Free Emmaus by Alessandro Baricco

capacity to imagine that that man was truly God. So they came together, that day, after Calvary, very simply in memory of a beloved and irreplaceable person who had been lost. But the Holy Spirit came upon them from heaven. Thus, suddenly, the veil was torn, and they understood. They now recognized the God with whom they had walked for years, and you can imagine how every little tile of life at that instant returned to their minds, in a light so dazzling that it flung them open, to their depths and forever. In the New Testament, that opening comes to us in the beautiful metaphor of glossolalia: they were suddenly able to speak all the languages of the world—it was a known phenomenon, and connected to the figure of the seer, the soothsayer. It was the seal of a magical comprehension.
    Thus, what the priests teach us is that faith is a gift, which comes from on high and belongs to the world of mystery. For this reason it is fragile, like a vision—and, like a vision, untouchable. It is a supernatural event.
    Yet we know that it is not so.
    We obey the doctrine of the Church, but we also know a different story, one whose roots go back to the docile land that produced us. From somewhere, and in an invisible way, our unhappy families passed on to us an immutable instinct to believe that life is an immense experience.The more modest the habit they handed down, the more profound, every day, was their buried call to an ambition without limits—an almost irrational sense of expectation. So from childhood we approached the world with the precise intention of restoring it to greatness. We demand that it be just, noble, steady in reaching toward the best, and unstoppable on the path of creation. This makes us rebels, and different. The world outside appears to us for the most part a humiliating, arid duty, completely inadequate to our hopes. In the lives of those who do not believe we see the routine of the condemned, and in their every single gesture we perceive a parody of the humanity we dream of. Any injustice is an insult to our expectations—every sorrow, spite, meanness, brutality. So is any passage without sense—and every man without hope or nobility. Every petty act. Every moment lost.
    So, long before God, we believe in man—and this alone, in the beginning, is faith.
    It emerges in us in the form of a battle—we are in opposition, we are different, we are mad. What pleases others disgusts us, and what others despise is precious to us. Needless to say, that energizes us. We grow up with the idea of being heroes, yet of a strange type, which does not derive from the classic typology of the hero—we do not love weapons, or violence, or animal struggle. We are female heroes, because we slip into the brawl bare-handed, strong in our childlike candor and invincible in our attitude of irritating modesty. We crawl among the toothed wheels of the worldwith our heads high but with the step of the humble—the same revoltingly humble and firm step with which Jesus of Nazareth walked the world for all his public life, establishing, before a religious doctrine, a model of behavior. Invincible, as history has shown.
    In the depths of this upside-down epic we find God. It’s a natural step, which comes by itself. We believe so much in every creature that it’s instinctive to think of a creation—a knowing act that we call by the name of God. Thus our faith is not so much a magical and uncontrollable event as a linear deduction—the extension into infinity of an inherited instinct. Seekers of meaning, we are pushed far, and at the end of the journey is God—the total fullness of meaning. Very simple. If we happen to lose that simplicity, the Gospels help us, because in them our journey from man to God is fixed forever in a definite model, where the rebel son of man coincides with the chosen son of God, the two fused into a single heroic flesh. What might be madness in us is there