Bishop Aiello: Only chaos and lights in the city, stop: let it be a Christmas of prayer
The message of the bishop of Avellino
We receive and publish the Christmas message from the Bishop of Avellino, Monsignor Arturo Aiello
THE HOT GOOD
“If we stopped for just an hour in this rush of cars clogging the streets, of lights and sounds at too high decibels that dazzle our eyes and pierce our ears, if we had the courage to cancel dinners and gifts, bottles of sparkling wine that their corks fly off, steps too fast to meet, greeting messages too formal to reach the heart, we would realize the Lord’s Christmas which is the only Gift to take with trembling hands and eyes wet with tears.
Hectic streets, too much noise
The frenzy of the streets and the markets set up everywhere, as if we were in Bressanone or Vienna, delude us that this Christmas 2022 is just any Christmas and that a few sequins and a sprinkle of snow are enough to create the usual effect, but, on closer inspection , under the colors of Santa Claus and a thick white beard, we try to hide, or someone forbids us to understand, that the celebration of our childhood (it is still “children’s” or “when we were little” Christmas!) has coordinate several this year.
Less parties, more faith
Perhaps of our literature, which nonetheless boasts a vast range of poetic compositions, the verses of Ungaretti come across to us as the most suitable. a thousand stalls of colorful shepherds: “I don’t want/ to dive/ into a ball/ of streets/ I have so much / tiredness/ on my shoulders”. It seems like the reflection of an old man tired of parties and noise, but the soldier poet was only twenty-eight when he wrote these verses which have the syncopated tempo of sobs. Maybe he was on leave from the front where the First World War was being fought and he carried in his heart and on his shoulders the weight of a tormented humanity that sent “the boys of 1989” to their deaths, like in a game: an entire generation of young people who “left and have not yet returned” will sing De Gregori in “Generale” decades later.
Stop and think about Ukraine
If we stopped just an hour we would see a flood of young people who left for any military exercise border who have seen their game get serious and the shots are not blanks as they crossed the Ukraine. Of them (how many happy hopes they had in their hearts) not even the tortured bodies remain to be returned to their mothers. In vain they would have written with a text message “Foreign people, then return my bones to the breast of the sad mother” as Ugo Foscolo had noted in his will.
Too much death, serve prayer
If we stopped for an hour we would see the silent dead of a war that has been going on for ten months without the words of democracy and diplomacy being able to stop it. There are children and women, elderly people with tears in their eyes on the rubble of destroyed homes and lives, blonde girls who took a selfie and sent it to their friends without knowing it was the last one. The face of one of them remains on the banner on the episcopal scaffolding which for months has been calling for the wind of peace to rise, but it is still a tragic calm. There are also thousands of Ukrainian children and women here on our territory, with in their eyes the nostalgia of a torn land where their men are fighting, in 2022, for a flag called freedom and every day they have reason to wonder if they are still among the living. Destroyed cities, gutted countries, civilizations razed to the ground and asphalted in an instant by missiles and bombs as if they had never existed. Christmas this year is also this.
Enough violence
If we stopped for just an hour, we heard the voice of women (in them I also see Mary of Nazareth) trying to come out of a prison as light as a veil, but as heavy as a mountain. Their unveiling reveals the desire to fully experience a femininity on which history and religions have always placed prohibitions by charging very high costs to those who only asked for “a room of their own”. The veil, lowered eyes, an ancillary role in the service of males in the name of a god that we have not come to know like this. Those women, the same ones who years ago “gave their voices” on Iranian balconies and terraces in the evening to incite revolt, today captured, raped, sentenced to death, must crowd our cribs and make us understand that history is the place of redemption or perdition. The story, the same that weighed on the shoulders of a young soldier in the colorful Naples of 1916, the only story of the man and women who today see colorful veils waving like spring flags. The story that comes to terms with an elderly and weak Europe, with eternal disputes, in the Bel Paese, between north and south, between ready laws that speak of autonomy and hide separations. In front of this Nativity scene where history meets, where the poor abound, where war sows death and destruction in Europe, in Syria, where a veil can strangle a woman, ten women, a thousand women, the pathetic question by Eduardo De Filippo in “Christmas in Casa Cupiello” “Do you like it or Nativity?” this time he finds me aligned with the surly answer of “Ninnillo”: “No, I don’t like it!”.
If we stopped for just an hour, we understood that it is not a political system or an ideology, not even this or that religion, that is in danger, but the very existence of man. This is why God incarnates himself and reverses man’s homicidal and suicidal spiral with the insertion of a divine photon into the aging veins of humanity: Jesus, the Son of Mary and Joseph, who came to light, like a Star “in one scarce moon” (Erri De Luca). “Leave me like this / like a / thing / laid / in a / corner / and forgotten” Ungaretti asks his friends clamoring at the door: it is not wanting to distance oneself from the party, but to adopt a contemplative attitude to understand its deepest roots. By stopping for an hour, you, I, we could access a vision of irresistible hope and keep your hands cold, as in front of a lit fireplace: “Here/ you can’t feel/ anything/ but the good heat”.
+ Arthur Aiello