Muscles

The emoticon with an arm showing off its muscles is often sent to encourage people suffering from an illness. What's wrong with that? Apart from the flatness of emoticons, which kill the ability to translate the infinite modulations of feelings into words, the bad thing is actually the muscles. They exhort the patient, just when he is becoming aware of his fragility as a creature, to attack the army of evil with an army equally armed with physical and moral muscles. Which he doesn't have. In the Christian tradition, evil, including physical evil mysteriously mixed with internal evil, as the healings performed by Jesus show us, is not fought with muscles; contradicts itself with the good. How the darkness disappears if you turn on a light. Increasing the reservoir of good that a sick person already has within himself, even without knowing it.

Those muscles disturb the painful path that the patient is laboriously working through. His condition forces him to make a choice: to make sense of his illness. He went through a first phase, precisely that of muscles: the arrogant challenge of those who want to succeed at all costs, ignoring the Stone Guest who is his evil. But it doesn't work, he gets depressed. Second strategy, resignation: an attitude foreign to the gospel of Christ, who does not give up even in the face of the death of his best friend Lazarus. Third, the revolt, the radical rejection of his unjust state. Thus he enters the fourth phase: the claustrophobic desperation of those who feel in a dead-end tunnel.

Now he is cornered, faced with the only sensible choice: the face-to-face confrontation with the reality of the disease. It is also a face to face with himself, with the fragility, the precariousness of the human condition. Illness becomes the privileged opportunity to move from unconsciousness to awareness: of who you are, of who the Other is who tries to communicate with you through your weakness. He understands, now, that evil must not be fought, but "crossed". Without resigning but without giving up, without resisting but welcoming the disease itself with friendship. Welcoming the unknown, abandoning ourselves to trust while the storm rages, like wheat that bends under the fury of the wind. Abandonting yourself to welcome loosens internal knots, serenely disposes of body and soul, produces that flow of good which alone is capable of dissolving evil. To make it bearable and even a source of new inspiration.

The illness now reveals to the patient his riches: self-knowledge, solidarity with all men, exchange of sincere affection with friends as there has never been in his previous life. Even healing becomes truly possible. Even when the physical one is precluded, the healing of the existential wound that makes us all bleed is never: infinite nostalgia for a total and unconditional Love, for a return to the Origin, life in the nascent state that the End cannot interrupt.


Flaminia Morandi
NP August / September 2023