for a loan are condemned, not those who grant it. In order to remind us that there is not only the impiety of granting loans at usurious rates, there is also that of those who take loans with no intention of ever repaying them. Because while poor insolvents end up becoming slaves to their creditors, the rich always had and still have a thousand ways to get out of an insolvency, and often even make it an opportunity to make a profit.
The righteous, on the other hand, are those who use their goods and property generously, transforming them into gifts. Hence, does this mean that the only good and right kind of wealth is that which is shared and given? The most subversive thesis, however, is obtained by putting together verse 21 with verse 26, which while speaking of the righteous add: «They are always generous and lend freely; their children will be a blessing». Lending: can lending be a righteous activity, an expression of compassion equated to a gift? Yes: we are righteous when we share our wealth through gifts and when we share it by lending our property and goods to others. Hence, those who, in principle, see philanthropy and finance, gifts and contracts as polar opposites are wrong. There are righteous loans that release and offer more than gifts, and there are gifts that end up being more poisonous than any contract ever could be. This was as true back then as it is today, when a financial system that enables the poor to live, coexists with one that instead proceeds to devour them.
One last tile is still missing in the mosaic, the central and brightest piece: «The meek [the nwym] will inherit the land» (Psalm 37,11). The earth as an inheritance. Superb. That ancient sage does not promise success to the righteous. It promises much more: the righteous who save their innocence will inherit the earth. The whole Bible is essentially the guardian of this promise; it is the shomer (sentinel) of this word, which is the foundation of the calling of Abraham, the Covenant with YHWH, the great liberation and the exodus, the cave in Bethlehem. A promise that was not fulfilled with the arrival in Canaan, because if the Promised Land had become our property and possession, the land would have remained but the promise would have disappeared. Hence, the promise of the inheritance of the earth - which is mentioned no less than five times in the Psalm - is the promise of having a future. It is not a reward for here and now; this different promise does not belong to the "already is or was", and even if we get to taste a few bites, these are only a deposit of the "yet-to-be", which is the place of the unfulfilled fulfilment of the promise. The righteous who do not yield to the council of the wicked «There is surely a future hope for you» (Proverbs 23,18). The promise of a future is not a guarantee of success or wealth, but of the gaze of someone who, like Moses' sister-child, will accompany us while our basket runs along the great river, because «The blameless spend their days under the Lord’s care, and their inheritance will endure forever» (Psalm 37,18). Therefore, the righteous are those who keep the promise of a land, which they know they will never possess; they are sentinels of the utopia, who experience every land as if it were just provisional and live life like a pilgrimage.
Psalm 37 was behind the third beatitude, behind all the beatitudes: blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (Matthew 5,5). Therefore, this psalm is also an explanation of what biblical and Christian meekness truly is. The meek are the just and righteous in this psalm. They are those men and women who do not follow the way of the wicked; they do not envy them, and remain firmly tied to their rope during their climb of life, only to realize, in the end, that they never left that cocoon protected by all that good and merciful lining during their journey. The earth is the inheritance of the meek, because only the meek are able to keep the promise of a land without also possessing it. We can still have a land and a future if we learn to apply this justice and this meekness, if we learn how to inhabit this planet without feeling like its masters and therefore its predators. The future will either be meek or it will not be at all: «A future awaits those who seek peace» (Psalm 37, 37).
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The soul and the harp /14 - Knowing how to "curl up" in God as his children, understanding what true blessing is
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 28/06/2020
"Every word is a spoken word. Originally a book is only at its service, at the service of the word turned into sound, being sung, being pronounced."
Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings
Psalm 37 makes it clear to us that wisdom is the learning of the human perspective from which to look at justice and injustice, in order to learn true meekness.
«Do not fret because of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong… do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes» (Psalm 37,1-7). We find ourselves within a tempting scenario. That of the righteous, poor because of their sense of justice surrounded by the wicked who instead continue obtaining success and wealth. A classic theme of wisdom in biblical literature, that is at the very centre of the Bible, of history, of life. These are the questions of Job, of Qoheleth, the questions of the poor and the victims, these are our questions. It has always been very difficult, sometimes much too difficult, to persevere in a life that we think is right when our troubles increase and the prosperity of those who we believe to be unjust grows. Sometimes we are in the wrong and believe ourselves to be more righteous than we really are. Other times, however, we are not actually wrong, it is simply a case of life "making a mistake"; and so we begin to think that God is the one being wrong and making a mistake.
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The soul and the harp/12 - The Lord is on the side of liberation, not condemnation
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 14/06/2020
"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I would use them so. That heaven's vault should crack"
William Shakespeare,  King Lear
Psalm 22, one of the poetic and spiritual highpoints of the Bible, is also the pentagram on which the symphony of the passion of Christ was written. And it helps us understand something about crucifixes and their mystery.
A man is persecuted, tortured, humiliated and despised by other men. He feels death is near. That man is innocent - like so many others both back in the day and today. He knows he does not deserve that great pain, that violence, those humiliations - who does? However, in addition to being a suffering and humiliated righteous man, this man is also a man of faith. And right there, on that dark night, perhaps in a prison, over a pile of rubbish or inside a cistern, a prayer is born, a last desperate song emerges within his soul. Beginning with words that should be counted among the most precious, tremendous and stupendous in the Bible, among the greatest and most beautiful and stupendous in life: «My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?» (Psalm 22,1). A poetic, spiritual and anthropological highpoint in the Psalter, perhaps the greatest one
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Yet another prayer opening with a cry, as in Egypt, when the first collective prayer of the enslaved people was another cry (Exodus 2,23). Many great prayers take the form of a cry, of a shout thrown out and up to the heavens in an attempt to awaken God. In the Bible, crying out and shouting is possible, lawful, and even recommended, it is a language that God seems to understand. By shouting out, we can awaken God, and remind him of his "work" as a liberator of slaves and the poor. As long as we are able to shout out our abandonment, we have not lost faith, we are only exercising it, merely carrying it out.
That tortured man, that "suffering servant", shouts out and experiences his misfortune in faith, and therefore within that general state of abandonment, he feels that God has abandoned him as well. And that cry becomes the rope or thread (fides in Latin) so stay in touch with God, that golden thread of life that does not break precisely because we dare to shout out. That man does not accuse God of having reduced him in that condition; unlike Job, he does not consider God his executioner. Instead, his pain arises from the non-intervention of God, who should intervene as the liberator of his faithful innocent, but still does not: «My God… Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?» (Psalm 22,1). To awaken him, that man resorts to the best strategy in the Bible: he reminds God who he is. He helps him to remember his promise: «Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the one Israel praises. In you, our ancestors put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried out and were saved; in you they trusted and were not put to shame» (Psalm 22,3-5). In any relationship you wish to save, the first prayer is not: "remember me", but: "remember you", and therefore "remember us".
