I do wait for you

In one of his plays, Camus explains that Saint Demetrius had an appointment with God himself in the steppe one day. On his way, he found a peasant whose cart had got stuck up to the axle in thick mud. He didn't think twice. He rolled up his sleeves and helped him. He had to work hard, but in the end, they managed to free the cart and Saint Demetrius ran to his appointment. But God was no longer there.I have thought a lot about this "he was no longer there". My theologian friends tell me that God was the farmer, but they don't convince me. My experience tells me that I am always late for appointments with God, even if for much less philanthropic reasons than those of Saint Demetrius. But I am not so late that I cannot see some trace of his evanescent presence. Thinking about it, when the mayor of Masnou invited me to give an intervention in public space, I responded by writing on a pedestrian crossing in the town that "The soul is the cage where the dandelion of the bird that has just escaped floats".The place where I most clearly feel the echo of the expanding wave of his presence is in the face of good Christians, of whom there are some, even if they don't care much for marketing. I can assure you: interacting closely with them is one of life's great experiences. It is possible to doubt God's existence. It is within anyone's reach. The Bible is full of doubters and the wary. But in the face of a good Christian, it is difficult not to believe that the light that illuminates their face is vicarious of another, greater light. It has been good Christians who have made me, a very mediocre Christian, understand the meaning of Nietzsche's words in Beyond Good and Evil: “To the homines religiosi one could include among artists as their supreme category.”I met Viqui Molins many years ago, at a bookstore stand on Sant Jordi's Day. I was struck by the number of neglected people, with evident existential wounds, who came to greet her. She knew their names and surnames, the history of their despair. She was interested in their problems with a welcoming and sincere normality. I asked her what exactly she did. "I am a Teresian nun," she told me. I already knew that, but there was something deeper in her than a mere charisma of label. She explained to me that she took care of the bad thief. "It's easy – she clarified – to take care of the good thief. He has stumbled, you help him up and from that moment on he walks straight and grateful; the bad thief, however, takes advantage of you helping him to vomit to steal your wallet." And at that moment I saw the light of her face.

Later I met other good Christians and understood that, if around the hero everything turns into tragedy, around the good Christian everything turns into world, because what we call world is the gift that our gods give us in return for the faith we place on their altars.To explain myself, I refer to The Faculty of Useless Things, a book that Yuri Dombrovski wrote during his comings and goings through "Stalin's sanatoriums," as he nicknamed the Gulag: –Why did Christ forgive everyone? –Christ could forgive and absolve – answers Father Andrei–. That is why we call him redeemer. He is God, after all. Why did he have to die, to suffer? Have we thought about it? […]. The morality of this fable is simple: not even God dared, listen carefully, to forgive men from heaven. Because the value of such a forgiveness would be nil. No, descend from your Sinai, put yourself in the skin of a man, live and work for 33 years as a carpenter in a small, dirty city, endure everything a man can endure from other men, and when… you are whipped with scourges, dragged with a rope, and crucified naked, ask yourself from the top of this cursed tree: do you love men as before or not? And if you say: “Yes, I love them as before. As they are! Anyway, I love them!”, then, forgive! For your forgiveness will have such a terrible force that anyone who believes he can be forgiven by you will be forgiven. Because it is not God in heaven who forgave sin, but a crucified slave. This is what the fable of redemption means! I expect the Pope because he is the continuator of Peter, that imperfect, stubborn and cowardly man, so similar to me. Jesus could have chosen another stone on which to build his Church. Surely there were refined theologians among the Essenes, but he chooses Peter, the inconsistent one. However, as Nietzsche warned us, "he who does not want to see the elevated aspect of a man fixes his gaze more penetratingly on what is low and superficial in him – and thus betrays himself".