Many are the thoughts and feelings that have come and gone since I was told, at ten o’clock this morning, that my friend Marcos had died in an accident. My instinctive reaction, greatly conditioned by the inertia of a certain mindset, takes the form of anger. Fourteen days ago we were beginning the spiritual exercises together in Guadarrama; days of intense experience and companionship together. The news that at the end of the exercises he would be entering the seminary in Barcelona bound me to him more intimately still. The grace of sharing together in the future the gift of the priesthood gladdened my heart as never before. When the exercises ended and we said goodbye, he told me: «I had never experienced anything like it in my life». It was priestly communion, which fills my life and gives it meaning, already beginning to take root in his heart.
This morning all those days came back to me like a rushing river, flooding my soul and provoking an insistent cry: it is Another who gives me life, here and now! A vertigo that has still not left my bones. It is a mystery how the Mystery reaches us and awakens us.
A lump in my throat took hold of me a minute before the Eucharist began. My whole life passed before my eyes at astonishing speed, with a Lenten refrain that I could hear perfectly: dust you are, and to dust you shall return! The fleetingness of life, the total and absolute dependence of my life on God’s hands, became the dominant thought, a thought accompanied by the urgent call not to waste a single second of my life, to live every instant as a protagonist of history.
The Gospel images about the need to be prepared for the Lord’s coming filed one after another through my mind. It was an unceasing flow of phrases, figures, attitudes… impossible to ford.
And on this dizzying descent the moment of the consecration arrived, where the meaning of Marcos’s life, of my life and of the life of every man became clear to me. Our life is loved to the very end, loved by Christ in the fragile and anointed flesh of the Church. My heart was flooded with joy on seeing that it was the same embrace that Marcos and I were receiving at that moment: the embrace of Christ through the life and charism of Fr Giussani, precisely today, as we commemorate the tenth anniversary of his passing from this world to the Father. The fullness of communion that Marcos was already experiencing as a foretaste in this company became plain in that instant in the embrace of the glorious Christ. I recalled the words that Fr Giussani, already very ill, said to a friend, words that today came true for Marcos: «I shall go to paradise before you, but when you arrive I will be there waiting for you and I will open the door, and behind the door I will be there». Only this communion, lived as a first fruit in our mortal flesh, makes possible the certainty of the hope of eternal life. He who has begun this good work in us, this experience of correspondence in history through this community of witnesses, will himself bring it to completion (cf. Phil 1:6).
Like Jesus before the tomb of his friend Lazarus, tears run down my cheeks too, but it is a weeping filled with hope, with the hope of seeing one another again. See you soon, Marcos!
Jesús Úbeda
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.