In the Bible, memory is the ultimate, most efficient resource available. We return to yesterday's events to recreate the faith of today and tomorrow. And the question of who is God immediately becomes a question of the deeds he has done, and not mere generic and anonymous actions but the specific and concrete actions within the real existence of those who are praying, shouting out, trying to awaken him. In biblical humanism, history is the first proof that its God is alive: the history of the people, but also the history of each single person. Each believer has his own Egypt, his own Red Sea and his own Sinai to narrate and to bring as a demonstration of the non-vanity of his faith. Each prayer is therefore, an encounter of three different "remember": we pray to God to remember himself, to remember us, and we pray to ourselves to remember God: «Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast... From my mother’s womb you have been my God» (Psalm 22,9-10).
It is you: I never get quite used to the intimacy and confidence with which men turn to their God in the psalms. In that ancient, violent, often primitive world, God was their most delicate and secret "you", He was their friend, lover, beloved, love. Repeating the psalms generation after generation, day after day, hour after hour, we learned to pray, getting to know God better and getting a deeper knowledge of man and woman as well. However, we also learned the tenderness and confidence that exists between us, the cheek-to-cheek dialogue, because that "Lord of armies" also knew how to become tenderer than a child, than a bride, than a mother.
«But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they hurl insults, shaking their heads. “He trusts in the Lord,” they say, “let the Lord rescue him. Let him deliver him, since he delights in him!” (...) All my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me. My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth; you lay me in the dust of death. Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment… But you, Lord, do not be far from me» (Psalm 22,6-19). No other words are needed. Any further comment falls flat. But we cannot silence a resurrection, all resurrections need to be announced: «He has listened to his cry for help!» (Psalm 22,24).
He who was abandoned awakened God. Once again, a cry from an innocent man had pierced the sky: «I will declare your name to my people; in the assembly I will praise you... For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one... The poor will eat and be satisfied; those who seek the Lord will praise him - may your hearts live forever! All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord!» (Psalm 22,22-27).
Praise becomes universal, cosmic, infinite prayer in space and time. One of the most sublime and wonderful fruits of any great misfortune that we overcome is a soul enlarged to cover the whole universe. We become mothers and fathers of humanity, a new fraternity with everyone, both good and bad, is born, we all feel very small and yet sovereigns of the world.
A different innocent man, on a different day, was captured, tortured and sentenced, his feet and hands were pierced, and he was nailed onto wood. Whoever collected and narrated that man's passion could not have found a more suitable text in the Scriptures than Psalm 22, to make it the pentagram on which to write the symphony of Golgotha. At the height of Christ's life and passion, we come face to face with another cry, dressed in the words of Psalm 22: «My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?» (Mark 15,34; Matthew 27,46). It was an extraordinary, ingenious choice, all gift. The evangelists knew that that passion was not the same passion that that anonymous psalmist had experienced centuries before. Yet they were not afraid to bring back that scandalous song - a Man-God who cries out the abandonment of God. They did it because they wanted to tell us something important. If those disciples chose Psalm 22 to convey some part of their understanding of the passion and death of Jesus, then the idea of ​​God at work in that crucifixion must be very similar to the God of that ancient psalm. They wanted to tell us that to understand that abandonment and that cross we must take Psalm 22 very seriously.
The man in the Psalm truly felt the abandoned by God. He was not pretending, the sense of abandonment was real. The same was true for Jesus. The man of the Psalm remained a man of faith within the realms of his passion, he did not lose faith. Neither did Jesus. That man did not protest with the Father accusing him of his suffering, but prayed to him to intervene within that suffering. And God replied, carrying out his job as liberator and savior, and raised him from his "death". Choosing Psalm 22 then means distancing yourself from many ancient and modern theological readings of the death of Christ. First of all, the psalm tells us that the cross of Christ was not intended by God as a "price" to be paid in order to save us. The psalmist knows that it was not God who led him to the gallows, but begs him to release him. God is on the side of liberation, not condemnation. Furthermore, the first Christians did not see and experience the cross of Jesus as a sacrifice of the Son wished for by the Father, because in that Psalm the psalmist does not say that God likes his suffering, in fact he says exactly the opposite. Finally, that passion and that cross are not seen as a voluntary sacrifice of the Son: the psalm tells us exactly the opposite, the suffering man asks God to free him from that unjust pain, and obtains that liberation. The biblical God does not want the suffering of his children.
Psalm 22 is also the Psalm of the resurrection. It tells us that the resurrection is the Father's response to the Son's prayer. As it tells us that, although the resurrection of Christ was a special and unique event, it is also true that what happened between the Via Crucis and the empty Sepulcher had some similar elements to what the ancient psalmist had experienced. And to what many already had experienced, wounded, humiliated, crucified and resurrected men and women, to the miracles that happen to us when we find ourselves on a mountain, we feel like worms, but we do not lose faith (at least that remains in our innocence), and suddenly we find ourselves risen. What Christ experienced was very similar, perhaps identical to what was experienced by the many crucified men and women throughout history - and therefore no crucifix in history remains outside the blessing framework of the Psalm, Golgotha, and the empty Sepulcher. And when the pain does not pass and resurrection does not come, we are allowed to cry out by borrowing the words of Psalm 22: let us sing it once, twice, a hundred times. If the angel of death finds us with those words on our lips or in our hearts, a resurrection will begin in his arms - many Bibles have been seen in the intensive care units of the pandemic spring of 2020, some open precisely on the pages of the Book of Psalms.
If the crying out of Christ on the cross is the beginning of Psalm 22, then we can imagine that that Psalm was the prayer of Jesus on the cross. Let's follow him in his secret song: «My God… why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish?... But I am a worm and not a man, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me… They pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display… But you, Lord, do not be far from me. You are my strength; come quickly to help me… You brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast». And finally, that last whisper: «You are my God».
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The soul and the harp/12 - The Lord is on the side of liberation, not condemnation
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 14/06/2020
"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: Had I your tongues and eyes, I would use them so. That heaven's vault should crack"
William Shakespeare,  King Lear
Psalm 22, one of the poetic and spiritual highpoints of the Bible, is also the pentagram on which the symphony of the passion of Christ was written. And it helps us understand something about crucifixes and their mystery.
