Lectio divina
Religious Sadness
Perhaps it is precisely here, in the relationship and in the destination to God, the reason for that "Religious Sadness" so intimately connected with the nature of man that it sometimes makes him feel as if he were in exile, on earth, in a foreign country. It is the price of the divine in man, a price that is all the more painful the more one is aware of it.
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Nostalgy for God
In the saints who more than others had a sense of God, the nostalgia for the distant homeland was poignant. Of it it could be said that it is the greatest misfortune never to have had it. Doctors and psychiatrists will be able to say many things, and even true ones, about the nature of the melancholy and restlessness of the human soul; but their experience is too deep and also too painful to leave it exclusively in their hands.
It's true. sometimes they can be the expression or inner manifestation of a certain temperament; but when they manifest themselves throughout the whole existence of a healthy and committed individual, who lives in the light of faith and in this light fulfills his earthly tasks, then it must be said that melancholy and restlessness belong to another order, namely, that they have their roots in the spirit.
Sadness, when it is religious sadness, originates from the limit and the precariousness or temporariness of things; it is the sadness of those who insistently seek something, always pushed towards something further, and invariably always return empty-handed.
Sometimes, either because we are tired or discouraged, we allow ourselves to delude ourselves by letting our spirit settle down or cling to things in a hesitant hope of finding what we have not been able to have in the past... who knows if this time he may be luckier! We say to ourselves. But even for that time the disappointment was not long in coming. There is nothing infinite on earth; nothing and everything; and what has a limit is defective.
We are on a journey with a very precise goal; we can try to lengthen the road and delay the arrival at the last station by allowing us to stop on things; but no matter how many stops we allow ourselves to make, we know that the last one will inexorably be an encounter with nothing; A meeting that we have already foreseen and presented because we already have a good experience in this regard, therefore capable of making us radically incapable of being happy.
Sadness then spreads, spreads, it is like the feeling of a great emptiness, as if there were nothing, nothing on earth for which it was worth existing. This great world is still too small for the heart of man.
And so it is true that sadness can lead to a sterile bitterness against life, to attitudes that smack of renouncing the obligations that it imposes: but it can also open the soul to a deepening of the problem of one's own destiny and an awareness of one's destiny to eternity; Sadness is not always a symbol of tiredness or fear of having to collide with the reality that has crucified us until now: but the discovery of being made for what is simply perfect and infinite.
The saints above all experienced this nostalgia that ennobles and consumes, this life on the border between time and eternity, between earth and heaven: they took it in themselves and lived it in all its suffering. They were living borders, disputed between two homelands: faithful to the earth, but oriented to God, rooted in the reality of the world, yet free from its seductions. They loved life because it was sacred like all that is a gift and a duty, and at the same time they sighed for death as the fulfilment of their spiritual and insignificant existence.On the other hand, with the Beloved "I die not to die" writes St. Teresa of Avila.
Like their Fathers before them, "They see and greet the world of the Promise from afar, recognizing that they are strangers and pilgrims on this earth, and in search of a homeland". "They hold everything in the world, but in such a way that nothing keeps them in the world; they possess earthly realities, but they are not possessed by them: they dominate as sovereigns the goods they have, but their spirit is not overcome by love for them."
It was not enough for them to recognize God in faith or even to assume him as the supreme norm of perfection; they took seriously the realities they believed in; meeting God, they were fascinated by him and made him their true and supreme reality, their supreme and boundless good, to the point of becoming indifferent to the riches of the earth and considering dying a gain. "For me, to live is Christ - and to die is gain." (Paolo)
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The redeemed man, incorporated into Jesus, has become the Son of God in Jesus, and he knows that this filiation is fulfilled in the encounter with the Father; Death itself completes life. For him too, the agony and death remain dramatic, but the promise of eternal life clothes them with a hope that lifts the soul above fear. If in the saints the voice of the earth has different tones than in us to the point of fading and being silent, it is because they walk to another call. "The soul that loves," writes St. John of the Cross, "considers death as a friend and a bride... and desires the day, the hour when death is to come more than the kings of the earth desire their kingdoms and principalities."
