At the beginning of February, we spent a week at Varigotti with some of our youngest priests and one evening, we invited to join us Antonio and Paola, the parents of Marco Gallo, a young man who died in a car accident when he was seventeen and for whom there is a nascent cause of beatification. That final morning, before hopping on his motorbike to go to school, Marco had written on the wall of his room the words that the women heard addressed to them that day at the empty tomb: “Why are you looking among the dead for the One who is living?”.
Christ is not buried in a tomb or in memories, in the nostalgia for something that is no longer. Christ is present now, within the lives of those who still seek Him and who let themselves be found by Him. Christ is the living man. This expression sums up, in my memory, two memories that are completely different from each other.
The first is tied to a small town in Sicily called Scicli. I did not know about its existence until I began to try to understand the meaning of a song by Vinicio Capossela that I had heard a number of years earlier and which was entitled “The living man.” I discovered that the famous singer-songwriter, born in Germany to Irpinian parents but raised in Emilia, had written that song after having witnessed what happens every year, on the morning of Easter, in that small Sicilian village.
Christ is alive in the existence of men and women made alive by the encounter with Him
At the end of the Mass, a handful of the town’s men, those who are muscular and lacking no nutrition, carried the statue of Jesus through the town square, which had been venerated inside the parish church during the sad days that mark the passion and death of Our Lord. As soon as the wooden sculpture reaches the square chock full of people who have arrived from all over the island, suddenly they begin to pull on it from all sides. The statue seems to become agitated, changing directions suddenly, dangerously oscillating and then continues in a kind of crazy dance, exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
This picturesque spectacle of popular devotion has one aim: to affirm before the world that that Man is alive. It is a way of saying that thanks to Christ, death no longer elicits fear. That the Resurrection of Jesus does not eliminate it, but makes it a passage that opens us to a new life.
But Man Alive is also the title of one of the first books I ever read, when I was young, written with the proverbial and ironic mastery of G.K. Chesterton: since then, I have not ceased to cite the story of its protagonist, Innocent Smith, accused of being a polygamist and philanderer, one who seduced girls to then abandon them after a few months of passion; one who always fell in love with the same kind of woman, small and timid, with hair the color of a carrot. Until you discover that, in reality, the woman is always the same: it is with her that the man continuously falls in love, whom he courts and conquers to be able to promise her, once again, eternal faithfulness.
The Resurrection of Jesus does not eliminate death, but makes it a passage that opens to a new life
Innocent Smith is an example of a living man because he is in love with life: it is the image of the Christian who arises every morning to scour reality for the signs of the Beloved, the presence of the Risen Christ.
Easter reminds us that Christ is alive. Alive within the Church, in the existence of men and women made alive by the encounter with Him and by the desire to encounter Him every day.
These are the saints whose faces we must seek, persons for whom neither their own limit nor the limit of others nor pain nor death represent a reason for scandal. “A love for life characterizes the figure of the saint who to affirm his own life does not need to deny anything, not even death,” writes Fr. Giussani; because “death is redeemed: it is a passage to life.”
It is here that we must seek, as Marco Gallo did, the Living Man: in those who are enamored of Christ to the point of giving their life for Him.