A man is persecuted, tortured, humiliated and despised by other men. He feels death is near. That man is innocent - like so many others both back in the day and today. He knows he does not deserve that great pain, that violence, those humiliations - who does? However, in addition to being a suffering and humiliated righteous man, this man is also a man of faith. And right there, on that dark night, perhaps in a prison, over a pile of rubbish or inside a cistern, a prayer is born, a last desperate song emerges within his soul. Beginning with words that should be counted among the most precious, tremendous and stupendous in the Bible, among the greatest and most beautiful and stupendous in life: «My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?» (Psalm 22,1). A poetic, spiritual and anthropological highpoint in the Psalter, perhaps the greatest one
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The soul and the harp/ 10 - Man and woman have something that God does not have: words without truth
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 31/05/2020
"Tyr lost his right hand during an oath, a false one given to a wolf to persuade him to allow himself to be tied up. In Rome, the mutilation of Scaevola is explained in relation to the mutilation of Tyr"
D. Briquel, On the good use of European comparativism in the Roman religion.
Sincerity is a typical trait of the human repertoire, which grows together with the pain of lies and falsehoods. Today more than ever, we need the true strength of a new sincerity.
Man is the only being capable of lying. Neither animals nor God can lie, except for the small lies spoken (perhaps) by some monkeys. The sincerity of a dog attracts and seduces us because we know that it is not like ours. Because we know that, the effects of our words and gestures depend radically on something typically human: truth. The possibility of words without truth is something so human that not even God possesses this ability. This is one of the paradoxes of biblical humanism (and in general of many religions): lies are something that belongs to man and not to God. A "less than" that becomes a sort of "more than". Man, inferior to the Elohim in every aspect, can actually become "superior" and supersede him in the lowest of things - lies, malice, evil. God cannot lie, man and woman can. Here too lies the seductive power of sin: we do not sin only "to be immortal like Elohim", as the snake said to the woman; we also sin because we are attracted and deluded by the possibility of being more than God, by doing something that He cannot, because if he did, God would become just like us. Hence, this bizarre anthropological primacy also contains a dimension of beauty: the possibility of lying gives human sincerity the highest kind of dignity. He made us "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8), and in sincerity he paradoxically made us "more than Himself".
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All civilizations have always been utterly afraid of lies. They know the destructive power they have in communities, families, and in society as a whole. They fear them as the greatest evil, as powerful and great as the word. The Bible, which lives on words, of divine words revealed in human words, of a God who speaks with our own words, is particularly vulnerable and exposed to false and lying words. So much so that the spiritually and ethically highest moments of the New and Old Testaments are events created by true words (the Covenant, the prophets, the Incarnation) but also by false ones (Cain, Jacob, Peter). The Bible is terrified of lies, because it strikes straight into the heart of its mystery. Its life is all about words; hence, it can be damaged and hurt when those words lose their truth. The word is the protagonist of Psalm 15: «Lord, who may dwell in your sacred tent? Who may live on your holy mountain? The one whose walk is blameless, who does what is righteous, who speaks the truth from their heart» (Psalm 15,1-2).
Who speaks the truth from their heart. The heart can contain a truth without the need to convert it into words. Sincerity lies in matching the content of our words with that of our heart. There are no lies in good faith. Sincerity enables us to enter the tent of the Lord as pilgrims and guests. The sincerity of our heart is the lateral entrance to the temple, the one from which we too, sinners in the company of the publican (Luke 18,9-14) can enter, and like him pray, be understood and listened to. If this secondary door had not been there, the tent of the Lord would only be home to the just, and thus would remain devoid of many beautiful people, even if they were sinners: sincere people.
Lying takes many forms. A particularly pernicious one is slander: «Whose tongue utters no slander,  who does no wrong to a neighbor, and casts no slur on others» (Psalm 15,3). Few things show the performative capacity of a word or words than slander: slander creates a new reality by saying it, changing the world by speaking. Perverse words create evil and darkness while we say them. It is a demonic creation, which reminds us that God and good are not the only masters of the word. We speak to bless and we speak to curse, and the wonderful possibility of making people better with our blessings (and being made better by the good words of others) is balanced by the experience of being made worse by bad words and making others feel worse by bad-mouthing them. However, while gratuity can be distorted if misused, the word is unable to resist such abuse. It is less powerful to this respect than gratuity for all its weakness, which while not being God is still better equipped with devices that protect it from manipulation. Instead, Satan also speaks, even demons use words to try to change the world, and often succeed. Magic is also a matter of words, even blasphemy is a word.
By binding himself to words, God decided to share their strength together with their fragility. When, with infinite joy and gratitude, we wished to write that "The word became flesh", we discovered that the word had become vulnerable and fragile like the flesh of a child, and then a wounded, humiliated, crucified word, a cry of abandonment, a risen word riddled with sores. The Psalm thus reaches one of the most ancient, controversial and important uses of the word: the oath: «Who keeps an oath even when it hurts, and does not change their mind» (Psalm 15,4). The nature of the oath is immediately revealed, an instrument at the service of the truth of the word, an aid for the fulfilment of our promises.
We invented oaths because we had learned about the power of perjury, we knew the infinite pain caused by broken agreements, and of communities, families, entire cities destroyed by false and empty words, the disasters created by lies, by those who prefer false interests to the truths of one's own words and those of others. The word is the soul of trust, the rope that binds people and communities, on which the entire social building is based. In Rome, the god of oaths was called Dius Fidius, closely linked to the word fides-trust. If we lose contact with the truth of our words, when winter comes, we will end up walking on ice too thin to support the weight of our steps. Each promise is based on our faith in the words being spoken, on the hope that there is something serious, something beautiful, something more behind that breath; "something" for which we have not yet found a better word than truth. If we did not believe, hope for and love this very real possibility, we would never say "forever", we would never say "I love you", "forgive me", or "excuse me", and we would not believe others when they said it either.
However, this urgent need for true words clashes with the millennial evidence of the fragility of our words and of others, with the inability of staying faithful to a given word when the cost of fidelity and loyalty increases. Thus, men invented tools to strengthen their words and as a consequence pacts. They added gestures (e.g. the handshake), witnesses, objects (salt or flint thrown on the ground during the making of an agreement), and above all they inserted the words into religious liturgies. We wrote our covenants and promises and then placed them on the altars, we promised to tell the truth by putting our right hand on our heart or on the Bible, hoping that their truth (of the Bible and of the heart) would also give strength to our words.
