The most usual gesture at the start of the day is to look at oneself in a mirror: all of us usually do it. It is not a blind obedience to the dynamics of wanting to appear, or a simple play of vanity. We look at our own reflex image and stop in silence, because the somatic features have their own eloquence. They are instants during which we fulfil fruitful journeys, going back to the innocent expression  of infancy or to the disquiet one of adolescence. This gesture helps us to re-think and to assume changes in a less fragmentary perspective; it consents us to open a window of sense on today.

Hidden places of origin

There are persons who live this kind of crossing with fatigue. Others, instead, do not catch its importance, having they chosen to live superficially: one can float better! But many more, perhaps the majority, fear, somehow, of being destabilised from a relation with their own roots and prefer to deny their commitment to memory.  

The planned speed, which all of us are somehow prisoners of, is surely not a good allied of memory. The memory of what we have been, of those who were the first to present life to us and made us to now it through their eyes and their hands, does not often reconcile with the direction we attempt to take at present or want to project for the future. It happens that we dialogue with many persons who conceal their origins and the place they come from; persons who do not speak willingly of their family, from which they mature a detachment similar to the contempt of one’s own culture.

In times like ours, signed by a fundamentalist defence of the identity and fear of the other, even to speak of one’s own ethnic or geographical roots could expose a person to serious problems. There is a tormented relation with the truth; the mask protects us from many provocations, but at the same time it makes us stay in oscillation, which is always a risk if we do not have resources to manage it. However, the moment comes in which unforeseen situations oblige a man to answer the problem, if he is walking along the path of falsehood  or whether he tries to embrace with patience and hope a history that he would never have wanted to live! Only fatigue and pain allow us to pass on to the “awareness”, namely, to a life-style made up also of questions and criticism on the inherited history. They are surely difficult, but fruitful journeys.

To re-establish clearer and more sensed relations with the world which we come from is the same as to make up our mind for a journey of re-signification. It is surely a journey not deprived  of joy and unexpected discoveries: “The journey de-freezes the identity, makes it mobile, itinerant, problematic (….). It has an effect of de-ritualisation of our experience, which could corrode the usual ways of psychic and religious experience, provoking a deep re-orientation” ¹.

Between fear and hope

We return to our own places of origin with a different baggage: for somebody it is a hard re-start of dialogue with conflicts that leave behind deep wounds; for others it is the joyful remembrance, charged with nostalgia, for the transparency of long forgotten tenuous landscapes, sounds, savours and colours. It is not an archive work, and a presentation in power point. with a Family tree of genealogy, would not suffice. It is almost a slalom of the soul between fear and hope, and one is not sure of putting an event at the right point.

Often it happens that fear blocks the journey within our own emotions and reactions, because we do not have enough courage or we think that we cannot make it. Then we have the tendency of stopping and of shutting the door: however, sooner or later, we are bound to open it again because somebody or something comes back to knock and to start everything all over again. They are moments when we need to create favourable conditions, such as: trying to create a sacred silence of wait, without being swept away by the will of understanding everything and soon, or of finding immediate solutions; the other is to stand still in the conviction that none of us is God. It is a profession of love for the human greatness and perfection.

Though we try to explain the cause and effect of everything, we are never totally in possession of man’s mystery. This is not an abdication of fate, on the contrary, we must try to desire an open heart: apparently solved conflicts emerge afresh in unforeseeable situations. Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel (See Gen 35,24) would never have imagined that their dialogue with memory would start again with the arrival of a famine. 

Dawn and sunset

In the court of the powerful, in Egypt, Joseph had tried, perhaps without succeeding, to cut off the bonds with a painful memory. The names he chose for his children say it: the first Manasse (“it has made me to forget”), the second Ephraim (“it has made me fruitful”), But the affliction and fruitfulness of Joseph, wrapped in the Egyptian customs of the court, seem to be mysteriously subjected to a hard trial.

It is not easy to invent oneself again completely: the fruit of each tree depends on its roots and on the lymph circulating through its branches! The escape from one’s own roots: traumatic, casual or voluntary, though accompanied by success and fecundity, sooner or later seems to ask for the “return”. Sometimes essential needs provoke unexpected encounters and re-open stories buried in the deep well of the past. The wheat that the family of Jacob must buy will be the bread without which one cannot sit at table, sharing and looking at one another. How strange it is that just Joseph has to sell it! His brothers, on their side, are compelled by the events to unbury him gradually from the remote zone where they had hidden him (Gen 42 ,13; 42,21). However, the pieces of the picture are re-composed only when Joseph allows Another (he mentions God thrice in Genesis 45) to enter this story made up of lies and most human frailty, above all when he explicitly speaks of that story as a reality where the Other is not a stranger and does not remain stranger. The story of Joseph, like other Biblical stories, brings to light another aspect: the commitment of a single person is not enough.

The community and its history are called to cause: the way to renounce to disentangle the threads of a polychrome cloth, on which many feet have been walking. As the work gradually proceeds, a new ethos will be built, a new place where to live, a more humanly inhabitable place: «It is the question of being convinced that we cannot think of any exodus, unless a deportation is first thought of. It is the matter of letting oneself be swallowed up by a whale”².  We grow to maturity in the company of common frailties, because it is then that we start changing our view on life. Several times Joseph tries to ransom himself from suffering through a simple revenge. But this is only the first step towards the re-composition of his story. Only the shout of weeping and the truth pronounced in the respect of the mystery  (See Gen 45,2) open afresh the doors of reconciliation with one’s own places of origin, often hidden by fear and resignation.

To start over again

To dialogue with history, to seek one’s own lost identity, is not the matter of one day; there are also the silent cuttings with the past. We need a critical return towards the lived experience, never an individual alone. The Biblical story of Ruth the Moabite is a paradigm  (Rut 1,14), but not towards one’s own roots: hers is an exodus together with Noemi. Her solidarity with the aged Noemi and her successive integration in the community, makes of her the prototype of a creative devotion to the origin and memory, with typically feminine imagination..

A return is not just the obsessive re-visitation of a lived experience: perhaps an impoverished man cannot allow himself this luxury! The encounter with Booz and the birth of a baby-boy (Ruth 4), say that one’s roots can get entwined with other roots, without producing  frozen distances  and instruction. A hard journey with the memory is to be accompanied with eyes turned towards the light coming down from above: we are not the only artisans of our destiny. We need to give a chance also to the light behaviour of those who do not feel to be at the centre of the universe and to know that one can always set on a journey once again «With light heart, with light hands/ the life to take, the life to leave” (Cristina Campo).

Note

1 F. FERRAROTTI, Partire, tornare. Viaggiatori e pellegrini alla fine del millennio, Donzelli, Roma 1999, 50.

2 S. AUGRUSO-G.B. CALVIERI-P. DE VITA-G. MONTELEONE, Geografie verticali. L’edilizia sacra di una comunitŕ calabrese, Qualecultura, Vibo Valentia 2001, 15.

 Antonietta Augruso
Lecturer of Religion
Via Eurialo, 91 - 00181 Roma