A thirty-fifth birthday, celebrated at the bedside of a friend who has not left his bed in ten years.
It is hard to capture that sense of celebration, and yet the intimate joy that fills the moment—especially since this friend, in his progressive immobility, can no longer shape his mouth to be understood by others.
And yet it is a celebration. It is a moment of joy, and "something" manages to speak it with an incredible depth and immediacy.
I bring him the Eucharist, and I ask myself, and him, and his mother and a friend gathered there: what does a birthday mean? What does this birthday mean? How do we understand today that life is, and remains, a gift?
Life, indeed—always, in every moment like this one—sets before us life itself as a question that makes us ask... what is life?... how is life?... is this better? Or perhaps, and let us hope... yes, if yesterday, today, and... tomorrow?
Questions that, posed truthfully, find no answer because they carry within them something mysterious—precisely because life is mystery. And so this moment becomes larger than it appears, and we sense how every question falls short of expressing the mystery that a birthday always evokes.
But, as at other times, "something" speaks the truth of this instant: we read a passage from Mark's Gospel (12:1-2)—the parable of the wicked tenants—and looking into Aldo's deep eyes, I understand that beneath the story of a man speaking of his own death and what it will cost him and his lies an intuition of something that explains even this moment, our "celebration" today.
It is the design of a great love, defenseless, without boundaries—a love by which the Father regards us, and every person who walks in time, as the most precious thing. He accompanies us with the passion of a love that nothing can diminish, a love that has made him able—makes him able—to suffer and die with us. Because we, in our human flesh, in our misery, in our mystery, he is present with his own flesh.
To understand this Presence, to sense it, to recover—in the courage of a hope that nothing can stifle—the strength of that love: this is to live again. It is to "feel" life as something born within you from the depths of your mystery. And that is a birthday.
How do you explain love? And so, how do you explain life? How do we understand this life today, flowing so slowly it seems like the tick of a clock marking time, leaving no trace because the hands have long since fallen from the face? Yet this clock that still marks its time is today still the dream of a life that pulses in its indefinable dimension—though my words cannot explain why.
From the very beginning of this "moment," Aldo's smile, his serene openness to this encounter, his longing for that Word and that Bread—the truest signs of this "celebration"—answered my questions, our questions. Because from the start, he had understood what perhaps we will never understand.
Don Bruno Ripamonti, 1979