An oath is a sort of contract with our own words, committing ourselves through other words to pay a price in case of a betrayal of the words that we ourselves are pronouncing. We ask our different words to come to the aid of our ordinary words, which we know are weaker than our sincerity. "I swear by my children", is an ancient expression that has remained in our language to this day. The maximum strength of an oath was reached when pronouncing: "I swear to God", associating divinity as a guarantee of the truth of our words. By swearing an oath, we call upon greater words today so that they may save our words of yesterday from their fragility tomorrow. Humility is the root of oaths.
Despite the criticism of the oaths that we find in the Gospels - motivated by the rather formal and empty use of that instrument very recurring in the Hebrew Bible, which ended up weakening the strength of human words and the invocation of God - the Church and the West have continued to resort to oaths to reinforce our words. But then, the secularization of our culture brought with it a progressive abandonment of oaths, and we found ourselves with increasingly weak words, with increasingly fragile promises and agreements, in the illusion that mortgages and sureties could be enough to support our weak words of today. I am not surprised that Psalm 15 ends with mention of the economy: «Who lends money to the poor without interest; who does not accept a bribe against the innocent» (Psalm 15,5).
Usury, but also the manifestation of power and desire for control masked behind gifts, gifts that capture those who accept them in perverse relationships, bribes and corruption, are, above all else, words without truth. Before becoming bad economic transactions, they were false words. Behind these contracts and wrongful economic deeds, there are false speeches and words that have lost all contact with the truth. Usury is a perverse promise, because "a son who asks for an egg is given a scorpion" (Luke 11,12).
We enable our businesses, associations, contracts, and employment relationships, to be reborn every time we find a connection with the truth hidden within the words we say to each other. We will emerge from the crisis we are experiencing, which has been, and still is, a crisis of words and promises as well, not only by finding the vaccine for the coronavirus: we will also need a new kind of truth in our words. Great pains and suffering can generate a new sincerity.
We are beautiful in many ways, but we are truly beautiful when we have all the incentives and interests to tell a lie, and instead chose to tell the truth. The choice of telling a costly truth when lying is available to us at zero cost (or with an added profit), makes the truth even truer, more beautiful, divine. Because if only men and women can be liars, then only women and men can be sincere. In Eden, Adam was innocent, but he became sincere only after the expulsion. When he lost his innocence and knew the price of lying, he also learned the value of sincerity - and we learned together with him. Sincere: a beautiful adjective, entirely made for us, the value of which derives from all the lies that we have said and one day stopped saying, and from the lies that we could have said but instead we did not.
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The soul and the harp/ 10 - Man and woman have something that God does not have: words without truth
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 31/05/2020
"Tyr lost his right hand during an oath, a false one given to a wolf to persuade him to allow himself to be tied up. In Rome, the mutilation of Scaevola is explained in relation to the mutilation of Tyr"
D. Briquel, On the good use of European comparativism in the Roman religion.
Sincerity is a typical trait of the human repertoire, which grows together with the pain of lies and falsehoods. Today more than ever, we need the true strength of a new sincerity.
Man is the only being capable of lying. Neither animals nor God can lie, except for the small lies spoken (perhaps) by some monkeys. The sincerity of a dog attracts and seduces us because we know that it is not like ours. Because we know that, the effects of our words and gestures depend radically on something typically human: truth. The possibility of words without truth is something so human that not even God possesses this ability. This is one of the paradoxes of biblical humanism (and in general of many religions): lies are something that belongs to man and not to God. A "less than" that becomes a sort of "more than". Man, inferior to the Elohim in every aspect, can actually become "superior" and supersede him in the lowest of things - lies, malice, evil. God cannot lie, man and woman can. Here too lies the seductive power of sin: we do not sin only "to be immortal like Elohim", as the snake said to the woman; we also sin because we are attracted and deluded by the possibility of being more than God, by doing something that He cannot, because if he did, God would become just like us. Hence, this bizarre anthropological primacy also contains a dimension of beauty: the possibility of lying gives human sincerity the highest kind of dignity. He made us "a little lower than the angels" (Psalm 8), and in sincerity he paradoxically made us "more than Himself".
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The soul and the harp/ 8 - The prophets provide words to those who must defend themselves against the masters of all words
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 17/05/2020
"Each line was bristling with words of many syllables that he did not understand. He was sitting on the bed and had the dictionary which was larger than the book in front of him... and for some time he entertained the thought of reading nothing but the dictionary, until he became master of all the words it contained".
 Jack London, Martin Eden
Words are the protagonist of Psalm 12, even the unpronounceable ones. They are one of the greatest sources of power available to humans. But also one of the strongest temptations of any power. The embankment of un-pronounceability.
Many forms of poverty are also a poverty of the ability to speak. An indigence, which prevents you from calling your own pain and that of others by name. This sort of narrative poverty sometimes precedes material and moral poverty; in other instances, it follows them, always in tandem. The "peasants" and the oppressed of all times were peasants and oppressed also and above all due to the words that they could not say and those used by the powerful that they did not know or could not understand. That is why every form of poverty that seeks to rise must learn and relearn to speak again, until at least one poor person will be able to start naming the demons of his or her indigence. This also includes the beautiful invitation from our grandparents: "Luigino, study"; they knew very well that knowing the words of the lords was the first step towards liberation.
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The Bible, teacher and guardian of the word, knows its many natures, it has seen its paradise, it has glimpsed its hell. It saw it, in the beginning, while creating the world; it watched it becoming a child again, and was amazed and moved. While chasing it in between genesis and eskaton, it learned the ambivalent grammar of human words. It saw it, while in Jacob’s mouth, then in David’s, that most beloved king but capable of killing with one single lying word, and finally in Mary’s beautiful mouth. Then it followed it in silence to the mountain where the word became a cry. In the midst of many difficulties and failures, it learned how to recognize it as good in the mouth of true prophets and as evil on that of false prophets. It understood that the word is the point of contact between God and man. It is the place where the human and the divine speak face-to-face and each becomes increasingly similar to the other. We are the "image" of Elohim in many things, but above all, when we add a sense of order to the world by expressing it with words, when we raise others and ourselves with a word that is finally different, when we hurt and kill others and ourselves with a wrongful word.
