The Dawn of Midnight

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The Dawn of Midnight/29 - Generated for ever: the world will not be abandoned

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/11/2017

171105 Geremia 29 ridThe Bible is not my sacred text, even though I also feel its sacredness, which I derive from its capacity to absorb the screams of the world. Jeremiah's cry of pain is almost fully let out as a scream. Job screams. Isaiah, too. So it is a strange sacred text composed of despair, failure and an implacable faith in a God who does not answer".

Guido Ceronetti, from a 2013 interview

“The word that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah, when he wrote these words in a book at the dictation of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: »Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: You said, ‘Woe is me! For the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.’ (...) Thus says the Lord: (...) And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord. But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go«”. (Jeremiah 45:1-5).

[fulltext] =>

It is very nice that a biblical tradition (the Greek text of the Septuagint) chose to conclude the Book of Jeremiah with this blessing on Baruch. Jeremiah leaves his book with a word of YHWH for his disciple. We do not know much about Baruch. This notary-secretary appears in the Book of Jeremiah within the great story of the purchase of the field at Anathoth (chapter 32). Then he became much more than a scribe-secretary. He accompanied Jeremiah during the tremendous hours of the taking of Jerusalem, he transcribed his words twice in the scroll (chap. 36), read them to the community in the temple, and then followed him in Egypt. The text dates this blessing more than twenty years before the Babylonian occupation. But the final editor of the text - perhaps Baruch himself -, violating the chronological succession of facts, places this blessing given in Egypt at the end of Jeremiah's life. It’s like a testament, which can be written at any time in life, but which becomes effective and reveals itself only at the end. Like vocations, which take place in the chronos-time but are understood only at the end, in that kairos-time which is different and unique. Perhaps Baruch had to wait more than twenty years, passing through the tests of Jeremiah and his own, to understand the sense of that blessing. Understanding these different words always requires a lifetime, and sometimes one life is not enough.


Baruch is an image of the good disciple of a prophet. He was the pen of the voice. He learned the words of YHWH by listening to Jeremiah's words. But his sufferings and anxieties have been similar ('I am weary with my groaning'), perhaps, at certain decisive moments, they were the same. This association reveals to us some typical dynamics of the relationship between a prophet (or the one who received a charisma) and his disciples. At first there is an encounter with the prophet, in different contexts. Perhaps Baruch gets to know him while at work, doing his job as a transcriber-scribe of a contract. That very secular contract became a sacrament of another decisive call, which upsets his life and work.


The call of the disciple of the prophet is a distinct vocation, and it is united with that of the prophet. The prophet receives the word directly from YHWH. The disciple also receives a direct and personal word, but understands it only in a dynamic relationship with the prophet. Baruch knows that he can't carry out his task, he can't understand his word and fulfil his destiny, he can't flourish without a deep, mysterious but essential bond with Jeremiah’s task, destiny and flourishing. But the disciple's life is also a personal ’skin to skin’ experience; he is not only a follower of the prophet. He is a follower on multiple levels: that of the prophet, the voice that speaks in the prophet and the voice that speaks in his soul. The fatigue and beauty typical of prophets’ disciples lies in remaining and growing in this specific trialogue. For certain prophets a dialogue can be sufficient, for the disciples there is a need for an extra number, two are not enough. For this reason, the typical and most common mistake of those who follow a prophet is to reduce the trialogue to a dialogue: either because they cancel the voice in their own conscience, or because they skip the prophet to draw directly from the source of words without the prophet ("do you seek great things for yourself?"), or because - in the most common case - they identify the voice of the prophet with that of YHWH (and the prophet becomes an idol). You become an adult disciple if you do not reduce three to two.


The disciple, then, has an active, dynamic, responsible and creative role. A disciple who is only a disciple is not a good disciple. Baruch with time became a companion, partner, counsellor and perhaps even co-author of the words that came from Jeremiah but when they became written words they were also those of Baruch. The Bible - like life - is great because it is bigger than the words of its main protagonists. Who knows if in the long periods of waiting for the word, as during those very long ten days in the Bethlehem camp (42:7), Jeremiah did not dialogue with Baruch, if they did not share the sense of that silence, their uncertainties, fears and hopes. There is perhaps also a trace of these secret dialogues in the accusation that those survivors address him with: “Baruch the son of Neriah has set you against us, to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans” (43:3).


Those who have been or are disciples of a prophet know these silent dialogues well, the painful accompaniments of the soul, the search for their own non-light in the eyes of the other, and sometimes they have also touched the co-writing of donated words with their hands. If Jeremiah’s Baruch had only been a mere secretary, his name would not have been chosen later for a biblical book and other apocryphal and apocalyptic writings.


If, therefore, it is true that the disciple has an absolute need of the prophet, it is also true that the prophet needs his disciples, at least one. Who knows how many prophets have left no trace because of the absence of Baruchs, or because their Baruchs were not as adult, faithful and resilient as their prophets. There is this mysterious reciprocity at the heart of the charismatic life of the world, which makes prophecy, which is perhaps the most individual experience that exists under the sun, a collective experience, too, which transforms an inner voice into a social reality.


But in this relationship between Jeremiah and Baruch there is also a splendid image of every fatherhood and parenting. Our son gathers our words, writes our name. He assists and accompanies our sufferings, our failures, our fidelity and infidelity. He seals the purchase of our camp, and eventually sees that we don't return home, because the camp we had bought wasn't for us. He compiles our will. The son cannot enter that intimate sphere of consciousness where everyone listens to his voice alone, but helps us to understand and interpret it with his mere presence. One day, then, he receives our last blessing, and we realize that we could not spare him the suffering and anguish of all, and that the only true gift, 'prey' and inheritance was, simply, life. And then we exit the scene, hoping that we have simply done our duty, to the end. Every child writes our promise and is a witness, an inheritance and a notary of our will. The dawn of midnight.


We don't know much about the historical Jeremiah, but we know a lot, almost everything, about the Jeremiah of his book. And that is enough for us. His book does not tell us about the very last days of Jeremiah or about his death. He disappears like Moses or Isaiah. They do not die like heroes, because they did not live as heroes. They received a vocation, a task, a mission, and they have only carried it out, until the end. By living it, however, they have taught us what a vocation means, the meaning of a word that has now been forgotten and erased by our generation: forever. And then they leave, just like our friends, parents and teachers leave. And we are left alone.


This Jeremiah, seduced by his God, has seduced us. We have become a bit like Baruch. Perhaps we also met him while at work - what could be more vocational than work? -, and then he seduced us with his immense and infinite words, and we freely decided to follow him. We have witnessed the fall of Jerusalem and our temples - Jeremiah does not seduce us nor change us unless we read him sitting on the ruins of our religions, our people and our greatest dreams. And then we saw him carrying a yoke, breaking a jug, tortured and jailed, and we rejoiced when a eunuch freed him. Then we followed him to Egypt, we were deported with him, ending up surrounded by golden and shimmering idols. Once again we listened to his condemnation of idolatry, understanding that the temptation of idolatry was within us and we have tried to believe to that naked, invisible and different word again. And today we listened to this last blessing, and we heard that it was, it is a blessing for us, too: “But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.” Also to find out that this blessing of Baruch is very similar to the other blessing given by Jeremiah to the Ethiopian eunuch (39:18), a rejected one, a stranger, a victim. The blessings of the prophets are above all blessings for the victims, the poor, the persecuted, the meek and the afflicted. These are the only beatitudes they know. They repeat them, and they will always repeat them to us, eternal beggars of our listening, which will always be too little.


We, too, must now let Jeremiah leave the scene. Not without that typical and great pain of those who take leave of a real friend. Knowing and hoping that he will come back, but detachment always hurts. And even this time, at the conclusion of the commentary on the sixth biblical book in Avvenire, my last word wants to be a multiple, great, sincere and emotional thanksgiving. To the Bible, because it continues to feed me without satiating me. To Jeremiah, an immense master of life, a companion necessary to learn the art of living. Thank you, readers who, like Baruch, have followed Jeremiah with me on this long journey, which lasted six months. They have flown by, because ‘one day with the prophets is like a thousand years elsewhere’. And as always and more than ever, thanks to Director Marco Tarquinio who continues to give me the gift of his generative trust.  


From next Sunday we will resume the discourse on Ideal-Driven Organisations (IDO), with the sure knowledge that the words donated to us by Jeremiah will help us to discover better the grammar of ideals that become organizations and communities. 
“And the Lord said unto me: ‘(...) the world will not be given over to oblivion’”. (The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch the Son of Neriah)


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The Dawn of Midnight/29 - Generated for ever: the world will not be abandoned

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 05/11/2017

171105 Geremia 29 ridThe Bible is not my sacred text, even though I also feel its sacredness, which I derive from its capacity to absorb the screams of the world. Jeremiah's cry of pain is almost fully let out as a scream. Job screams. Isaiah, too. So it is a strange sacred text composed of despair, failure and an implacable faith in a God who does not answer".

Guido Ceronetti, from a 2013 interview

“The word that Jeremiah the prophet spoke to Baruch the son of Neriah, when he wrote these words in a book at the dictation of Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah: »Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: You said, ‘Woe is me! For the Lord has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.’ (...) Thus says the Lord: (...) And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord. But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go«”. (Jeremiah 45:1-5).

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Simply Life

The Dawn of Midnight/29 - Generated for ever: the world will not be abandoned by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 05/11/2017 The Bible is not my sacred text, even though I also feel its sacredness, which I derive from its capacity to absorb the screams of the world. Jeremiah's cry of pain is a...
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The Dawn of Midnight/28 - Man and woman: the most beautiful "image" under the sun

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire le 29/10/2017

171029 Geremia 28 ridThe longer we are uprooted from professional activities and our private lives, the more it brings home to us how fragmentary our lives are compared with those of our parents. Our spiritual existence remains incomplete.”

Dietrich BonhoefferLetter to Eberhard Bethge, 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)

Ideology is anti-hope. Hope is born within the imperfect reality of today and feeds on a better tomorrow that it does not know yet but awaits. It is the gift-virtue of the crossings of deserts, when we walk in the scorching heat knowing that a promised land awaits us in the end, which is real even if nobody has ever seen it.

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Hope makes us see Canaan while we are still at the waters of Meriba. Ideology, on the other hand, lives on an already perfect today, and does not wait for anything that it does not already know. It leaves us slaves in Egypt for a lifetime, but has the extraordinary ability to transform the slavery of brick factories into the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’. The promised land is the land where we already live. Therefore, a typical symptom of the person infected by ideology is the absence of surprises and amazement. They cannot be surprised because there is nothing but the interests of the present and and there is nothing in the future world that has not already happened, is known, perfectly controlled and dominated. Amazement needs ignorance (perhaps only children can be truly amazed) and the desire that arises from the awareness that life is something wonderful whose most beautiful pages still have to be written. And we always expect everything, always, really. But when we are convinced that we have finally come into possession of the secret of life and that we know everything we need to know under the sun, there remains nothing to be expected or hoped for. Desires are turned off, and we begin to die. Ideology is the transformation of the idea into reality, and the ‘gap’ that remains between ideal and reality is denied or experienced as an evil, a sin, a scandal. Hope, on the other hand, cultivates and cares for today's reality so that it can flourish tomorrow in something new, and the gap is the soil of desire and expectation. The already of ideology curses the not yet; hope blesses it because it lives it as the beginning of the fulfilment of the promise.

The Bible is also a great treatise on the birth, development and justification of ideologies. It is a syntax and often a semantics of the tremendous nature of ideological thought and action. That people saw Jerusalem invaded, the temple become a heap of rubble, the kings and ministers killed and deported. They believed the false prophets, they were fed up with illusions, nothing remained of their kingdom. And now, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they continue to produce ideologies, to offer their interpretation of that ruin. Jeremiah can only tell a different story, the same one, because it is the only story he knows: “Then Jeremiah said to all the people..., »As for the offerings that you offered in the cities of Judah ... did not the Lord remember them? ... The Lord could no longer bear your evil deeds and the abominations that you committed. ... It is because you made offerings and because you sinned against the Lord and did not obey the voice of the Lord or walk in his law and in his statutes and in his testimonies that this disaster has happened to you, as at this day«” (Jeremiah 44:20-23).

Now almost at the end of our commentary on the Book of Jeremiah, we must try to answer a difficult but inescapable question: and what if the ideology had been that of Jeremiah? And what if Jeremiah's interpretation had become the true interpretation only because it was adopted by the elite of intellectuals who fixed the canon? And what if it was the cult of the ‘Queen of Heaven’ that was the true and good one for simple people, for humble and oppressed women? Who is telling us that Jeremiah spoke in the name of the true God and his compatriots in the name of the wrong idols? No one can tell us with certainty, nor can we exclude that some of these things have actually happened. Like no one can guarantee that Jeremiah and all the biblical prophets were only self-deceived like all the other false prophets, neurotics convinced of listening to voices that were not there. Or that it was the events and internal conflicts of Israel's religious power that made them call the oracles of some prophets ‘true’ and good, and all others false; and that the rabbinic school which at some point chose Jeremiah or Isaiah as prophets hushed the oracles of other prophets who were their competitors. This is a serious question because it lies at the root of the entire Bible and every religious (and perhaps even secular) humanism because it is, simply, of that great human experience called faith. Faith is first and foremost trust in a story of a historical experience of a relationship between a people and their God. First there is this faith, and then comes the subjective experience of believing in God's existence.

The two can also come at the same time, but the first is the decisive one. Also because when believing in God it is not or does not become believing in the words of those concrete people who have told me about that God through the events of their own history, that belief lasts little, serves very little, does not affect life, and if it does, it only does harm. Without first believing in the narrative capital of the fathers and mothers in faith, we will never know if that voice that one day called us by name was a ghost, an idol, self-deception, or simply nothing.

This faith is neither a guarantee nor a reassurance that we are not believing in an untrue story. The freedom of the believer lies precisely in the real possibility of having believed in a great collective deception - that’s where its beauty and his risk is. It is possible for faith not to be an illusion because it is possible that it may be one - and when we begin to be sure of the impossibility of illusion we are already trampling the ground of ideology. Too many people are not able to mature in collective experiences of faith because they are not educated to inhabit this existential risk, and so they grow up with a faith that is too small to make them become adult people.

The abstract god becomes concrete when someone tells me a story that says what the name of God is. And in the Bible the name is also the incarnation of the idea of God in a historical and concrete experience, the Logos that comes to dwell in our midst. The name is a word revealed in a concrete encounter between a man with a name (Moses) and a voice, on the slopes of a mountain with a name (Horeb), to liberate a people enslaved in a place (Egypt). A name says a history, geography, community and a tradition. For this reason the name YHWH is kept in the very heart of the Law, it is the intimacy of a concrete and living relationship, which must be pronounced without pronouncing it.

No wonder then that to the women who “made cakes for her bearing her image” (44:19), Jeremiah responds, “Then confirm your vows and perform your vows! Therefore hear the word of the Lord, all you of Judah who dwell in the land of Egypt: Behold, I have sworn by my great name, says the Lord, that my name shall no more be invoked by the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, ‘As the Lord God lives’” (44:26). Jeremiah contrasts the name with the image of the queen of heaven imprinted on the cakes. The name is not the image. In the Bible, the only true and good image of God is Adam. But we are not the name of God. We are made in his image, but we do not inherit his name.

This dialogue between name and image opens up something important for us about biblical humanism and its anthropology. The Bible tells us that in our being we carry the image of God, but we do not carry his name. Unlike in human generations, the biblical God is a Father who does not imprint his name on that of his children. He leaves us our name and imprints his image on us. Our freedom is so great that we are also free from the Father's name, but not from the image that remains in the children of Cain, too.

Whoever wants to read God's word on earth has the Bible and other sacred texts (and profane ones: much literature and poetry) to turn to. Whoever wants to hear God's voice can listen to the prophets. But those who want to see the most divine thing present under the sun can only look at the most human thing on earth: a man, a woman. It is in order to save this very high dignity of humans that the Bible does not allow us to represent the divinity by other images. They would be less beautiful and true than those we already have around us, every day, looking at each other. When the first man appeared on earth, the universe understood something more about God's image.

The mere representing of a divinity on a cake or stone already tells the biblical man that the God represented is an idol, because the only good image of that name is: you. Here, too, we can find a root of the pictorial poverty of the tradition of the people of Israel: the prohibition to represent YHWH's image has also become a brake on the image of his image. We are not God, but we look very much like him. We are the thing that most resembles him under the sun. We resemble him to the point that the first and greatest temptation of man is to make himself God, and therefore to become an idolater of himself.

