even in the extreme darkness …

… of the most absolute human loneliness we can listen to a voice that calls us, and we can find a hand that takes hold of us and leads us out. The human being lives because he is loved and can love; if love has penetrated even into the realm of death, life has arrived even there. (Julian Carron May 26 2010 p. 9-10)

One who is dying really knows who is accompanying him and he calls him. It may not be the wife with whom he has shared everything, but he calls the one who can really accompany him to the other shore. And why can this person accompany him? What had he intuited in her that made him call her among the many faces present in the hospital? What had he intuited? What was she carrying? What are we carrying? The other understands it immediately, he calls specifically her to be able to cross the darkness of death. And why can she do it? Here we really understand what our contribution to the world is; on one side one who calls her, and on the other she who enters the room. In these moments is comes to the surface what is the value of our ‘yes’ to Christ; when we say ‘yes’ to Christ we don’t realize what is the value of our ‘yes’ for the world. In these moments it becomes clear that what men need is exactly this, and then this ‘yes’ gains all its significance; without saying ‘yes’ to Christ in the way she did, she wouldn’t have been able to get inside the dark, she too would have run away. In that moment we understand who Christ is for each person: if Christ has taken possession of me – not because I am more clever or because I have more energy or I am more capable, it’s not this – this allows me to enter. What everybody is waiting for from us is to be able to find someone like this, in whom what Jesus introduced into history continues to happen. The Pope said it in a spectacular way in Turin in front of the Shroud: “Holy Saturday is ‘no-man’s land’ between the death and the Resurrection, but One – the only One – entered this ‘no-man’s land’ and crossed it with the signs of His Passion for man’s sake: “Passio Christi. Passio hominis”. And the Shroud speaks to us exactly about this moment, testifying exactly to that unique and unrepeatable interval in the history of humanity and the universe, in which God, in Jesus Christ, not only shared our dying, but also our remaining in death: the most radical solidarity. In this ‘time-beyond-time’ Jesus Christ “descended to the dead’. What does this mean? It means that God, having made himself man, reached the point of entering man’s most extreme and absolute loneliness, where not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort: ‘hell’. Jesus Christ, by remaining in death, passed the threshold of this ultimate loneliness to lead us to cross it with Him. We all have, at some point, experienced the terrible feeling of being abandoned, and what we fear the most about death is precisely this, like when we are children we are afraid to be alone in the dark, and only the presence of a person who loves us can reassure us. This is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday: the voice of God resounded in the realm of death. The unthinkable happened: Love penetrated into ‘hell’: even in the extreme darkness of the most absolute human loneliness we can listen to a voice that calls us, and we can find a hand that takes hold of us and leads us out. The human being lives because he is loved and can love; if love has penetrated even into the realm of death, life has arrived even there. In the hour of the extreme loneliness we will never be alone: “Passio Christi. Passio hominis”. This is the mystery of Holy Saturday! Exactly from there, from the darkness of the death of the Son of God, the light of a new hope gleamed: the light of the Resurrection” (May 2nd, 2010). Because of this we can enter  into any darkness. We can make a journey that ties us so much to Him, that makes us become so much one with Him, that we can cross any darkness without fear. This is the purpose of the work we have in front of us. (Julian Carron May 26 2010 p. 9-10)