We were already the image of God in the caves and mobile tents of the Neolithic period, but we became more so because of the billions of good and beautiful words that we learned to repeat to each other every day. Only gods and men can speak. There is, furthermore, an intimate and essential relationship between the word and the truth, which perhaps only the Bible (and a few great poets) can explain to us. Truth is the soul of the word. Just like the soul it does not appear on the surface, it does not show itself, for many it does not even exist. When the word loses contact with the truth it loses its soul - or sells it to the devil. The word is the protagonist of Psalm 12, a psalm on the word and therefore on prophecy: «Help, Lord, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Everyone lies to their neighbour; they flatter with their lips but harbour deception in their hearts» (Psalm 12,2-3).
Loyalty, sincerity, lies: it is all a matter of words. The psalmist's is certain that loyalty has all but disappeared from the earth - or at least from his life. This is a stage that inevitably arrives in the life of any man of faith, especially in that of the prophets. Because, as they live closely within the relationship between the received and given word, they are particularly sensitive to the truth of their own words and those of others. They are words made flesh, always finding themselves between nothing and infinity, witnesses of the weak force of a breath that is ephemeral yet capable of overcoming death. They are sentinels able to see the soul of words in the night. Those who pray have a great resemblance to the prophets: both live by the truth of the word, both are beggars for the echo of whispered or shouted words, and neither are masters of the words nor, least of all, of the return of their echo. Hence, they are also radically vulnerable to the manipulation of the word, to lies. Sometimes they are convinced that they are surrounded only by lies. Moreover, it is not uncommon for the prophet to insert his own lack of loyalty and sincerity among all the loyalty and sincerity that has disappeared from the earth. Because it is not part of the repertoire of an honest prophet to feel like the only righteous survivor in the world: the first non-sincerity that he feels is his own. It is not easy to get out of these spiritual traps of depression, but it is not impossible.
The psalmist sees and sings a crucial aspect of the lie: "lying to each other". When the lie takes over a community - some types of lies take the form of a virus - they become reciprocal. The opposite of the new commandment ("love one another") it is not only the conflict: it is also the reciprocal lie. Because just as love "does not forgive" a loved one by generating reciprocity, neither does the lie often forgive those who are touched by it. It spreads, it multiplies, it searches for its own kind, producing its own perverse company where each person feeds on the lies of others and his or her own. Few things are able to feed us more than our lies, which by dint of telling them we end up believing are true: losing moral weight day by day without realizing it. A typical form of lie stigmatized by the psalm is adulation: "flattering lips". The Book of Proverbs knows and speaks of this as well: «Those who flatter their neighbors are spreading nets for their feet» (Proverbs 29,5). Among the many forms of flattery, that of a friend is in fact particularly dangerous and subtle.
This adulation is not the kind that comes from a false friend (which exists as well). Unlike the fake-friend ruffian, the flattering friend does not praise us in pursuit of his or her own interests, but due to a strange form of pity for us. He knows he is saying an untrue word, but says it anyway to please us. Flattery is very frequent in any request for appreciation: we have no real reasons to sincerely appreciate the work or action of a friend, but we decide to satisfy his request by giving him a false note of appreciation. We prefer emotional assonance to the truth in the words. And so, we "spread nets for their feet ". Because instead of digging into that relationship and looking for a real reason to harbor and express sincere esteem, we settle for a fake sort of currency passing it off as legitimate. The relationship then begin to regress, the word loses its truth, and the friendship loses its soul. Moreover, as the Psalm says, the heart begins to harbor deception: a sincere heart that stays silent and a non-sincere heart that praises. The heart deceives, a friendship goes awry and over time, the lying heart contaminates and spoils what is good. Whoever finds a friend finds a treasure; whoever finds one who is not a flatterer finds two.
However, the grammar of the word contained in the Psalm does not end here: «Those who say, “By our tongues we will prevail; our own lips will defend us - who is lord over us?”» (Psalm 12,4). Our tongue is our strength: here we find ourselves in another essential dimension of the word. The one directly linked to power, to those who, feeling like the masters of all words and their soul, believe that they have no other master than themselves. Those who can speak and use words well easily dominate and oppress those who cannot speak or cannot speak well - we see it every day. The prohibition to pronounce the name of God in vain, enclosed in the Decalogue (Exodus 20.7), is also a protective device against any attempt to know all words and therefore command everything and everyone. It is the temptation of magic, but also of those who aim to become masters of all words. The fight against idolatry in the Bible also translates into making a word inaccessible and unpronounceable, because if a word cannot be commanded with a word, then its masters will always only be partial masters even when they feel that they are absolute masters. A name in the Bible always speaks of mystery.
Here, the psalm then denounces the temptation, always strong and at times invincible, of those who use words to build their own cult, their own religion. If "word" is one of the names of God, then the power over words is always a religious power. This is also were we find the root of the ancient and ever current project of Babel, where the construction of a unique and total language becomes the tool for building an absolute empire, without "any master". Each empire, including ours, begins by aspiring to give a name to that one unpronounceable word, and thus ends up turning into a new idolatry-religion, smaller and less free than the one it initially wished to overcome by occupying all its names and words. Any religion where the masters know all the words, where there is not even one left hidden in a cloud of mystery, becomes and empire that while wanting to pronounce all the names cannot even say one of them well.
The religious man is the first to be tempted by wanting to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of all the names of heaven and earth. Adam can and must name the animals but cannot name God. This is the only name that can only be revealed and then veiled again by the same revealer, because in the custody of the name of God lies the custody of our individual names as well. «“Because the poor are plundered and the needy groan, I will now arise,” says the Lord. “I will protect them from those who malign them”» (Psalm 12,5). The psalmist prays that the Lord comes to the rescue of his testimony. The prophet bears witness to the poor oppressed by the power of words. Those who, by vocation, are competent in matters of the word, those who know its soul, can - must - use it to testify in favor of those who do not know enough words to save themselves.
Thus, we understand the civil value of prophecy: the prophets are those who provide words to those who must defend themselves from the masters of all words. Writers, poets, journalists, politicians, trade unionists, artists, lawyers, all participate in the same prophetic function as Isaiah and Amos if they bear witness to the oppressed by the word in the courts of history. A poor man is someone who does not know enough words to be able to call upon all the spirits of his life and thus, not knowing their name, cannot drive them away either. The prophets, and their friends, call the demons who threaten the poor by name, and then send them away. And so, each day, the word becomes flesh again while repeating to Lazarus: "Come forth".
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The soul and the harp/ 8 - The prophets provide words to those who must defend themselves against the masters of all words
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 17/05/2020
"Each line was bristling with words of many syllables that he did not understand. He was sitting on the bed and had the dictionary which was larger than the book in front of him... and for some time he entertained the thought of reading nothing but the dictionary, until he became master of all the words it contained".