These words on the ‘name’ are the last ones of Jeremiah. After this he will leave the scene without Baruch telling us about the end of his life, perhaps so as not to risk that the events of his biography eclipse his words that are not his own. But it will be with the wonderful blessing of Jeremiah on Baruch that we will conclude our search for dawn in the midnight next Sunday. In the meantime, let us stop and rest our hearts contemplating the most beautiful image under the sun, which shines and illuminates even the darkest nights in the world.

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The name-image dynamic, which is at the centre of Jeremiah's last prophetic argument, reveals important dimensions of biblical anthropology. 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The Dawn of Midnight/28 - Man and woman: the most beautiful "image" under the sun

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire le 29/10/2017

171029 Geremia 28 ridThe longer we are uprooted from professional activities and our private lives, the more it brings home to us how fragmentary our lives are compared with those of our parents. Our spiritual existence remains incomplete.”

Dietrich BonhoefferLetter to Eberhard Bethge, 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)

Ideology is anti-hope. Hope is born within the imperfect reality of today and feeds on a better tomorrow that it does not know yet but awaits. It is the gift-virtue of the crossings of deserts, when we walk in the scorching heat knowing that a promised land awaits us in the end, which is real even if nobody has ever seen it.

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God’s Legacy is Liberty

The Dawn of Midnight/28 - Man and woman: the most beautiful "image" under the sun by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire le 29/10/2017 “The longer we are uprooted from professional activities and our private lives, the more it brings home to us how fragmentary our lives are compared with those...
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The Dawn of Midnight/27 - Beyond the seduction of useful faith and mutual consumption

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire Avvenire on 22/10/2017

171022 Geremia 27 ridA nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. (...) it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices... (...) Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence ... is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (English translation by: H. L. Mencken)

In certain decisive moments, faith and hope become the same thing in fact. This happens when the question ‘Do you believe?’ seems too small and incapable of grasping the richness of the mystery of our heart. When we lose faith simply because we wanted to become adults and our first, child's faith failed to grow together with our love and with our own and others' pain, faith can still return home, taken by the hand by hope. Hope is more resilient than faith, because even under a sky that has become uninhabited we can always hope that the good words that they had told us about there being a greater love in the world were true - that some of them were true, or at least one of them was true. Even when we can no longer believe in God we can always continue to hope in him, we can hope that although on the day we stopped praying we made the greatest mistake, that day we could not know it. And this humble and gentle hope already becomes a true new prayer, and fills the utterly human and restless waiting for the not-yet.

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“So Johanan son of Kareah and all the army officers and all the people disobeyed the Lord’s command to stay in the land of Judah. (...) And they took Jeremiah the prophet and Baruch son of Neriah along with them. So they entered Egypt in disobedience to the Lord..."(Jeremiah 43:4-7). The survivors bring Jeremiah and his disciple Baruch to Egypt. They take him with them, like a new ark of the Covenant. They do not listen to his words, but the covenant with that different God, the tales of patriarchs and liberation through the sea were still alive in their moral and spiritual chromosomes, and in some way continued to determine their actions. As it happens to those who have forgotten the faith of their parents and all the prayers they have learned as a child, but feel real pain if an earthquake destroys the church in the village where they heard good words as a child. This faith may not only be nostalgia for childhood or culture. It acts on a deeper level of our psychology; it works without our knowledge and sometimes, in our spite, as an instinct or destiny. We may not listen to the prophets, we may kill them, but there is a ‘remnant’ of the soul that can be tuned to their voice. For this reason we want them with us, we do not listen to them but we would like them to be close to us, because of the need for life and truth that even the evil ones have. We remain human even when we are bad. We are Adam before being Cain, and we remain Adam even after Abel. We remain the image and resemblance of those who we cannot listen to with our ears but who we cannot help but listen to with the medulla - this is biblical anthropology.

Jeremiah, who arrived in Egypt with the caravan, simply continues to do his ‘job’, to fulfil his destiny. To prophesy in the name of YHWH, to speak with his mouth and gestures: “In Tahpanhes the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: ‘While the Jews are watching, take some large stones with you and bury them in clay in the brick pavement at the entrance to Pharaoh’s palace in Tahpanhes’” (43:8-9). The meaning of the gesture is clear at once: “I will send for my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and I will set his throne over these stones I have buried here; he will spread his royal canopy above them” (43:10). They have fled to Egypt, but they cannot escape their sad fate. Even in Egypt YHWH continues to speak to Jeremiah, giving him messages to the people. And Jeremiah obeys. He has done so throughout his life, and he continues to do so even in the exile, without his homeland, without the temple. This nomadic and wandering voice, which speaks without a temple, among deportees and in the midst of new gods, once again speaks the radical secularism of biblical humanism: to find the divine spirit on earth nothing else is needed than human persons, voices of men and women, hands, eyes, bodies. We are the only temple under the sun - so, perhaps, in our time when God speaks less and less in temples, we can hope to hear his voice again if we meet and recognize at least one prophet.

Jeremiah continues to prophesy, and his people continue not to listen to him: ‘Now this is what the Lord God Almighty, the God of Israel, says: (...) Why arouse my anger with what your hands have made, burning incense to other gods in Egypt, where you have come to live?” (44:7-8) At the end of his mission and life, Jeremiah finds himself in the same battles of the early days in Anathoth. Above all, we can rediscover his eternal and continuous struggle against idolatry, the great illness of Israel and all religions, of which the prophets would be the only cure if they were listened to: “Then all the men who knew that their wives were burning incense to other gods, along with all the women who were present – a large assembly – and all the people living in Lower and Upper Egypt, said to Jeremiah, ‘We will not listen to the message you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord! We will certainly do everything we said we would: we will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and will pour out drink offerings to her just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials did in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem’” (44:15-17). They seem consistent and sincere to the end in their rejection.

Finding the (futile) fight against idolatry even at the end of Jeremiah's book and prophecy, him being deported, tired and old, is something of extreme importance. On the day when Jeremiah received his vocation, YHWH told him that kings, priests and all the people “will fight against you but will not overcome you” (1:19). Why did his enemies not “overcome” him? Actually, if we browse through his entire book again, we realize that Jeremiah knew by vocation that the people were too comfortable to convert, and he always announced the end to them. Where is Jeremiah' s ‘victory’ then? First of all prophets do not want to win, they only want to respond to their vocation, resist to the end in failure and frustration, not to have their voice extinguished which continues to shout out in the desert of listening. In this sense Jeremiah ‘won’.

The prophets know that they cannot win their battles against idolatry. Idolatry is invincible, because we humans love to construct idols too much. And to its very end Jeremiah's book explains and reflects the nature of idolatry, and hence its inescapable nature: “...ever since we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have had nothing and have been perishing by sword and famine” (44:17-18).

The root of idolatry is our radical tendency to transform the relationship with the divinity into a commercial exchange. We believe in a god if and until it is convenient for us, if and until that particular divinity best satisfies our needs; and we change gods as soon as we think that a new ‘god’ serves our interests better. And when we change a god for another, cheaper one we are clearly saying that both the old and the new god were simply idols, i.e. experiences of consumption to seek our profit. The relationship of idolatry is a mutual consumption, a consuming of each other: the idol consumes its believer, and the idolater consumes the idol, up to the pint of total reciprocal holocaust.

Idolatry comes back every time the dimension of consumption of spiritual goods, the search for strong emotions, or the satisfaction of one's own interests and pleasure prevails in a religious or ideal experience. Men and women have always done so, and continue to do so, inside and outside religions, inside and outside the church, movements and religious communities. It is natural, it is human to seek a relationship of convenience with God as well. But it is not the experience of God that the prophets give us and defend. The relationship with the biblical God is best suited to man, but it is a convenience that must be found on a different level from the economic, consumer and pleasure level - this is the great teaching of Job, the Gospels and the prophets. It is not the convenience of power and wealth. The convenience of the biblical God is Job's powerlessness, the defeat of the prophets, the ‘power’ of the Sermon on the Mount, the ‘weakness’ of an all-powerful God who cannot convert even his people. Every time, and many times, that we measure the convenience of faith with the measure of our consumption and our pleasure, we are already within an idolatrous relationship, even if we give our convenient idol the name of God. It should never be forgotten that on the slopes of Sinai the name given to the golden calf, the paradigm of every idol, was “YHWH”: “Then they said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, ‘Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord’” (Exodus 32:4-5). Perhaps the main reason that makes idolatry invincible is the very name: today's idol often has the same name as yesterday's God, and we celebrate it under the same mountain, on the same altars, with the same prayers.

The prophets' tenacious struggle against idolatry, which the Bible has always preserved and still does, helps us to become aware of our idolatry (however, we are usually better at seeing that of others), and then gives us hope that one day we will hear a different voice beyond the many idols that fill our house. Biblical faith, every faith, is authentic until it helps us become aware of our natural and inevitable idolatrous condition, and therefore makes the desire for something truer be born in our soul. And because it repeats it to us a hundred, a thousand times in the course of life. Until the end, when, if we have not stopped attending and listening to it, it will help us to distinguish the good angel of death from the last idol we still don’t know. And it will be our last thanks to the Bible, to the prophets, to life.

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Jeremiah ends up in Egypt, where he continues his fight against false deities. 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The Dawn of Midnight/27 - Beyond the seduction of useful faith and mutual consumption

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire Avvenire on 22/10/2017

171022 Geremia 27 ridA nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. (...) it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices... (...) Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a decadence. The divinity of this decadence ... is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (English translation by: H. L. Mencken)

In certain decisive moments, faith and hope become the same thing in fact. This happens when the question ‘Do you believe?’ seems too small and incapable of grasping the richness of the mystery of our heart. When we lose faith simply because we wanted to become adults and our first, child's faith failed to grow together with our love and with our own and others' pain, faith can still return home, taken by the hand by hope. Hope is more resilient than faith, because even under a sky that has become uninhabited we can always hope that the good words that they had told us about there being a greater love in the world were true - that some of them were true, or at least one of them was true. Even when we can no longer believe in God we can always continue to hope in him, we can hope that although on the day we stopped praying we made the greatest mistake, that day we could not know it. And this humble and gentle hope already becomes a true new prayer, and fills the utterly human and restless waiting for the not-yet.

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Not with the convenient idol

The Dawn of Midnight/27 - Beyond the seduction of useful faith and mutual consumption by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire Avvenire on 22/10/2017 “A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. (...) it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom...
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The Dawn of Midnight/26 - The haste of easy answers establishes the roots of fear

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 15/10/2017

171015 Geremia 26 ridIf God exists, today, more than ever before, he needs someone who, if he does not know who he is, can say at least who he is not. We need to change God in order to preserve Him, and so that he may preserve us ".

 Paolo de Benedetti, Quale Dio? (Which God?)

When and if one day the moment of encounter with the Bible arrives, if it is a chaste encounter (because it does not use the Bible for one's own happiness), free (because we are ready to discover new realities and to really change any belief in religion) and gratuitous (because we don't want to convert anyone other than our own heart), friendship with the biblical word becomes a wonderful education in the intimacy of the word and words. We finally begin to love poets, to understand them more and differently, we begin to thank them in the soul. We discover the depth of wisdom, we learn to distinguish it from natural intelligence and talents, to then find it, in abundance, among the poor - and then listen to them to learn. If we then have the courage and resilience to reach to the prophets, the discoveries become more and more shocking and great. For example, we can sense something about the relationship between the different words present in the Bible. It is understood that when the word of YHWH arrives, in various ways and times, in the soul of the prophets it is only a word of God, but as soon as it reaches the mouth from the soul and is then said, it also becomes a word of Jeremiah, Isaiah or Amos.

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The entire Bible is the fruit of this stupendous dialogue between logos and flesh, a word hosted in the soul and a word spoken with the mouth, between obedience and freedom. This word is completely God's word, it is completely the prophet’s, and it is completely of the relationship between the prophet and God. This is how we arrive at the Trinitarian mystery of the biblical word. But if the journey proceeds and saves freedom above all along the way, from the encounter with the intimacy of the word one can also arrive at another idea and experience of God, even of its foundation. We begin to get to know another God, we see him step out of religions and temples to move into factories, inside the immigrants' boats, into gaming halls and the desolate streets of the night. The idols love altars and sacrifices; the biblical God is comfortable only in places that a god the-way-he-is-supposed-to-be should not attend. Because it is only there that he succeeds in resurrecting every day. Religions will not withstand the shock of pain and love generated by the third millennium unless they become something different from what they have been in the previous millennia. And if Christianity is to have a future as religious humanism (and not only as culture and tradition) it will be a Christianity that will be reborn, once again, from the Bible.

In that "remnant" of Judah who had not been deported to Babylon and now camped in Bethlehem, there was also Jeremiah. That group of survivors is dismayed and lost; they don't know what to do. And so they draw on the extreme resource. They go to Jeremiah and tell him: “Please hear our petition and pray to the Lord your God for this entire remnant. (...) Pray that the Lord your God will tell us where we should go and what we should do” (42:2-3). Words full of trust, which seem, and perhaps are, sincere. Jeremiah responds: “I have heard you... I will certainly pray to the Lord your God as you have requested; I will tell you everything the Lord says and will keep nothing back from you” (42:4). And they replied: “Whether it is favourable or unfavourable, we will obey the Lord our God” (42:6). A very beautiful dialogue, rich in emotions and pathos, as well as mutual trust, where YHWH from "your God" becomes "our God” in the end. These words had the capacity of opening the door to a radical change in the attitude of the people that was tried and made mild by such suffering.

Time passes, and it is only after "ten days" (42:7) that Jeremiah receives the word. Ten very long days for a frightened, scattered and wounded community. We can imagine the movements of the heart and bodies in that camp at Bethlehem. Johanan and the other commanders probably went to Jeremiah’s tent, and maybe, at times, they also dared to cross the threshold to ask if the word had arrived for them. Why did Jeremiah wait for ten days, in such tremendous time, when the days were as long as months or years? Simply because the prophets, when they speak in God's name, are not masters of the content or timing of that word. The false prophets speak on command because, simply, they have nothing true to say. This long time that passes between the question and the answer is yet another proof of Jeremiah's honesty and of the truth of his prophecy. The prophets are beggars of the different word that they must proclaim. They ask, and then they can only wait for it, being poor as everyone else, never certain that the word will arrive. They are ignorant watchmen of the night (Isaiah 28), who can and must listen to and receive all questions without being able to give all the answers. The prophet is the man and woman of expectation, who is surprised and moved each time because the word that could come did really come - who knows what the prophets feel at that moment when they sense that the word is being formed in their womb!? Every true, donated word is a birth, taking all the time of gestation, birth pains and labour. The true word can only become flesh in the fullness of time - and the land of Bethlehem will see it again.

Jeremiah was aware that the climate of trust was deteriorating hour after hour, that the probability of accepting the word that was maturing in that expectation became smaller every minute. He probably had an opinion right away about the right choice for the people to be made, but he had learned throughout his long life to distinguish the voice of the man Jeremiah from what YHWH whispered inside him. He also thought that the word expected from YHWH would most likely be similar to what he had told them at other times - trust the Babylonians, and stay in your homeland under their protection. But he chose to wait until the end. Perhaps those long ten days were necessary because the voice of his personal opinion was loud. The stronger the honest prophet’s own ideas are, the more difficult and slower the process of discernment of spirits must be. This process, which is extremely delicate, does not always come to fulfilment. One of the typical sufferings of prophets with strong personalities (like Jeremiah) is to prevent their ideas from covering out God's voice - it is very easy for a true prophet with a strong personality to turn into a false prophet, if the strength of their voice rejects the other voice. The so-called “sins against the Holy Ghost" cannot be forgiven - above all to prophets. At other times the process is jammed because the severity of certain moments and the prophet's compassion for his own people suffering in the waiting makes them speed up time, so that the answer comes on the eighth or ninth day. That unanticipated day is the decisive day. One of the most precious qualities of prophets is to be able to resist under the tent as people crowd around asking, crying and screaming for the gift of the word.

