Consciousness at the dawn of reality

 

Paolo Cugini

 

 

There's a hardness of heart that doesn't come overnight. It doesn't come suddenly like a summer storm, but settles slowly, like fine dust on things left untouched for too long. It's a hardness that takes shape over time, within the conscience, when men and women stop listening and simply begin to defend themselves; when they no longer look at the life that comes their way, but prefer to take refuge behind ready-made formulas, pre-written judgments, learned precepts never truly touched by compassion.

It happens then that the precept, instead of being a light on the path, becomes a wall. What should help us discern, orient, and protect life, ends up taking precedence over reality itself. And when precepts are constructed far from the concrete flesh of existence, starting from abstract ideas, prepackaged schemes, personal or community interests disguised as universal truths, they no longer liberate: they imprison. They don't open paths: they close doors. They don't accompany men and women in the toil of living: they measure it from afar, as if life could be understood without bending over it.

Reality, however, is never as impoverished as our concepts. It is broader, more restless, more wounded, and more luminous. It brings with it faces, stories, tears, contradictions, expectations, failures, barely rekindled hopes. Therefore, when we attempt to impose a rule from above without engaging with what reality manifests and indicates, rigidity arises. We withdraw into ourselves, we confuse our own ideas with the entire world, we mistake our security for loyalty, our fear for prudence, our immobility for virtue.

Moral rigidity is one of the deepest wounds that can arise even within a religious life, when it becomes separated from reality and no longer accepts being questioned by it. Then two opposing worlds emerge: on one side, the world of religious men and women, with their orderly ideas, their clear definitions, their seemingly untouchable morality; on the other, the world of people living in the daily grind of everyday life, where everything is more complex, more fragile, more exposed. In between, often, there is not dialogue, but distance; not listening, but suspicion; not mercy, but judgment.

Hardness of heart is the most obvious sign of a missed encounter. It is the trace of a failed listening, of a word from another left outside the threshold, of a life watched without being touched. The heart hardens when it renounces the risk of relationship, when it prefers the cold clarity of distance to the hot toil of closeness. It hardens when it no longer wants to learn, when it refuses to be surprised, when it thinks that everything true must already coincide with what it has established once and for all.

This harshness also harbors a great deal of laziness. It's easier to sit on the pedestal of the just and ruthlessly judge life's situations, which almost never present themselves as pure, simple, and linear. It's easier to feel at peace because one has fulfilled one's moral duty, because one has passed a sentence in accordance with laws deemed just, than to be troubled by a person's concrete history. It's easier to say what should be done than to accompany someone who no longer knows where to start. It's easier to condemn a wound than to heal it.

Yet, reality, over time, demands its space. It refuses to be caged, silenced, suffocated within overly narrow categories. Reality continues to speak, even when no one wants to listen. It speaks in tired bodies, in homes inhabited by toil, in broken relationships, in confused desires, in hidden solitudes, in simple joys, in failures that cry out for a second chance. It speaks like the dawn: it makes no sound, but slowly forces the night to recede.

Reality always manifests itself in the present tense, and for this very reason it cannot be possessed once and for all. Its deepest dimension is plurality: life's situations are many, existence offers itself and demands to be understood in many ways. Not only human reason, with its criteria and deductions, but also feelings, passions, memory, the body, the creation that surrounds us. Plants, animals, stones, stars, and the sun speak to us; the earth speaks to us when it groans, water speaks to us when it is lacking, the wind speaks to us when it passes through things and reminds us that nothing is truly still.

Trying to force all this complexity into the narrow confines of a concept elaborated by our small minds is a sign of great presumption. It's like trying to collect the sea in a bowl, or hold back the dawn with our hands. From this presumption arise tensions, lacerations, exclusions. A religious word is born that, instead of consoling, wounds; instead of pointing the way, it closes the horizon; instead of generating life, it produces fear.

Listening to reality, then, means taking everyday events seriously. It means not letting them pass as insignificant, but welcoming them, meditating on them, cherishing them, ensuring that nothing is lost. Every encounter, every question, every contradiction can become a threshold. Every fragment of life can contain a call, a light, a word not yet understood. Conscience softens when it is willing to listen, when it is not in a hurry to conclude, when it knows that truth does not impose itself like a stone, but grows like a seed.

This is, perhaps, the deepest law of love: to lose nothing, to exclude no one, to never confuse faithfulness with harshness. Love desires to embrace everything and everyone like a great mother. Not because everything is equal, not because everything must be justified, but because everything must be seen in the light of a mercy greater than judgment. Love does not eliminate discernment, it purifies it; it does not erase truth, it makes it habitable; it does not renounce justice, but frees it from cruelty.

When consciousness begins to listen again, something within it opens up like the earth at the first light of dawn. Harshness no longer has the last word. The heart understands that reality is not a threat to be mastered, but a revelation to be welcomed; not chaos to be repressed, but a mystery to be embraced. And then religious life too rediscovers its original scope: not to stand above reality to judge it, but within reality to serve it; not to speak before listening, but to listen until the word that emerges is capable of protecting, healing, and generating hope.