It is only a few days since the tragic suicide of Andrea Prospero. At the tender age of 19, Andrea took his own life because he was overwhelmed by the anxiety of his studies. The fact that, according to the investigators, he was pressured to take this tragic step by a teenager slightly younger than himself, and that a third teenager sold him the lethal drug, makes the incident even more horrifying. But it also compels us to interpret what happened from a spiritual perspective, which can serve as a warning and help us to be vigilant – in the awareness that such reflections will remain as a kind of Cassandra, offering advice without being heard or heeded, in the face of overwhelming dynamics that seem to be constantly moving in the opposite direction, and in light of which we must ask ourselves whether the Church will once again succeed in protecting her children from the snares of evil.
Indeed, it is evil at its most subtle, spiritual (rather demonic) manifestation. A dark thought creeps into the darkness of the heart, into the empty space of the being experiencing fragility, and encounters an unjustly accusing voice to nail it down with the falsehood of the seeming impossibility of life.
This has nothing to do with the “normality” mentioned by investigators: “How could this have been possible?” “He was a normal boy from a normal family!” The fact is that this deception, the underlying torment of seeing oneself as flawed, unfit, unlovable, is in fact normality, because it affects all of us, and more than ever it affects the fatherless generation of the youngest. The depths of our hearts are a never-ending battlefield, and we routinely seek to escape from this struggle by building walls that numb us and facades that deceive us into thinking that there are no problems, that everything is fine – except for those unsettling moments of crisis, anxiety or panic, when out of that void our inner self comes screaming again.
Abandoned to himself and his sense of emptiness, how will the individual fight against this destructive and gnawing thought, that suggests negative and apparently convincing explanations?
Will he perhaps try to silence it, continue to avoid it, while in fact building a life entirely around the negative idea he had tried to reject: an alienation from everyday life that ultimately leads to obituaries such as “He was such a hard worker”, “He was such a good person”, without the slightest reflection on the truth, the struggles and therefore the dignity of who that person actually was.
Or he can try to fight it, the first step being to name it, to say it. The light of communication is unbearable for those dark thoughts that thrive in the darkness of the unsaid. But the question is: to whom can they be told?
This young man’s mistake was to assume that he could entrust his inner burdens to someone in worse circumstances than himself, whereas the first rule of spiritual struggle is always to entrust our temptations only to someone who is further ahead than we are in the journey of faith and human maturity. Spiritual direction and, in a certain sense, auricular confession, originated many centuries ago in the desert as therapies of and with the Word against the temptations of evil. Openness of heart is only possible with those who can connect us to God’s gaze upon us, whose unconditional love opposes the interpretation of our lives offered by the temptation of evil. Situating our fears within the broader horizon offered by a spiritual gaze rescales and objectifies them, revealing that they do not speak the truth about us, but are in fact biased and flawed interpretations.
But the question is: are there enough priests today, or even adequately trained lay believers, who are willing to take on the great and beautiful burden of listening? An act of listening that certain activist and philanthropic understandings of what it means to be Church consider to be a waste of time, and which, instead, according to the two-thousand-year-old tradition of our faith, is the first and fundamental tool for uncovering and successfully confronting the evil that lurks in the folds of our souls.