Jeremiah managed to persist until the tenth day, and, finally, he spoke. But can tell us that ten days were really the right amount of time, that the right day was not the eleventh or the twentieth? It is the Bible that tells us this, because if Jeremiah, in that decisive passage of his and the people’s life had chosen the wrong day, everything would have changed, his story would have ended differently, and perhaps his book would not have arrived to us, or would have come as very different. This is the mysterious but true "infallibility" of the biblical word. “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, to whom you sent me to present your petition, says: ‘If you stay in this land, I will build you up and not tear you down; I will plant you and not uproot you” (42:9-10). The word that Jeremiah received for the people was a great, strong and important word. We find ourselves in the company of the vocational words of Jeremiah, those of the first day. But this time, however, they are not the same words. YHWH told Jeremiah that he would "uproot and tear down”, “build and plant" (1:10). Now, at the end of his life, he receives a word that also becomes the fulfilment of his vocation: not destruction and uprooting, but only construction and new life. In those ten days, not only did he mature a word for the people, but the waiting also generated a new word for Jeremiah. However, in those ten long days many things changed. The feelings of new trust and mutual assurance changed radically. Fear and insecurity had taken over again, and the "basket of figs" left in Judah got rotten once again (ch. 24). And they say to Jeremiah: “You are lying! The Lord our God has not sent you to say, ‘You must not go to Egypt to settle there’” (43:2). The long wait generated a real word, but it got rejected by the community, despite the solemn promises that they had made to YHWH and Jeremiah.

This failure of Jeremiah helps us to perceive something more than the sense of that waiting or his vocation. “Who knows how the people would have responded to YHWH's oracle if I had spoken right away, without waiting for so many days?” “Would they also have chosen to disobey?” Perhaps Jeremiah actually did ask himself these questions after the umpteenth failure of his word, especially if on that tenth day he realized that YHWH's word was exactly the word that he himself would have given them immediately. Or, perhaps, the word of remaining in the homeland only matured in the last minute of the tenth day. We do not know. We only know that the first and tenth day's words, even if they are the same to the letter, they are not in spirit. Jeremiah could know it from experience that there was a 99% chance that the word would arrive and it would be similar to his own. But there was that tiny 1%, a mustard seed that can move mountains, that different eye of the needle where sometimes camels pass. Jeremiah had to risk everything to save that infinitely little chance. The prophets can only do this. Sometimes we, too, saved ourselves because someone wanted to believe in the 1% probability of our innocence and beauty, when 99% said otherwise. In the Bethlehem camp, the people failed to pass through that eye of the needle. But we, thanks to the faithfulness of Jeremiah, can continue to hope.

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Jeremiah waits for ten days before he speaks, and in this waiting some new words on the true prophecy are hidden. 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The Dawn of Midnight/26 - The haste of easy answers establishes the roots of fear

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 15/10/2017

171015 Geremia 26 ridIf God exists, today, more than ever before, he needs someone who, if he does not know who he is, can say at least who he is not. We need to change God in order to preserve Him, and so that he may preserve us ".

 Paolo de Benedetti, Quale Dio? (Which God?)

When and if one day the moment of encounter with the Bible arrives, if it is a chaste encounter (because it does not use the Bible for one's own happiness), free (because we are ready to discover new realities and to really change any belief in religion) and gratuitous (because we don't want to convert anyone other than our own heart), friendship with the biblical word becomes a wonderful education in the intimacy of the word and words. We finally begin to love poets, to understand them more and differently, we begin to thank them in the soul. We discover the depth of wisdom, we learn to distinguish it from natural intelligence and talents, to then find it, in abundance, among the poor - and then listen to them to learn. If we then have the courage and resilience to reach to the prophets, the discoveries become more and more shocking and great. For example, we can sense something about the relationship between the different words present in the Bible. It is understood that when the word of YHWH arrives, in various ways and times, in the soul of the prophets it is only a word of God, but as soon as it reaches the mouth from the soul and is then said, it also becomes a word of Jeremiah, Isaiah or Amos.

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The needle’s eye of the awaited word

The Dawn of Midnight/26 - The haste of easy answers establishes the roots of fear by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 15/10/2017 If God exists, today, more than ever before, he needs someone who, if he does not know who he is, can say at least who he is not. We need to change God in order to p...
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The Dawn of Midnight/25 - The risk of the encounter and the moral climb of the world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 08/10/2017

171008 Geremia 25 ridGreet the banks of the Jordan
and Zion's toppled towers.
Oh, my country so lovely and lost!
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair! 

T. Solera e G.Verdi, Nabucco/Nabucodonosor (English translation by Norman Tucker and Tom Hammond

We can imagine the ending of a story a thousand times and have a certain idea of it because the end was already inscribed in the many signs that we have found and interpreted. But when that ending really arrives it's always different. We knew that little Marco would grow up to be a man, and when one day we realized that that beautiful "child" of ours was no longer there, our emotions and tears were all different, and beautiful. We have predicted and said endless times that our bad actions would lead us to the end, but the day we really took the books to court, it was all different, with pain and real tears that we had not been able to foresee. We had prepared our last day in community until the last small detail, but when we really closed the door of the room behind us for the last time and crossed the doorway forever, what happened in the depths of our hearts was totally new; we could not know either the taste of the last bread eaten with our companions, or the nostalgia for heaven that accompanied us throughout our life. We didn't know, we couldn't know, we didn't have to know it in order to try to make that impossible flight. We can and must prepare for it, we can and must accept the idea of the certain arrival of the angel of death with gentleness, but when it really happens the angel of death will not be as we have dreamt, and we will be surprised that while living our life we have also learned to die. But we could not know this in advance, otherwise it would not have been the greatest gift.

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For forty years Jeremiah had seen, heard and said that Jerusalem would be destroyed, her citizens killed and all survivors deported. But the day that the Babylonian army really entered the city, when the temple was destroyed, women, men and children were really killed, was surely a different day for him, a certainly more painful one. The prophets, unlike us, do not rejoice in seeing the corpse they have announced floating in the river, they do not say "I told you” with malignant satisfaction. They die twice: when they announce the end, and when they see it accomplished before their eyes, experiencing it in their own flesh. “In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon and all his army came against Jerusalem and besieged it. In the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, on the ninth day of the month, a breach was made in the city. (...) The Chaldeans burned the king's house and the houses of the people, and broke down the walls of Jerusalem” (Jeremiah 39:1-2;8). After the city fell, King Zedekiah tried to escape to save his own skin (39:1) - how many times we have seen it again throughout history! But he is captured near Jericho, and subjected to the most atrocious torment. “The king of Babylon slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah at Riblah before his eyes, and the king of Babylon slaughtered all the nobles of Judah. He put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains to take him to Babylon” (39:6-7).

In the general chaos, Jeremiah ended up in prison again, among the Jews destined for deportation to Babylon. After capturing Zedekiah, the Babylonians left a Jew, Gedaliah, who was not of the Davidic dynasty, as governor of the "rest" who remained in the country: “Nebuzaradan, the captain of the guard, left in the land of Judah some of the poor people who owned nothing, and gave them vineyards and fields at the same time” (39:10). It’s one of the not so rare cases when being poor becomes a sign of providence. The humble are exalted and the rich are sent away empty-handed. As for Jeremiah, whose fame as an anti-resistance prophet was also known among the Chaldeans, “Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon gave command ... saying, »Take him, look after him well, and do him no harm, but deal with him as he tells you«” (39:12). The captain of the guard said to Jeremiah: “»Now, behold, I release you today from the chains on your hands. If it seems good to you to come with me to Babylon, come, and I will look after you well, but if it seems wrong to you to come with me to Babylon, do not come. See, the whole land is before you; go wherever you think it good and right to go. If you remain, then return to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, son of Shaphan ...« So the captain of the guard gave him an allowance of food and a present, and let him go” (40:4-5). Jeremiah is liberated and he also receives a gift. We don't know what this gift was, but it is still significant to encounter the gift at the end of a central episode in Jeremiah’s story. Gifts are very serious things, they are at the heart of life and death. The Bible knows this, and places a gift inside a liberation, as a sacrament of a decisive choice. We have confined gifts to the field of the non-necessary and, often, useless; the Bible doesn’t: it places it in its rightful place, at the crossroads between freedom and slavery.

Jeremiah is now in full freedom to choose where to go. His recognition by the Chaldeans had earned him the privilege of being able to decide about his own fate. Going to Babylon would have meant protection and security, perhaps a place in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. However, “Jeremiah went to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, at Mizpah, and lived with him among the people who were left in the land” (40:6). Jeremiah decides to stay; he uses the privilege of freedom to remain among his own people, among the poor. Why? Maybe he hoped in Gedaliah, a member of a friendly family of his (26:24). Or perhaps he stayed because his conscience or the voice simply told him to remain in the devastated country, among the remnant made up by the poor - the true prophets are at home only among the poor. The only way you can decide to stay in a devastated and desolate land is because you feel that you have to stay in it. Many people flee, others are "deported" elsewhere by life. Someone, one person, however, remains. When all that remains of the community that had been the great dream of youth, the promised land is but a heap of rubble, there are always many who flee, but someone decides to stay. He cannot explain the reasons that make him stay, he only knows that he must remain - imperatives of the soul exist on earth. Perhaps he doesn't even choose to stay: he just stays and that’s all. Perhaps because of that strange fidelity to the land, inscribed in the chromosomes of the heart, which he inherited from his parents and grandparents, who had taught him with the magisterium of dignified poverty that fidelity is more destiny than choice, it is a mutation of the flesh, it is a call of origin. Because life is a serious thing, and you have to get to the end, learning the magnificent art of the "Stabat". He doesn't know why, but he remains, he doesn't leave like and with the others, when, being Jeremiah, he could have done so. Staying when one could leave has an immense moral and spiritual value, it is a very precious common good. Cities would remain destroyed and in ruins forever if there was no one who decides to stay even if they could leave - if there wasn't at least one such person. It’s among these people who are capable of remaining in the destroyed cities that the true prophets of our time should be sought: in the long and silent faithfulness in the middle of ruins.

In the very first few months, Jeremiah sees his prophecy fulfilled. Gedaliah showed himself to be a wise leader. His new residence became a meeting place for the dispersed Jews and a centre of rebirth: “And they gathered wine and summer fruits in great abundance” (40:12). A hope that lasted very little, however, because Ishmael, a member of the royal house of David's lineage, plotted a conspiracy against Gedaliah: “Ishmael the son of Nethaniah and the ten men with him rose up and struck down Gedaliah” (41:2). The "basket" had some rotten figs in it (24,8), and everything got rotten. However, the tragic story of Gedaliah is very important and beautiful. The text presents him to us as a truly wise and righteous man. Johanan, an officer, warned him that Ishmael was arriving to kill him on behalf of the Ammonites. Johanan tells him, “Please let me go and strike down Ishmael ... Why should he take your life...?” But Gedaliah replies: “You shall not do this thing” (40:15-16). Johanan, however, was right. Ishmael came, Gedaliah welcomed him as a guest, and was murdered by him while “they ate bread together” (41:1)

There have always been cases of hosts killed by their guests. But much more numerous are the hosts who were blessed and made better by their guests. Humanity became more human every time when the pain and fear for the murderer guest in the neighbouring house did not kill our freedom to open our door with confidence and generosity to the unknown guest arriving. Throughout history, the real winners were not the Benjamites from Gibeah (Judges 19-21), nor Polyphemus, even if their shadow keeps reappearing and threatening people all too often. When we welcome a guest into our house, we open our hearts and our table, we cannot always know if those entering are "angels" (Hebrews 13:2) or Ishmael the murderer. Gedaliah paid with his life for his choice of hospitality. He preferred to risk his encounter with the other, he was not prudent, he did not believe what Johanan had said. But that sacrifice of his allows us to indignate ourselves, to condemn Ishmael and to strengthen the good reasons for hospitality.

It is not the good stories with a happy ending that strengthen the deepest collective moral conscience of peoples. The most important ethical norms are formed in the continuous exercise of approval and indignation of people and characters that we have never met, starting with the fairy tales of childhood (the flesh and blood people around us are not enough to form our feelings: we also need a reality intensified and extended by the great biblical word and literature). The people that stops reading and telling their great stories is navigating itself towards the greatest kind of famine: that of empathy and indignation, the pillars supporting every good and righteous common house, and every human heart. A mortal wound of a righteous person brought about by an agapically imprudent act becomes a nail driven into the rock wall to continue the moral climb of the world, to a height that the sum of a thousand prudent actions without wounds does not reach or even touch - Christianity did not invent the agape: it recognized and exalted it. We were able to perceive the special resurrection of Christ because the Bible had resurrected many righteous people by cherishing their crosses and narrating them for centuries under the tents. Gedaliah did not die forever: he re-lives every time we read the Bible, smell his innocent blood, and recognize him in the victims of the earth. And then we continue to open the door.

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Jeremiah is liberated, and he chooses to stay among the poor of his people who have remained in the country, alongside a just and open governor until the latter dies for this very reason. Remaining, despite being free to leave, is a very high moral choice, which has saved and continues to save many. 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The Dawn of Midnight/25 - The risk of the encounter and the moral climb of the world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 08/10/2017

171008 Geremia 25 ridGreet the banks of the Jordan
and Zion's toppled towers.
Oh, my country so lovely and lost!
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair! 

T. Solera e G.Verdi, Nabucco/Nabucodonosor (English translation by Norman Tucker and Tom Hammond

We can imagine the ending of a story a thousand times and have a certain idea of it because the end was already inscribed in the many signs that we have found and interpreted. But when that ending really arrives it's always different. We knew that little Marco would grow up to be a man, and when one day we realized that that beautiful "child" of ours was no longer there, our emotions and tears were all different, and beautiful. We have predicted and said endless times that our bad actions would lead us to the end, but the day we really took the books to court, it was all different, with pain and real tears that we had not been able to foresee. We had prepared our last day in community until the last small detail, but when we really closed the door of the room behind us for the last time and crossed the doorway forever, what happened in the depths of our hearts was totally new; we could not know either the taste of the last bread eaten with our companions, or the nostalgia for heaven that accompanied us throughout our life. We didn't know, we couldn't know, we didn't have to know it in order to try to make that impossible flight. We can and must prepare for it, we can and must accept the idea of the certain arrival of the angel of death with gentleness, but when it really happens the angel of death will not be as we have dreamt, and we will be surprised that while living our life we have also learned to die. But we could not know this in advance, otherwise it would not have been the greatest gift.

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The Magnificent Art of the “Stabat”

The Dawn of Midnight/25 - The risk of the encounter and the moral climb of the world by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 08/10/2017 “Greet the banks of the Jordan and Zion's toppled towers. Oh, my country so lovely and lost! Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!”&nb...
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The Dawn of Midnight/24 - Mutilation weighs more heavily on the soul than the body

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 01/10/2017

171001 Geremia 24 crop ridThe duty to neighbours is not confined only to those who live next door. (...) The Samaritan is linked to the wounded Israelite through the event itself... (...) Once he finds himself in this situation, he is in a new ‘neighbourhood’. (...) There are few non-neighbours left in the world today.

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

The secularity of the Bible is something very serious but increasingly distant from our lives as believers and "laypeople". Biblical humanism is first and foremost a discourse on life, on the whole of life, especially on human life. The Bible speaks a lot about God, but it does not only speak about God to us, because above all it speaks about us. Because it tells us that there is not only God in life: there is life. The biblical God knows how to retreat, to remain silent, to leave room for us. To our freedom and responsibility. He is not a monopolist of our lives, he does not want a continued and perpetual cult - for that is what the former look for and they only get idols. The Biblical God is a liberator, he does not free us from idols to enslave us to himself - if he did so, he would be the perfect idol. He activates processes, he doesn't occupy any space, not even sacred ones, which he rarely frequents, because he prefers the square, the house and the vineyard to the temple. But above all, he loves to look at what is happening under the sun, to follow us with a look of hope in the full exercise of our humanity. He is astonished when he sees our wickedness, but he is even more astonished at the beauty of our actions, looking at the admirable spectacle of solidarity and fraternity, especially those cases of wonderful solidarity and fraternity that begin in the hearts of the poorest and the rejected.

[fulltext] =>

“When Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, a eunuch who was in the king's house, heard that they had put Jeremiah into the cistern... [he] went from the king's house and said to the king, »My lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they did to Jeremiah the prophet by casting him into the cistern, and he will die there of hunger, for there is no bread left in the city.« Then the king commanded Ebed-melech the Ethiopian, »Take thirty men with you from here, and lift Jeremiah the prophet out of the cistern before he dies«” (Jeremiah 38:7-10). It was a eunuch, an Ethiopian - a rejected one, a foreigner - who saved Jeremiah from the mud and from death. We don't know much about this saviour. However, we know that there were many eunuchs in ancient times, in the East, in Persia and also in the whole Mediterranean, including Rome. They were slaves in particular demand and they were expensive in the markets, because they could play special and delicate roles (taking care of harem women, for example). Many of them were castrated before puberty, and ended up having a female voice and attitudes. They were generally used for court and temple services. Some similar phenomena of the ancient eunuchs have remained until recent times (think of the sacred choirs in Europe, until the beginning of the 20th century) - a few weeks ago I saw some of them in India (the Hijras) asking alms at the traffic lights: in them I saw the eunuchs of the Bible, their very sad condition as victims, and I remained speechless for my amazement and pain.

