Alone, and the true holiday that preserves the life force

(Mk 6:30-34)

 

Spy and interpretive key of the Gospel passage is the expression "in aloof" (v.31), which in the Gospels is everywhere used to indicate critical moments of misunderstanding or even open opposition between the Lord and the Apostles.

"Come ye apart, into a deserted place": the explicit reference to the "desert" is that of the Exodus - recalling the time of the first Love.

Experience the great Ideals that the path of Freedom could still instil in the New People.

Brought forth in silence, far from the hustle and bustle of idols: in the guise of reflection and attention, sobriety of life, acceptance, real sharing.

 

Jesus distances himself more and more decisively from his environment, and does not want around him a horizon of conceited chosen ones, attracted by the suddenly exploded visibility - they would end up considering themselves indispensable.

They would be overloaded with triumphalist and monopolistic platitudes - little attentive to the contents, their connection with the forms of implementation... and the social implications, such as bridging the gaps.

In fact, here they chase the many things to be done - also to make them positively more agile, of course - but they go haphazardly and regardless. Despite all the fuss and hosannas, they do not make sensible paths.

They are always there, even though they should go elsewhere; or vice versa.

All this perhaps precisely to consolidate ascents and positions from the earliest days, in the manner of certain life offices [still never questioned] or stages of careers that cannot be changed.

Conditions that make one artificial, and do not create intimate fulfilment, nor that of others. They raise a lot of fuss, but stay in the habit.

The problem they have in mind is wrong, and in spite of any sweats and little free time (or for themselves) they do not demonstrate a genuinely creative energy.

We see this.

So the Lord does not call 'aside' for a 'spiritual retreat' - to safeguard the stability of exhausted hierarchies, or for a moment of escapism that avoids the crush and its stress. But because something profoundly substantial does not add up.

One has to be self-critical.

 

In all four Gospels, only Jesus is the one who "teaches" [passim, Greek text].

The apostles - who give themselves the air of teachers (v.30) - are only given the task of "announcing", not of supervising, presiding over, coordinating others.

They have no title whatsoever to approach people thinking they have to convey a life tailored to their agenda, and a mind set on results [or banner membership].

 

After having called them to himself - because they are still far away - and sent them to proclaim their experience of freedom and the Good News on our behalf (vv.7-13), the Master does not seem very happy with what the apostles have preached.

So he imposes on them a test (so to speak) of basic catechism, just for his intimates.

Even after his failure even in Nazareth (vv.1-6) - his bannermen willingly mistook the Servant who was educating them for the victorious, hoped-for, respected, glorious Messiah.

For this reason, faced with the needy masses, the Lord first "began to teach" (v.34).

In short, the young Rabbi has to start again, in order to correct the illusory easiness conveyed by the followers. Maybe just to leave a trace, get recognised and succeed - with lost people!

 

The Tao Tê Ching writes (xxvii):

"He who travels well leaves neither furrows nor footprints [...] he who closes well uses neither bars nor stakes".

Master Ho-shang Kung comments:

'He who travels well in the Way seeks within himself, without going down the hall or out the door. Therefore he leaves no furrows or footprints'.

He adds:

"He who well closes his cravings through the Dao, preserves the life force".

Master Wang-Pi points out:

"He proceeds in accordance with spontaneity, without being cause or principle: therefore creatures reach their highest degree, without him leaving chariot furrows or footprints [...] he conforms to the spontaneity of creatures and neither institutes nor confers.

 

Jesus' closest collaborators had not yet realised that there is another World, evolutionary and inverted - but ignored.

That is why they have a fortune of their own, but produce very bad evangelisation.

The crowds thronging around the Lord were still exactly as they were before: "like sheep that have no shepherd" (v.34). Steeped in dismay.

In spite of the affirmation of the circle of disciples who had set their sights on the model of subservience and prestige, humanity was still crying out. 

Their stability made others even more insecure.

[We, too, want to discover personal wealth, not only that of the known 'pupils', the ever-neighbours, or the founders, the princes, the leaders].What was missing was the friendship that nourishes more than food, a perception of adequacy that satisfies more than health; the adherence that conveys life.

And the sense of being born and seeking. The encounter that shifts the gaze; the intimately recognised union with the Truth.

Apostles or no apostles, without the Person of Christ Himself, that people searching for their roots would not have flourished - least of all from their own grey, fragile, lacklustre hues.

