LETTERS

LETTERS

At the Meeting
with the Family
For several years now, I’ve been unable to come to the Meeting. This year, I wanted it so much that I decided to go for two days with the whole family (I have 8 children between the ages of 16 and 3) and with some dear friends. Once we arrived, I found myself overwhelmed by a whirlwind of people, and it was hard to keep track of everybody–in fact, I lost two (and found them again). One of them cried and fussed the whole time, not to mention the number of trips to the bathroom… I experienced such a variety of emotions–anxiety, anger, apathy–that I wondered whether it was worth it, since my initial desire had vanished, leaving room for only one desire: to go home. During the return trip, in the silence while my husband drove and the children slept, I kept getting flashes of sentences I’d heard, and to which I hadn’t given much thought at the moment–for examples, everything connected to the Meeting title, the sentence about Don Giovanni, that he was damned precisely because he didn’t desire the Infinite, and the sentence, “Alone, you don’t do anything; there’s always the need for a relationship.” I realized that it was good to have friends who were patient with my anger and shared my tiredness. Another such sentence said that words are like the waves that arrive small at the shore, but carry all the greatness of the sea. Now, as I cross the threshold of my home, so longed for, I think that it was worth all the effort, because when you believe that you are enough for yourself, or that your things are enough for you, you sense a melancholy that brings you back to the place that reminds you that it isn’t so, that the heart desires something greater, desires the infinite, even when it doesn’t seem so to you.
Loredana

An Evident Newness
It was 12:15 am in Miramare di Rimini. We got out of the car after finding a miraculous parking spot and I held my sleepy daughters by their hands. There was a bedlam of lights, shop windows, music, pubs, and discos: the Rimini nightlife. I held my girls’ hands more tightly, because this is not the life I want for them. What is this? This frenzied appearance that demonstrates only an “I” disappointed by the nth style of the season… I couldn’t help but see again the day I’d just spent at the Meeting in Rimini. I’ve been coming here since 1980, and I’ve seen it grow, flower, consolidate, and deepen. Today, I saw friends I worked with twenty years ago to build the Meeting, and this time their children were engaged in the same work. Here, people work for free–they take vacation days to come work. I found the engineer who heads a big construction company, attentively drawing a customer’s beer at the tap, together with the university freshman working for the first time at the Meeting. I met the humanities professor working as a cashier at the Argentinean restaurant, rushing to be on time for her shift. The work you do, whatever it may be, is of worth–such great worth that if you weren’t there, or if you did it poorly, it would be noticed. You see this at the Meeting, and you bring it home with you. You find again the origin for which you are made, and you can begin to give an answer to that anxious swirl of questions you have inside. Participating in a conference on subsidiarity, seeing an exhibit on Hopper, attending a theater performance, or wandering around the stands provokes you and gives you the will to start again, to return home and face your same-old work, your same-old relatives, and even your same-old friends, because you have encountered something or someone who has finally taken you seriously, and a journey can start again. We returned to the hotel. The late-night news mentioned the Meeting, but only reported about the politician who attended that day, one I didn’t even catch a glimpse of. Nothing else. Such an evident newness, so patently clear, is too uncomfortable for those who don’t want to rock their own boats.
Luisa, Perugia, Italy

Encountered Beauty
Dear Fr. Julián: It’s always difficult for all of us to start a new year. After the summer, the incessant rhythm of daily life seems almost like an undesired visitor who regularly comes knocking on our door. How can we begin the year well if we consider school and work–in short, our life–as an obligatory waiting period for the next vacation? How can we be happy, sitting at a desk in the office or at school? These are the things I was asking myself when I returned from the Meeting. At the Meeting, I lived a Beauty. I began something that I didn’t want to end. So I returned to Salerno with the hope and then the certainty that the Beauty I had experienced can be present in daily life, in the usual things that at times seem banal to us. I am happy when I rediscover in a version of Greek or in the face of a teacher that Beauty to which Christ testifies. It is important to start the year well, just as it is important to start a meeting with a song. Singing is prayer written in musical notes. It is important to sing and learn new songs so as not to forget the reason we meet every week. If we meet every week, it’s not because we don’t have anything better to do. It’s because we have encountered that Beauty, that Presence, Christ among us. We are together because of the same desire for happiness.
Filomena,
Salerno, Italy

Positive Experience
For the first time, my wife and I went to the Meeting, invited by two dear friends. I accepted because of the trust in and esteem for this friendship, and also because my 16-year-old son had planned to go with GS. I couldn’t continue being ignorant about what it is, and I wanted to be able to talk with my son about it. It was a very positive experience, for me, my wife, and, even more so, for my son. I would define the Meeting in this way: a place rich in cultural and sensorial stimuli and experiences that represents a good, just, and beautiful reality in all its positive and negative aspects, with man at the center.
Luigi, Chiavari, Italy

