How and when is it possible to encounter God in our present time and to be fascinated and to get transformed by it?

Often we run the risk of limiting ourselves to speak of God, just as if we could know anything from the external reality, instead of listening to Him there, where He is present. Only in this last case, our person, even before our words, becomes a credible testimony for the brothers and sisters we meet along our journey.

David Maria Turoldo stated that the silence of Jesus impresses her particularly. Most of her life, in Nazareth, was a family life, a life of work and silence. Sermons and teachings followed, occupying a quantitatively much reduced time.

This reality concerns us, too. The man, who intends to sit at the school of Jesus, cannot ignore this aspect of his existence. "The utmost love is in the highest degree of imitation.  The highest degree of imitation is to imitate Christ perfectly in one out of the three kinds of life of which she has given us the example: preaching, desert, Nazareth"2. Nazareth is the place of listening and of ordinary living.

The word must get mature through years of silence, which charge it with experience and deep meaning.  When Jesus starts saying things bigger than the world, He uses the humblest images. "The Kingdom of heaven is like a bit of leaven which a woman mixes with a handful of flour (Matthew 13, 33): a little leaven, a measure of flour, a humble woman. Let us go through the whole chapter, which presents the so-called sermon in parables. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. The Kingdom of God is like a pearl hidden in a field, like a seed thrown into a field, like a field sown with wheat and darnel; it is like a net thrown into the sea.

"They are always images of concrete, little, real things. This is just because the truth is within things, not outside them. Christianity is concrete; grace is the lymph of creation, and not a reality separated from life and history"3.

See, then, that we have not to seek it in unknown places. The encounter with God begins here and now; in the immediacy of our reality and of the situation in which we are. It is, therefore, in our condition of corporeity, which is its essential and important part.

The body today

Two different cultural tendencies sign the way of perceiving and living our corporeity4. With his distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, Descartes de-classed the body to the range of an object of investigation, almost a simple appendix of the thinking substance, which, according to him, is our true essence. It is very eloquent, in this regard, a passage from the Meditazioni metafisiche, in which the human person is identified with a mind, which is something different from the body.

"Who am I"?  I am a thing that thinks. What is it a thinking thing? It is a thing, which doubts, conceives, states, denies, wants, does not want, imagines and feels (…). Now, knowing that we do not conceive the bodies if not by the faculty of comprehending within us, not through imagination, nor through the senses; that we do not know them because we see and touch them, but only because we conceive them through the thought, I evidently know that there is nothing easier than my spirit "5.

In many manifestations of the triumph of the body, characterising the contemporary culture, we meet again the heritage of dualism. We must not forget the fact that the Cartesian vision of the body has favoured the progress of medicine, by consenting of investigating it with detachment, through reason and scientific observation. However, there is a use of the body, an exaltation of its efficiency and spontaneity, which moves to the direction of manipulation and of reducing the body to an object, an expropriated body, a machine to produce labour, esthetical, erotic or athletic results.

The invasion and exploitation to trading ends of techniques and practising to empower or even to modify our corporeity (fashion, fitness, cosmetics, esthetical surgery   …) prove it. We can say the same thing about the exaggerated, almost obsessive, recourse to pharmacology and to medical assistance before every symptom or hint of ill-being, almost as if we wanted to exorcise or deny the frailty, which characterises our humanity. Here we go out of the horizon of the cure and the struggle of suffering. They are dutiful and legitimate attitudes: to follow a dream of perfection and of intangibility of the "machine-body", as if it were the matter of keeping a car to obtain always the best service from it.  The extreme point of these tendencies comes from the interventions allowed by the genetic researches, which want to mould and control the bodily reality from its very conception.

The reflection leading to the re-discovery of the body, starting from the phenomenology of the '900, is of a different sign. Edmund Husserl, in Ideas for a pure phenomenology and for a phenomenological philosophy, speaks of the body as a zero point of every orientation. All the positions in the space have their own collocation with respect to our viewpoint. Our body, instead, is for us the zero point, wherever it is. Our body is the "here" in which we situate ourselves. In this sense, Gabriel Marcel says that our body is an absolute mediator: all that we experience and feel; all our relations with the world pass through the body: the body mediates our very ideas. We live in the body from within. I to hold the objects, not my hand; I can see, not my eyes;  I can hear, not my ears.