 Jack London, Martin Eden
Words are the protagonist of Psalm 12, even the unpronounceable ones. They are one of the greatest sources of power available to humans. But also one of the strongest temptations of any power. The embankment of un-pronounceability.
Many forms of poverty are also a poverty of the ability to speak. An indigence, which prevents you from calling your own pain and that of others by name. This sort of narrative poverty sometimes precedes material and moral poverty; in other instances, it follows them, always in tandem. The "peasants" and the oppressed of all times were peasants and oppressed also and above all due to the words that they could not say and those used by the powerful that they did not know or could not understand. That is why every form of poverty that seeks to rise must learn and relearn to speak again, until at least one poor person will be able to start naming the demons of his or her indigence. This also includes the beautiful invitation from our grandparents: "Luigino, study"; they knew very well that knowing the words of the lords was the first step towards liberation.
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The soul and the harp / 6 - Prayer brings the Creator out of the cage-metaphors created for him
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 03/05/2020
"In my notes you will find neither a Jewish comment nor a Christian comment.
Man pains me: I have no other guide. And as an act of pity this is what I transmit."
Guido Ceronetti, The book of psalms
Psalm 6 helps us to remember that suffering and illness are not wanted by the Father who, if we ask him to, knows how to "move" closer.
Anyone who has crossed the chasm of a serious illness learns that that illness is not just about the body. Or rather: he or she understands that the body is an interweaving of matter and spirit, it is spiritual flesh and incarnate spirit. Diseases are therefore questions, addressed to us and to others. They are among the few moments of truth that we experience in life. When we find ourselves in a hospital bed that until then we thought was only meant for others, the time of fiction ends and that of truth and bare raw questions begins. We are no longer satisfied with the half-lies told to others and to ourselves: reports and diagnoses become languages ​​of a new authentic relationship with life and with the world. This is why a disease can also be the announcement of a great blessing. The religious pitfalls of any illness lie precisely in that space between suffering and blessing. Ancient man addressed his questions first and foremost to God. We, however, have depleted the language and vocabulary ​​of life and hence tend to address our questions above all to science and doctors. Nevertheless, if the disease becomes severe, sooner or later even the profound questions arrive: "Why me?", "What went wrong in my life?"; "And why?" Every now and then, even in the midst of our world, depopulated of gods, the terrible question may come back: "What have I done wrong to deserve all this pain?" It is very difficult to come out completely innocent from a serious illness.

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Our questions rarely manage to reach God: we have trivialized him too much to feel him near us in the midst of the truth of our suffering. Our questions often come very close to him, they stop just a breath away from heaven, even if we do not know it - but the angels know and always see us. The first psalms of the Psalter present us with various models of prayer, that is, the different existential conditions from which man can learn and relearn to speak with God: encircling the enemies, unjust accusations, hope. Learn: the development of the psalms is about learning the art of praying. In the monasteries, liturgy was understood as an art form, as a profession - the ambiguous semantics of this beautiful word further reveals this to us. Psalms are many things; they are also an apprenticeship in prayer. On that day when the need for prayer is born within our soul, we can open the book of psalms, scroll through them one by one and stop at the one that we feel is our psalm; and as we start singing it, we realize that those are our words; we just did not know it yet: «When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it» (Genesis 28,16). And that first psalm, the one that the prayer taught us, will be our psalm - and in the end we will discover that the first and the last are really the same song.
With Psalm 6 the anthropological space of prayer widens again. A man is facing a long and serious illness. And asks: «Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. How long, Lord, how long?» (Psalm 6,2-4). God is the first interlocutor of the two questions. Ancient man, then, added the horizontal dimension to the vertical dimension of these bare questions. God, the others and me: this was his ternary space. And so, after dialoguing with God, the psalmist (and us with him) looks for other allies in guilt, and the interpersonal question almost always arrives as well: "Who is responsible for what happened to me?"; "Who are my enemies?" Day after day the dialogue with one's soul and with God increasingly also becomes a dialogue with others, seeking the executioners around us: «Away from me, all you who do evil» (Psalm 6,8). My colleagues, my boss, the competition, my community, the doctors: we search the soul looking for a grammar of our pain. We are unable to resist for a long time without calling our suffering by name, because we know that only by calling out to our pain, it might be able to show us another unknown, and perhaps good, side or face.
Ancient wisdom had developed a complex hermeneutics, an ability to decipher pain, disease, and misfortune. This is also where a decisive dimension was added: illness and suffering were experienced as punishment for those who experienced it, due to faults of their own or of their family. That pain hence became the bill asked by heaven to restore a balance broken by a committed sin. This remunerative-economic vision of faith has always been very successful, because it is extremely simple. Very simple, and therefore too simple to be true. Such a faith works because it perfectly performs the function of saving the ethical balance of the world and justifying divinity, which thanks to this religious expedient always falls on its feet, and always comes out innocent from our misfortunes. This is how religions have often become moral mechanisms that save the justice of God by sacrificing the innocence of men.
Furthermore, retribution was to take place on this earth. The accounting between men and God did not extend beyond life: «Among the dead no one proclaims your name. Who praises you from the grave?» (Psalm 6,6). Death is the kingdom of nothing; and even if God lives in the heavens, earth is his home. His voice resounds in the sun, he needs the sounding board of the mountains, the seas, the infinite space of the human heart. A theology of retribution without paradise is even more demanding, and so it also uses our pain as currency to bring the accounts back to balance. In Psalm 6, however, the author does not accept his destiny, impassively or resigned. He talks, discusses, and argues with God and with his own misfortune. He asks God to change, to answer his question: "how long". He asks him to come back: «Turn, Lord» (Psalm 6,4). Re-turning alludes to the possibility that God changes direction, and is converted. The biblical God is a God who knows how to turn, if we ask him.
It is within these sentences that we find the theological and anthropological greatness of the Psalms. They are prayers to the God of the yet to be: they ask him to become something that he is yet to become. The man of the psalms does not feel imprisoned by his destiny or his faith and dares to ask God: "How long?". And so prayer meets with religion and resurrects it. This is also what prayer is about: a person who in the experience of his spirit no longer feels a slave because he has been freed and as a free man manages to free God from the cages in which theology and religion keep him locked up. That is why God needs our prayer, at least as much as we need God. Biblical prayer then becomes our first exercise of freedom, a liberated man who manages to free his God.
