A friend, known many years ago, a non-believer, who follows us on “Politics Together”, sent me a long message wishing me a “happy Lent”. Not “Happy Easter”. And not because it is still early, but because he doesn’t believe in the Resurrection. He believes in “Lent”. And he accompanies his message with these lines from a Guccini song:
“In what we believe, God is risen.
In what we want, God has risen.
In what we will do, God has risen.”
The “Lent” he believes in concerns politics. Even in this regard, the light of the resurrection seems too dazzling and unlikely to him. Too sudden to be true. Instead, he is convinced by the grey, slow, millimetric, disarming daily effort of healing the wounds of politics, mending its tears, cleaning its face as Veronica did with Christ on the way to Calvary. He alludes to a “penitential” path of politics, which, in his opinion and despite the lacerations inflicted on it, is not lost, but rather must regain itself, uncover, in a deeper root, the ultimate reason for the dignity that belongs to it.
He does not believe in the salvation of the soul, but of the world. He believes in saving the world and thinks that politics has something to do with it. Because it is not a doctrine, but much more, that point, in its own magical way, in which the lines of force that cross the field of life meet, intertwine and fertilize each other.
It is rare to find such a high conception of politics. A concept that is, at once, strong and naive, courageous and full of hope. And it is rare to still have a friend who, despite the violence that, in every direction, corrodes the world, still continues to believe in it undaunted. A reading of politics and its role that, essentially, a non-believer shares with Thomas Aquinas, who believed it to be a fundamental aspect for the fulfillment of the person and the full affirmation of his dignity.
Domenico Galbiati
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