A letter to Chris from a priest in Italy

General discussions relating to the story.
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 80
Joined: Fri Oct 02, 2009 11:32 am

A letter to Chris from a priest in Italy

Postby admin » Wed Mar 31, 2010 7:31 pm

Hi Forum,

Elio - an Italian Priest from Venice, wrote to me with a long and heart felt letter/diary he made for Chris.
I believe that this diary/letter deserves a place on this website, so with Elio's permission, here it is. (Included are quotes from books and the bible).

------------------------------
Into the wild

A letter to say thank you

“And all this didn’t take place in Ada’s times. But what does Ada’s times mean? How could you understand that the two of them had lived in the same times and that Ada’s times had finished? And how could you understand that this wasn’t Ada’s time any longer?” (from “ My lover is like a gazelle”, by David Grossman)

On 29th January 2008 I went to the cinema. Nothing special, I often do, I like it so much that I even go alone occasionally (I know it sounds a bit sad but..); moreover it was a cold night without any other choices than that, or staying at home of course. I’m accustomed to every genre, from Almodovar to Kieslowski. I love cinema but it’s just because I’m so familiar with it that I rarely get particularly excited about a film. That night I picked the film that seemed the least bad to me, even if I didn’t know much about it or feel enthusiastic about the way it was being advertised.. it was about extreme adventures in the wild, about looking for oneself. In one word, it seemed to me quite an American show-off, as we in Italy use to put it, that is to say, something high-flown, strained, dreamy, and far from any reality.. But at the end I decided to get in!
What happened to me that night is difficult to explain.. Into the wild, the film in question, not only impressed me but I felt thunderstruck! That night I couldn’t get any sleep, in two days’ time I went to see the film again, then I bought the book and the sound track, I took people to see the film, so that I myself saw it over and over again.. I really pestered people with talking about it anytime, anyplace: probably you, who are now reading this letter, are one of my victims, too! I got “obsessed with the story of this guy“, Christopher McCandless, in the same way as Krakauer, the author of the book which the film is based on, says he got. In this short piece of writing I’d like to explain the reasons of my obsession, or at least try to explain them as far as it is possible.

I didn’t only see the film over and over again. To tell you the truth, I also did something else: I took advantage of my spiritual exercise week to go and visit the places Christopher had lived one part of his life in, the last part and perhaps, under some aspects, the most significant part of his life. I managed everything adapting the time I had at my disposal. To make the journey technically viable I had to add one Sunday (our spiritual exercises usually go from Monday to Saturday), the following Monday, my day off, and the following Tuesday, putting off all the meetings and appointments in a cunning “mosaic”of time.
Very importantly, I wanted to make this journey in the same style as Christopher had led his life in his last two years, that is, as cheaply as possible. The money for the airway ticket came from the tips of a journey I had organised for a group, the guide gave it to me and told me to use it for a new journey! Board and lodging were offered to me by some exceptional nuns of Mary Immaculate (sisters of the same Order host visitors at Auschwitz in Poland where you may have been lucky enough to meet them). The only expense I had to meet, a tiny expense indeed, was renting a car, some gasoline to fuel it and a few dollars that I gave to a priest who lodged me for a couple of nights in the desert.

Erri De Luca says that he started reading the Bible because he was fed up with novels and got keen on these stories about life written by non-professional authors, often based on other stories which had really taken place and which, all summed and mixed up in the biblical tales, tell the story of a people and their God.

I think it was the fact that the story in the film was a real life story that intrigued me. It’s not a novel but the real life led by Christopher Johnson McCandless (whom I will call Chris from now on in this piece of writing, not only for the sake of brevity but also for affection..) that coincides in an amazing way with what I was living through those same years, 1990 to 1992, on the other side of the ocean. A wide ocean, so diverse the situations and choices in our lives were; a narrow creek, so similar our thoughts and feelings were probably on some days, our hearts probably beat to the same rhythm and for the same reasons. He and I, born at three months’ distance from one another, were at the same time both far away and near. Those years I used to wonder: “Is there anybody who has the same feelings, desires and intuitions as I do?” I’m happy to know there was. And I’m happy to know it only now that many years have elapsed and, in some ways, it’s too late now.