Entrusting Yourself
to Your Friends
I work as the director of the dentistry project of the Alvorada Center of Belo Horizonte that we have been building for the past seven years together with the local Catholic University of Belo Horizonte, in collaboration with the University of Bologna (Department of Dental Sciences), where many of our friends work. This story began by chance with Andrea’s thesis, and one evening at Arturo Alberti’s house with Rosetta, Andrea, and Ciocca. Now, it provides dental care for 2,200 patients from the favelas, thanks also to the passionate and stable involvement of the dentistry students of the local university. I had planned my trip to Italy so that I could work and then have some holiday time with my sister. I planned to work, then attend the Fraternity Exercises, and then travel around Italy, Spain, and France. Two days before departing, something unexpected happened: unfortunately, my grandfather died after a yearlong illness. I was confused and afraid of leaving my mother alone with her pain, but my mother encouraged us to go ahead with this experience, saying that my grandfather would have been happy to see us go. I entrusted myself to my friends, asking them to be close to my mother while we were away. So, certain of their presence, I departed with serenity. It is difficult to express the experience I had in Italy. I felt welcomed by people and by friends as if I were in my own family, and when I called home or my friends in Brazil, it seemed more spontaneous to tell them about encounters with people, rather than to describe places I visited. How true it is that encounters with people mark you forever and remain impressed inside! Ciocca, Fabrizio, and Pamela not only did their best so that I could attend the Fraternity Exercises, but they kept close to me and accompanied me during the Exercises. Every word I heard moved me, because it confirmed ever more the encounter I had had in Brazil with the friends of the Alvorada Center in Belo Horizonte. The experience I was having at that moment evoked the experience I was living in Brazil with Rosetta, and this gave me certainty about the road I’d undertaken.
Fernanda, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Escape
from Lebanon
Last July 1st, we moved to Lebanon so I could study Arab and Islamic law, and Romina could work in an NGO. Our intention was to stay for a year. Two weeks later, we were back in Padua, having fled (with another family that, like us, had gone there to work) through Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, to get a flight back to Italy. Our regret at having all our plans overturned, and the pain of seeing a people prey to panic and fearing for the future were accompanied by a strong question about the meaning of what we had experienced. My passion for Muslim law and Romina’s interest in a work experience abroad had been accompanied by the hope of being useful for the Church. The new environment forced us to look at what had brought us down there, to remain firm in our goal, and also to observe reality more for its meaning than its forms, so different and at times even apparently hostile. This assiduous personal question produced some comforting confirmations: friendships that began, doors to homes that opened wide, an unexpected familiarity with people never seen before. The fascination for a new and hectic life confirmed for us that our “I” grows anywhere, as long as we have nothing to defend, except reason, which leads us to a true curiosity. But the real surprise happened when we were forced to leave. During the night while we were packing, our friends in Italy were praying the Rosary, and in Lebanon, people we hardly knew stayed up with us and involved all their friends in finding out what roads we should take, what dangers we should avoid, and who to turn to in case of problems. We saw a people at work for us. We had wanted to be useful but, instead, everything that happened to us was useful for us, for the awareness of our belonging.
Romina and Andrea, Padua, Italy

Argentinean
Encounters
Dear Fr. Carrón: This letter began on February 22, 2005. I was in the Argentinean Chaco for a journalistic investigation, when I read about Fr. Giussani’s death. While the death of a person always leaves a great void in the life of his loved ones and those who were close to him, it wasn’t this way with Fr. Giussani. Certainly, the pain mixed with eternal gratitude to a person who, a few months before, had changed my life, is a sentiment that is difficult to describe with simple words. But Fr. Giussani’s death didn’t create a void. The next day, I arrived in Buenos Aires to continue my investigation. I thought right away: I have to contact the kids of the Movement for a Mass or a Rosary in memory of Fr. Giussani. I was walking the streets of the metropolis together with Mariano, an Italo-Argentinean friend and colleague, when my curiosity to see what the local anti-globalization activists were doing led us to the Faculty of Social Sciences, the “reddest” place in the capital. Only a few steps after we crossed the main entrance, a flyer was put into my hand. A few steps more, and I realized that it was from the CLU students. I turned quickly toward the university students and introduced myself. In the midst of reciprocal incredulity and amazement, I asked for a Mass. They invited me to the 7:30 pm Mass and Rosary. It was as if I had known them forever, in their gazes and their words. The next Friday, they invited me to see the theatrical work, The Announcement Made to Mary by Claudel. That encounter marked my life and my faith forever. That fact, made present in my life, did not happen just once, but still happens now. That day, I felt and will feel forever the embrace of a father, the unmerited embrace of Fr. Giussani.
Lorenzo, Reggio Emilia, Italy

