In the orchard all is silence and twinkling dew. Above, a sky that is acquiring an increasingly clear sapphire color, having already shed its black-blue bouquet of stars, which all night long had been watching over the world. From east to west, the dawn rejects these still dark areas, as does the wave during high tide, when it is advancing and covering the dark coastline and replacing the black gray of the wet sand and the reef with the blue of the sea water.
Some little stars still refuse to die, and flicker, fainter and fainter under the wave of greenish-white light of dawn, milky with ashy tones, like the fronds of the sleepy olive trees that crown that little distant mound. And then they are shipwrecked, submerged by the wave of dawn, like land overtaken by water. And there is already one less... and then another one less... and another one, and another one: the sky is losing its flocks of stars... Now, in the far west, there are only three, then two, then one, which continues to contemplate the daily wonder that is the emergence of the dawn.
And when a rosicler thread draws a line on the turquoise silk of the eastern sky, a sigh of wind caresses the fronds and the grasses, saying: "Wake up. The day is rising." But it awakens only fronds and grasses, which, under their diamonds of dew, shiver, with a faint rustle accompanied by arpeggios of falling drops; the birds do not yet awake among the bushy branches of a towering cypress that seems to dominate like a lord in his kingdom; nor in the tangled tangle of a laurel hedge that protects from the tramontana.
The soldiers on guard, bored, chilled, in various postures, watch the Sepulcher, whose door has been reinforced, at the edges, with a thick layer of mortar, as if it were a buttress. Against the opaque white background of the mortar stand out the wide red wax rosettes of the seal of the Temple, stamped together with other seals directly in the fresh mortar.
The soldiers must have lit a small fire during the night, for there are ashes and badly burned blights on the ground; and they must have played and eaten, for there are still remains of food scattered about, and small clean bones, used, no doubt, for some game similar to our dominoes or our childish game with marbles, played on a rudimentary tracing drawn on the path. Then they got tired and abandoned everything to look for more or less comfortable positions, depending on whether to sleep or to watch.
In the sky, which now presents in the East an entirely pink area that is extending more and more through the serene sky - where there are still no rays of the sun - appears, coming from unknown depths, a meteor full of brightness. And the meteor descends - a fireball of irresistible radiance - followed by a glittering trail, which perhaps is nothing more than the memory of its glow on our retina. It descends swiftly towards the Earth, spreading a light so intense, phantasmagoric, terrifying in its beauty, that the pink of the aurora is annulled, surpassed by this white incandescence.
The soldiers raise, stupefied, their heads (even because with the light comes a powerful, harmonious, solemn boom that fills all Creation with its sound). It comes from paradisiacal depths. It is the hallelujah, the angelic glory, which follows the Spirit of the Christ in his return to his glorious Flesh.
The meteor strikes against the stone that uselessly closes the Sepulcher. It tears it up, throws it to the ground. It paralyzes, by terror and clamor, the soldiers placed as jailers of the Owner of the Universe. And, on his return to Earth, just as he had produced an earthquake when he fled from Earth, the Spirit of the Lord produces a new earthquake. He enters the dark Sepulcher, which, with this indescribable light, is filled with clarity; and while the light remains suspended in the still air, the Spirit is re-infused in the motionless Body under the shroud.
All this (the appearance, the descent, the entrance, the disappearance of the Light of God) has been very rapid: not in a moment, but in a fraction of a moment.
The "I will" of the divine Spirit to his cold Flesh has no sound. The Essence says it to motionless Matter. But no human ear perceives that word. The Flesh receives this imperative and obeys with a deep breath.... For a few moments, nothing more.
Under the shroud and the sheet, the glorious Flesh recomposes itself dressed in eternal beauty, awakens from the sleep of death, returns from the "nothingness" in which it was, lives after having been dead. Certainly the heart awakens and gives its first beat, drives into the veins the icy blood that remained and, immediately, creates the full measure of blood in the emptied arteries, in the immobile lungs, in the darkened brain, and brings new warmth, health, strength, thought.
Another instant, and there is a sudden movement under the heavy sheet. So sudden, that, from the instant when He moves His crossed hands, until the moment when He appears, majestic, standing, full of radiance in His dress of immaterial matter, supernaturally beautiful and majestic, with a gravity that transforms and elevates Him without annulling His identity, the sight has almost no time to grasp the successive moments. And now the sight admires it, how different from how the mind remembers! Neat, without wounds or blood; only resplendent, with the radiance of the light that gushes from the five wounds and oozes from every pore of his epidermis.
When he takes the first step and, as he moves, the rays radiating from his Hands and Feet halo him with beams of light: from the Head, haloed with a halo constituted by the innumerable small wounds of the crown, which no longer gush blood but only radiance, to the edge of the dress-, when, opening the arms that were together on the chest, he discovers the zone of very lively luminosity that passes through the dress, lighting it with a sun at the level of the Heart, then it is really the "Light" that has taken shape.
Not the poor light of the Earth, not the poor light of the stars, not the poor light of the Sun. It is the Light of God: all the paradisiacal radiance gathered in one Being, a radiance that gives it its inconceivable blues as pupils, its golden fires as hair, its angelic candors as dress and coloring, and all that constitutes-and it is not describable in human words-the supreme ardor of the Most Holy Trinity-which overrides with its power the light of God. Trinity-which annuls with its ardent power all fire of Paradise by absorbing it in itself to generate it anew in every instant of eternal Time, Heart of Heaven which attracts and diffuses its blood, the innumerable drops of its incorporeal blood: the blessed ones, the angels, all that constitutes Paradise: the love of God, the love of God; all this is the Light which is the Risen Christ, which constitutes the Risen Christ.
When he moves, coming towards the exit, and the sight can see beyond the gleam, then appear before my sight two most beautiful luminosities (only like stars compared to the Sun): one inward and the other outward from the door, prostrate in act of adoration to their God who passes by wrapped in his light, breathing out beatitude with his smile; and he goes out. He leaves the funereal grotto and steps again on the earth, which awakens with joy and shines all in its dew, in the colors of the grasses and roses, in the infinite corollas of the apple trees that open by a prodigy when they receive the first rays of the Sun, which kiss them, and in the presence of the eternal Sun that walks under them.
The soldiers have remained paralyzed where they were.... The corrupted forces of man do not see God, while the pure forces of the universe - the flowers, the grasses, the birds - admire and venerate the Mighty One, who passes by, nimbued with his own Light and surrounded by a nimbus of sunlight.
His smile, the glance he casts on the flowers, on the fronds, or that rises to the serene sky, increases the beauty of everything: and softer, and tinged with a sfumed, silky pinkish color, appear the millions of petals that form a flowery foam on the head of the Victor; and more vivid appear the diamonds of the dew; and bluer the sky, that reflects His refulgent Eyes; and more festive the Sun, that puts brushstrokes of joy in a little cloud moved by a light breeze that comes to kiss its King with fragrances snatched from the gardens and caresses of silky petals.
Jesus raises His Hand and blesses. Then, while the birds sing louder and the wind perfumes more intensely, He disappears from my sight, leaving me in a joy that erases even the slightest memories of sadness and suffering and the slightest hesitation about tomorrow...