In this episode of the Book of Jeremiah, Baruch offers a striking description of the eunuch's action, which is delicate and full of attention to detail: “So Ebed-melech took the men with him and went to the house of the king, to a wardrobe in the storehouse, and took from there old rags and worn-out clothes, which he let down to Jeremiah in the cistern by ropes. Then Ebed-melech the Ethiopian said to Jeremiah, »Put the rags and clothes between your armpits and the ropes.«” Jeremiah did so” (38:11-12). A detail that might seem insignificant, however, expresses the splendid humanity of those who manage to grasp a value in that wound, in that mutilated man who stayed in the company of women, who had learnt the art of care from them, who had learned a competence on the suffering of the body of others from his own suffering. Once again, the salvation of a prophet comes from a person who is rejected by society, from a cursed man, a stranger, a victim. But, educated and made meek in the spirit by great pain, this man is still able to of recognize a different voice amidst the general noise, and then to act and work for the prophet’s release.

It is not the pharaohs, the kings, the powerful, the great or the rich who save the poor. Yesterday and today, the first salvation of the victims comes from other victims, because of that solidarity of pain which, when it is triggered, works true miracles, and transforms prisons and even lagers into a paradise of fraternity. In that general confusion and despair in a Jerusalem where everyone was trying to save their lives, a castrated man transforms that palace polluted by corrupt courtesans and politicians into a paradise of humanity. That victim is able to see another victim, the prophet, and finds the resources to act, looking for clothes in the chaos of a court that could be placed under his armpits, so as not to injure them.

Perhaps that Ethiopian man had already known Jeremiah, perhaps he hadn’t. This particular detail of the story remains unknown, but this lack of knowledge reminds us of something very important: proximity is not friendship. You don't need to meet someone personally in order to feel them your neighbour. That Samaritan of the Gospel of Luke, who was a stranger just like the Ethiopian of Jeremiah, didn't know the man attacked by the robbers by name, but he lived that fraternal closeness that doesn't need to know names, documents or residence permit; he didn't know or wanted to know if that man was on the road because he was running from a conflict, if he was innocent or guilty, or if he was “simply” an economic migrant. He was a man, he was a victim. Friendship must know the name of the other, fraternity does not have to; friendship needs frequent meetings, contacts, intimacy; fraternity does not. The man on the way to Jericho and Jeremiah, they were human beings, and they were victims. There is no need for anything else to stop in front of an injured person, help them, take them to an inn, take care of them and leave some money with the innkeeper. The Samaritan and the Ethiopian knew how to be neighbours without being close - for their respective geography, clan, social status, ethnicity, religion. Proximity without the necessity of closeness is one of the greatest moral achievements of humanity, which is killed every day but also resurrected every day. In our suburbs, in the refugee camps, where - next to the many Zedekiahs and adulating court officials - we still meet so many Ethiopians with eyes capable of seeing other victims, recognizing them because they have the same smell: the human smell, the finest smell of the earth; they look for clothes in the cupboards to lift up men and women like themselves from the mud.

In the time of ruins and deportations, amidst the great pain of extreme violence, some new episodes of proximity and, sometimes, fraternity are also born. But in order to find it, we have to look for it among the victims and among the rejected, who sometimes, shielded by their pain, managed to save their ability to feel the pain of others in their bowels, and then to act. The first poverty, an immense poverty, which is often generated by power and wealth, is the weakening of that muscle of the heart that we call mercy, which first prevents us from seeing the victims, then from truly feeling them brothers and sisters, and finally from acting. And when this moral muscle is weakened in human life, we return to Cain, even when we are satiated and live comfortably in our courts, surrounded by modern servants and eunuchs. In our world there is a growing poverty of this integral humanity, which unfortunately cannot be measured by any indicator of well-being, because they do not want to measure it; and so we plunge into a deepening sea of dehumanization, perhaps in the different mud of thermal baths and massage rooms; and maybe we also believe that the poor are no longer there just because we have been so impoverished in our souls that we are no longer able to see them, listen to them and save them from the mud.

That Ethiopian eunuch had in himself all the humanity present in that decadent and corrupt palace. And so he saved a prophet, and in him he continues to save us when, thanks to the Bible, we discover him and meet him again today, and we thank him. That eunuch saw and saved the prophet because he had remained an integral man, intact in the soul even if mutilated in the body. With body mutilations one can remain entirely and authentically human; the mutilations and the self-mutilation of the soul are the more serious cases, because the first part removed is precisely our spiritual ability to see ourselves being amputated. Jeremiah prophesied a blessing for the Ethiopian Ebed-Melek, he said words of salvation to him: “the word of the Lord came to him (Jeremiah): »Go and tell Ebed-Melek the Cushite, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: I am about to fulfil my words against this city... But I will rescue you on that day, declares the Lord; you will not be given into the hands of those you fear. I will save you; you will not fall by the sword but will escape with your life, because you trust in me, declares the Lord’«” (39:15-18). This is a sublime form of reciprocity, where a prophet’s words of blessing and salvation become a response to a liberation from the mud.

Another Ethiopian, on another day, while reading another prophet, experienced another encounter. And he was the first non-Jewish to be baptized by the apostles: “Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, »Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.« So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch ... [who] on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet” (Acts 8:26-28). The first one whom the apostle met after a theophany, after an angel's word was one of the lasts ones, again, another Ethiopian, another eunuch. All theophanies in the Bible are beautiful, but the stories of angels who become friends of the poor are splendid: the one that appeared to Hagar, the slave woman expelled into the desert by the jealous mistress, the one that made a foreign eunuch the sign of a finally universal salvation. We don't know if Luke wanted to tell us about the baptism of that Ethiopian in order to also remind us of the other, distant Ethiopian saviour of the prophet. But we can think and hope for it, it would not be foreign in a Bible full of improbable reciprocity and fraternity in space and time. But we can and we want to think that after listening to the words of Jeremiah, also that first Ethiopian eunuch "went on his way rejoicing" (Acts 8:39).

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It is not the pharaohs to liberate their slaves. Jeremiah, too, is released from prison and from the mud by an Ethiopean eunuch - and so by a foreigner and a rejected one. 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The Dawn of Midnight/24 - Mutilation weighs more heavily on the soul than the body

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 01/10/2017

171001 Geremia 24 crop ridThe duty to neighbours is not confined only to those who live next door. (...) The Samaritan is linked to the wounded Israelite through the event itself... (...) Once he finds himself in this situation, he is in a new ‘neighbourhood’. (...) There are few non-neighbours left in the world today.

Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice

The secularity of the Bible is something very serious but increasingly distant from our lives as believers and "laypeople". Biblical humanism is first and foremost a discourse on life, on the whole of life, especially on human life. The Bible speaks a lot about God, but it does not only speak about God to us, because above all it speaks about us. Because it tells us that there is not only God in life: there is life. The biblical God knows how to retreat, to remain silent, to leave room for us. To our freedom and responsibility. He is not a monopolist of our lives, he does not want a continued and perpetual cult - for that is what the former look for and they only get idols. The Biblical God is a liberator, he does not free us from idols to enslave us to himself - if he did so, he would be the perfect idol. He activates processes, he doesn't occupy any space, not even sacred ones, which he rarely frequents, because he prefers the square, the house and the vineyard to the temple. But above all, he loves to look at what is happening under the sun, to follow us with a look of hope in the full exercise of our humanity. He is astonished when he sees our wickedness, but he is even more astonished at the beauty of our actions, looking at the admirable spectacle of solidarity and fraternity, especially those cases of wonderful solidarity and fraternity that begin in the hearts of the poorest and the rejected.

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The Poor Angels of the Poor

The Dawn of Midnight/24 - Mutilation weighs more heavily on the soul than the body by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 01/10/2017 “The duty to neighbours is not confined only to those who live next door. (...) The Samaritan is linked to the wounded Israelite through the event itself... (...
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The Dawn of Midnight/23 - Accepting the truth is reconciliation, not resignation

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/09/2017

170917 Geremia 23 1 ridCassandra: “Has my arrow hit the mark or has it missed? Or am I a false prophet, a chatterer beggar? Swear an oath that you have not heard these things before and that I know well all the ancient sins of this house. (...) And yet again! Ah! The dreadful pain of prophecy fulfilled spins me around and – there! It begins to shake me!

Aeschylus, Agamennone (English translation by George Theodoridis)

When we cultivate a great illusion in life, the management of disappointment is always very complicated and extremely painful. Furthermore, if the time of illusion has been lived in good faith and for many years, when we can already glimpse the day of disappointment, we almost always prefer to remain deceived. Because calling the illusion its true name means having to say words that are too painful to say out loud: failure, (self-)deception, immaturity, manipulation. Yet, it would be enough to understand that disappointment is the only good flowering of illusion, live it as a blessed passage to bring good fruits, and then conclude our journey under the sun in truth. In the struggle between illusion and disappointment - and we are talking about real agony, especially in case of righteous and honest people - the outcome depends decisively on whom we stand next in the struggle. If we have one or more false prophets as companions, we remain imprisoned in the illusion, we continue to deny reality, even when it is obvious and evident to everyone. Because the false prophets are masters of presenting facts contrary to their ideology as the last test to pass in order to finally be ready for true salvation. If, however, we meet a true prophet in the struggle, the age of illusion can end at last, and the evil and oppressing pain can be transformed into the good labour of liberation. Faced with the total and definitive collapse of what seemed to us for so long to be the most beautiful and true life on earth and in heaven, the only possible salvation is to embrace disappointment. And to invite her to dinner, put the most beautiful tablecloths and cutlery, and open the best bottle of wine from the cellar. And then, together, to celebrate, inviting the few real friends and the very few prophets. Without this dinner of reconciliation we cannot discover one day that that life was really beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful than we had imagined.

[fulltext] =>

“Jeremiah set out from Jerusalem to go to the land of Benjamin to receive his portion there among the people. When he was at the Benjamin Gate, a sentry there named Irijah the son of Shelemiah, son of Hananiah, seized Jeremiah the prophet, saying, »You are deserting to the Chaldeans.« And Jeremiah said, »It is a lie; I am not deserting to the Chaldeans.« But Irijah would not listen to him, and seized Jeremiah and brought him to the officials. And the officials were enraged at Jeremiah, and they beat him and imprisoned him in the house of Jonathan (...). …Jeremiah had come to the dungeon cells and remained there many days” (Jeremiah 37:12-16). We arrived at the last part of Jeremiah's story, narrated by Baruch. It is the cycle of the so-called "martyrdom of Jeremiah". Of his ordeal, his passion. And there are many important and most vivid analogies of the passion of other righteous people to be found. The beatings, interrogations, secret nightly dialogues, the dungeon and the mud. We can become familiar with the Gospels, the life, passion and death of Jesus Christ without ever having read the Bible, the prophets, Job or Jeremiah. We can, so many have done so, so many still do so. But we can read the Gospels together with the whole of "the Law and the Prophets", and thereby learn to know another kind of Christianity, we begin another spiritual life, and perhaps we meet another Christ.

In a moment of a loosening grip of the Babylonian siege - as they were busy on the Egyptian front (37:11) -, Jeremiah, who is still free to move (37:4), leaves the city perhaps for the purchase of that land in Anathoth, of which the grandiose episode of Chapter 32 informs us. He is arrested and accused of collaborating with the enemy, and they throw him into a cistern. Like Joseph, another righteous one, the first prophet of salvation history - he was also accused by his brothers for his different words, for his prophetic dreams that were true and uncomfortable. He, too, was saved and not let to die in the cistern: “King Zedekiah sent for him and received him. The king questioned him secretly in his house and said, »Is there any word from the Lord?« Jeremiah said, »There is.« Then he said, »You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon«” (37:17).

Jeremiah's faithfulness to the word is extraordinary and impressive: we have seen this many times by now, but he continues to amaze and leave us breathless each time. The king sends for him to the prison, in search of words other than those of the prophet, perhaps thinking that the change in the geopolitical context and the reappearance of the Egyptian empire would produce another prophecy and another outcome. These tricks, however, don't work with Jeremiah, not even amidst general despair. And from the bottom of his cistern, old and exhausted, he offers the king the same words as always: the only salvation is surrender, the Chaldeans will return, and they will occupy Jerusalem and the temple. End of story.

This is another episode that says a lot and very loudly, telling us many things. One of them is the radical ambivalence of this king (and of power in general), who on the one hand seems to give credit to Jeremiah and asks him for a new oracle, and on the other hand would like to suggest him what words to say, which are of course different from those that Jeremiah has always said. The king seeks consolation; Jeremiah obeys the truth. Zedekiah acts as those who in the face of a decisive choice feel the need for a "prophet" to advise and consult them, but does not have the moral strength to go to someone honest and true because he may offer some uncomfortable advice; and so he seeks, sometimes unconsciously, a spiritual father or a manipulable spiritual coach who will advise him the very choice that he has already made in his heart. Fake discernment without a love for truth is the typical form of deception always cultivated by false prophets. In fact, Jeremiah adds: “Where are your prophets who prophesied to you, saying, »The king of Babylon will not come against you and against this land«” (37:19). As if to say: if you want the usual consoling lies, turn to your court prophets, to the adulators who have always told you what you wanted to hear, and have pushed you into the abyss. But Jeremiah resists until the end: he doesn't become a servant of power and its fictions. Jeremiah is great for many things, but he is immense for this unconditional faithfulness to the word and to his own dignity. Faced with the imminent defeat of the king and the people, he could give in to human pietas and say a word of consolation - as the one who, at the bedside of a dying friend, tells him with love, “You'll see that you’ll get better”. We tend to do it, Jeremiah does not: so as to repeat the absolute value of the truth of the word, in every circumstance, even in the most dramatic situation. Even when truth seems to conflict with the demands of charity, Jeremiah tells us that the only way to surely betray charity is not serving the truth of the word. Discounts, sales, remissions... the prophets leave these to our businesses, yesterday and today.

The secret dialogue between the prophet and the king continues: “Jeremiah also said to King Zedekiah, »What wrong have I done to you or your servants or this people, that you have put me in prison? (...) Now hear, please, O my lord the king: let my humble plea come before you and do not send me back to the house of Jonathan the secretary, lest I die there.« So King Zedekiah gave orders, and they committed Jeremiah to the court of the guard. And a loaf of bread was given him daily from the bakers' street, until all the bread of the city was gone” (37:18-21).

In this dialogue, the words of Jeremiah are not preceded by “Thus says the Lord” or "The oracle of the Lord". We are faced with a dialogue between two men, a sovereign and a prophet, a king and his prisoner. Jeremiah's words in the Book of Jeremiah are not all words of YHWH. There are also many words of Jeremiah himself, which are no less beautiful and important - like the story of his vocation, his trials, his intimate songs. This plea that the old prophet, exhausted by imprisonment, now addresses to the king is neither a prophetic gesture nor a command of God. It’s only a word of Jeremiah from Anathoth. A word like the many words that the sufferers shout out to the powerful who can liberate them. Perhaps all the "oracles" received in the course of our existence have made up a capital that we will spend when we have to reach the top of our Golgotha, where we will remember only one of those words heard and spoken, and we will compose our psalm of abandonment.

In the chapters of his martyrdom narrated by his scribe Baruch, Jeremiah also appears increasingly defenceless, alone, at the mercy of the leaders of his enemies. The words he repeats are those he has always said: “Thus says the Lord: He who stays in this city shall die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence, but he who goes out to the Chaldeans shall live. He shall have his life as a prize of war, and live. Thus says the Lord: This city shall surely be given into the hand of the army of the king of Babylon and be taken” (38:2-3). He has no other words to say. And so the ministers and generals, still captured by nationalist and warrior ideology, ask the king that Jeremiah be arrested again. And King Zedekiah answers: “Behold, he is in your hands, for the king can do nothing against you” (38:5). Pilate could not be missing from this story of passion - he is almost always there in the true passions of men and God: “So they took Jeremiah and cast him into the cistern of Malchiah, the king's son, which was in the court of the guard, letting Jeremiah down by ropes. And there was no water in the cistern, but only mud, and Jeremiah sank in the mud” (38:6).

Jeremiah sinks into the mud. We can see him sinking while we continue frittering our time away in our illusions. Or we can decide to sink with him, and wait for salvation in the cistern, but without knowing if an Ethiopian eunuch will come to save us. Because there are not enough "Ethiopians" to save all Jeremiahs who continue to sink into the mud of the world.