Nothing Taken
for Granted
I left for the short CL vacation, taking everything for granted: relationships, events, etc. Less than twenty-four hours after arriving, I called a friend and asked him to come get me, because all of a sudden I felt like an outsider to those hundreds of people who I knew little or not at all, with their characters, with their relationships already consolidated. But I also asked myself if it were possible that my whole history with the Movement had nothing else in store for me. So, I decided to stay and tough it out, asking with a few prayers that the history that led me to that point would be revealed. Then a little piece of the School of Community reading reminded me about the difference between what banally corresponds and what truly fulfills the heart. Slowly, in the faces of the people, I began to discern the same desire for fulfillment, and it was moving. The vacation ended with the clear perception of the presence of Christ, there, in a companionship, the Church, simply being there.
Maurizio, Cassano d’Adda, Italy

The Infallibility
of the Heart
Dear Fr. Carrón: After the Fraternity Exercises we lost our third child, in the third month of pregnancy. We came to Rimini already aware of the problems for his survival, with a strong entreaty, asking for a miracle. But reality, that which happens, the fact that he died, didn’t correspond to my desire. Where was the infallibility of the heart you spoke of? Where was I wrong in desiring life for my child? These questions left me no respite. I wasn’t placated by telling myself that what happened was for the best, that it was the way it was supposed to go, even though immediately it was an attempt to anesthetize the pain, to try to look away from it. My entreaty for life and truth remained unsatisfied, and I put this question to my friends; I cried it out to them. I cried out my limit to them, to my Fraternity group and my School of Community.
I had to look straight and hard at my heart’s pain about this child who was no longer there, to perceive that the correspondence you spoke of doesn’t mean the fulfillment of my desire that my child live, but something beyond this, in the revelation of the face of Christ in my life. Deep down, no child can fulfill my heart; it is fulfilled only by Christ.
Sara, Ascoli Piceno, Italy

The Child
and the Little Angel
Lidia, Anna, and I have been working for years helping families who come to Pesaro from all over the world for bone marrow transplants. One Sunday afternoon, many years ago, during a party organized to cheer up the sick children, a Muslim family arrived from Azerbaijan with a thalassemic (anemic) child. The child received bone marrow from his mother, but the transplant didn’t succeed, and so they stayed in Pesaro to continue his treatment and face a second transplant. In the meantime, the mother had a little girl who was compatible, and the second transplant was done successfully. During the course of the illness, in addition to bringing the bags of food from the Solidarity Center, we helped them for about two years by taking turns with the hospital assistance. To help the child bear the pain better, we gave him a little angel, telling him to look at it because it would help him. The parents weren’t very pleased with the initiative, but seeing that the child reacted well, they accepted our gift. One day, the child asked how he could become the angel’s friend, and we told him the life of Jesus in the form of a fairy tale. Every day, we helped the child in the course of his illness and tried to distract him with lots of games, but he always asked us the fairy tale of the little angel and Jesus.
Once he overcame his illness, the child asked us to let him continue to know Jesus better. Because of this, the parents allowed their children to be baptized, and as the children progressed in their journey of faith, they received the sacraments of the Eucharist and Confirmation. In explaining this decision, the parents told us, “If Jesus is the reason for what you do, then it is a good thing and we want it for our children.”
Flora, Pesaro, Italy

Not an Intellectual Experience
Outside of my wedding and my conversion to the Catholic faith, the encounter with the Movement has changed me more than any other experience of my life. When I contacted the Movement, I was looking for something that would put my intellectual experience of the Church into action, and I could never have expected what was to come. Since my first encounter, I have met some of the most remarkable people I could have ever asked to know, from literally all corners of the globe. They have helped me to see that the “Word made Flesh” is not an intellectual experience but rather a reality. When we come into this reality, the outcome can only be friendship and love, not because we choose it but because it chooses us, and for me the effects have been amazing. It changed the way I work with youth in the Church and brought both me and my young friends to an understanding of the Church that is based more on mutual experience than on a “teacher–student” relationship. I will never be able to thank the Movement enough and pray for my continued growth and a continual relationship with you.
Christopher Johnson, Florida

The Risk of Fraternity
I had gone to the Fraternity Exercises for a couple years. I remember sitting in the Exercises last year and thinking, “Yes, this is for me.” Months later, I was invited by Bunny and Gary in Woodbury to join a local Fraternity. I remember not responding, feeling myself hold back, not sure I was ready to entrust myself to something I didn’t completely understand. I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else and yet there was a risk. Fr. Giussani talks about the risk of education. For me, it became the risk of Fraternity. The first time we met as a Fraternity, Nick asked right away, “Can you all help me to judge something that is happening with me at work right now?” I knew right away that this is why I am here, to judge my life with others and follow Christ with them. The last time my Fraternity met, Missy stopped us at one point and said, “I don’t want to settle, in School of Community or here; I don’t just want to read or study. I want to see how this applies to my life.” Missy saying this was such as reminder to me of what I want not only in my reading, but in my life everyday. I don’t want to settle; I want to see the meaning in my life, today, now! I joined the Fraternity because I wanted to live my life in a companionship with those who also desire to follow Christ with others. I know that I grow closer to Christ by following them and that Christ becomes more present to me by staying with them.
Heather, Minnesota