The profound needs of the shaky ones were absolutely intact, despite the leaders' busy-ness around... unfortunately artificial and careless, still ambiguous and immature, dirigiste and superficial.

Extremities that even nowadays do not allow disoriented people to reach the highest degree of their being, because every pastoral expedient triggers the reverse: a loss of capacity.

 

The cunningly opiate and artefactual festivals advocated by guides or approximate agencies are an expression of the normal religious side of the civilisation of the outside world.

Being with the Lord again... puts the mind right.

He alone opens wide the doorways of understanding and creates other options that correspond to us, in quintessence and hope - generating new answers to new questions, overcoming forced compactness.

This is the real holiday, the real decisive appointment: to stay with the right Person; the one who does not enervate with his wrong rhythms or add confusion to confusion.

Christ gathers our kernel from dispersion, our seed from fragmentariness [which hides behind the masks of pretended expertise]; our flower, from life without intimate purpose.

To seek oneself one must gather oneself together with Him - and verify oneself in the creative power of His Word, interpreted far from the commonplaces that anaesthetise.

The throng and the noise of the crowd, however naive, confuse ideas; they inculcate the vulgar plots of the earthly realm: not the style of the divine life, which entrusts us to our own unexpressed resources.

No more models. We need a real Witness, who corresponds, and becomes a companion on the journey.

We feel an incessant desire to be balanced in the identity of the concrete good. It lies beyond the fatuous, variant but immediately succulent traits of recognition.

Here, no person regenerates.

Only around our inner Friend do we become Body in serious, amiable and profound conversation; even in the noisy and confusing everyday.

 

After a day of worries, instead of TV anaesthetics and before epidermal things, let us be refreshed by this Contact that introduces us into the Banquet of Life (vv.35-44).

We will be recovered rather than condemned to pious futility - and never alone. Inside we have a Friend.

 

In short, in the reference [established or fashionable] no person is cradled in his novelty, or balanced and regenerated.

Enough, then, of the many 'models' without soul or prophecy that reproach us - and the commonplaces that anaesthetise.

In fact, in each of us, every expedient or artifice triggers the opposite: a loss of capacity.

"Like sheep that have no shepherd" (v.34).

In preparing us for the metamorphosis that belongs to us, the Friend of the Journey does not always intend to analyse and control.

Thus he does not extinguish the small energies, the character, the unique projections, the silent actions, and the Enchantment.

Letting us breathe, only the authentic Shepherd gathers our 'core' from dispersion, our Seed from fragmentation; our Flower, from life without intimate purpose.

 

 

To internalise and live the message:

 

How do you evangelise? Does Jesus speak in you or do you speak alone?

 

 

Authentic Contact

Come and see

[cf. Jn 1:35-42].

 

"Tithing hour" (v.39): in the Semitic mentality, sunset of the old and beginning of the new Day. It is approached dialogically, heart to heart; not according to the prescribed ancient order.

The Vocation is the discovery of the reason why we were born, of what we were made for, and it corresponds immediately - in an unprecedented, not cloying way - to the reality of a road travelled as if on foot.

On it, the call of the hearth of the Word gradually helps to understand our person and to define our exceptional mission.

God is the One who calls, so that without too much commentary we see into it, sense the impulses, develop a new outlook on things, grasp them as an Encounter, and let ourselves go.

Says the Tao Tê Ching (LVII): "From what do I know that this is so? From the present' - and Master Ho-shang Kung comments: 'Lao-tzu says: How do I know that Heaven's intention is this? I know it from what I see today'.

Such a scenario triggers in the soul a passion that sinks into the mystery, an energy that develops on this meaningful encounter and encounter with reality and new yet extravagant relationships, without exaggeration.The way of scrutinising the world anchored to small certainties of custom or thought will always make us be and do ordinary things, dictated by habit, prejudice, conditioned hopes (which do not belong to us).

If so, we will never move our inner eye to unknown processes and territories. If undertaken, they will introduce the heart to a kind of hermeneutic island, face to face with the invisible Friend who makes us feel at home.

Such paths together will not give us a priori the certainty that we are 'in the right', but that we are involved in the same spirit of the Nazarene - rebelling against the constraints we may already be putting ourselves in.

They entangle with entanglements his superior Voice, or the innate icon to be admired intimately, the figure of our Vocation.