I think the time has now come to put into writing at least some of the “whys and wherefores” of this syntony and of this interior disruption of mine in order to try and “justify” my excitement about this film and comunicate it to friends, to those who have shared my same feelings aroused by coming to know about this singular story, this life led by Chris and by those who met him.
Even if a justification hasn’t been asked for, I want to say that this piece of writing has no claim of teaching anything to anybody or exegetically explaining the passages of the Sacred Scriptures included and cited by me. I will even refer to a man who has been banded from teological teaching because of not being in line with orthodoxy but I do believe that no one among those who will receive these pages is inclined to transmission! These are just reflections, maybe even somewhat disorderly and disjointed, reflections which express only a part of what I feel; what I’ve written is the part that you can communicate and explain. Therefore there is much that I can’t say, first of all because some things aren’t easy to explain and secondly because some things won’t probably interest anybody and are really just personal: we’ll talk them over, just me and Chris, one day.

Why did I choose the letter format? Why wasn’t it enough for me to make just a few reflections? I don’t know but I’ve always liked writing letters. And one day I found in a book what might be the reason for this choice. I’ll cite a short passage of it here below.
Some conversations are like wells, full of anxiety and promise, dangerous adventures, in any case such that they will change everything. After them you will be another person, like it or not. (...) At the National Archaelogical Museum of Beirut I met a woman of about 35, employed as a guide at the museum. In addition to Arabic, she spoke three European languages fluently and had also learnt Aramaic and Ugaritic for her archaelogical studies. We were in the basement of the museum, in front of the sarcophagus of King Achiram who reigned in Byblos (around 1200 BC). “Already those days”, she explained, “people used to believe in immortality. Human life is like a flower that withers though it always returns to a new life.” (...)
“Do you believe in immortality?”, I asked her later.
“I’d like to”, she answered in a low voice.
“What keeps you from believing?”, I replied astonished.
“This.” In a helpless gesture she showed me the tombs and images in the hall buried in the shadows. “Are you Christian?”
“Sometimes. I’m trying to be.”
“I’m not any longer. My parents are believers. They’ve never known anything different. When I started to study History, it was for no particular purpose. It was a kind of longing instead. (...) I just wanted to find the spot where all originated.”
“You didn’t find it, did you?”
“No. I lost it. All that Christianity teaches is thousands of years older. Have you seen the gods’ mothers? Inanna, Cibale, Iside? All of them lose their son, their husband, the god of their love to Death, and the world holds its breath. They go to the underworld and reawaken the dead person. These are myths, images, dreams. How can you believe in myths?”
I tried to explain what I had learnt: Christianity is not a myth. Christianity differs from all the other doctrines on gods because of its historical evidence. She shook her head: “Have you studied History? It’s the same everywhere. Dreams broken and trips to the underworld. Do you know about Pindaro? Our life is a shadow’s dream.”
She had tears in her eyes. “Preserve your faith, if you can.”
I’ve never met that woman again. Maybe she died long ago. I’d give anything, if I could talk to her once again. On the other hand, what is a book or a letter, if not an attempt to try and continue a conversation that we couldn’t conclude and that won’t ever be concluded?”
(From E. Drewermann’s novel “Your name is like the good taste of life”)

What else should I say? It’s time to start!



Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers.. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made a richly ornamented robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.. Now his brothers had gone to graze their father's flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, "As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them." "Very well," he replied. So he said to him, "Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me." Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, 15 a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, "What are you looking for?" He replied, "I'm looking for my brothers." (Genesis 37)

Now let our journey start.


Dearest Chris,
I’m out of my mind. I’ve never met you personally but I’m here in the United States, in California exactly, to cover a part of the road that you covered. I’m twice out of my mind if we take into consideration the fact that a lot of people who saw the film based on your life think you were crazy, egoistic, and reckless, an irresponsable person, a child unable to take on any responsability. Actually I think that it’s a bit more complicated than that and would like to start speaking out my opinion, putting you a question: we’ve got a lot of young people, and not only so young, who are empty-headed, so, why do we get upset about you? On the same flight I was on there were a group of French youths in front of me: it was all a fidgety display of mobiles, mp3 players, headbands, earrings, piercings, bracelets, ringlets, low rise flares showing off underpants, shrill laughs. I wasn’t amazed or scandalized by their restlessness, it just showed me another face of the same anxiety and emptiness that we adults often feel and hide under a lot of things, a lot of things to be done, maybe our ways are more sophisticated or more insidious - which one, depends on your point of view.
I don’t think you were a saint and I think you didn’t mean to be one. You just did what many of us have thought, at least once in a lifetime, of doing: going away, changing everything by giving our lives a new direction. Sure, you went away and completely broke off with your family, with everybody you knew, for ever. Maybe this was your biggest “fault”. But you did it because you couldn’t stand a certain way of thinking and living any longer. And being fed up and tired of what seems to be the only way of facing life is a feeling that I can understand perfectly well. The fact that I haven’t made the same kind of choice makes no difference. Pay attention: I don’t really mean a difference, but it doesn’t make enmity, or conflict. On the contrary. Your being radical and, to the end of your life, true to your choice “redeems” you in a way and makes you into a much braver person than I am. Anyway, you were looking for something else, maybe somebody else. You were looking for a real home where you could live fully and you found it in Nature; you were looking for real brothers, you who had had a really “complicated” family, and you found them in the people who shared the road with you. People who received you such as you were, such as you had become, a young supertramp, a super vagabond! A generous, many-sided farmer, and a lonely old man who goes on the road, at the age of 80, only because you, who are just a boy, suddenly enter his life..
What Joseph, you and me, and many other people are looking for is the very same thing: a brother, a sister, a person who won’t just stand by you but who will thoroughly share at least a part of your feelings and your hopes. While you were walking across the States with your rucksack on your back, I was, as I’ve alrady said, asking myself the same questions that you had in your heart.. it’s difficult to explain. Maybe telling a bit about my journey, I’ll be able to express some of my thoughts.




.. Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head." (Matthew 8:20)

That is, poverty and simplicity

I’m in the Californian desert, near Palm Springs. Apart from Mount San Jacinto (a mountain full of snow in the middle of the desert!) there’s nothing, just some ugly towns lost in the middle of sand. There are no space problems, so the highest buildings are not taller than about four meters only. For this reason sometimes you won’t even notice that you’ve reached a village or a small town. You will see a few houses and say: So?! And that might be a town of 30 000 inhabitants! It’s here that you, Chris, used to live for quite a while and here you also met an old man who you made great friends with. To him you used to talk about everything and at the end he came to understand your choice of wanting nothing for yourself, of being poor, actually he shared your choice when he sold everything he had and went to wait for you in the place where he had last met you when you were leaving for Alaska.
One of the things that impressed me and that is, in a way, very similar to what I’ve recently lived through personally, was this choice of yours to keep nothing for yourself, to donate everything, every single possesion. When you arrived here, you were a truly poor vagabond. Yours was really a “way towards freedom”, certainly incomprehensible to most people. Yours was a gesture which looked irresponsable. When I recently had to take the decision of helping or not a person who was dear to me, I asked my “Superiors” advice and you know what they told me? They told me not to, they thought this person should take care of himself, and I should think of myself and keep my part of what I had inherited! How could that be? In my 14 years as a priest I had used up three cars driving around preaching and talking about the Gospel, about loving each other, about being helpful and compassionate.. and they come and tell me that I should think about my inheritance? I decided for the opposite, after meeting you. That’s it, now I don’t virtually own anything at all and must start all again at the bottom but, honestly, I’m not at all sorry for that. I know, it’s difficult to explain.. I feel you are with me in this, a brother and a fellow traveller!
There’s a beautiful scene in The Sacred Heart: the protagonist, a rich magnate, strips herself naked in the subway and is sent to a mental hospital. At the end a woman doctor lets her go because she understands that it was just an extreme gesture by this woman to say a thing both incomprehensible and very simple at the same time: she didn’t want to keep anything for herself any more. That’s all. Is it after all so difficult to understand and accept? Is a person who doesn’t want to go up the ladder, reach the top, and be successful such a weirdo? In the blogs dedicated to you, most everything has been said about you: that you were affected by bipolar disorder, that you were raving mad, egoistic.. But it’s all perfectly comprehensible: just have other values than money, success and sex and people will accuse you of being abnormal!
Even as Church (and I’m saying this as a priest) we’re always tempted by the lure of success, gathering big numbers and crowds, having the “majority” with us.
In the desert, at Slab City, which is a camp site with people living in their caravans and camper vans, stands Salvation Mountain. It’s there that I met Leo, the author of “this mountain of salvation”, a person I think you, Chris, met too, because you can’t miss him! He was already there when you used to live in Slab City for a while. What impressed me about him was his great simplicity and poverty. He has lived and worked for years in the desert, and repeated over and over again the prayer that he felt flow from his heart one day many years ago, surprisingly so, considered that in his life he had never entered a chruch before: “Jesus have mercy on me..” It was the prayer by a Russian pilgrim! After years of work at a car dealer’s, he left everything and moved to Niland, in the middle of nowhere. Sure it’s bizarre but unlike so many preachers on TV, just haughty and avid third-rate actors, this man lives in poverty and tells everybody about God’s love. What a madman! Just like you.
When you were around here, you wrote: “The missions here are a bore, I can’t help bickering over their high preaching”. I can perfectly understand! I’ve just seen Mother Angelica on TV once again. I had already seen and heard her, alas, in Columbia, perfectly doubled in Spanish, which made me think that she was Colunbian and that therefore her message would be confined to that country only..
Instead she’s really an American, a kind of Father Livio on the Radio Maria, a woman who uses TV instead of the radio, and is well known all over the USA! Different media but the same arrogance and boldness, the very same response of spontaneous and immediate dislike in anybody who is carefully listening to her or to her Italian colleague. No, that can’t be the way of future Church, or at least it can’t be my way. I can understand that Church in the US has had a different kind of History. The priest who is hosting me here in the desert has explained how they sometimes feel like in the trenches, under attack from all sides. To him Obama is the devil and the world is doomed to perdition; he celebrated Mass facing the altar with his back turned to the only woman, that is to say the only human being, present in the church besides the two of us. What more, the woman is the lady who tends all the practical errands in his house of priestly exercises! But after all he’s a good man who offered me an amazing American breakfast at a diner here in Yucca Valley, where they used to shoot outdoor scenes in Western films. On the walls you can see pictures of actors who were here. Above our table there’s a picture of Dean Martin. How can you help forgiving this priest? Actually, I like him because after all I don’t believe he really thinks what he says. He’s just afraid, very frightened and, basically, alone.
The nuns of Mary Immaculate told me that Church here in America was going through a very difficult period, a huge purification. At the end I think it’s something possitive: if you haven’t got anything, they can’t take away anything from you! Of course the important thing is that something will remain, almost nothing, as they say in Taizé, but that nothing can give birth to something very beautiful. If you can, Chris, believe me: Chruch is also made up of a lot of people who are good and who do a lot with almost nothing.