An example by Umberto Galimberti is quite appropriate: we can have a conceptually perfect idea of swimming, but we shall never really know what swimming is until our body experiences the immersion into water6. The concept of swimming is not enough to be able to swim; we need to be in water. It is by inhabiting the world with our body, that we can know the world. We cannot distinguish ourselves from our body, because it is the original opening to the world. We are in the world with our body, which allows us to intervene in the world and to change it. At the same time, it is through the body that we realise ourselves, our choices, and we start our relation with others by communicating, dialoguing and loving.

Let us think of the love between man and woman. Can there be any love without the physical reality, without the face of the other, without the caress, the kisses and sexuality?

The body is not only the physical instrument of love, but also its symbolic and communicative support. Communication is characterised by the space in which we are, by our reciprocal position and by the bodily signals, which we send to each other. Without the body, that is, without the form, the dimensions, the space occupied by the body, there would be no relations, nor any possibility of experience. The energetic potential resides in the body. It enables man to produce, to create and to transform reality starting from what is missing.

Another determining contribution to the re-discovery of the body has come from the feminist movement, which has brought to evidence the reality of the sexed body. The body not only is not an instrumental support for the mind, but it is itself signed always by its sexed nature, male or female, which is translated into those traits which lead to the distinction of the gender ( namely, what it means to be male and what it means to be female in the social life). Rather than only one, there exist two fundamental experiences of the body lived in its specificity: the masculine and the feminine.

In the light of these brief observations, it becomes a priority for us to avoid that our body be monopolised by messages and practices of medical-scientific, aesthetic, sportive and commercial character coming from society. They tend to orient the management towards one direction, rather than the other. Thus, we would finish by losing our own fundamental aspect and of our identity, to fall into any form of control. In fact, there would be other persons to tell us how to manage our body, convincing us that it is the true good. What we actually need is the awareness of our body, of its potentials and limits; of its well-being and ill-being, as well as of the signals it sends us. If the choices concerning the body pass through our awareness, if the external bombing impulses did not influence us, our autonomy and our freedom would increase.

The love-history between God and the human body

Summarising the previous considerations, we are a body. It is in the body that our sensations centre themselves. We live as a body. We create relations with one another through the body. The feelings manifest themselves through the body.

Faith allows us to see the body as an occasion of sharing, of communion. The concrete physical encounter with the other is the foundation of every authentic relationship, the foundation of love, unless there is distance and extraneousness. It is not by chance that the reality of God ca reach us through corporeal symbols and, therefore, the corporeity -if lived as a sharing- can favour our encounter with the divine. In fact, God becomes present to us in his corporeity.

The Camaldolite monk, Benedetto Calati, for instance, said that God is a kiss, referring to the first nine sermons of St. Bernard on the Song of Songs, dedicated to the kiss. A kiss explains everything. The Trinitarian life is a kiss: the Father kisses the Son and the Holy Spirit. The hypostatic union is a kiss. The divine nature is like the human nature. Is the life of man and woman not a kiss? This purely physical contact is a sign of tenderness, of the loving and respectful encounter with the other. To kiss each other is to share the deepest intimacy.

In the Word of God, the signs are unequivocal. They open a completely new horizon. "Christianity is not a doctrine; it is not a theory of what has been and what will be of the human soul, but the description of a real event of man's life"8. I like to retrace three moments of this event, in which we see the delineation of God's relation with the human body, a relation in the emblem of sharing. It is a kind of triptych with the healing of the deaf man at its centre. Here is the narration of Mark.

Returning from the territory of Tyre, he went by way of Sidon towards the lake of Galilee, right through the Decapolis territory. And they brought him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they asked him to lay his hands on him. He took him aside to be by themselves, away from the crowd, put his finger into the man's ear and touched his tongue with spittle. Then looking up to heaven he sighed and said to him 'Ephphatha', that is, "Be opened". And his ears were opened, and at once the impediment of his tongue was loosened and he spoke clearly" (Mk 7, 31.36).

