Christmas is coming and the role of Virgin Mary, the blessed mother of Jesus is still a mystery for humankind. Through the lenses of Luke's gospel, a book explores her travel to Elisabeth: download the essay if you like. Rek Magazine is born! And it wishes you a Merry Christmas
By Primavera Fisogni
Being used, all of us, spending our existence always in a hurry, the aspiration of a slow world - slow, which goes slowly - belongs to contemporary living as a sort of 'mantra'. We tend to attribute an eminently negative value to the behaviour of being in a hurry, finding in it something of that frenzy, the root of which fren- refers to the possibility of losing control. Also, for this reason, the hurry of Blessed Mary, the mother of Jesus, mentioned by the evangelist Luke, on one of the first pages of the text, cannot but intrigue. A few hours after having received the news of divine her motherhood, to which she immediately consented, the Virgin woke up early to go and visit her cousin Elizabeth. She was, in fact, a mother to be, despite her older age, by the special grace of God.
Everything is resolved in a few words (1,39-40), leaving the reader with the supernatural sense of an event full of mystery, with respect to which the text appears full of cross-references, full of implicit and innuendoes, despite the extreme linearity of the narrative.
A woman is in a hurry to meet her cousin. Why this acceleration of events? And why, then, is Our Lady in a hurry?
Among the joyous mysteries of the rosary, prayer par excellence to the Virgin, traces of Mary's hurry have been lost, because what is focused is the young woman's journey from Nazareth to her old, beloved relative, not the state of mind with which she faces up the event. If we ask ourselves why, two plausible answers emerge: in the economy of Luke's Gospel that expression - Mary's hurry - is definitely marginal; or it is so decisive as to constitute the very engine of the action, the dramaturgical root of what is going to happen.
A third way is provided by an idea developed by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, not about Mary, but about the invisible. He maintains that, alongside a hidden invisible, in no way graspable with the senses, there is an invisible visible. Let's think of a dress, and how it reveals a body while concealing it.
In other words, on the one hand, that body cannot be seen, but it is visible, and how: it can communicate whether a person is slim, robust, tall, short, athletic or awkward.
This is the suggestion which, in my opinion, best suits Maria's hurry and which I intend to use as a key to enter the text. There is no point in having any piece of iron to gain access to a house: you need to have a custom-made key. Metaphor aside, my aim is to meditate on Luke's text in the light of the Gospel and the Old Testament, of which the former announces its fulfilment.
I quoted some results from an investigation dated the 2014. It was basically a book for friends with academic taste. I wish the readers of Rekh Magazine can appreciate it as a Xmas present.
