There is a goal, but no way.
—Kafka
It is undeniable that there is an unknown (the geographers of antiquity drew an analogy of this unknown with the famous expression terra incognita with which they marked the edge of their great map). At the margins of reality that the eye embraces, that the heart feels, that the mind imagines, there is an unknown. Everyone feels it. Everyone has always felt it. In every age, people have felt it so strongly that their imaginations have given it a form. In every age, people have sought, through their speculations or fantasies, to imagine, to gaze on the face of this unknown. Tacitus, in his work Germania, described the religious feeling that defined the ancient Teutons with these words: “secretum illud quod sola reverentia vident, hoc deum appellant” (that mysterious thing they intuited in fear and trembling, this they called God). All people of every age, whatever image they make of the mystery, hoc deum appellant, call “God” this unknown one they look upon—many with indifference but also many with passion.
Imagine the human world, human history, as a vast plain and, in this vast plain, an immense throng of firms, of construction companies, that are particularly skilled at building roads and bridges. Each of them in their corners, from their corners, try to build a bridge connecting the point where they are, the ephemeral moment in which they live, to the star-studded sky, to use Victor Hugo’s image in his beautiful poem from Les Contemplations entitled “Le Pont” (“The Bridge”). Hugo imagines someone sitting on the beach at night, on a starry night, a man gazing up and staring at the largest and seemingly closest star. He thinks of the thousands and thousands of arches that would need to be erected to build such a bridge, a bridge that is never completely defined, never fully usable.
Imagine, then, this vast plain, all crowded with the attempts of groups large and small, or even of loners, as in Victor Hugo’s image—each one carrying out the design he or she has imagined or dreamed up. Suddenly a powerful voice is heard in the vast plain, saying, “Stop! Everyone stop!” And all the workers, the engineers, the architects suspend their work and look in the direction from which the voice came: it is a man, who raises his arm and goes on,
You are great men, you are noble in your endeavor, but this effort of yours, though great and noble, is nevertheless a sad one. This is why many give up on it and think no more about it and become indifferent. It is great but sad, because it never accomplishes its goal, it never succeeds in reaching the end. You are incapable of it because you are powerless with respect to this goal. There is an unbridgeable disproportion between you and the farthest star of the sky, between you and God. You cannot imagine the mystery. Now leave your laborious and thankless work and follow me: I will build you this bridge, or rather, I am this bridge! Because I am the way, the truth, the life! (John 14:6).
You cannot understand the serious intellectual value of these things unless you become one with them, unless you try to identify with them in your heart. Imagine, then, that on the sand dunes by the sea you see a huddle of people from the neighboring village listening to one of them speaking, to someone in the middle of the group who is speaking. You pass by them to go to the beach where you are heading; you pass close by, and as you pass by and look curiously, you hear the man standing in the middle say, “I am the way, the truth, the life! I am the way, the truth”: the way that cannot be known, the way of which Kafka spoke: “I am the way, the truth, the life.” Picture it, make an effort of the imagination, of fantasy: what would you do, what would you say? However skeptical you may be, you cannot but help but prick up your ears, attracted by something coming from that direction, and, at the very least, you look with utmost curiosity at that man who is either crazy or is telling the truth: tertium non datur, either he is crazy or it is true. In fact, it is so true that only one man, only one, has ever said this phrase in the entire history of the world—of the world! A man amid a small group of people, often amid a small group but often amid a large crowd, too.
So, everyone in the great plain halts their work and pays attention to this voice, and he continually repeats the same words. Who were the first to be annoyed by this matter? The engineers, the architects, and the owners of the various construction companies, who said almost immediately, “Come on, come on, guys, get to work! Workers, back to your jobs! That guy is just a braggart!” He was a radical, trenchant alternative to their project, to their creativity, to their profit, to their power, to their name, to their very selves. He was the alternative to their own self. After the engineers, architects, and bosses, so also the workers—beginning to laugh a little—dragged their eyes away from the man more reluctantly, talking about him for a bit, making fun of him or saying, “Who knows, who knows who he is, could he be crazy?” Some of them, however, did not. Some heard an accent they had never heard before, and they did not respond to the engineer, architect, or company boss who said to them, “Come on, quickly, what are you doing here, why are you still stopping to look over there?” They kept looking at the man. And he came forward. Or rather, they went up to him. Out of 120 million people, there were twelve of them. But it happened: this is a historical fact.
What Kafka says (“there is no way”) is not historically true. Paradoxically, one might say that it is true theoretically, but it is not true historically. The mystery cannot be known! This is true theoretically. But if the mystery knocks at your door, “He who opens the door to me, I will enter his house and dine with him” are words we read in the Bible, they are the words of God in the Bible (Rev 3:20). And it is a fact that happened.
The first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, which is the first page in literature that speaks about it, besides making the general announcement—“The Word was made flesh,” that of which all reality is made became man—contains the memories of those who followed him immediately, who resisted the urgings of the engineers and architects. On a sheet of paper, one of them jotted down his first impressions and the features of the first moment in which the fact occurred. Indeed, the first chapter of the Gospel of Saint John contains a series of notes that are just that—notes from memory. One of the two men, having grown old, reads the remaining notes from his memory. For memory has its own law. Memory does not follow a law of continuity without gaps, as for example in works of fantasy or imagination. Memory literally “takes notes,” as we are doing now: a note, a line, a point, and this point covers many things, such that the second phrase begins from the many things that were assumed in the first point. Things are often supposed rather than stated, and some are only stated as landmarks. As a result, in my seventies I am rereading this passage for the thousandth time, and without any hint of fatigue. I challenge you to imagine anything in history that is more serious, more weighty, in the sense of pondus, greater, charged with more of a challenge to human existence in its apparent fragility, more pregnant with consequences than this fact that happened.
“The next day John was there again with two of his disciples, and fixing his gaze on Jesus as he walked by, he said. . .” (John 1:35). Imagine the scene, then. After a hundred and fifty years of waiting, the Hebrew people—who, throughout their whole history, for two millennia, had always had some prophet, someone recognized by everyone as a prophet—finally had a prophet again: his name was John the Baptist. Other writings from antiquity also mention him; he is historically documented, therefore. Everyone—rich and poor, publicans and Pharisees, friends and opponents—went to hear him speak and to see the way he lived, beyond the Jordan, in the desert land of locusts and wild grasses. He always had a huddle of people around him. Among those people that day were also two who had come for the first time and were from, we would say, the country—they were actually from the lake, which was quite far away and out of the loop of the highly developed cities. They were there like two villagers coming to the city for the first time, bewildered, looking wide-eyed at everything around them and especially at John. They were there with their mouths open and their eyes gaping, looking at him and listening to him very attentively. Suddenly, one of the group, a young man, leaves, taking the path along the river heading north. And John the Baptist, fixing his gaze on him, immediately cries out, “Behold the Lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sins of the world!” But the people did not move; they were used to hearing the prophet occasionally express himself in strange, unintelligible phrases, seemingly unrelated and out of context, so most of those present took no notice. The two who had come for the first time and were hanging on John’s every word, watching his eyes, looking wherever he turned his gaze, saw that he was staring at that man who was leaving, and they set out after him. They followed him from a distance, timid and ashamed, but also strangely, profoundly, obscurely awestruck and intrigued. “The two disciples heard him say this, and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him, and he said to them, “What are you looking for?’ They replied, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’”
This is the formula, the Christian formula. This is the Christian method: “Come and see.” “So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him all that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” It does not specify when they left, when they followed him. The whole passage and the following one too are made up of notes, as I said before; the sentences end at a point that takes for granted that we already know many things. For example, “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” Does this refer to when they left, or when they arrived? Who knows? In any case, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who had heard the words of John the Baptist and followed Jesus was named Andrew, and he was Simon Peter’s brother. Indeed, the first person he met was his brother Simon, who was returning from the beach—he was either coming back from fishing or from mending his fishing nets—and he said to him, “We have found the Messiah.” John does not narrate anything, does not quote anybody, does not offer any documentation. It is common knowledge, it is clear, these are notes about things that everyone knows! Few pages can be read that are so lifelike, so straightforwardly true, where not a single word has been added to pure recollection.
How could Andrew say, “We have found the Messiah”? Jesus, in speaking to them, must have used this word, which was part of their vocabulary, because saying that this man was the Messiah, asserting it so emphatically right away, would have been impossible. It shows that staying there for hours and hours listening to that man, seeing him, watching him speak—who could speak like that? Who had ever spoken like that? Who had ever said such things? Unheard of! No one had ever seen anyone like that!—slowly within their hearts grew the phrase, “If I don’t believe this man I will no longer believe anyone, not even my own eyes.” Not that they said it, not that they thought it; they felt rather than thought it. That man must therefore have said, among other things, that he was the one who was to come, the Messiah. But it was so obvious in the face of the exceptionality of the announcement that they came away with that statement as if it were something simple—and it was simple!—as if it were something easy to understand.