God shares the body of man

Verbum caro factum est. The Word became flesh (Jo 1, 14). God is not an alien, shut up in inaccessible heavens. He loves the whole man, to the extent of making man's corporeity his own. Jesus is a man, with a human body. However, if Jesus were only a man, we would still be alone, left to ourselves. God encounters man, choosing to be a body. This is Christmas. He is a God of men, because He binds divinity with humanity

God shares with the body

He took him aside to be by themselves, away from the crowd, put the finger into the man's ears and touched his tongue with spittle" (Mk 7, 33). When Jesus heals the deaf man, he does not go up a pedestal practising some kind of magic. He enters in relation with him, and touches him where his evil is localised. It is as if, through a physical contact, he opened a channel. Sharing is not alms, it is not a form of assistance. It is an entering the house of the other with one's own life and an overcoming evil together. The attention paid to the whole person begins with a physical dimension.

God shares his own life with the body of man

Jesus said, "Why are you so agitated, and why are these doubts stirring in your hearts? See by my hands and my feet that it I myself!  Touch me and see for yourselves;  a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have" (Luke 24, 38.39). From God to man and from man to God … It is a total sharing: God has made himself one of us to make us like him. The whole man becomes eternal.  He enters a new life, including his body: the Resurrection of Jesus is a sign of our resurrection. God loves us as we are, that is corporeal. Therefore, also our body shares the eternal life of God. With regard to God, the presence of the Risen Lord reveals that He does not accept death, does not allow that the dead remain dead. God is not eternal death, but eternal life. About the human history, the presence of the Risen Lord means the unfailing certainty of God's victory over all the hostile forces, of good over evil, of the truth over lie, of love over hatred, of meekness over arrogance, of joy over sorrow, of truth over falsity.

To deepen the contact dimension, of the encounter with the body, in which there is reciprocal trust, exchange, help, he puts us in this trail of sharing. It arouses a new, alternative, anti-trend, fairer and fraternal life-style.

A seed of eternal life

Christmas and Easter are signs of God's loving project on the human persons and on the whole man in his entirety: corporeity and spirituality without dualism. In the light of God, there are both the roots of our material body and its final destiny. Fr. John Vannucci has explained this with a wonderful and poetical clarity in a meditation to the Benedictine nuns of Pontasserchio, during 1973 Advent.

"Our task as men consists in transfiguring our matter, our body. One day, we shall depose the external part of our body, which has not been a prison at all, but which has allowed us to mature and to leave behind the essence of life, of good, of love and of freedom we have been able to conquer on earth. We shall put down our little bag into the womb of mother earth, but we shall deposit in it also all the good, the greatness, the nobility, the vibrations of the life we have conquered here on earth, imprinted in the matter of our body. The eternal part of our being flies to God and immerses itself into the indefeasible ecstasies of those who enjoy the vision of God. Our body will not be like chains, which they leave over here, fleeing away from prison, no. It is a seed which others will pick up and continue"9.

Nothing of us goes lost: the good rises and finds fulfilment. Mary shows us the fulfilment of God's designs: saved from the force of evil and the death of sin, called to share the divine life with our body, our body is a seed of eternal life.

I have brought to evidence the healing of the deaf man as a fulcrum of the sharing history between God and man: it is the story of how we can encounter God in the body. In my flesh, in the flesh of every person whom I meet, there is His imprint. The listening to this Word makes me to feel loved by God and thus it makes me to love Him. This love is sharing and it starts from a contact, from the physical relation, as the form with which it expresses and concretises itself. A disincarnated sharing, made up only of good feelings, is artificial. Sharing also starts from the body, that is, from the physical, tangible encounter; otherwise there is always distance, extraneousness.

We exalt our bodies excessively and we reduce them to goods for sale, yet we are very little able to share with the body. The gestures of Jesus with the deaf man attribute a new significance to the gesture, with which we become neighbours to others. They push us towards directions not yet explored: learning how to touch each other with reciprocal trust, transmitting tenderness, communicating through contact, listening to one's body and that of others, learning gesture and therapy forms with which we can contribute to the well-being of others.

The human heart is a jewel case, which no forcing instrument can ever open: it opens and shares its treasures only when we caress it.