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The mud of the prison cannot swallow the word of Jeremiah and God. And we are called upon to state which side we want to stand on. 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The Dawn of Midnight/23 - Accepting the truth is reconciliation, not resignation

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 24/09/2017

170917 Geremia 23 1 ridCassandra: “Has my arrow hit the mark or has it missed? Or am I a false prophet, a chatterer beggar? Swear an oath that you have not heard these things before and that I know well all the ancient sins of this house. (...) And yet again! Ah! The dreadful pain of prophecy fulfilled spins me around and – there! It begins to shake me!

Aeschylus, Agamennone (English translation by George Theodoridis)

When we cultivate a great illusion in life, the management of disappointment is always very complicated and extremely painful. Furthermore, if the time of illusion has been lived in good faith and for many years, when we can already glimpse the day of disappointment, we almost always prefer to remain deceived. Because calling the illusion its true name means having to say words that are too painful to say out loud: failure, (self-)deception, immaturity, manipulation. Yet, it would be enough to understand that disappointment is the only good flowering of illusion, live it as a blessed passage to bring good fruits, and then conclude our journey under the sun in truth. In the struggle between illusion and disappointment - and we are talking about real agony, especially in case of righteous and honest people - the outcome depends decisively on whom we stand next in the struggle. If we have one or more false prophets as companions, we remain imprisoned in the illusion, we continue to deny reality, even when it is obvious and evident to everyone. Because the false prophets are masters of presenting facts contrary to their ideology as the last test to pass in order to finally be ready for true salvation. If, however, we meet a true prophet in the struggle, the age of illusion can end at last, and the evil and oppressing pain can be transformed into the good labour of liberation. Faced with the total and definitive collapse of what seemed to us for so long to be the most beautiful and true life on earth and in heaven, the only possible salvation is to embrace disappointment. And to invite her to dinner, put the most beautiful tablecloths and cutlery, and open the best bottle of wine from the cellar. And then, together, to celebrate, inviting the few real friends and the very few prophets. Without this dinner of reconciliation we cannot discover one day that that life was really beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful than we had imagined.

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The Moving Sands of Illusions

The Dawn of Midnight/23 - Accepting the truth is reconciliation, not resignation by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 24/09/2017 Cassandra: “Has my arrow hit the mark or has it missed? Or am I a false prophet, a chatterer beggar? Swear an oath that you have not heard these things before a...
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The Dawn of Midnight/22 – The life reborn is not just a copy of the life burnt

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/09/2017

170917 Geremia 22 rid“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry".

Emy Dickinson, from a letter of hers

Writing, too, can be a spiritual activity. There are many ways of writing, for many reasons, and very different things are written. But there has always been, and there will always be some who write because they have heard and embraced an inner command. Poets know this very well, who write to respond to a voice speaking and calling, and their poetry becomes the fruit of a 'yes' to an incarnation. They tell us that writing is second, because first there is the gift of a voice, a word, a spirit. There are many words spoken, even great and immense words, which do not become written words. But there are no great and immense scripts that have first not been said in the soul by a whispered word. It is this vocational and spiritual dimension of the written word which ensures that our other words written without vocation can also be mysteriously true, or at least not always and not entirely false.

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The few spiritual words we have are a common good for all, even if we do not know this. The truth of the word of those who write by obeying a voice gives substance to the words of everyone, it saves us from the global, radical and absolute vanitas of chatter, to which we are condemned when we lose contact with vocational writing, when we stop reading the poets. Because - by their vocation - poets and writers are that righteous one found in our city of words that saves it from destruction. My grandparents did not know the poets' poems, but their dialectal words were true, because they were born of the truth of nature, popular piety and pain; and because they were mingled with ancient proverbs, the gospel, nursery rhymes, songs, saints and much prayer, a great number of prayers. And so when a daughter or grandson recited a poem by the poets taught at school, they knew how to sense it with their hearts, beyond semantics and metrics, and sometimes they got really moved, because they felt and loved those words before they understood them - and loved them, at least a little bit. Today we have lost these different truths of words. To save us from the vanitas of chatter, what remains for us is only the work of poets, great writers, the Bible - and little else. But we lack that little inner silence necessary to hear a different voice.

“In the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, king of Judah, this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord: »Take a scroll and write on it all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel and Judah and all the nations«” (Jeremiah 36:1-2). With this new command we find ourselves in a typical event of the Bible. The word that Jeremiah had said and shouted in the first part of his prophetic mission, now becomes, by an explicit order of God, written word. Jeremiah and Baruch offer us one of the most intimate, precious and secret experiences of the entire Bible. This verb that becomes a scroll is a sign, a prophetic gesture like the others, no less solemn and decisive than carrying a yoke, shattering a jug, not taking a wife. In order to try to decipher this event, however, we should return to that Middle Eastern world built on oral accounts, where the primacy did not belong to the written word but to the spoken word. What was pronounced with the mouth was worth more than what was written, because for those cultures there was nothing more certain and reliable than a person's own voice. The word's rate of truth was higher than that of writing because the value of man was greater than that of his instruments. No written oath reached the value of a verbally proclaimed oath - we can still infer it when we think about the power of the first "I love you" uttered, or that of the last "thank you" whispered to our mother.

“Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah, and Baruch wrote on a scroll at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the Lord that he had spoken to him. And Jeremiah ordered Baruch, saying, »I am banned from going to the house of the Lord, so you are to go, and on a day of fasting ... you shall read the words of the Lord from the scroll... (...) It may be that their plea for mercy will come before the Lord, and that every one will turn from his evil way...«” (36:4-7). Jeremiah does not write his words directly (probably he could have done so: he came from a priestly family), but he dictates them to his scribe Baruch. Perhaps because to write “all the words of the Lord” one person is not enough: you need a community, at least one who first listens to the word spoken loudly, and another one who writes it. Writing is a dialogue, never a monologue, it is a social event, a collective action, a community, a relationship.

Furthermore, Jeremiah himself cannot go to the temple (perhaps for reasons of impurity, or because he would have been arrested before he could finish reading), and the translation of the word into writing makes it possible for another person to read and pass on the gift of the word. This is where a fundamental, perhaps primary characteristic of the word is explained: once the spoken word becomes written, it emancipates itself from the necessary relationship with the one who uttered it. Writing frees the word from its master, redeems it, calls it to a different kind of freedom. It is not the only instrument for this operation (even oral cultures knew how to embody words and liberate them through memory and the narration of traditions), but it is perhaps the most powerful; so powerful that the liberated 'slave' often ends up killing his master, when the written word is manipulated and perverted.

That first solemn reading in the temple produced some fruit. Micaiah, a close friend of the prophet, went to the leaders and “told them all the words that he had heard, when Baruch read the scroll in the hearing of the people” (36:13). Then the officials sent a message to Baruch saying: “Take in your hand the scroll that you read in the hearing of the people, and come” (36:14). Baruch read to the leaders and “When they heard all the words, they turned one to another in fear. And they said to Baruch, “We must report all these words to the king” (36:16). The leaders of the people and some priests in the temple took the words of Jeremiah seriously. King Jehoiakim, however, did not: “…the king was sitting in the winter house, and there was a fire burning in the fire pot before him. As Jehudi read three or four columns, the king would cut them off with a knife and throw them into the fire in the fire pot, until the entire scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the fire pot. (...) And the king commanded ... to seize Baruch the secretary and Jeremiah the prophet, but the Lord hid them” (36:22-26). Today we know the heart of the scroll read by Baruch, and the king also knew it, as he had heard Jeremiah and his prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple many times. Words that Jehoiakim had not wanted to listen to, and that he still does not want to listen to. The effect of the written word was the same as that of the spoken word. The gesture of burning the papyrus, piece after piece, says with a new language what Jehoiakim had already said many times: your words are straw, vanitas, nothing. The written word shares the same fate as the spoken one.

But here's another wonderful surprise for us to discover among those flames and ashes. Jeremiah, an expert in the traditions of the North, the Covenant and Exodus, gives us another parallel with a great episode in the history of the first salvation. Just like YHWH dictated the Tables of the Law to Moses once again after the wickedness and idolatry of his people had broken them, now, after the destruction of the first scroll by a deaf and unfaithful king, Jeremiah receives a new order: “Take another scroll and write on it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned” (36:28).

The text of the Book of Jeremiah that the Bible has preserved and handed down is therefore the second script of the word of Jeremiah, risen from the ashes of the first scroll. Jeremiah was still alive, free, and so he could rewrite the words he had received and said: “Then Jeremiah took another scroll and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah, who wrote on it at the dictation of Jeremiah all the words of the scroll that Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire” (36:32). The fire of the fire pot did not win over the fire of the word.

The story closes with a simple sentence containing a wonderful message. About the second edition of the scroll it says: “And many similar words were added to them” - similar to those that had been written in the burned scroll (36:32). In the first edition of Jeremiah's scroll, there were some words that were probably lost forever; words that were similar, not identical, to those he dictated again. The fire of evil and of the stupidity of mankind always leaves its mark - this is also an expression of the seriousness and truth of human history. But, and this is really important, in the second edition we have new words that were not in the first dictation. Perhaps that fire stimulated the writing of Jeremiah's most intimate confessions, his most beautiful prayers, the story of his call and his wonderful songs of despair. Maybe: we cannot know, but we can imagine it, we can wish that the most beautiful of his pages flowered from the wound that the fire engraved in Jeremiah’s soul (our wishes about what has already been do not change history, but always change our ‘already' and 'not yet').

The new life that is reborn from the ashes is never a copy of the burnt life. The resurrected body is not the earlier body reanimated. The second episode is not a replica of the first. When the first script of our story went up in smoke - because it was deliberately burned by someone, because it was burned by self-combustion, or it burned and that’s it, and we didn't understand why - as long as we are alive we can still write another one. Remembering the first words, and adding many more to them. We are alive and out of prison if in front of the ashes of the chapters of our life or those of our whole life we still manage to find the strength, and a friend to be our scribe, to start over, writing a new story. And, in the end, to find out that it was the most beautiful tale which we would not have written without the flames of the fire pot.

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The Dawn of Midnight/22 – The life reborn is not just a copy of the life burnt

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 17/09/2017

170917 Geremia 22 rid“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry".

Emy Dickinson, from a letter of hers

Writing, too, can be a spiritual activity. There are many ways of writing, for many reasons, and very different things are written. But there has always been, and there will always be some who write because they have heard and embraced an inner command. Poets know this very well, who write to respond to a voice speaking and calling, and their poetry becomes the fruit of a 'yes' to an incarnation. They tell us that writing is second, because first there is the gift of a voice, a word, a spirit. There are many words spoken, even great and immense words, which do not become written words. But there are no great and immense scripts that have first not been said in the soul by a whispered word. It is this vocational and spiritual dimension of the written word which ensures that our other words written without vocation can also be mysteriously true, or at least not always and not entirely false.

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The Gift of the Second Telling

The Dawn of Midnight/22 – The life reborn is not just a copy of the life burnt by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 17/09/2017 “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me I know that is poetry". Emy Dickinson, from a letter of hers Writing, too, can be ...
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    [alias] => the-song-of-the-wandering-aramean
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The Dawn of Midnight/21 - Truth of life and salvation meet on the way

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/09/2017

170910 Geremia 21 2 rid“Even if you don’t read it, you are in the Bible .“

E. Canetti, Il cuore segreto dell'orologio (The Secret Heart of the Clock)

When a community is experiencing a deep, long and uncertain crisis, what is really at stake is the past-future link. Because if it is true that the only good future is the one that turns the past into a blessing, redeems it and frees it from the trap of nostalgia, it is equally true that without a good history of yesterday there are no new words today to talk about a good and credible tomorrow. Individual and collective crises are famines of the future and famines of the past, because it is the friendship between the past and the future that makes the present beautiful and fruitful in every stage of life. Even when the sunset is approaching, and the shadow of the past becomes very long, memories feed us and accompany us at all times. The past alone is not enough for the present, no matter how great and wonderful it was. We should wait for a new word, to see the face of a daughter again who will come today, too. We should hope to see, in the end, the face of God that we cherished in our heart’s desire for a whole life. In order to live the time of crisis well, it is therefore essential to have an exciting future that blossoms from a reconciled present with a past lived as a gift and promise, beyond wounds, disappointments and failures. It is in the right reciprocity between roots and gems, between bereshit and eskaton that you really find the opportunity to continue generating life and future in the now.

[fulltext] =>

“The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord, after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to make a proclamation of liberty to them, that everyone should set free his Hebrew slaves, male and female, so that no one should enslave a Jew, his brother” (Jeremiah 34:8-9). Chapter 34 of the Book of Jeremiah contains the account of an actual event that happened in Jerusalem during the Babylonian siege. Jeremiah receives a message that touches the heart of the social and political life of his people, because it concerns the salvation and liberation of men and women who were in the state of slavery. At that time, a Jew could become a slave to another Jew essentially because of debts. They were the so-called debt slaves. The Law received by Moses on Sinai (Exodus 21) said that economic slavery could not last more than six years (in the Code of Hammurabi, the maximum is three years: § 117).

In antiquity, unsettled debts were a very serious thing, but even more serious and alive was the collective and religious conscience that slavery could not last forever, that an economic failure should not become a condemnation for life, that the economy was not the last word - an awareness that we have lost over time. The liberation of slaves was therefore one of the great precepts linked to the institution of the shabbat: in the seventh year the slaves had to be made free again. Therefore, in Israel the liberation of the slaves was a sign and a memorial of the great liberation from slavery in Egypt, always present and very much alive in the collective conscience of the people. That first liberation from slavery was supposed to teach Israel that God is a liberator, that he does not want slave people but free people, that YHWH is the God of freedom. However, as also Jeremiah reminds them: “But your fathers did not listen to me or incline their ears to me” (34:14). That is, despite the Torah, the slaves were not freed, and many Jews found themselves in a prolonged state of slavery and enslavement, private property of other Jews, used as instruments and things to satisfy the needs of others. This episode, therefore, stems from a condition characterised by the generalized desecration of the Covenant and the Law, which makes a precept that should have been part of the ordinary life of the people stand out.

From the story we learn that the people of Israel first obey and slaves are actually freed. But shortly after that there is a real twist in the story, one of those which the Book of Jeremiah is getting us become used to (but we don't have to get used to them). Those who liberated their slaves “afterward (...) turned around and took back the male and female slaves they had set free, and brought them into subjection as slaves” (34:11). We are faced with an upside down type of repentance, a perverted conversion that cancels the earlier good conversion. The people who had finally listened to the prophet change their mind and restore the original, unequal condition. We do not know the reasons for this reconsideration - perhaps the loosening of the siege of Nebuchadnezzar that produced a new wave of nationalistic and anti-Jeremiah ideology. What we know is that that pact of liberation had not been internalized by the people, it had remained on the surface; and so a crisis or a dimming of fear was enough to violate that promise, the Covenant and the word of Jeremiah. That good and fair collective resolution did not have enough strength to last.

Durability is the crucial element in pacts. I can sincerely repent and promise to change my life, we can even do it together, but only time is the real proof that that conversion was deep enough to last and so bring about real change. Only God (and the true prophets) can change the reality of things through the word, by saying it. We too can and must begin a change by saying it, giving each other sincere words that express our desire and need to start again. But if and as long as those words do not become actions, deeds, things, flesh, hands and legs, we can go down to the street and retake the slaves that we have just freed, at any time. As long as time does not flow through our own flesh and into the flesh of others, transforming it, we cannot know the degree of truth of the words that we have pronounced sincerely. The truth of our words and those of others is revealed only when we have said them with our sweat, with our arms, with our tears - perhaps we will never know if some of the decisive words of our lives were true, but we can continue to hope that they were true, or at least wish for it.

But the most serious and tremendous perverse reconsiderations are the collective ones, when a community, a people, an entire generation denies the words and gestures that they had said in some luminous moments of their history. That’s when they re-erect the walls that were already demolished one day, close borders that one day, listening to a word, they themselves opened up. Again, we are letting children die in a sea that has become their enemy. After this sad episode of infidelity, the Book by Jeremiah immediately adds a wonderful story of the opposite sign. It is the story of the faithfulness of the Rechabites, which shows us yet another face of Jeremiah, through his genuine prophetic gesture: “Go to the house of the Rechabites and speak with them and bring them to the house of the Lord, into one of the chambers; then offer them wine to drink” (35:2). The Rechabites were a nomadic community, which at some point in its history had joined Israel and her religion. Their founder, two centuries before this meeting with Jeremiah, had ordered the community to remain nomadic, not to drink wine, not to build houses or cultivate vineyards - perhaps the lack of cultivating vineyards and no wine drinking were connected as precepts in basically self-sufficient communities. Jeremiah knows their law, yet he offers them some wine jugs: “But they answered, ‘We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, ‘You shall not drink wine, neither you nor your sons forever. You shall not build a house; you shall not sow seed; you shall not plant or have a vineyard” (35:6-7). Jeremiah praises this faithful community, and prophesies about their future and fruitfulness. “thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Jonadab the son of Rechab shall never lack a man to stand before me” (35:19). Vocations are the sacrament of faithful communities.