“Then the LORD said to him, "This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, 'I will give it to your descendants.' I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it." (Dt 34,4)

That is, the road will never end

I’ve always been impressed by the story about Moses, and particularly by the fact that he wasn’t allowed to enter the Promised Land. I’ve never been able to accept this punishment which seems to cancel the effort of a lifetime. One day, a short time after the death of my father who had actually realized almost nothing of what he had hoped for, I understood. An author once wrote that to Moses entering the Promised Land would have been like treading on a dream: he would have seen that the land he had, all his life, hoped for wasn’t so perfect as he and all his people had dreamed, and that, in a way, the real Promised Land was the way itself, walking it without never stopping. Your biographer defines you as a pilgrim, a kind of monk. Who knows..

Enzo Bianchi says that monks are useless, serve no purpose. They just remind us of “another” way of life, a different way, they remind us of what can’t be calculated or understood by our heads and our minds.. for that matter, just like walking with a rucksack on your back to a place that you could reach much faster by other means, which stands for the same thing.. probably that’s all. You didn’t arrive where you wanted to, even if you had ambitiously planned to reach the ocean crossing the whole width of Alaska on foot. You even tried it but then you realized that it was impossible because it was all an incredible quagmire. So you decided that the “Magic Bus” would be your promised land. Here, too, of course the main thing wasn’t the bus but the way you had walked to reach it: the note you left there thanked God for the happy life you had had. A gesture that adds taste to life, even if it hasn’t fulfilled all its promises. How many of us would have the courage or the feeling to write something like that when we were about to die?
“Learn to live on little – you wrote – and you will learn to appreciate everything.” A pilgrim’s condition that you chose is probably one of the most beautiful comments that you could make about the Gospel, that is, showing that you can live detached from the things that most people consider vital, bearing witness to the fact that another way of life is possible.
You invented an existance on the fringe of society, together with those who lived on the fringe already. When you were a student, you used to bring rolls of bread to prostitutes and tramps on Friday evenings, and talk to them. You did alone what the order of Saint Egidio does! And I think you had never heard of them! That’s what disrupts me: people who are not part of the “right cirle”, and who do things that marvelously fulfill the word of the Gospel, maybe even without knowing it.



"Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat..” (Mt 25)

That is, surprise and wonder

“When did we feed you?..” those who are called blessed ask God in Chaper 25 of the Gospel by Mathew.
I’ve experienced shopping in an American supermarket, possibly even much fuller and more abounding in goods that European shops are. And doses are meant for dinosaurs. You can’t find tins suitable for one or two people only, just portions for a family of ten or for Incredible Hulk!
When I was a boy, my parish priest used to describe Paradise as a big supermarket where you can get everything, anything you want and can imagine. This image is still impressed in my mind but at the same time I’m almost sick with it: what an awful vision! An Eternity in a supermarket! After a while, what can you want any more? Doesn’t the boredom of having everything for ever become a Hell?
Today I understand what interests me about Paradise: a place or a moment where you can complete what you‘ve left halfway, where you can say what hasn’t been said, where you can meet whom you haven’t met. The passage about the Last Judgement gives a vision that is absolutely violent, totally different from this “place” of mine which is ..surprise! This is real Paradise: being surprised by God who will reveal what we hadn’t seen or understood, the surprise of a meeting.. and our surprise will turn into wonder and our wonder into joy. You won’t ever get tired of joy and wonder, will you?
“What great joy is being alive.. Thank you, God, thank you!” It was you who wrote these words when you were a vagabond in the streets of San Diego and in this desert. Should I add anything? Let the joy of those days be for ever and for everyone of us!


“Being alive or being dead is the same thing” (from “Poor as a Coliseum cat” by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

That is, the dialogue goes on among us

The trip I’ve been on here in California hasn’t been a sad one. I’ve been having great fun, especially about my own gaffes and silly things. I drove Sizzler’s waiters crazy because of my “well done / done well” steak, just meaning cooked all over. As I couldn’t understand well enough, I ordered mine, showing one, more or less randomly, on the menu, and they brought me a pulpy mess dripping with blood! I asked them to do it well, causing havoc with my words.. having the manager come to my tabe and make his excuses to me! Who knows what they had understood, or more precisely, what I had said in my incredible English! I’m sure we would have had great time together, or at least you would have had a good laugh at me. For example, if I had shouldered your rifle, at the very first shot I’m sure I’d have got my own toes! Then at the Universal Studios I asked for a reduction because on the entrance bill it read that those under 48 pay 20% less. Just looking at the cashier’s face I could understand I had made a mess as usual. After some quick mental work I got it straight sensing that 48 wasn’t referred to years of age but to “feet” of height..!
I wouldn’t swear to what exactly Pasolini meant with the sentence here above, but it’s been impressed in my mind together with the scene that the words were spoken in: a poor boy living in a slum goes back to his hut and finds his mother, who has just died, alive, serene and with a smile on her face. Outside the limits of time and space it’s possible to be united, to feel alive and near one another; and that is not counting our Faith which offers us horizons even wider than that..

But it doesn’t always take off the burden of feeling lonely or of the nostaglia that sometimes grips you: being nostalgic for the past, for the early 90s, to me so full of enthusiasm and expectations, for my father and for all the others who have left us, feeling nostalgic for you, for the loss of never meeting you, as, on the other hand, I haven’t met many other people I would have been so glad to meet. Sure, I know that History, both that of nations and that of a single person, isn’t made up of ifs and buts. It’s important to accept what you’ve got and who you are, be realistic.. etc. But ..I think I’ve got an answer to these doubts and scruples.
At the Studios I saw the time machine of “Back to the Future”! At the end of the film the boy says to the mad inventor, who is about to send him back to the future after modifying the past: “Sorry, but didn’t you tell me that it was dangerous to transform the past? That acts like that could have a devastating, unpredictable and catastrophic effect on the future?”
“Yes, I did – the inventor replies – but then I thought: who cares?!?”
So, even if these reflections might seem improbable and useless to somebody.. who cares?!? If a bit of nostalgia, a bit of friendship, even if only spiritual, a bit of longing, if all these things don’t paralize us, but on the contrary make us more human, humbler and truer, it can’t be but for the best! And when nostalgia and longing are sometimes about to get hold of me, to tie me up, to stop me, or even to make me withdraw to the past and to a spiritual return under the disguise of devotion and piety which is a trend in our day, it will be enough for me to fix my eyes on a few fotos in addition to yours. Among them is the foto of Tumekash, a Mozambician child, whom I held in my arms for three whole days because he was so feeble with Aids. Today he is well thanks to the cure that the community of Saint Egidio has supplied for him, a cure to which I’ve contributed, too, in a small part. It’s not a merit but joy! When I look at his face and into his eyes, I can see such will and joy of living that they catch me, the same joy as you had, too, and that reminds me and all of us that resurrection and joy won’t only be in the future, in another life, but can be in our lives here and today! It’s vital not to forget, always to remember one another’s lives and remember that they are bind together in a strong, indissoluble, and incredible way.
You used to be polite and kind to everybody, you never asked for anything, not even for food when you were hungry, and you used to thank people frequently: kindness is a rare quality, even if it often seems something optional, useless tinsel.

Therefore, I just want to say “Thank you” - for the things I’ve written here and elsewhere, for what you were and still are.

With friendship and deep affection
Brother Elio

Return to “General Discussions”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests