The crosses I carry inside me

I am not a great man of faith.  Not infrequently, in the grip of despondency over everyday problems, I have asked myself hard questions about the true nature of God. But the questions and the doubts have often remained unanswered.

And yet so many times, when I reached the summit of a mountain and waiting for me there was a cross, a symbol of sacrifice and passion, I felt a strong emotion, a strange feeling, at times incomprehensible, which hardly suits a vulgar unbeliever like me. Not happiness, not joy, only a deep stirring, compassion and wonder. Yes, an unexpected feeling set off by a symbol of a religion I still understand little.

Really, because when all is said and done I feel I am just a lone wolf, a wild beast, an animal  that accepts neither rules nor compromises. I don't accept rites, I don't accept abstractions, I need logical and rational understanding. I dwell on what is real.
That is why in everyday life I hardly ever weave relationships of abstract diplomacy, quite the opposite in fact... I run away from such relationships.  In life as in the mountains I look for relationships founded on true and continuous experience, founded on exchanged glances, on handshakes, on hugs. On simple attentions given and returned that thicken the mutual need to know each other.
In the mountains I love to feel the cold, the fatigue in my legs, the fear, the laboured breathing. I don't love comforts, I prefer to see things as they really are, whole, not through the action of someone who has first gobbled them up and then digested them... to serve them up again already filtered.

So I dwell on details, on little things, because I believe that only with lots of small bricks can you build a house. I watch the joys and fears of a rope partner. I listen to the deafening silence of things left unsaid. I stop to look at a boundless panorama as well as at a little ladybird resting on a mountain thistle. I notice that tuft of blades of grass that looks like a wig and dream that those clouds are the famous mad rabbits of the sky. And yet although life,  death, love, friendships and mountains seem to have nothing to do with one another, I become convinced that there is a “magic that escapes me”, an “invisible bond between all the things in the world” that with this short-sighted gaze of mine I just can't see.

I climb the mountain and find a cross and perhaps I weep, I weep for the responsibility of being an ungrateful son, for the responsibility of being an inept father, or a demanding husband, or for the responsibility of being an absent, distant friend.
It doesn't matter that that cross belongs to a religion I don't understand. That cross, a symbol of sacrifice, passion and courage, is perfectly good for me too. It explains to me all too well how the human condition is always the same, a condition perhaps unchangeable, moving, for which we should patiently have greater compassion... and not only in the mountains.

These are the crosses I carry inside me...