At a time of widespread unfaithfulness, it is a nomadic community, immigrated to the city trying to escape a war, not belonging to the twelve tribes of Israel, to give us a testimony of faithfulness, and to offer consolation to the prophet. This praise for the Rechabites is not, however, improvisational in the Book of Jeremiah and in the Bible, narrating an ambivalent and generally critical relationship with the city. The first citizen was Cain, and the early faithful times of Israel are a tale of nomads and tents. When Israel finally lived in the promised land, the contamination of her religion also began, she suffered the influence of the contemporary cults and succumbed to the ever-present sin of idolatry. For the prophets Jerusalem is a holy city, but it is also a prostitute city. Settling down, building houses and planting vineyards was the beginning of a spiritual and identity decay of the people, which had reached the level of the widespread corruption that Jeremiah is telling us about.

Every love story begins with nomadic ways. Following a voice, we walk decisively and happily towards the future. Even if we cross through a desert we don't see it, because what we really see and hear is a mobile tent and a wonderful voice. Then we arrive at the promised land, we stop and settle down, we set up a worship, a temple, and we begin the construction of the "house, the vineyard, the fields". The nearby cultures and cults fascinate and seduce us, that voice seems increasingly distant, faint, we confuse it with the bewitching songs of idols. One night, or at times, we dream of that desert which is now far away, the first love, the poor tent, the purity of the first voice. Someone, after this very real dream, disassembles the buildings, leaves the fields and vineyards, and starts walking in a new desert, alone or with others. Others remain in the city, like Jeremiah, but they start singing the song of the desert and the bride. And they tell us that the wandering Aramean is the human condition, and that the true promise is not a land but a tent on an endless road. And when they meet a nomad, a migrant or a vagabond, they see a word of salvation in him, and they bless him.

Dedicated to Odilon Junior, pioneer and witness of the Economy of Communion in Brazil and in the world

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Today Jeremiah tells us about a perverse conversion, which first frees up the slaves and then takes them back in captivity. And then he ends with the wonderful story of the Rechabites, a faithful and nomadic community that receives Jeremiah’s blessing. 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The Dawn of Midnight/21 - Truth of life and salvation meet on the way

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 10/09/2017

170910 Geremia 21 2 rid“Even if you don’t read it, you are in the Bible .“

E. Canetti, Il cuore segreto dell'orologio (The Secret Heart of the Clock)

When a community is experiencing a deep, long and uncertain crisis, what is really at stake is the past-future link. Because if it is true that the only good future is the one that turns the past into a blessing, redeems it and frees it from the trap of nostalgia, it is equally true that without a good history of yesterday there are no new words today to talk about a good and credible tomorrow. Individual and collective crises are famines of the future and famines of the past, because it is the friendship between the past and the future that makes the present beautiful and fruitful in every stage of life. Even when the sunset is approaching, and the shadow of the past becomes very long, memories feed us and accompany us at all times. The past alone is not enough for the present, no matter how great and wonderful it was. We should wait for a new word, to see the face of a daughter again who will come today, too. We should hope to see, in the end, the face of God that we cherished in our heart’s desire for a whole life. In order to live the time of crisis well, it is therefore essential to have an exciting future that blossoms from a reconciled present with a past lived as a gift and promise, beyond wounds, disappointments and failures. It is in the right reciprocity between roots and gems, between bereshit and eskaton that you really find the opportunity to continue generating life and future in the now.

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The Song of the Wandering Aramean

The Dawn of Midnight/21 - Truth of life and salvation meet on the way by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 10/09/2017 “Even if you don’t read it, you are in the Bible .“ E. Canetti, Il cuore segreto dell'orologio (The Secret Heart of the Clock) When a community is e...
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    [title] => The redemption of the promise
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by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/09/2017

170903 Geremia 20 rid“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Martin Luther

After the great chapters of consolation, blessing and promises, after the announcement of the New Covenant, Jeremiah's book returns to the chronicle of the time of the Babylonian siege and the imminent conquest and destruction of Jerusalem (in the year 587 BC). These terrible days will accompany us to the end of the book, where the prophecy and the life of the prophet will be fulfilled. The next deeds and words are conveyed to us by Baruch, the faithful companion and secretary of Jeremiah, whose name now makes its first appearance in the text. Going back to the story, we find Jeremiah prisoner of King Zedekiah. We already know the main point of the accusation, because it is the very heart of his prophetic mission: “Why do you prophesy and say, »Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall capture it«” (Jeremiah 32:3). Although denied by the false prophets, the heads of the people and the priests of the temple, the prophecies of Jeremiah are therefore coming true.

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In this context of despair, we suddenly come across another great episode: the prophetic purchase of a land. His cousin (Hanamel) offers him the right of pre-emption on a land in Anathoth, the birthplace of the prophet, not far from Jerusalem. Jeremiah buys it, because “I knew that this was the word of the Lord” (32:8). It is a new prophetic gesture, this time taking the form and language of economics directly. The sign uses the words and actions of a contract, the sale of a real estate, a market exchange. The pitcher, yoke and belt were also human artefacts, therefore the fruits of labour and human oikonomia. But now the economy comes into play explicitly, and for the first time the prophecy speaks through economic words, it is embodied in money, seals and contracts. What could be a more beautiful and true form of secularity than the biblical one? The word of YHWH becomes 17 shekels of silver: “I signed the deed, sealed it, got witnesses, and weighed the money on scales. Then I took the sealed deed of purchase, containing the terms and conditions and the open copy. And I gave the deed of purchase to Baruch the son of Neriah son of Mahseiah, in the presence of Hanamel my cousin, in the presence of the witnesses who signed the deed of purchase...” (32:10-12).

As often happens when we have to deal with decisive acts (as prophetic gestures always are), important words are hidden in the details. Jeremiah writes the contract in two copies on the same papyrus sheet, partly cut on one side, so as to keep the two copies together. He seals one of them - the other was rolled up and opened so as to be available for consultation -, he then calls the witnesses, weighs the silver on the scale (in ancient times the units of measure for coins were units of weight). He wants to be sure that everyone understands, that we understand that he has entered into a true, perfect contract ("according to justice and the law": 32:10), that he really bought that land, in front of witnesses. And so words, gestures and objects that belonged to the repertoire of the few professionals in the sector now become one of the most solemn signs of the entire biblical prophecy.

When the word 'redemption' is heard, many things come to mind to the reader of the Bible. Job's cry calling for a redeemer/Goel who hadn't yet arrived on his pile of manure, and who wouldn't arrive (ch. 19). Or the story of Ruth, which reveals another splendid detail of these ancient redemption contracts: “to confirm a transaction, the one drew off his sandal and gave it to the other” (Ruth 4:7). But that purchase by Jeremiah, above all, evokes Abraham, his contract for the purchase of land for Sarah’s tomb: “and Abraham weighed out for Ephron the silver that he had named in the hearing of the Hittites, four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weights current among the merchants” (Genesis 23:16). The Bible is also this, a patrimony of ordinary life of men and women, where a yoke and a contract contain the same dignity as Sinai. Is there a truer secularity than this? This beautiful and liberating secularism of the Bible is increasingly rare in our time, where too many believe that the words and gestures of the economy, work and contracts are too human and simple for us to be able to perceive prophetic words and gestures in them, because the only deeds and words worthy of God must be those formed within the temple by the experts of the religion. And so we continue to talk about a God who is increasingly distant from the true life of people, and - as Jeremiah repeats it to us - also from the Bible.

Jeremiah, Ruth and Abraham, therefore, tell us that only death and a bride can be compared to the solemnity and seriousness of a prophetic gesture, which for this reason must be described and remembered in all its details. And then kept in an amphora, safeguarded above all, inside the Bible: “I charged Baruch in their presence, saying, »(...) Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware vessel, that they may last for a long time«” (32:13-14). And they have been preserved for a very long time, even for us today.

The masterpiece of this episode lies in the explanation that Jeremiah gives of his prophetic gesture. Every time I read it again it moves me and says new words to me: “For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land” (32:15). A grandiose verse, a song to humanity - the Bible speaks a lot about God, but above all it speaks about men and women, and their infinite dignity.

Jerusalem is about to be destroyed, the people exiled. The fields, the vineyards and all economic activities are no longer worth anything. No one sells because nobody is so careless as to buy land on the vigil of exile. Perhaps the only people who were able to buy, hoping to speculate on fear, were the false prophets, convinced supporters of the ideology of the inviolability of the temple, certain that YHWH would save them from the siege, carrying out a great miracle. Jeremiah, however, had been prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem for forty years, and therefore he has no doubt that the city is on the brink of capitulation and deportation to Babylon. The days of devastation announced are about to really arrive. And Jeremiah buys a field. He pays it ‘in cash’, he enters into a perfect contract, with the same care as those who, convinced of having done a big deal, are attentive to all the details. And he does all this to say: Houses, fields and vineyards will be bought here again. We will work here again. This land promised to our fathers, even though today it is occupied and devastated, remains the promised land, the place of the Covenant, where we will fall in love, marry and generate children again. The destruction of the city does not destroy the word that had founded it. It does not destroy it because a prophet continues to pronounce it still. It is right here, on land like this that I am buying today, where we will still work, sign contracts, sell and buy. The purchase of that field is not only a ransom of land: it is the redemption of the future, which becomes a pledge of the return home, of a sure return, as certain as the misfortune.

He bought that land to tell all this to the king and his people who did not believe him, who put him in prison to kill him. But also to tell us, reading these words today.

To those who, faced with the imminent and sure devastation of their own enterprise or community, when everything is already telling only and truly of the end and death, hear a voice that tells them: this destruction and this exile are real and painful, but it is equally true that we will return to living, loving and working, this death will not be the last word. This desolate land of ours will still have a future. And then he acts, makes a deed, because the words of life are never abstract or just intellectual: they are golden calves and fat calves, children, wooden crosses and rolled stones. The logos that does not become flesh does not live in the Bible, because it does not live in life. There are many ways of acting, but we will never know how many ‘fields purchased’ by someone yesterday made it possible for us to return home today. Someone who believed, resisted, made acquisitions during the long crisis - and so we can still work in that company today. Someone who today, while everyone is fleeing from the disillusioned and frightened town, keeps and cares for a garden, does not let a plant die taking care of it in the secret of the room, makes a tree grow, to say that in that house, in that community, in that family life will continue, and it will be true life - the promised land is full of gardens and plants watered at night by those who want to continue to believe, despite everything. The prophets know how to do these things, and whoever does these things resembles the prophets, is like them and is one of them, even if he does not know it - the earth is full of prophecy. Sometimes we learn of some of these gestures, but there are always many more of them that we will never discover. Just as we cannot know how much ‘land’ that we are buying today in the time of devastation is creating the spiritual conditions so that tomorrow someone can return, to cultivate it and continue to live on it.

Jeremiah had prophesied that the exile would last seventy years. So he knows that the land he buys today will not be the land that he, already an old man, will cultivate tomorrow. That land will have a future, but it will be the future of children, men and women that Jeremiah and his contemporaries will not know. Gratuitousness is buying, with a perfect contract, a field that will feed others. It is this gratuitousness that can save the planet and our souls today: when will we return to buy land that will feed our great-grandsons? “Fields shall be bought for money, and deeds shall be signed and sealed and witnessed, in the land of Benjamin, in the places about Jerusalem"(32:44). There are no words greater and truer than these to say ‘start over' at the end of the exile: buy fields, close contracts, make acquisitions, sell and work.

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Is there a truer secularity than this? 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by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 03/09/2017

170903 Geremia 20 rid“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Martin Luther

After the great chapters of consolation, blessing and promises, after the announcement of the New Covenant, Jeremiah's book returns to the chronicle of the time of the Babylonian siege and the imminent conquest and destruction of Jerusalem (in the year 587 BC). These terrible days will accompany us to the end of the book, where the prophecy and the life of the prophet will be fulfilled. The next deeds and words are conveyed to us by Baruch, the faithful companion and secretary of Jeremiah, whose name now makes its first appearance in the text. Going back to the story, we find Jeremiah prisoner of King Zedekiah. We already know the main point of the accusation, because it is the very heart of his prophetic mission: “Why do you prophesy and say, »Thus says the Lord: Behold, I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall capture it«” (Jeremiah 32:3). Although denied by the false prophets, the heads of the people and the priests of the temple, the prophecies of Jeremiah are therefore coming true.

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The redemption of the promise

by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 03/09/2017 “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” Martin Luther After the great chapters of consolation, blessing and promises, after the announcement of the New Covenant, Jeremiah's book ...
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The Dawn of Midnight/19 - Together, in the pact-communion that can change history

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 27/08/2017

170827 Geremia 19 rid

Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness (...)”

D. BonhoefferLetter written on 21 July 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)

Perhaps there is no greater gift than the gift of hope. It is a primary good. We can be satiated with merchandise and all kinds of comfort goods, but we still die in despair. The promised land seems unattainable at all times, but above all when we cross deserts, then the exile seems endless. Those who give us true and not vain hope first look our despair into the eyes, cross through it, make it their own. They fight false hopes, undergo all the consequences and wounds of the struggle. They resist that dimension of human pietas that brings so many to succumb to the temptation to offer false consolations - to themselves and to others. From the middle of the night the prophets announce to us a true dawn we still cannot see, only through their eyes. Just like when everything around us has been talking only of death and vanitas for a long time, but one day there comes a friend and talks about heaven to us. And, this time, finally, everything seems true, beyond the artificial paradises that kept deceiving us in the age of illusion. And it is, finally, all grace, all charis, all gratuitousness: “For I will restore health to you, / and your wounds I will heal” (Jeremiah 30:17).

[fulltext] =>

We have reached the chapters known as Jeremiah's Book of Consolation, a diptych that contains wonderful verses, some of the greatest of Jeremiah and the Bible. But in order to understand them, we must keep a close eye on and focus our soul around all of the first part of his book, his disappointments, his true and hard words of misfortune. We must see Jeremiah betrayed again by his relatives from Anathoth, then with the yoke on his neck, with the pitcher in his hand, chained in the prison of the temple. And getting to the banks of the Jordan only after these forty years of desert. Without the background of the preceding chapters, these songs of hope and consolation lose all their strength, they do not move us, they do not penetrate into our flesh, they do not make us exult and they do not become a completely different kind of prayer: “the Lord appeared to him from far away. / I have loved you with an everlasting love; / therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. / Again I will build you, and you shall be built, / O virgin Israel! Again you shall adorn yourself with tambourines / and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers” (31:3-4).

The announcement of this new joy does not arise from the oblivion of the times of pain and anguish. Those days are always present and very much alive, because it is the truth of the pain of yesterday that makes the hope of today true and not vain: “A voice is heard in Ramah, / lamentation and bitter weeping. / Rachel is weeping for her children; / she refuses to be comforted for her children, / because they are no more” (31:15). The inconsolable cry of Rachel, the beloved wife of Jacob-Israel, makes the consolation of Jeremiah truer and more beautiful, because it brings him closer to the real life of everyone: “There is hope for your future, (...) / and your children shall come back to their own country (31:17).

Rachel's tears and Jeremiah's consolation are side by side in the same song. Because the announcement of the arrival or return of a child does not erase the pain for the lost child and the real and immense types of pain are not the enemies of joy but can become its closest friends. Jeremiah's consolation is truer because he does not forget Rachel's cry for the children who are lost forever. He looks at it, loves it, assumes it and makes it flourish in hope. However it happens just too many times that, dazzled by the Easter light, we can no longer see the many who continue to be crucified, we no longer see Rachel crying without consolation. And we believe that there are no more poor people because we simply do not see them anymore, as we are well-sheltered in the comfort of our homes and in the temples of those who, forgetting the crucifixes forget the resurrection, too, or confuse it all with the spectacular ghosts generated by false prophets.