Then there is a last message. The words that the psalmist uses in the second verse (hwkyh + ysr) are the binomial of pedagogy; they are the expressions of the education of children by their parents and teachers. The translation that the biblical scholar Alonso Schokel makes of it is particularly beautiful: "Scold me without fury, correct me without anger". Until now, we had chosen the image of the judge and a rather forensic language for God (and we find them here in this Psalm 6, as well). Now prayer asks God to leave court and enter primary educational relationships. Hence, illness is no longer understood as punishment for atoning guilt, but as punishment within the educational paradigm of that world. And here the Book of Job returns, punctually, when a fourth "friend", Elihu, bursts onto the stage bringing with it the pedagogical explanation of suffering: «Or someone may be chastened on a bed of pain with constant distress in their bones» (Job 33,19). Job did not reply to Elihu, he was not convinced by the explanation of suffering as an instrument that God would use to give us a "lesson". Job was silent; the psalmist seems to accept the pedagogical explanation, but continues the dialogue and asks God to "return". He starts from the metaphor, but is not satisfied.
If we wish to repeat the experience of the psalmist today, we must continue asking God to return, and therefore free him from this pedagogical metaphor that so often appears in the Bible. After overcoming the legal and economic metaphors that have tried (and still seek) to trap the freedom of God within our concepts of remuneration, we cannot now feel calm and reassured by a religion that associates our sufferings with some sort of educational intention of God. We must at least live up to Job and stay silent with him, or live up to the psalmist and ask God to "return". And this is where something new about praying is suddenly revealed. When we now open the Bible and find a word, a psalm, a song of a prophet, the Bible continues to be alive and active if we are able relive the same experience of that ancient author; hence, if we dare ask God to become what he is yet to become, to keep changing, and to return for us, for me.
Therefore, we keep delivering God. We are the deliverers of God, and we did not know it. What infinite dignity!
Illness and suffering are human facts; they are part of our repertoire. It is up to us to do everything to keep God out of the responsibility of our pain, and then not stop while reducing the pain and the suffering of human beings and all living beings. If we wish to see the hand of God during our sweaty nights spent in a hospital bed, we must be able to recognize it in those of nurses and doctors, in that of those who wipe our foreheads and cry with us. God does not wish for our pain, but accompanies us when it arrives. On Golgotha, ​​the Father found himself on the same cross as his son, wiping his forehead, shouting with him. All the other spirits surrounding our pain are demons, and we must repeat with the psalmist: «They will turn back and suddenly be put to shame» (Psalm 6,10).
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The soul and the harp / 6 - Prayer brings the Creator out of the cage-metaphors created for him
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 03/05/2020
"In my notes you will find neither a Jewish comment nor a Christian comment.
Man pains me: I have no other guide. And as an act of pity this is what I transmit."
Guido Ceronetti, The book of psalms
Psalm 6 helps us to remember that suffering and illness are not wanted by the Father who, if we ask him to, knows how to "move" closer.
Anyone who has crossed the chasm of a serious illness learns that that illness is not just about the body. Or rather: he or she understands that the body is an interweaving of matter and spirit, it is spiritual flesh and incarnate spirit. Diseases are therefore questions, addressed to us and to others. They are among the few moments of truth that we experience in life. When we find ourselves in a hospital bed that until then we thought was only meant for others, the time of fiction ends and that of truth and bare raw questions begins. We are no longer satisfied with the half-lies told to others and to ourselves: reports and diagnoses become languages ​​of a new authentic relationship with life and with the world. This is why a disease can also be the announcement of a great blessing. The religious pitfalls of any illness lie precisely in that space between suffering and blessing. Ancient man addressed his questions first and foremost to God. We, however, have depleted the language and vocabulary ​​of life and hence tend to address our questions above all to science and doctors. Nevertheless, if the disease becomes severe, sooner or later even the profound questions arrive: "Why me?", "What went wrong in my life?"; "And why?" Every now and then, even in the midst of our world, depopulated of gods, the terrible question may come back: "What have I done wrong to deserve all this pain?" It is very difficult to come out completely innocent from a serious illness.

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The soul and the harp / 4 – Understanding the weight of God and the glory of man
By Luigino Bruni
 Published in Avvenire 19/04/2020
Stuck
between deadly things
(the starry skies
will also end)
Why do I crave God?
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Damnation
Prayer is an essential and universal dimension of human life. Psalm 4 reveals this to us, and offers us a sense of great hope in these difficult times.
«Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; have mercy on me and hear my prayer» (Psalm 4,1). Save me from these narrow spaces, oh God. We learn words one at a time. In these times of pandemic, when our spaces have suddenly drastically been reduced, we can understand the metaphor with which Psalm 4 begins. Perhaps only those who are accustomed to freer horizons and now find themselves in a forced state of distress will be truly able to discover the infinite value of «endless spaces».

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This psalm is the prayer of a man who is going through a great difficulty that is putting him in a tight spot: «How long will you people turn my glory into shame? How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?» (Psalm 4,2). How long? This question is often asked in the Bible by those who find themselves in a non-transitory condition of anguish. It is the question of the sentry who still awaits the distant dawn in the middle of the night; of those, who are stuck in a trap, plunged into misfortune, and can only ask God and life: how long? How long until dawn? When will this violence end? This praying man was attacked by slanderers, by lying people who accused him of non-existent and serious faults. The man in the psalm is a victim.
The key word here is glory: kavod/kabod in Hebrew. It is one of the most important words in the Bible, of its theology, which in the psalm also becomes a word of its anthropology. This man feels offended in his glory, he feels stripped of his honour (synonym of glory). Glory is what you see, what appears in front of your eyes, and is therefore closely related to how others look at us. It is a word connected to our eyes and gaze. For the ancient man, more radically than for us, identity was constitutively relational. I am what others can see and recognize in me. Fame or reputation is a fundamental dimension of life, as are honour and glory. At the same time, the denial of honour is the denial of something intimate: even if it concerns seeing, honour has nothing to do with appearing but with being, it is an attribute of the soul. This is why slander and lies that take away honour and glory deprive men and women of their dignity. As true yesterday, as it is today when the deprivation of honour can also stem from being denied the right to work or when your glory disappears along with your company gone bankrupt. Honour is perhaps one of, if not the most intimate thing we possess, but it also one of the things that is most affected and depends on the words and looks from those around us. It is the mystery of every person, living his or her inner and external world within this essential link. The substantial nature of this relationship makes us human beings radically vulnerable and greatly exposed to the gaze of others. Because if "I am what you do to me", then you are "hurting me" can reach as deeply inside as you are " good for me".