The restlessness of the Waiting, its fantastic frenzies, those murmurs that seem to be in the air, are perhaps the expression of an unseen fairy tale that we do not know what it is - but our fascinating brother does.

On the contrary, we will be on the path marked out by always or by others, until his alternative vision launches us onto a path that is still dark instead of well illustrated (where everything is under control).

With excessive mental feedback we would get no further than vicious circles, or already adopted characters and defined roles - armour humiliating the Spirit, who does not like sphinxes impermeable to the dew of the coming tide.

Over-filtering and over-managing will not lead us to appreciate the value of the inner world and its presences, nor will it help us to perceive the meaning of encounters, the openness of the horizon of the proposals that life brings us to dismantle the imprinting we drag along.

The only therapy for jumping beyond the usual way of seeing things will be to shift the perspective, so that it makes us dissymmetrical and allows us to enter the field richer and more varied, outside the perimeter traced by conventions.

With Jesus we will embark on a path full of pitfalls, yet magical, because it is not taken for granted. With Him we will realise ourselves, our vocation and our own codes - but in the fullness of the polyhedron that is personal essence.

No one is without modulations to be discovered and activated; calibrated, anonymous and poor before the Lord and others. Hence, no one is destined to be a labourer or a functionary of archaic bandwagons - devoid of living figures and fantastic, magical, awe-inspiring inventiveness.

Even the dreamy tone of this narrative says so.

In a relationship of assiduity with Christ, it is his and our ideals outside the guidelines that characterise existence, which becomes red-hot starting from the soul... without first normalising it according to others' rules.

Beware, therefore, of constructing a conformist destiny of the penultimate hand, one that shatters one's whole life because it is chosen from what is common, external, accustomed and quiet, or vice versa delusional: criteria destined to collapse.

Nor does the Calling become a projection of ambition, suggested by vanity. Nor a reward for previous loyalties or behind performance.

First of all, a reading of oneself, a living listening to events (more intimate than conformist and outlined) as well as a participatory interpretation of reality, of the Word - and elastic reworking of moments, advice and relationships.

 

"Come and see" (v.39 Semitic undertone): perception, the glance that notices, is essential to understand who we are.

Nothing intimate, but nothing external - not even for the happenings outside us: we are those who develop innate images and Dreams.

God did not create us to stay on the ground, but to take flight. In fact, the Baptist had stopped (v.35 Greek text): "again he stood (there)".

Jesus, on the other hand, proceeds, is always moving; He Himself begins a new journey.

The comparison is stark. The old expectations come to a standstill - they have no strength left in them. That is why the first disciples of Jesus came from the school of John - where they had met.

After being a pupil of the greatest leader of his time, the new, young Rabbi sets out on his own.

He does so not to stand out from the others, but to proclaim the authentic heart of the Father, in his own figure: Word-formed Son, but who has only gradually assimilated the secrets of the human and spiritual journey.

It is an astonishing identity, that of the Lamb of God: his Person, event and Blood depict the Action of the Creator Spirit, who takes away the capacity of the forces of evil to do harm - not through immediate and prodigious shortcuts.

Purposes that are too close do not unite man and the world to God. They do not confirm the rightness and conformity of the great End and Source: the continuous Presence that accompanies our particular activity.

Every soul has an original physiognomy: it is in a special way, it has its own place and meaning.

The personal Calling is constitutive of this unrepeatable essence - which opens up the task of uniqueness - grammar of our language (even with ourselves) and interaction in the world; in the soul, of listening to God.

The unrepeatable Vocation is the only path to follow to read and encounter the genius of time before problems, and a kind of impulse; will and factor of recognition that accompanies and orients in them.

 

There may be an unforgettable day and hour in life, but the relationship of custom is essential.

A furtive encounter with the unstoppably moving Christ is not enough to 'look inside' and understand every decisive weight. And to become - like Simon - building stone that composes and is composed.

 

Here, even in seemingly unimportant situations, we are ourselves: we are cosmic and divine intention; we are immeasurably important.

Commenting on the same passage from the Tao (LVII) quoted above, Master Wang Pi points out: 'He who rules the world with the Way, exalts the root to make the branches grow.

 

Like an artistic vein.

 

 

To internalise and live the message:

 

What do you wait for from Jesus? Or do you give in and let him lead you? What do you think he would call you?