April 1, 1945
I see again the joyful and powerful Resurrection of Christ.
In the kitchen garden all is silent and glittering with dew. Above it the sky is becoming a clearer and clearer sapphire shade, after leaving its dark-blue hue studded with stars, that through the whole night had watched over the world. Dawn is driving back, from east to west, these still dark zones, like a wave that during the high tide advances more and more, covering the dark beach and replacing the grey-dark shade of the damp sand and of the reef with the blue sea water.
A few little stars do not want to die yet and peep more and more faintly through the wave of the white greenish light of dawn, a white shaded with grey, like the leaves of the drowsy olive trees that form a crown on that not far away hillock. And then it is wrecked, submerged by the wave of dawn, like land overflowed by water. And there is a star less... And then also another one less... and another one, and another one. The sky loses its herd of stars and only over there, to the remote east, three, then two, then one remains to contemplate that daily wonder, which is the rising dawn.
And then, when a pink thread draws a line on the turquoise silk of the eastern sky, a breath of wind passes over leaves and herbs and says: «Wake up. The day has risen.» But it awakes only leaves and herbs, that shiver under their dewy diamonds and rustle gently while the falling drops resound like arpeggios. The birds have not awakened yet among the thick branches of a very tall cypress that seems to dominate like a lord in his kingdom, or in the thick entanglement of a laurel hedge that shelters from the north wind.
The guards, weary, cold, sleepy, in various postures are watching over the Sepulcher, the stone of which has been reinforced round its edge, as if it were a buttress, with a thick layer of lime, on the opaque white of which stand out the large rosettes of red wax of the Temple seal, impressed with others directly on the fresh lime.
The guards must have lit a little fire during the night, because there are ashes and half- burnt fire-brands on the ground, and they must have played and eaten, because scattered around there are remains of food and some small clean bones, which have certainly been used for some game, like our dominoes or our children's games of marbles, which are played on a coarse board traced on a path. Then they became tired and left things as they are now, and they tried to find more or less comfortable postures to sleep or to keep watch.
In the clear sky, where to the east there is now a completely rosy zone, which is spreading out more and more widely, but where, however, there are no sunbeams as yet, a very bright meteor appears, coming from unknown depths, and it descends like a sphere of fire of unsustainable splendor, followed by a glowing trail, which perhaps is nothing but the persistence of its brightness in our retinas. It descends at a very high speed towards the Earth, shedding such an intense phantasmagoric light, frightful in its beauty, that the rosy light of dawn vanishes, outshone by such white incandescence.
The guards, astonished, raise their heads; also because with the light there comes a mighty, harmonious, solemn rumble that fills the whole of Creation with its roar. It comes from heavenly depths. It is the alleluia, the angelical glory, that follows the Spirit of the Christ, which is returning to His glorious Flesh.
The meteor clashes on the useless closure of the Sepulcher, tears it off, throws it on the ground, and it strikes with terror and noise the guards placed as jailors of the Master of the Universe, producing with its return to the Earth a new earthquake, as it had caused one when this Spirit of the Lord fled from the Earth. It enters the dark Sepulcher that becomes all bright with its indescribable light, and while it remains suspended in the still air, the Spirit is infused again into the Body motionless under the funereal bandages.
All this takes place not in a minute, but in the fraction of a minute; so fast have been the appearance, descent, penetration and the disappearance of the Light of God...
The «I want» of the divine Spirit to its cold Body is noiseless. It is uttered by the Essence to the immobile Matter. But no word is perceived by the human ear. The Flesh receives the order and obeys it with a deep sigh... Nothing else for some minutes.
Under the Sudarium and the Shroud, the glorious Body is recomposed in eternal beauty; it awakes from the sleep of death, it comes back from the «nothing» in which it was, it lives after being dead. The heart certainly awakes and gives its first throb, it propels the remaining frozen blood through the veins and at once creates the full measure of it in the empty arteries, in the immobile lungs, in the dark brain, and brings back warmth, health, strength, thought.
Another moment, and there is a sudden movement under the heavy Shroud. It is so sudden that, from the moment He certainly moves His folded arms to the moment He appears standing, imposing, splendid in His garment of immaterial matter, supernaturally handsome and majestic, with a gravity that changes and elevates Him, and yet leaves Him exactly Himself, the eye has hardly time to follow the development. And now it admires Him: so different from what the mind remembers; tidied up, without wounds or blood, only blazing with the light that gushes from the five wounds and issues from every pore of His skin.
When He takes His first step – and in the movement the rays emanating from His Hands and Feet halo Him with beams of light: from His Head haloed with a garland, made with the countless little wounds of the crown, but they no longer bleed but only shine, to the hem of His tunic, when, opening His arms, that were folded across His chest, He uncovers the zone of very bright luminosity that filters through His tunic inflaming it like a sun at the height of His Heart – then it is really the «Light» that has taken a body. Not the poor light of the Earth, not the poor light of the stars, not the poor light of the sun. But the Light of God: all the heavenly brightness that gathers in one Being and grants Him its inconceivable azure as eyes, its golden fire as hair, its angelic whiteness as garment and complexion and all that exists, but cannot be described by human words, the supereminent ardor of the Most Holy Trinity, that outshines with its ardent power every fire in Paradise, absorbing Him in Itself to generate Him again at each moment of the eternal Time – Heart of Heaven that attracts and spreads His blood, the countless drops of His incorporeal blood: the blessed souls, the angels, everything there is the Paradise: the love of God, the love for God, all this is the Light that is, that forms the Risen Christ.
When He moves, coming towards the exit, and the eye can see beyond His brightness, two most beautiful brilliances, but similar to stars compared with the sun, appear to me, one on this side, the other on the other side of the threshold, prostrated in the adoration of their God, Who passes by enveloped in His light, beatifying with His smile, and He goes out, leaving the funereal grotto and going back to walk on the earth, that awakes out of joy and shines in its dews, in the hues of herbs and roseries, in the countless corollas of apple trees, that open, by a wonder, to the early sun that kisses them, and to the eternal Sun Who proceeds under them.
The guards are there, shocked... The corrupt powers of man do not see God, whereas the pure powers of the universe – the flowers, herbs, birds – admire and venerate the Mighty One, Who passes by in a halo of His own Light and in an aureole of sunlight.
His smile, His eyes that rest on flowers, on dead branches, that look up at the clear sky, everything becomes more beautiful. And softer and more shaded than a silky rosery are the millions of petals forming a flowery foam on the head of the Conqueror. And brighter are the diamonds of the dew. And of a deeper blue is the sky reflecting His refulgent eyes, and more joyful is the sun that with gladness paints a little cloud blown by a light wind, that comes to kiss its King with scents stolen from gardens and with caresses of silky petals.
Jesus raises His Hand and blesses and then, while the birds sing more loudly and the wind carries its scents, He disappears from my sight, leaving me in a joy that cancels even the slightest remembrance of sadness and sufferings and hesitancy for tomorrow...