“Set up road markers for yourself; / make yourself guideposts; / consider well the highway, / the road by which you went. / Return, O virgin Israel, / return to these your cities” (31:21). The way to return home is, almost always, the same road that led us to exile. The road to slavery and freedom are the same: only the direction is opposite. It’s enough just to reverse the way, give it an opposite meaning. There are many people who never return home again and are lost in alternate winding paths because the memory of the pain of the journey to exile impedes their understanding of the new freedom being at the end of the path of slavery, which is in the opposite direction. The way to exit a big crisis is simply by changing the direction of the same road that generated it. We can return to the lost faith by walking the same path we did when losing it, but in the opposite direction. We return home by re-walking the road that took us away, and only to find out on the way that those signs that guided us in our escape had other letters and other numbers on their back side, but we could not see them until we turned back, walking backwards: “How long will you waver, / O faithless daughter?” (31:22)

This verse closes with an unexpected and wonderful conclusion, which continues to create problems for the exegetes: “For the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: / a woman encircles a man” (31:22). It’s a mysterious and beautiful phrase, like many things in life are beautiful just because they are incomplete, open, ambivalent, alive. Therefore, it is from this ambiguous opening that we can glimpse Jeremiah, who, under a special creative inspiration, returns in his thought to the days of Creation, the first breath of the spirit, to light and darkness, to Adam, to the woman, their disobedience that generated those tremendous words of Elohim: “To the woman he said, / »I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; / in pain you shall bring forth children. / Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, / but he shall rule over you«” (Genesis 3:16). The prophets have always suffered and continue to suffer when they read this sentence because they have seen it being realised in families, politics, businesses, religions; they saw it yesterday, we continue to see it today, too many times still. Perhaps, in giving us his hope at the end of the night, Jeremiah wanted to include a promise of a new and different relationship between man and woman, which he could not see, and we cannot fully see it yet, either. Every full human hope is also hope of reciprocity and communion, of the meeting of gazes, coming from different yet equal pairs of eyes.

We were just acclimated to this new and beautiful hope, and while the chapter is approaching its sunset it gives us its most beautiful colours. At the end of the vision of the promise of returning home, Jeremiah touches his prophetic-poetic peak, and the promise of salvation flourishes in the rightly-famous verses about the New Covenant. Let us read how Jeremiah has given it to us, without missing even a comma, letting ourselves be wounded here and now: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (31:31-33).

Every great and true hope of liberation is also a promise of a new alliance. When the first pact was betrayed, wounded and defamed, the promise of a homecoming must necessarily become a promise of a new covenant. These are the decisive moments when the memory and the renewal of the first pact is no longer enough: there is a need to dream of a different future together. When we left the house and did not come back, when we saw the other who did so, for the hope in a future together it is not enough to remember the days of the first love, or to open the wedding album. What’s necessary is simply to see ourselves at another altar tomorrow, as we say other words, with new witnesses, with a new kind of love. Or when the first pact that brought us into this community has become mute, the first prayers a child’s play, the first love story a deception, we cannot get saved without the promise of a new alliance, unless one day a prophet announces another covenant, other prayers, another life. Life does not come to full maturity if it does not join into a new covenant from the first moment, even if it is the one with the angel of death that makes its announcement to us as it embraces us. When we enter the time of the new covenant, what is external becomes internal, the Law becomes flesh and we begin to really obey the best part of us.

But Jeremiah tells us something even more specific, too. This new and decisive phase of people and communities is not an individual and/or solitary achievement. It is a covenant, a pact, communion. In the new covenant we can only enter together, though, once inside, it is the freedom and love of everyone that reaches a new phase. The fruits are personal, but the conquest is collective. Everyone finds themselves inside the law that they used to know from outside, but we are not the writers of this new law. We find that it is written by a hand that is not ours. And the greatest reciprocity and the greatest freedom possible under the sun are born.

But while we were in exile we could not know about it. We had to start on the way back, recognize it as the same one that had led us to slavery and continue walking. And, in the sunset, we had to meet a prophet who announced the new covenant. We believed him, and we continued to walk. We have become new creation, the true hope of the future has saved the true pain of the past. And then we understood, or at least sensed, that this new alliance was not the last one. Once again we felt alive, and we started walking again.

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To fully understand them, it is necessary to read them taking the darkness of previous chapters as our point of departure, and discover that the ‘new covenant’ is an essential dimension in every human existence. 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The Dawn of Midnight/19 - Together, in the pact-communion that can change history

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 27/08/2017

170827 Geremia 19 rid

Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must abandon every attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a churchman (the priestly type, so-called!) a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I mean by worldliness (...)”

D. BonhoefferLetter written on 21 July 1944 (English translation by Reginald H. Fuller)

Perhaps there is no greater gift than the gift of hope. It is a primary good. We can be satiated with merchandise and all kinds of comfort goods, but we still die in despair. The promised land seems unattainable at all times, but above all when we cross deserts, then the exile seems endless. Those who give us true and not vain hope first look our despair into the eyes, cross through it, make it their own. They fight false hopes, undergo all the consequences and wounds of the struggle. They resist that dimension of human pietas that brings so many to succumb to the temptation to offer false consolations - to themselves and to others. From the middle of the night the prophets announce to us a true dawn we still cannot see, only through their eyes. Just like when everything around us has been talking only of death and vanitas for a long time, but one day there comes a friend and talks about heaven to us. And, this time, finally, everything seems true, beyond the artificial paradises that kept deceiving us in the age of illusion. And it is, finally, all grace, all charis, all gratuitousness: “For I will restore health to you, / and your wounds I will heal” (Jeremiah 30:17).

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The greatest reciprocity

The Dawn of Midnight/19 - Together, in the pact-communion that can change history by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 27/08/2017 “Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe. One must ab...
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The Dawn of Midnight/18 - Humanity and the power of visible (and invisible) empires

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 20/08/2017

170820 Geremia 18 rid“...he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

Hugh of Saint-Victor Didascalicon (12th century; English translation by Jerome Taylor)


“(T)o pluck up and to break down, / to destroy and to overthrow”: this is what Jeremiah heard on the day of his prophetic vocation. But together with these words he also heard two others that are different and complementary: “to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). It is not enough to announce scary scenarios of misfortune to be non-false prophets, because the earth is full of people who describe, sometimes even in good faith, a desperate present and future only to gather the consent of the many desperate people who feed on despair. Jeremiah does not deceive his fellow citizens by promising imaginary well-being and peace to them; but while prophesying this bitter and uncomfortable truth, he can say words of true and sublime hope.

[fulltext] =>

Like that immense hope contained in the letter Jeremiah sent to the Jews deported to Babylon. It was addressed “to the surviving elders of the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon” (29:1). As we continue reading the text of the letter, we find ourselves in something unusual and amazing that surprises and moves us by its very humanity: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: »Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease«” (29:4-6). These are words that still leave us flabbergasted for their intense beauty. When in exile, there couldn’t be truer and higher words of hope to be heard than those of Jeremiah. In any exile.

When life takes us away from home, and we emigrate through our own, free choice or are deported by some visible or invisible empire, we can experience exile as a curse or in the form of rage - or we can follow Jeremiah's advice. We can build houses and live in them, plant gardens and work, love, marry and then bring sons and daughters to the world, and see the sons and daughters of their sons and daughters. The immigrants who, even without knowing Jeremiah, lived their 'exile’ like this, were saved, made a propitious time out of that difficult time, became a blessing for those who remained in their first homeland and the fellow citizens of their new homeland. They built a house, not a tent, because they wanted to inhabit that land and not just pass through it, rob it or make a short stay there.

The day you start building or buying a home in a foreign land, you become real citizens of that country, by virtue of the jus soli of the law of the earth and life. Because we build a house to talk of the future, to tell ourselves and others that we want to love and marry in that land, that we will conceive and grow up our sons and daughters in these rooms - and that one day they may even become disgusted and hateful, but we could only build a house and we did so.

While in exile, building a house has the same value as it had for Abraham to purchase land to bury Sarah on the land of the Hittites. Because building a house or a tomb makes the land of others mine, too, and it makes that land a deposit of heaven. Like Don Lorenzo Milani: the day after he arrived at Barbiana, he went to the local government and, aged 31, he bought a tomb for himself in the cemetery of his new parish, so as to say that the land of exile had already become the land of the only good and true life for him that day, and therefore that of his death the day after - which is always true, though not always good.

Build houses. Plant gardens. That is, work. When our grandparents arrived in America or Belgium, the fear of the future and the pain of the past began to vanish as soon as they began to work. By planting gardens, building houses (for others), that land also became theirs, the fruit of their co-creation. A wall or a mine gallery became part of the promised land thanks to the work of their hands, which made their life, language and food lighter. Hard but light. By working together, true fraternity-solidarity flourished among people speaking different languages, even though they talked to each other by their hands and through the tears of good and bad work. And even in the great exiles of wars and prisons, resurrection often begins when people can go back to work, or when they can take up some real work. And even today, friendship with the new exiles and immigrants can be born and reborn if and where we can work together. Brother Work.

Marry, bring sons and daughters to the world. Jeremiah was asked by YHWH not to marry and to have no sons or daughters (chapter 16), and so he did not know the joy of having a wife, sons and daughters during his prophetic exile. But, as it happens sometimes, those who know something but cannot avail of it for themselves end up acquiring a chastity that allows them to penetrate into its deepest nature. This is one of the true miracles of gratuitousness, which only the prophets really know and are able to explain to us: “For the children of the desolate one will be more / than the children of her who is married” (Isaiah 54:1). Multiply. In the land of exile, the same first words of Eden resound (Gen 1:28), Adam's first blessing takes on new life. Every time a child is born, the foreign land becomes a new Eden, Abraham can re-hear the promise of a new land and a great progeny, numerous like the stars of heaven. Isaac is saved from the ram again. The cave of Bethlehem becomes the empty tomb of Jerusalem.

This first letter to the deported ones reaches its prophetic culmination in the conclusion, which, therefore, is its splendid paradox: “But seek the welfare [shalom] of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (29:7). What more can you ask from a prophet? What's 'beyond' a high prayer to God asking for the shalom of those who have occupied, deported and torn you away from your home?  “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you,” we will read seven centuries later in the gospels. And maybe we would not have read it, or would have read it differently, had there not been Jeremiah, had there not been the prophets: “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets” (Mt 16:13-14).

The faith of Israel, the Covenant and the Law can also be lived in exile: there is no need to wait for the return home, because everything is there to live in full in Babylon, too. And this is what Jeremiah writes, and this is what the true prophets know and must say. They remind us that the only promised land is where we are living today; that even the desert may be the promised land if we make it flourish by building, working, loving and generating sons and daughters on it. No present time has to be killed in the expectation of a future time.

The chapter ends with a new clash between Jeremiah and the false prophets, but this time they are among the exiles in Babylon. We find - not surprisingly - that among the deported prophets there are also some promoters of nationalist ideology, from the same school as Hananiah (chapter 28). Jeremiah’s words are far from being tender when he refers to them in his letter: “Do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you ... for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them” (29:8-9). Jeremiah calls them by name, maybe he knew them well: Ahab, Zedekiah and Shemaiah (29:21, 24). Even the exiles have their false prophets, who proliferate even more than at home, because their sale of illusions and false consolations finds more 'customers' in the time of suffering and anguish.

And this time, too, the prophets accused and de-legitimized by Jeremiah act. Shemaiah “sent letters (...) to all the people who are in Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, and to all the priests” (29:25). Shemaiah’s request to Zephaniah, the supervisor of the temple was very clear and direct: “why have you not rebuked Jeremiah of Anathoth who is prophesying to you?” (29:27), equating him thus to “every madman who prophesies” (29:26). Zephaniah, who is obviously a righteous man, did not listen to Shemaiah - even in vastly spread corruption and in 'structures of sin' one can meet a righteous person. He informed Jeremiah about the letter, who answered with a new letter to the exiles: “Thus says the Lord (...) Shemaiah had prophesied to you when I did not send him, and has made you trust in a lie” (29:31).

The first enemies of true prophets are false prophets, those in bad faith, and those who in good faith, but devoured by ideology, see the true prophet as a serious threat to the people. Many of those marching against Jeremiah were genuinely convinced of fighting a foe of the homeland, a collaborator who wanted the ruin of Israel. This is the terrible power of ideology: persecuting and killing prophets and doing it in the name of goodness, truth, religion and God. Yesterday and today. The Bible does not tell us that history recognizes the true prophets and listens to them. Instead, it tells us the opposite, and shows them to us as defeated, after all. But the tenacious and hard struggle between Jeremiah and false prophecy, exactly because it is the story of a defeat, teaches us the grammar of the ideological kind of disease, which accompanies every religious and ideal driven experience (false prophecy is ideological, and the most powerful ideology is a form of false prophecy). Because ideological false prophecy flourishes on the same tree as true prophecy does. Unlike the weeds, it is not easy to recognize in the middle of the field, and so entire communities and peoples have nourished, and continue to feed on weed, believing to eat very good grain. And, almost always, the first weed eaters are the false prophets themselves, enchanted by their own spells.

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His advice to exiles offers some precious lessons on how to live well while being uprooted, and to dwell and love every land as the promised land. 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The Dawn of Midnight/18 - Humanity and the power of visible (and invisible) empires

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 20/08/2017

170820 Geremia 18 rid“...he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

Hugh of Saint-Victor Didascalicon (12th century; English translation by Jerome Taylor)


“(T)o pluck up and to break down, / to destroy and to overthrow”: this is what Jeremiah heard on the day of his prophetic vocation. But together with these words he also heard two others that are different and complementary: “to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). It is not enough to announce scary scenarios of misfortune to be non-false prophets, because the earth is full of people who describe, sometimes even in good faith, a desperate present and future only to gather the consent of the many desperate people who feed on despair. Jeremiah does not deceive his fellow citizens by promising imaginary well-being and peace to them; but while prophesying this bitter and uncomfortable truth, he can say words of true and sublime hope.

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The exile which is also a blessing

The Dawn of Midnight/18 - Humanity and the power of visible (and invisible) empires by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 20/08/2017 “...he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his...
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The Dawn of Midnight/17 - It is decisive to recognize who uses the past to kill the future

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 13/08/2017

170813 Geremia 17 ridAnswer not a fool according to his folly, / lest you be like him yourself. / Answer a fool according to his folly, / lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Proverbs 26

Many words are used to describe work, one of them is: travail. Trabalho, travaglio, trabajo all derive from the Latin trepalium, which meant yoke (for animals). It was a shaped wooden bar, with ropes and laces attached to it. It was similar to the horizontal arm of a cross. Over time, the yoke has become a symbol of submission by animals or people and a symbol of slavery. Peoples have fought for and attained freedom and justice by breaking up the yokes of slavery, and have been freed from these travails and tribulations. No one loves being subjugated, being put under a yoke by others. Only the subversive and radical message of Jesus of Nazareth could use the image of the yoke to express the bond between him and his disciples: it is light and gentle, but still a yoke. Perhaps, in using this paradoxical image, the evangelist, here too, had Jeremiah in mind: “this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Thus the Lord said to me: »Make yourself straps and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck.«” (Jeremiah 27:1-2).

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Jeremiah receives another incarnate word, a verb by YHWH that speaks through the flesh of the prophet. It is not about rhetorical techniques, nor even tools to shock and then seduce the public. These are words of YHWH, like the others, like the pitcher, the belt, the baskets of figs, like Isaiah's nakedness, like Ezekiel’s sleeping on his side. Baruch, Jeremiah’s faithful chronicler also reports the explanation of that gesture (“Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon... All the nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson” 27:6-7), but when they saw the subjugated prophet come, perhaps everything was already quite clear to those ancient men who used the many non-verbal languages.

There were representatives of neighbouring peoples in Jerusalem who went there to make an alliance and war against the Babylonians, supported by the nationalist illusions of their “prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your fortune-tellers, or your sorcerers, who are saying to you, »You shall not serve the king of Babylon.« For it is a lie that they are prophesying to you” (27:9-10). Jeremiah continues his battle against the illusions produced by the professionals of lies.

The confrontation with the false prophecy reaches a peak in the next chapter, which is also one of the dramatic summits of the entire book, when Jeremiah is publicly faced and challenged by another prophet:

Hananiah, an exponent of the prophets of salvation and the nationalist ideology of the temple: “Hananiah the son of Azzur, the prophet from Gibeon, spoke to me in the house of the Lord, in the presence of the priests and all the people, saying, »Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord's house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon«” (28:1-3).

After the many attacks on Jeremiah we have already seen, another prophet comes to face him, a 'colleague' who works in Jerusalem just like him, probably a figure of some importance among the prophets of the city. Baruch, the narrator of the episode is the one who calls him 'prophet'. For the people, therefore, Hananiah is a prophet like Jeremiah, both of them are accredited as prophets among the people and the priests. At the beginning of the story we do not know whether Hananiah is a true prophet or a false one. Certainly his contemporaries did not know it either, and we do not have to know. If we want these words to touch us in the flesh, we must go down with Jeremiah, see him fight with Hananiah, and discover who the true prophet is of the two is and why.