Not only is it easy to recognize him, not only was it easy to recognize him in his exceptionality—because “if I don’t believe this man, I don’t even believe my own eyes anymore”—but it was also easy to understand what kind of morality, that is, what type of relationship came from him; because morality is relating to reality as something created by the Mystery that made it. It is the rightly ordered relationship with reality. It was easy, it was easy for them to understand how easy it was to have a relationship with him, to follow him, to be consistent with what he was, to be consistent with his presence.
There is another page by Saint John that says these things in a spectacular way. It is in the last chapter of his Gospel, the twenty-first. That morning, the boat was coming to the shore and they had not caught any fish. A few hundred meters from the bank they realized that a man was standing there—he had lit a little fire, they could see it from a hundred meters away. The man started conversing with them in a certain way that I will not describe now. John was the first to say, “It is the Lord!” and Saint Peter suddenly threw himself into the lake, and in four strokes reached the shore, and it was the Lord. Meanwhile, the others arrived, and no one spoke. They all gathered around in a circle, and no one spoke, they all kept quiet because they all knew that it was the risen Lord: he had already died, and had already shown himself to them after he had risen. He had prepared some roasted fish for them. Everyone sat down and ate. In the almost total silence that hung over on the beach, Jesus, lying down, looked over at his neighbor, who was Simon Peter; he stared at him, and Peter felt the weight of that gaze. Let’s imagine how he felt its weight, because he remembered the betrayal of a few weeks prior, and all that he had done—he had even gotten himself called Satan by Christ: “Get behind me, Satan, you are a stumbling block for me, for the destiny of my life” (Matt 16:23). He remembered all his faults, because when you make a serious mistake, all the other things you have done also come to mind, even those that are less serious. Peter felt as if he were crushed by the weight of his inability, his inability to be a man. And that man next to him opened his mouth and said, “Simon [imagine how Simon must have been trembling], do you love me?” If you try to imagine yourselves in this situation, you will tremble now thinking about it, just thinking about it, thinking about this scene that is so dramatic; dramatic, which is to say, so descriptive of what is human, exposing what is human, exalting what is human, because drama is what exalts the factors that make up the human person—only tragedy annihilates them. Nihilism leads to tragedy, while the encounter with Christ brings drama into your life, because drama is the lived relationship between an “I” and a “thou.” Then, like a breath, like a breath, Peter answered. His response was barely audible, like a breath. He did not dare, but, “I don’t know how, yes, Lord, I love you; I don’t know how, but I do.” “Yes, Lord. I don’t know how, I can’t tell you how, but. . . .”
In short, it was very easy to retain—to live—the relationship with that man. One simply had to adhere to the sympathy that he brought forth, a profound sympathy, like that dizzying and visceral sympathy between a child and his mother, which is sympathy in the intense meaning of the word. It was enough to adhere to the sympathy that he aroused. Because, after everything that Peter had done to him, and the betrayal, he heard him say, “Simon, do you love me?” Three times. And the third time he suspected, perhaps, that there was some doubt within Jesus’s question, and he answered more fully, “Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you. My human sympathy is for you; my human sympathy is for you, Jesus of Nazareth.”
Those two, John and Andrew, and those twelve, Simon and the rest, told their wives, and some of those wives went with them. At a certain point many went with them and followed him: they left their homes and went with them. And they also told other friends, who did not necessarily leave their homes, yet participated in their sympathy, participated in their positive attitude of awe and faith in that man. And these friends told other friends, and these in turn other friends, and then others again. Thus, the first century passed, and these friends invaded the second century with their faith, and meanwhile they invaded the geographical world as well. They reached Spain at the end of the first century and as far as India in the second century. And then those in the second century told it to others who lived after them, and these told others after them, like a great stream that swelled, like a great river that swelled, and eventually they told my mother—my mother. And my mother told me when I was little, and I too say, “Master, neither do I understand what you say, but if we leave you, where shall we go? You alone have words that correspond to the heart.”
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted and adapted from Time and the Temple (Slant Books, 2026). All rights reserved.
Seeking the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary through prayer