Evil besieges our lives. A war within Europe and one outside Europe. Students in crisis and disarmed parents. A reader confides in me that she is contemplating suicide. A friend with advanced cancer. Since I am powerless in the face of all this, I might become cynical and not do what Nobel Prize-winning literature laureate Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to hard labor in the 1960s and then exiled from his country, saw as a political commitment Writer: “Write beautiful things”. I can do this, opinions don’t count but actions matter, all that matters is how much beauty I have created today because beauty is the source of hope and hope is the source of new beauty. This is the virtuous circle of creation, because beauty is love embodied (beautiful is a caress, a page, a dinner, a rose…), the fulfillment of a small piece of the world that is saved instead of dying, and Although for everyone Who wants to be touched by this salvation? When something beautiful touches me, I want to do the same. In the villages, a pregnant woman was once prevented from seeing bad things: in order to generate (the) good, one must first be regenerated. And then I pick up a pen and try to create a space in which perhaps beauty can emerge. Will he save the world? No. But maybe me. As?
Matthew Perry, who was found dead in the hot tub of his villa, made millions laugh in one of the happiest series in television history, “Friends”. In an interview in 2022, he said: “When I die, I don’t want friends to be the first thing people talk about me, but because I helped people who suffer from alcohol addiction.” His father had nothing for him given as drunkenness and abandonment, and his battle with alcohol and drugs was his battle to save himself and the world. His extraordinary acting talent gave him peace because he could be someone else, someone who gives others the joy that he had to earn with all his skin. The fight for peace was his task and he wanted to be remembered for it.
This is confirmed by the most recent Nobel Prize winner in literature, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who said that he only broke away from alcohol after he almost died from it. Writing saved him because it allowed him to “free himself” from being an alcoholic. In fact, for him, writing turned out to be listening to a voice that went beyond him and actually led him to God: “I was a convinced atheist, but it was a way of seeing things, especially for a writer. I pray every day, I go to mass once a week. It gives me peace and I have been searching for it my whole life.
We seek peace, and our self-destructive decisions are often reassuring so as not to feel contempt for ourselves or forget that we are disintegrating: “When I traveled around the world with my theater works – says Fosse in a recent interview – I was almost always there.” alone. My only companion was a bottle of whiskey. Saving oneself means finding integrity, uniting the parts of existence, repairing the decay of body, mind and heart, giving peace, that is, salvation, to the three dimensions of man, which only when they fit together.
To greet one another, the early Christians desired peace and were not sentimental: to desire peace is to commit to finding unity within oneself and with others. It is no different from “Hail!”, i.e. “be saved,” an ancient word that meant nothing other than “whole,” “united.” The opposite of saving yourself is actually disintegration and disintegration: tearing yourself apart. And where there is no peace among individuals, there can be no peace between relatives, neighbors and peoples.
The line that separates good and evil is not the one that wars impose, but it is in our hearts. A line that separates life from death and that we use to decide where to move every day. It is not possible to eliminate evil from the world, all the bloodiest ideologies have tried in vain because they then project evil onto someone, but it is possible to compress it in one’s own heart. It is the job of the Little Prince, who must pull up the baobab shoots every morning to prevent them from destroying his planet as they grow.
The roots of evil lie in the heart and will always be there. Our job is to eliminate them every day. Christ said it this way: “There is nothing outside a man that, if it enters into him, can defile him.” But it is the things that come out of a man that defile him. From the hearts of men come evil intentions: impurity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, debauchery, envy, slander, pride, destruction” (Mark 7).
It is pointless to want to change the world, instead you must change within yourself what you want to change in the world: Do you want peace? Do it where you are, in the condominium meeting. To make peace is to do something that makes a part of the world whole; to wage war is to dissolve it.
As Christopher Nolan shows in his recent film Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb is first in the heart of its creators and only then in the heart of a warhead dropped on Japan. This is how it is and always will be since Cain: the peace and the war that are around me come from me. It is enough to return from the fruit of an action to its root, the heart, to find out where I drew the line that separates life and death, the life and death that I later gave to the world. The peace of the world depends on the advancement of this lineage to life, in every heart, every day, wherever and however I can.