In the Bible, the word kavod refers to weight. The glory of God has weight because YHWH is consistent, true and real. On the opposite side, there is only a void, breath, vanitas, the hevel of Qoheleth, which does not have weight because it is inconsistent. Kavod is the anti-Hevel. The idol is a nothing (the other meaning of hevel in the writings of the prophets), it weighs nothing and it is not worthy of glory because it has no substance. In that ancient world, only that which exists has any weight. God is spirit and yet his glory is heavy. However, this psalm reminds us that not only God, but man has his own glory too. Every denial of respect for the honour and glory of another human being begins by denying his or her consistency, his or her value - the first ancient coins were units measuring weight (lire, talents...). Every person on the planet has the same moral weight, no man or woman weighs more or less than another, because the honour of every human being is infinite.
This is why the Bible uses the same word to express both the glory of God, as well as the glory of man. In order to truly understand this, we need to go back to Genesis. In biblical humanism, Adam is blessed with glory, honour and weight, kavod because God had it first, which he transmits while creating him. All men and women must be respected and honoured because they have weight, i.e. importance, in the eyes of God. They are the «image and likeness» of Elohim, and the image of an infinite value has infinite value. It is a heavy image because it is consistent, because it is not mere shadow and wind. It is what weighs and matters the most "under the sun". At the same time, to dishonour man is to dishonour God; denying men and women their glory means denying it to God. Because if it is true that we have learned to glorify and honour people from glorifying and honouring God, it is equally true that it was by looking at the dignity and honour of human beings that we have learned to recognize the dignity and honour of God. The religion of a people is also an indicator of their humanism: the most beautiful and elevated true words about God arise only from communities that also know how to say beautiful and elevated words about men and women. And when good words for God are not accompanied by equally good words for men and women, religions turn into in-humanism, where in order to praise the gods they humiliate human beings. God is the glory of man, man is the glory of God.
It should come as no surprise that the same word (kavod) is found in the heart of the Ten Commandments: «Honour your father and your mother» (Deuteronomy 5,16). Honour, give glory, give weight to your parents: remember that, even here, you are a child. During this pandemic, despite all the mistakes, we have really tried to honour our fathers and mothers to the best of our abilities. We did not consider them a burden but gave them weight, importance. And without knowing it, in restricting our spaces, together we rediscovered and resurrected the collective space and the common good of the Fourth Commandment - we had forgotten the Bible, but the Bible had not forgotten us. Job, at the peak of his night, exclaimed: «He has stripped me of my honour!» (Job 19,9). Job directs this cry of his directly to God, whom he feels is his executioner. And, while there are still many who, in the past as well as today, cry out to God to impute the loss of their honour, and thus do not lose their faith (there is a good place in the Bible for them too), Psalm 4 shows us another form of crying. That of someone in the middle of a disaster who feels that there is Someone who still believes in his glory and in his honour: «Know: that the Lord hears when I call to him» (Psalm 4,4). Faith is also the confident belief that, when no one else sees our dignity anymore, there is still a place where its weight has not lost even an ounce of its significance. This is where the nature of the gift of faith truly emerges: to find within oneself that gaze that is able to see an honour denied by everyone else, to feel that someone recognizes our glory even when everyone else only see vanitas, is a heritage of inestimable value.
Many people go through their lives accompanied by the gaze of just a few different people – and at least one - capable of seeing a dignity, honour and glory that others are not able to see. Without these special gazes, life would simply be too sad to bear. However, we all know that the "horizontal" gaze of those around us does not last forever. Some leave us, some "change" their eyes and gaze, some get lost or we lose them. And even those few whose fate it is to die under one of these gazes, if their existence is long enough and true, eventually still realise that there is a depth of the depths in our soul that no human gaze can reach - not even ours. It is the place where our first and last words are kept, where the pains that we never told anyone rest, all the ineffable joys, the moans too delicate and precious to be able to relate to anyone, not even to our hearts.
This is the "wine cellar" that the eyes of faith are able to reach. Prayer is to find oneself in the conditions of the meekness and mildness that allow this different gaze to reach us in that unknown inner territory of ours. Before asking, begging, pleading, thanking, prayer is to be reached and seen within a different kind of intimacy. And even those who do not call these eyes by the name of God can sometimes feel this gaze «in the best and deepest part of my being, what I call God» (Etty Hillesum). Every one of us can feel touched in this unfathomable depth. The world would be too unfair if only those who received the gift of faith could feel seen in this abyss of the heart. There are many more prayers than there are believers, because experiencing God is something very different from the mere name by which we call him. I would not be interested in a God who only looks at those who also look at him, because he would be less worthy than those fathers and mothers who throughout their lives, continue to see and call those children, who have forgotten about them and no longer call, by their names too. This too, is universal brotherhood.
Prayer is an essential and universal dimension of human life
Psalm 4 reveals this to us, and offers us a sense of great hope in these difficult times
«You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound» (Psalm 4,7). The happiness that comes from an inhabited interior space is perhaps the greatest wealth there is. As those who have found themselves in a hospital ward these days, without their loved ones, without their friends, without certainties. And there, in that abyss of solitude and fear, they suddenly felt that spirituality, cultivated for a whole lifetime, suddenly emerge inside. Cultivated so that it could flourish in those terrible moments, for many the last ones, when it becomes a good for which there are no substitutes to rival it. Who knows how many invisible angels, mixed with demons, are filling our hospitals right now. Some have seen these angels and recognized them, because they had not made them flee after their youth, when God and the angels easily fade away. Because somewhere in their adult heart they asked them to stay, they tied them to the bedside table with the last Ave Maria that they remembered and they never stopped acting. We can forget everything but we must not forget all the prayers, because we will need one to say our last amen well: «In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety» (Psalm 4,9).
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The soul and the harp / 4 – Understanding the weight of God and the glory of man
By Luigino Bruni
 Published in Avvenire 19/04/2020
Stuck
between deadly things
(the starry skies
will also end)
Why do I crave God?
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Damnation
Prayer is an essential and universal dimension of human life. Psalm 4 reveals this to us, and offers us a sense of great hope in these difficult times.
«Answer me when I call to you, my righteous God. Give me relief from my distress; have mercy on me and hear my prayer» (Psalm 4,1). Save me from these narrow spaces, oh God. We learn words one at a time. In these times of pandemic, when our spaces have suddenly drastically been reduced, we can understand the metaphor with which Psalm 4 begins. Perhaps only those who are accustomed to freer horizons and now find themselves in a forced state of distress will be truly able to discover the infinite value of «endless spaces».

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