At the climactic celebration of the Youth Jubilee, Pope Leo XIV offered a profound reflection to the young people gathered: he addressed them not as immature disciples, but as those already initiated into life. He did not speak to persuade, nor to stir enthusiasm, but rather to provoke thought. His meditation began with a simple image — that of grass — drawn from the responsorial Psalm of the day’s liturgy.
Yet that image, in his words, became a parable of human existence, a hermeneutic key to youth, fragility, and the infinite longing that lives in the hearts of those in their twenties — those who refuse to settle. “In the morning it springs up new, but by evening it withers and dries” (Psalm 90:6).
The Pope did not soften the disarming power of this image. On the contrary, he underscored its shocking force, deliberately choosing not to flee from it. Fragility, he said, is part of the wonder that we are. A simple phrase, yet profoundly countercultural. In a world that sees weakness as a failure to be hidden, and youth as currency to be spent quickly before it loses value, Leo XIV proposed a theology of fragility, in which the ephemeral is not a negation of life, but the condition for its renewal.
This vision recalls, by resonance, certain pages from Rainer Maria Rilke, especially when he writes that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are still just able to endure” (Duino Elegies, I). The grass that bends and then rises again, that is consumed and yet becomes nourishment for what follows, speaks of a circularity of lifethat is not only biological, but deeply spiritual. And in the field that “trembles underground” even in winter, one can hear an echo of the seed that dies to bear fruit (John 12:24) — the quintessential Christian paradox.
But Pope Leo XIV did not stop at an aesthetics of limitation. His address took a second, even more decisive turn: toward desire. To the youth, he said that we are made for a life that “constantly regenerates itself in gift, in love.” And he added words that deserve to be quoted in full: “We constantly yearn for a ‘more’ that no created reality can provide; we feel a great, burning thirst so intense that no drink in this world can quench it.”
Here surfaces the great intuition of Blaise Pascal: “There is a God-shaped void in the heart of man.” But more than the apologist, it is the storyteller who seems to step forward. This passage of the Pope could belong in a Julien Green novel, or among the interior monologues of certain Dostoevsky characters, where the heart wrestles between the temptation of substitutes and the longing for the Absolute. The thirst of which Leo XIV speaks is not a condition to be removed, but one to be listened to. And the image that follows is among the most tender ever offered by a Pope to the youth: “Let us make of it a stool on which to climb and, like children, stand on tiptoe at the window of encounter with God.”
An image that evokes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and his way of portraying the adult world through the lens of lost childhood. Perhaps it is no coincidence that at this point in his homily, the Pope emphasized the waiting for God: not a God who breaks in, but who “gently taps on the window of our soul.” The window is fragile, the glass may break. But it is transparent, if we are willing to look. The “adventure with God into the eternal spaces of the infinite,” which Leo XIV mentioned at the end of his homily, is not mystical rhetoric. It is a concrete and deeply realistic invitation to recognize that nothing in time can satisfy what was made for eternity.
This is the hidden motive of every youthful unrest. And Emily Dickinson knew it well, when she wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.”
Hope — like grass, like thirst, like encounter — is fragile, but tenacious. And it sings “a wordless melody,” even in the storm. At Tor Vergata, Leo XIV did not offer solutions. He sowed seeds and invited us to look to Jesus. He spoke of life as one speaks of a field: with reverence, with wonder, with silence. That is the language young people understand. For they do not need slogans — but meaning. And meaning, as one intuits, is always a journey, never a possession.
s.R.A.
Silere non possum