Isaac. Chronicle of a assisted sacrifice

Reflection by Fabio Trimigno of the Zaccheo Puglia network

I was 20 when I fell in love for the first time of a man: I 20 years old, he 50. For me he was everything: he was caught, nice, robust, strong and a little grumpy and we were in love. But one evening he forced me to make love while I didn't feel like it.

I cried and, as he kissed on my neck and whispered my name, blocked my wrists, coming inside me at all costs. I felt alone, not understood, abandoned in that moment by God.

The next day I cried and I felt ashamed in telling him that our story could not go on and that we could not have a future together. He screamed me against everything, making a great sense of guilt grow in me for the fact that it was ... a priest.

He didn't know anything about him and passed 20 years, without ever seeing him again.

To my 40 years my beloved Roberto asked me to marry him, but I felt that if I hadn't treated that wound of the past I would never have been really free to belong to someone else. I wanted our union to be one of the stages of a life project together, and not because Roberto had come to a queue of attempts to happiness earlier with other men.

So I decided to find out where that gruff man I had loved 20 years earlier and that I had never been able to forgive had ended. I managed to recover places and contacts: that priest was in a distant and lost place in Northern Italy. I took courage, I called and on the other side of the phone only embarrassing silence: I 40 years old, he 70.

I wanted to climb that mountain and decide to perform this sacrifice: look at it in the eyes and forgive him. I had to do it without anyone accompanying me in the lonely pilgrimage of my soul. I planned the departure for an reverse canon: that young Isaac was ready to kill that elderly Abraham; That young Isaac was ready to put an end to a pain with forgiveness.

And what did God did? I prepared an ram among the shrubs: I had an accident at work, I broke my leg and I never left again. It was then that I realized that God had always been with me in that open wound until the last moment just before my departure.

That so desired and planned sacrifice was replaced by my faith and courage. God read my sincere heart, God had the certainty that I was willing to climb that mountain, to look in the face that priest to penetrate him with my eyes as if they were knives and forgive him once and forever on the altar of a past love.

I forgiven him, yes, but without having ever met him again: my heart had been free for some time now, without knowing it.

I married Roberto after a year from my accident at work: there were neither shrubs nor deer, neither mountains to climb nor altars to be smeared with the blood, neither victim nor executioner.

There was only a lot of love to promise, to continue to feed one for the atro.

This is a small story, the story of an Isaac as they are, the chronicle of a assisted sacrifice, the painting of an altar on the contrary, an inverse canon with several voices, the testimony of a true forgiveness.