Drifts and landings

Fragility as a meeting ground, to experience closeness and build concrete paths of brotherhood. The writer Daniele Mencarelli knows something about it: an adolescence and youth marked by addictions, then a journey of rebirth and new awareness. Among his best-known works, Everything asks for salvation in which he told of the compulsory health treatment he experienced when he was twenty years old, in the summer of 1994.

What was the root of it all?
There are individuals who, faced with the scandal of birth, remain attracted to life, like moths to fire.
All the education they receive is not enough to understand. I wasn't a difficult boy, but I always suffered from love. I can say that suffering was my greatest belonging.
I was a lively boy who began to ask himself questions in a radical way. For better or worse I followed the all or nothing logic. What happened started from here.
Today I can say that life is made up of drifts and landings and that in addition to birth and death there is love which demonstrates the irreconcilability between the first two terms.

The search for meaning is often also combined with crises. Our society sees them as a problem. But is it really like that?
No, the crisis is not a defeat or an accidental, transitory, negative element.
It is wrong to see it this way, because the crisis is constitutive of our existence. We make the difference, depending on how we approach moments of crisis. I live a nature that involves birth, love and death that I cannot reconcile, which is why the crisis cannot be escaped.

The fear of many perhaps arises precisely from this awareness. A reality experienced above all by young people. Sometimes it is fear itself that becomes fragility that paralyzes. How do you go further?
I'm not a believer, but I read the Bible and it says there that fear is a seduction, it's something that becomes so pressing in our interior life that it completely takes possession of us and distances us from reality. Clearly there are fears and fears. If I think about my experience, it was natural for me to be afraid of my parents' death.
At the same time, I am full of guilt towards my children because I am part of a generation that has devoured all the resources, leaving a more difficult world for those who come after. I think fear is toxic when it distances us from reality. It is another thing to fight to raise the thresholds of dignity, to say no to the seductions of evil. It is everyone's task, but first and foremost young people's task.

Ours is a time of individualism. How do we learn to protect the fragility of those around us?
Anyone who doesn't meet the standards is put under the microscope. However, being atypical should not be a problem, because everyone must try to realize themselves through what they do best. In the name of an alleged normality we risk losing the possibility of growing free and developing artists. We will be better when we learn to cherish and respect everyone's originality.

What does salvation mean to you?
Salvation in sacred texts is always the same: one always saves oneself by saving others. Salvation is one. Many think of a spiritual salvation and an earthly one, but splitting is an error that harbingers of tragedies. The Nazis killed with the motto God with us. Think of Putin or those who kiss crucifixes and don't save people at sea. I live following a single precept which is mine: you never know where it comes from. But what? I do not know.
It can be salvation, a problem, a love... you have to be attentive and ready.
Are we capable of really seeing what is happening around us and who is around us? It is tiring to exercise your freedom. The goal before us is to live peacefully, but is it really possible to experience this comfort? Is it really possible to keep all this peace of mind? Try it, but then the world will make us understand that this is how things are! We don't have to live in peace! But save ourselves by saving others.

Were you able to forgive yourself today?
Yes. I managed to forgive myself after having caused so much pain. At the same time in these twenty years, I have demonstrated what my mother always knew, that my doing and undoing and even destroying was born from a white intention and not a black one. So I reconfirmed with her that what I did wasn't out of malice.

By the editorial team
FOCUS
NP December 2023