First of all there is something not obvious but important: Hananiah's discourse is the same as that of Jeremiah. He, too, starts his speech by the prophetic phrase ‘thus says the Lord,’ and then calls God by the name from the Covenant (YHWH). His message, however, is the opposite of Jeremiah’s - no submission to Babylon. In front of the people and the temple, the two prophets appeared as two competitors selling the same 'product', with a decisive difference: that of Jeremiah had a very high price, while that of Hananiah was offered free of charge. True prophets know how to maintain high prices without giving in to the demand of the people for discounts and sales, because prophetic dumping is the death of true prophecy.

The first dramatic turn is Jeremiah's first answer: “the prophet Jeremiah said, »Amen! May the Lord do so; may the Lord make the words that you have prophesied come true«” (28:6). His first word is 'amen', which in this context means 'I wish it were as you say.’ Jeremiah does not love peace and freedom less than Hananiah and the people, but he cannot tell illusions to console them. And so he continues with a complex discourse which includes something very important: “The prophets who preceded you and me from ancient times prophesied war, famine, and pestilence against many countries and great kingdoms. As for the prophet who prophesies peace (shalom), when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet.” (28:8-9). Jeremiah calls the ancient prophetic tradition into question, those who “preceded you and me” (another acknowledgement of Hananiah as a prophet), and reminds that those prophets were prophets of misfortune, and they were true prophets. On some rare occasions the prophets have also prophesied salvation, but it was the historical verification of their prophecy that decided on the truth of their words. As if to say that it is far more common that a true prophet prophesies “war, famine, and pestilence” than prosperity and peace. The prophecy of misfortune is most likely to be authentic, and we can confirm it ex ante, before the events predicted actually take place. That of salvation can only be validated ex post. Why? The explanation can be found in the gratuitousness of true prophecy.

When a prophet announces misfortunes and sorrow, above all to "great kingdoms," all he gets in return is persecution and suffering because, as we can see, the leaders and the people do not love prophets of misfortune. However, when a prophet envisions that prosperity and peace for the people that they want, this prophecy will most likely produce consensus, success, power and wealth - temptations that are always very strong, at times invincible. So it is far more plausible that the one who announces what the leaders of the people do not want to hear is a true prophet. This reasoning has an extraordinary sapiential force. We have no assurance that the prophet of misfortune is not false (or crazy) - certainty does not exist when it comes to such great things to decide on. With no incentives but only costs to prophesy, the prophecy of misfortune is more likely to be authentic.

The message came clear and strong to Hananiah (and probably also to the people who attended the temple). His reaction produced another unpredictable and impressive scene: “Then the prophet Hananiah took the yoke-bars from the neck of Jeremiah the prophet and broke them. And Hananiah spoke in the presence of all the people, saying, »Thus says the Lord: Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon from the neck of all the nations within two years«” (28:10-11). It’s a violent and spectacular gesture, which had to appear like a clamorous duel victory and a clear sign to see which side was the real oracle.

At this point the text shows us a confused and helpless Jeremiah. He was used to persecutions and defeats. This time, though, the difficulty he encounters is of a different nature. Another prophet, in the name of the same God, prophesying with the same prophetic authority, with an equal and opposite action breaks the symbol of Jeremiah, denies the contents of his prophecy and proposes another one, with the opposite sign. But there is something deeper to consider here. The reader of the Bible as well as the contemporaries of Jeremiah knew that Hananiah was directly linked to the authentic tradition of the Covenant. In the Torah, in the Psalms, we find many references (Gen 27:40; Psalm 18) to the yoke broken by YHWH to free his people from slavery: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt... And I have broken the bars of your yoke” (Lev 26:13). But Ananias found great support especially in Isaiah, who had obtained the miraculous liberation of Jerusalem from the Assyrians from God about a hundred years earlier. So the conviction of the inviolability of the temple and the city was based on a great miracle by a great prophet. That historic truth from earlier days – which was older and therefore more authoritative – had become an ideology, because it prevented the acceptance of the word of another prophet saying something true but different in a different historical moment. We fall into ideology whenever the truth of yesterday becomes the eclipse of the different truth of today, because it becomes an idol. Hananiah, perhaps in good faith, was leading his people astray, bringing them to the massacre, but not in the name of a false prophet or foreign gods - he was doing it in the name of tradition and a miracle of a true prophet. He used the past to kill the future. The most powerful and infallible ideologies, whether religious or secular, are not the unfounded ones, but those that are absolutely well-founded on some true words and facts of yesterday that silence and blind the true words and facts of today.

Jeremiah does not respond to Ananias. He stays silent. Breaking and desecrating the sign of the prophet is the greatest outrage. The gesture is a flesh-word, and there is no other gesture to answer the destruction caused by it: one flesh cannot be replaced by another, nor can one child be substituted by another. If the words said in the Bible are 'forever', the prophetic gesture is 'forever and ever'. After a gesture of profanation the prophet can only be silent. To say new words the gift of a new word of God is needed, and if and until it comes, the prophet remains mute and defeated: “...Jeremiah the prophet went his way” (28:11). This is a wonderful form of the meekness and humility of heart that accompanies and nourishes the extraordinary strength of the prophets.

YHWH sent a new word, and Jeremiah answered Hananiah: “Listen, Hananiah, the Lord has not sent you, and you have made this people trust in a lie” (28:15). Hananiah died within a year, disappearing from the Bible after this transient passage. But from the heart of the book of Jeremiah, Hananiah will always remind us of the danger of all the ideologies of tradition that kill the true prophets of today in the name of those of yesterday.

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The Dawn of Midnight/17 - It is decisive to recognize who uses the past to kill the future

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 13/08/2017

170813 Geremia 17 ridAnswer not a fool according to his folly, / lest you be like him yourself. / Answer a fool according to his folly, / lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Proverbs 26

Many words are used to describe work, one of them is: travail. Trabalho, travaglio, trabajo all derive from the Latin trepalium, which meant yoke (for animals). It was a shaped wooden bar, with ropes and laces attached to it. It was similar to the horizontal arm of a cross. Over time, the yoke has become a symbol of submission by animals or people and a symbol of slavery. Peoples have fought for and attained freedom and justice by breaking up the yokes of slavery, and have been freed from these travails and tribulations. No one loves being subjugated, being put under a yoke by others. Only the subversive and radical message of Jesus of Nazareth could use the image of the yoke to express the bond between him and his disciples: it is light and gentle, but still a yoke. Perhaps, in using this paradoxical image, the evangelist, here too, had Jeremiah in mind: “this word came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Thus the Lord said to me: »Make yourself straps and yoke-bars, and put them on your neck.«” (Jeremiah 27:1-2).

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Prophecy does not include incentives

The Dawn of Midnight/17 - It is decisive to recognize who uses the past to kill the future by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 13/08/2017 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, / lest you be like him yourself. / Answer a fool according to his folly, / lest he be wise in his own eyes...
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    [title] => Beyond the deserts of betrayed words
    [alias] => beyond-the-deserts-of-betrayed-words
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The Dawn of Midnight/16 - Recognizing and enriching the prophetic family in the world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 06/08/2017

170806 Geremia 16 ridOnce Rabbi Mosche of Kobryn said, 'I see that all the words I said did not even find one who had welcomed them in their heart. The words that come from the heart, in fact, go into the heart; but if they find none, then to the man who said them God gives the grace that they do not err without a dwelling, but they all return to the heart from which they came out’ ... Some time after his death a friend said, 'If he had someone to talk to, he would still live.'

Martin BuberTales of the Hasidim (rough translation from the Italian quote)

Even if every prophet has his own unique personality and his own name, prophecy is a collective experience. It forms a community, a tradition, and those who join in continue the same race, fight the same battles, give new words to the same voice. Every true prophet is created by the prophets who preceded him and nourishes the prophets that will come after him. This generative spiritual chain is the root of faithfulness to the word, because every prophet knows that he is writing a chapter of a book that will be completed by others, and if there are some words missing from a chapter, or if it is partial and needs editing, those who continue writing it will find some adulterated material in their hands, they will not have the words they need to write their own chapters and so the final outcome will be poorer and worse.

[fulltext] =>

The prophets’ faithfulness to the word makes us understand a more universal kind of truth, which concerns every generation and every word. Today's art and poetry feeds upon the faithfulness of yesterday's artists and poets to their word, and if a poet betrays his word, he impoverishes tomorrow's poetry. When a parent confuses or betrays their word that they have inherited, the children find themselves in the hands of miserable or false words to write their lives with - behind bad lives written by our children there often lies the betrayal of our words. Communities are lost when someone betrays the first charismatic word in the process of conveying the tradition. Crossing deserts of betrayed words does not lead to any promised land, because the map that leads from Egypt to Canaan can only be written with faithful signs and words.

"After Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had taken into exile from Jerusalem Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, together with the officials of Judah, the craftsmen, and the metal workers, and had brought them to Babylon, the Lord showed me this vision: behold, two baskets of figs placed before the temple of the Lord. One basket had very good figs, like first-ripe figs, but the other basket had very bad figs, so bad that they could not be eaten." (Jeremiah 24:1-2). We are facing a new vision of Jeremiah, the meaning of which YHWH immediately reveals to him: “Like these good figs, so I will regard as good the exiles from Judah... I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord... Like the bad figs...so will I treat Zedekiah the king of Judah, his officials, the remnant of Jerusalem who remain in this land, and those who dwell in the land of Egypt.” (24:5-8)

The theology of the 'remnant' is at the centre of biblical prophecy because it speaks of the profound nature of biblical humanism and its typical form of salvation. ‘Great’, ‘strong’ and ‘many’ are the characteristics of empires, the pharaoh, armies, all of which are places where God is not and where man is denied. Even in the Bible, and even in prophetic tradition, we find a spirit that has linked salvation to strength and to the ‘Lord of Hosts’; but along this we find another one that did not prophesy a victorious messiah appearing on the horizon on a white horse, but was expecting a suffering servant, an emmanuel, a baby in a manger. Without the true prophets communities – even those born from the purest spiritual charismas – soon turn into empires headed for conquests, converts and power, and forget about the poor truth of the little remnant. And, eventually, they perish.

Even in Jeremiah we find the tradition of the 'remnant', but the greatness of this prophet reveals a truly profound and subversive dimension to it: the 'remnant' is not to be found among those who remained at home, escaping the first deportation but between the exiles in Babylon. The good basket is the one taken away. This is not just a wise reading of the present and future events of Jerusalem and Judah, or just a criticism of the corruption of priests and prophets. We can also find a great message about the logic of the salvation of communities and people here. In those days, an observer in Israel having seen a significant part of the people deported and exiled, forced to live among a tyrannical, idolatrous people, without a temple, prophets or priests, even if he had believed the prophecy of the 'remnant' he would place it in the part of the people that remained, because it was still possible to pray in the temple, celebrate the Shabbat, and because there were still spiritual and religious leaders. Jeremiah, on the other hand, says that the 'remnant' that will be saved and will continue the Covenant is now among the deportees, surrounded by the processions of very high and shining foreign gods, without the religious apparatus and the guardians of YHWH. Salvation will not come from those who remained in the religion and the temple, but from those who were led out and away, into an idolatrous land.

How many times has it happened, and continues to happen still, that someone takes off, leaves, is taken away with violence by someone or something stronger, and those who remain interpret it as a misfortune. And then in the exile there begins a salvation that will turn out to be a blessing one day. Someone leaves a community, a home, an institution; those who remain see this departure as a curse, and their own fate to remain as a blessing. Then the story continues, and within that curse there blooms a beautiful flower of evil. Those who had remained in Jeremiah's time, protected by the ideology of false prophets and priests of the "temple", did not know that in those distant lands, under the ground of sorrow there was something new, faithful and true growing that would also save their children one day. Sometimes, part of our heart takes on a journey, it leaves us, it is taken away from home, and the part that remains cries of abandonment. But it may happen that exactly what has fled to a foreign land begins to generate a mysterious kind of salvation; it comes back and saves what remained at home and has been corrupted and deceived by ideologies and false prophets in the meantime. There are kingdoms where the banquet of the fat calf can begin in a pig shed, where the acorns flourish in mustard seeds. The truest cases of faithfulness are the unlikely ones. Those that are too linear and obvious often produce the feelings and words of the elder brother who remained ‘faithful’ in his father's house.

But if we read these verses of Jeremiah within the whole biblical tradition, we can make other discoveries. Let's go back to the Torah, and to the end of Genesis where we meet a friend of Jeremiah: Joseph. He, too, a deported and enslaved brother, without family and father, with corrupt and treacherous brothers, becomes a 'remnant' of salvation for everyone in that distant land of the pharaoh. Salvation was not there in the land of his father Jacob or among the altars of their God. It was far away, among the pyramids, in imperial prisons, in solitude, flourishing in a dream.

But for Jeremiah it isn’t enough to tell the parable of the two baskets. A few verses later he prophesies the destruction of the city and the temple: “Thus says the Lord: »...I will make this house like Shiloh«” (26:4-5). The foreseeable consequences of this prophecy promptly arrive, too: “The priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah speaking these words in the house of the Lord. ... [they] laid hold of him, saying, »You shall die! Why have you prophesied in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate, without inhabitant’?«” (26:7-9). However, this time, the death sentence was not executed, because 'certain of the elders of the land', spoke in the assembly and said, “Micah of Moresheth prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and said to all the people of Judah: (...) »Zion shall be ploughed as a field; / Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, / and the mountain of the house a wooded height.« Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him to death? (...) But we are about to bring great disaster upon ourselves.” (26:18-19).

In this episode, narrated by Baruk, there are some pearls hidden. Among the people there were still some elderly who remained faithful to the tradition of the Covenant, able to hear and believe in the prophets. The real enemies of Jeremiah and the prophets were the leaders, the false prophets and the priests. The ancient and constant tension-conflict between charisma and institution, and between the periphery and centre of the empire is repeated (neither Jeremiah nor Micah were from Jerusalem). Furthermore, these elders save Jeremiah by quoting an earlier prophet (Micah). There is a rare and beautiful testimony here that reveals a general and fundamental law of the Bible to us: true prophets recall and refer to each other, they save each other even when the one that saves the other lived a hundred years earlier. And the saved one resuscitates the one that saved him.

The chapter closes with a story coming from the mouth of one of those righteous elders: “There was another man who prophesied in the name of the Lord, Uriah... He prophesied against this city and against this land in words like those of Jeremiah. And ... King Jehoiakim ... sought to put him to death. But when Uriah heard of it, he was afraid and fled and escaped to Egypt. Then King Jehoiakim sent to Egypt certain men (...) [who] struck him down (26:20-23).

There were more true prophets in Israel than those whose words the Bible has kept. YHWH's word is more abundant than the words of the Bible, and the Bible is greater than the sum of the words it contains. Uriah is the image of the many silent brothers of the prophets who, yesterday and today, do not write books and that perhaps are waiting for an 'elder of the land' to see them, talk about their lives and their blood, enriching the prophetic family of the earth.

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And so a fundamental dimension of life is revealed to us: salvation often comes from those who are outside, forgotten and excluded. 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The Dawn of Midnight/16 - Recognizing and enriching the prophetic family in the world

by Luigino Bruni

published in Avvenire on 06/08/2017

170806 Geremia 16 ridOnce Rabbi Mosche of Kobryn said, 'I see that all the words I said did not even find one who had welcomed them in their heart. The words that come from the heart, in fact, go into the heart; but if they find none, then to the man who said them God gives the grace that they do not err without a dwelling, but they all return to the heart from which they came out’ ... Some time after his death a friend said, 'If he had someone to talk to, he would still live.'

Martin BuberTales of the Hasidim (rough translation from the Italian quote)

Even if every prophet has his own unique personality and his own name, prophecy is a collective experience. It forms a community, a tradition, and those who join in continue the same race, fight the same battles, give new words to the same voice. Every true prophet is created by the prophets who preceded him and nourishes the prophets that will come after him. This generative spiritual chain is the root of faithfulness to the word, because every prophet knows that he is writing a chapter of a book that will be completed by others, and if there are some words missing from a chapter, or if it is partial and needs editing, those who continue writing it will find some adulterated material in their hands, they will not have the words they need to write their own chapters and so the final outcome will be poorer and worse.

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Beyond the deserts of betrayed words

The Dawn of Midnight/16 - Recognizing and enriching the prophetic family in the world by Luigino Bruni published in Avvenire on 06/08/2017 Once Rabbi Mosche of Kobryn said, 'I see that all the words I said did not even find one who had welcomed them in their heart. The words that come from the heart...