Today I begin a new challenge: to stop procrastinating when I read. Paradoxically, the challenge begins with an obligatory act of procrastination: I must set aside the book I am reading to focus on two new projects, The Wisdom Jesus, by Cynthia Bourgeault, and The Kingdom of God Is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy. I will try to finish one before starting the other.
I have always been interested in Jesus as a teacher, not as the magical son of God, that superman who is better than us because a god, Greek-style, granted him powers we do not have. For me, what is fundamental lies in what he tried to teach us and what, because of our own incapacity, never became the moral compass it should have been.
This restlessness was reborn when, watching James Talarico’s victory speech, I read a message on the podium: “Love thy neighbor.” I remembered then that one of the main goals of my literary projects is to make the truth expressed by the universal teacher more intelligible.
I want to understand Jesus in order to become the best version of myself, because that is also the best version I can offer to others. And I want to do it, moreover, as living proof that it is possible.
If one day I achieve it, that knowledge, that understanding, that faith will become action. Then Jesus will be a Verb and no longer a noun.
I am certain this is no simple undertaking; I am certain that the restlessness that begins this search will lead me to disturbance. Finding a truth different from the one we have considered unique and universal for millennia will disturb me, and it will disturb us all. The Gospel of Thomas already warns of it: “If you are seeking, you must not stop until you find. When you find, however, you will be disturbed.”
Faced with the imminent arrival of that state, one must remember every day why one searches. We search because what we have always been told makes no sense. We read, ask, and investigate because our understanding feels incomplete, even though we often begin the search with a silent expectation: that whatever we discover will somehow confirm what we already believe.
We tend to associate discovery with relief. But time, or the belief that it is scarce, is one of our non-renewable treasures, and recognizing that we have always been wrong and would have to start over is a dizzying idea, one not all of us are ready for.
There are two fundamental ways of acquiring knowledge. In the first, we add something to what we already know: we learn something that makes a historical fact relevant, we look up the etymology of a new word. Knowledge grows, but the mode and structure of our thinking remain intact, and we run the risk of becoming eternal seekers, because we still find no meaning in what we know. This way of discovering increases what I know and, also, my doubts about what I know.
In the second, I discover an idea that contradicts a millennia-old conviction and recognize that a judgment I believed was my own is, in fact, inherited from my mental model: television, religion, the zip code, almost always tied to income. I discover that the judgment I passed on others was born, above all, of my inability to take charge of myself. What I condemn in another also exists in me.
This second way of discovering shakes us because, by changing what I believe I know, it threatens what I believe I am. The restlessness grows as a line is drawn between what I believed I was and what, sustained by a knowledge that gives me more meaning, I can and must be.
Then the fear of time returns. It is as if you took thirty years to reach the top of a mountain and, upon arriving, found a small box with a message: “This is not the mountain; it’s the other one.”
Something similar happened to me. I reached an economic peak very young. In the eyes of others, I was success. I enjoyed social recognition and had many of the material advantages others pursue their whole lives. And yet I was not fulfilled. Above all because I believed I understood Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Whitman, Piketty, Machiavelli, and many others, and believed that understanding was the right one.
That is how my first disturbance was born: I had arrived, I had opened the box, and the message was clear. It did not come from how much I knew, but from my belief that what I knew was enough to give life meaning. “At least in this I resemble Tolstoy,” I told myself, as if a front-row seat in hell could make me forget I was inside it.
I did not know I had accumulated information and not understanding. Today I am trying to reread Tolstoy, because I remember, from that unawareness I mistook for erudition, that he examines the contradiction between the teachings of Jesus and the conduct of the societies that claim to profess them. Rereading him might be like reading the autobiography of my past.
When that moment came, I fell to pieces. It had cost me so much to reach the wrong peak. I did not understand it; it was unfair. Why me, after I had fought step by step for that peak? I challenged God and Jesus, because I saw Jesus as the son of the universal magician and not as the master teacher he is in me today.
I hurled thirty questions at the sky, because my ignorance, which loved to disguise itself as knowledge, told me those two hustlers lived up there. One blasphemes when one does not understand life, but one blasphemes against oneself, not against them.
One of the questions that kept returning was: so must I abandon everything I have been, everything I did to become it? That filled me with vertigo. Abandoning what I had built, what I already was, the recognized one, the embodiment of success, was unthinkable.
Emerson explains it with more dignity in Self-Reliance. Criticizing our attachment to consistency, he asks why we feel obliged to defend an opinion just because we expressed it yesterday, and he slaps us with his famous line: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
That is why I fell to pieces on that peak, which was not the final one, only a passing peak; but I did not know it. And the disturbance began: what if I reach the other peak and there is a box there too, and in the box, the same message?
I wept without answers, alone, on that cold peak. My beliefs were becoming insufficient; I did not understand, because I believed I knew. I did not understand that I was entering a stage of transition. I stayed there for days, without eating, without sleeping, until anger and blasphemy turned into humility, because when you are a fucking wreck, arrogance runs off like the coward it is. Then I went back to heaven… no, no: I went back to looking at the sky; in those days I had never been to heaven. And I asked them: if the world is not the way I think, then how is it? What other things are possible?
I would like to tell you that God came down hand in hand with Jesus and answered my questions. No: they did not come down, and they did not, above all, because they are not up there. If I want to understand the truth, I have to practice it. I would like to tell you that I recovered in a few days, but no: years went by. More than a decade later I understood that I had finally found the path. That front-row seat in hell was the beginning of the road to paradise.
And it took years, because not every crisis, whether existential, intellectual, or economic, is a path to enlightenment or to success. Not every contradiction contains a revelation.
I said I have found the path, but that does not mean the search is over. It is not over because what I seek is not a set of knowledge that can be acquired, but stages of life that must be lived.
And it is not over because understanding the teachings of Jesus is no small thing: it is probably the greatest task an individual can undertake. Accumulating knowledge no longer defines the new individual I am. This new individual lives experiences that transform his understanding day by day.
I want, I desire, and I know I will learn, because my task afterward will be to emulate the teacher: learning, so that I will be able to teach. Taking charge of myself so that I can later show you how to take charge of yourselves.
And then, perhaps, only then, I may one day be able to explain to you what the carpenter of Nazareth meant when he spoke to Nicodemus of heavenly things.
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