| 01-10-2006 - Traces, n.9
La Thuile The Courage to Face Reality by Paola Bergamini We met on the last evening of the International Assembly of Responsibles. I was curious to meet the university student who had written, together with friends of the community, the flyer (published in the May issue of Traces, Vol. 8, No.5, p.20) about the Paris protests. When I see her, in a flash she reminds me of a famous photograph of the “French May” of 1968, a beautiful girl in the midst of the crowd with her arm raised in protest. The same vivacity, the same grit. Murielle is enrolled in the Faculty of Oriental Languages in Paris. “In France, languages are studied intensively,” she explains, “and I chose Chinese. I’ve always been passionate about languages, and have the advantage of being bilingual, since my mother is Italian and my father is French. Every language has its own descriptive constellation for reality. For me, language is the possibility of communicating oneself and for encountering the other. We start out from this. My life has been shaped by a few encounters.” We begin with the first: “I lived in France until I was ten years old and then, for family reasons, I moved to Italy with my mother, who had met Fr. Giussani when she was young and always communicated that way of living to me. We lived in Milan, where my mother had wonderful friends who made me feel right at home. On weekends, I used to go see my grandparents in Brugherio (a town on the outskirts of Milan) and there I began to attend some meetings in the parish, led by Fr. Gianni Calchi Novati. I wasn’t baptized, because my father had decided that it should be my choice.” Catechism? “No, it wasn’t the first step. One day, Fr. Gianni asked, ‘Who wants to be a fisher of men?’ I went to the stationer’s shop and bought a card and wrote, ‘Yes, I want to be a fisher of men.’ Those who had written yes began to gather at Fr. Gianni’s house for dinner. We were a group. At a certain point, I asked to be baptized. It was a beautiful celebration. For me it was a fundamental moment, a watershed.” Did you continue your schooling in Milan? “Yes, I attended a languages high school, where I encountered a great teacher from the Movement who helped me become passionate about the world and who loved me like a mother. Living GS in the community of my high school, the Manzoni, I then met Fr. Giorgio and the Sacred Heart friends, and it was going to the beach in the summer that I met the community of Chiavari (in Liguria), where I met Fr. Pino DeBernardis, the person who more than any other made me passionate about the Movement and changed my life. One day, I went to a talk by Fr. Pino about the historicity of the Gospels. For me, it was very important. Seeing how the study of the frequency of some consonants made it possible to reconstruct historical facts that are fundamental for our faith, and thus give the reasons for our faith, made me say, “Linguistics is my cultural vocation!” At the end of the talk, I went to Fr. Pino, who invited me to Catholic University, because he wanted to introduce me to someone. This is how I met Eddo Rigotti, a Linguistics professor. We chatted for ten minutes, and in the end, as part of his advice, he said, ‘Study Russian or Chinese.’ I preferred Russian, because a friend of mine had already studied it.” And instead? “Instead, another encounter. That summer at the GS Equipe there was a testimony by a husband and wife who had just returned from China. Their story was fascinating. In the fall, I signed up for an evening course in Chinese!” After high school graduation, Murielle decided to pursue this interest in languages. “I had this desire to communicate and to understand the other.” But why did you return to France? “First of all, because I wanted to study Linguistics, and then again this time, because of a series of coincidences and bureaucratic snags, I had to enroll in Oriental Languages. Why Paris? I could say because it seemed like the best to me, but it was really because I missed France; my history was linked to there. The first year was very hard; I was finding again something that was very familiar to me, but that seemed far from the experience I had had in Italy, to the point that I thought, ‘I don’t allow myself to “soak in” what happens around me.’ I couldn’t understand the people’s mentality. I had this difficulty with my university peers and also with the community.” Then what happened? “I stopped thinking that what I had encountered was better, that I had to be ‘impermeable’ to the environment around me, to those I encountered. I’m interested in others, because they offer a real possibility for encounter. I had written that I wanted to be a fisher of men. At times this isn’t easy because there’s incredible competition at the university, to the point that some even deliberately give you incorrect lecture notes, or some are happy to distract you with stupid things the week before the exam. It’s an environment that provokes you, where you have to engage yourself fully.” How did you and your friends come to write the famous flyer? “When I saw that graffiti in the bathroom (‘We have to do something, because we won’t always be students’), I freaked out. I thought, ‘I’m not proposing anything.’ That evening, we met at my house for School of Community and I said we couldn’t waste time.” The last thing that comes to mind looking at Murielle is that she’s someone who would waste time. But it seems even stranger that she would spend hours and hours studying Chinese ideograms. Do you find the study of this language fascinating? “Very much so. The Chinese, having not taken the step toward ‘phonetic abstraction,’ remained at a familiar impact with reality. Writing a thing in calligraphy is more than writing a word; it’s already the being of the thing. If you don’t experience what harmony is, you can never do the calligraphy of the character exactly. This isn’t easy to understand, but it certainly is fascinating. Even so, there was a moment when I asked myself whether this was the right field for me. During the Mass for the anniversary of Fr. Giussani’s death, I asked to understand whether it was worthwhile. A few days later, I happened to see a newspaper page (dated February 22nd) with the title, “Why study Chinese?” My curiosity piqued, I read it. Fortunately, it wasn’t an economic analysis. Hardly. A sentence struck me: ‘This language is the occasion for many to open themselves to the other.’ The article was signed by the Jesuit in charge of the Ricci Institute in Taiwan. The newspaper was la Croix, the French Catholic daily. It seemed like an encouragement, an answer to my question.” |