It is opportune to take up again the theme of prophecy, not only in light of the Islamic-Christian reality, but also that of the Mediterranean and the world.

Prophecy and the act of faith represent two aspects of one reality. It involves the possibility and the capacity to welcome the presence and the initiative of the personal God to the bottom of the heart and the summit of the soul, in communion with the Spirit. This presence of the divine Guest in the human person is rational and creative. Adam as microcosm was created, from the Koranic point of view, by the divine order: “Be!” and “it was” in history until consummation (See Qur. III:59). The angels are invited to prostrate themselves before Adam (Qur. II:34, VII:11, XXXVIII:71-73) who is formed of clay and breath (Qur. XV:28-9, XXXVIII:71-72). As a prophet, Adam pronounces the names and knows the meanings, which God has revealed to him, of which the angels are ignorant (Qur.: II:31-33).

Earth receives form as letters receive meaning. The individual is inscribed like a clay tablet styled in cuneiform.

Adam is taken from the Earth, Eve from Adam. A astonishing correspondence. The Breath penetrates Mary and the Word is formed as a man.

The idea of our Adamic origins are now lost back in the infinite processes of evolution. Meanwhile our vision of the future has become an explosion of the present moment. Because it is now possible and necessary to imagine futures as a progressive human expansion outside of the planet towards a spatial-temporal dispersion of infinite potentiality. Only the arch of personal life, tied between a creative beginning and a mortal ending, constitutes the surviving key-analogy for the interpretation of existence.

This is why Jesus the son of Mary, the Person, in the dramatic pretension to destroy and rebuild in himself the Temple, image of the Cosmos, the place of the Glory, proposes Himself as the summit and source of sense, life and light for his disciples. When they recognised in Him, in the arch of his own life, the design of a benevolence that is all-embracing. That is why He, having tasted with Mary abandonment, declared that everything is achieved. But the disciple who recognises the mystical birth of the Church at the flow of the blood and water from the right side of that Temple, declares that only now is everything beginning.

The Qur'an emphasises the analogy, and hence polemically the identity, of Adam and Christ (See Qur. III:59) (And see in the Bible: Rom 5:14; I Cor 15:20-22, 45-49). The discipleship of the Church to Jesus of Nazareth is set between the summit of Sinai - the Mosaic prophecy - and the cave of Hirâ - the Muhammadan prophecy. And this is because He supersedes the law recreating the person, as the Other of the Relationship, man-woman, God-me. Meanwhile Elijah, the Spirit of Elijah, Enoch and John the Baptist, continually returns and ascends to heaven in a chariot of divine fire.

Moses, to whom God speaks directly, still announces the coming of the Anointed. Thus Muhammad, upon whom the Word descends as an oracle, also announces His final return.

Every prophecy plays out in a particular linguistic environment that is necessarily equivocal. If this does not justify the fundamentalistic absoluteness of this or that prophetic expression, nor does it allow the exercise of a naive doubtfulness of the truthfulness and the sincerity of the prophetic experience. It is only through a spiritual intelligence, practised in the future of dialogue and communion, that it will be possible, to grasp the truth of such a radical, polemical, apparently anti-christian, monotheistic prophecy, like the one of Mohammed. This will be possible moving spiritually upstream through the current of tradition of devotion of sincere souls, arisen souls, sacrificed souls of muslim saints, men and women, towards the Prophet of Islam.

A disciple of Jesus spoke of the veil of Moses which opportunely descended to obscure understanding of the axial mystery of Golgotha, so that the Mystery is not held prisoner by particularism (see 2 Cor 3:7-18). At the same time this veil is extended by the Koran to prevent, forbid and chastise the usage of this holy Mystery, at the end of its power and its appropriation, by the “christian” world.

There are different post-christianities: that of a post-christian historic prophecy, like that of Islam, or that of the ulterior and constant pursuit of pre-christian religious traditions, such as Judaism, or extra-christian religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Finally there is the modern and post-modern refusal of the “pretention” of the witnesses of the empty tomb. This all turns in a centrifugal and centripetal way on this axis to spread a vast shroud over the Christ.

What will they do, these disciples of Jesus, with these post-christianities? They could refuse it as the work of Satan; or they could tolerate it waiting for the final manifestation of Light. Finally they could love in a dynamic of relative functions, some towards others, to build partaken hopes in common futures.

The year 2000 in particular, during which the Churches have been trying to demonstrate the historic centrality of the Christ-event, it seems to indicate on the contrary the historic failure of christianity. The failure of christian universality nevertheless doesn’t constitute success for another form of globality, even though it could look much stronger and more efficacious. At the same time this failure of the christian system corresponds to a process which favours the reconstruction of the discipleship to Jesus as an inter-personal relationship. From this reconstruction springs fidelity to the mystical value, a meta-historical one, of the human person in a divine being children.

Future, eschatology: we will re-write it together, men and women in this time of plurality and dispersal, of globalisation and homogenisation with imperial tendencies.

This man from Nazareth, so peripheral, and his disciples wanted to be witness to the definitive dynamic of the gift, offering, communion, in the efficacious and symbolic place of the passage to the infinite and eternal. Other traditions are witnesses by other paths to these exigencies together with others.

So, this eschatology we will re-write it, we will do it, we will realise it together if we are capable of penance, of pardon, of communion, of tolerant dialogue, of loving relations (ie: to have access through devotion to the truth of the Other, as a condition of witness to the truth which is in Us). That is why it will be good to be able to practice dialectically belonging to plural and dynamic identities with the intention of favouring crossed hermeneutics of futures. This will not be possible other than through attentive welcome and the development of the gift of prophecy at the centre of every personality, through silence, listening and oracle. Here and now there is an infinite Pentecost of the Spirit in an effort until death, until divinisation by way of relationship, every relationship, from the most mystical until the most material. Spirit, further than the letter in the humid earth of today. In the common body of the Verb, the world.

Humbly, but firmly we will oppose the ghettoes of blocked belongings. At the same time we will remain faithful to the truth of each tradition in his uniqueness and his complementary and corrective interconnections, sometimes punitive, often salvific. In diverse places and different manners some new identities are appearing as more or less solid bridges. Even more than that, a new cyber-network dresses the world and wears a common and new linguistic habit. This habit is like a new virtual image of a more real and efficacious Communion of Saints. This is the hour of a new prophecy; not just of a new prophet but of all of us as prophets.

When we regard that way behind us and in front of us the open sea, we are filled with infinite emotion, compunction and consolation.