Maria Antonia Avati, Il silenzio del sabato
[The Silence of Saturday], La nave di Teseo
While always looking for something to illuminate Holy Saturday and especially the experience of the Mother on the day of great silence, celebrated in the Orthodox East but almost non-existent in the Christian West, I came across Maria Antonia Avati’s book. It is a novel, it is true, but it is at least an attempt to enter into the mystery and depths of Mary, who sums up the hopes and disappointments of the tragic moments of the Messiah's death. The conversations with her Son, recalled at the moment of the greatest trial, in which He had asked her to stand by him even in the misunderstanding of events, are intense. Forty hours pass between death and the moment when her Son will rise again, forty hours in which I almost breathe close, inside, the emotions of a mother who will know how to believe to the end and in this faith will find the reasons for her loss and healing from her pain. I carry in my heart and mind the final scene: the running of the young Mary challenging her male peers in a race, outrunning them, releasing her laughter and happiness into infinity. “Then she laughed. She laughed as no other woman ever knew how to laugh, for now Maria was certain that her life would be beautiful”.