Examples for All

Looking at One who Looks
At dinner with a hundred young people at table, an adult helps them become engaged with reality: coming
to terms with a beauty that is communicated everywhere

by Davide Perillo

St. Moritz, last summer: Meadows, trees, the usual Swiss picture-postcard landscape... And, suddenly, five hundred cheerful faces burst in among the tourists enjoying their evening stroll. They are selling Traces and issuing invitations to a party.  The driving force behind it all is that thin guy in a jeans jacket who does not hesitate even when it’s a question of inviting the mayor to come along. Scene two, a room in the center of Milan: Twenty people around a table. They are bank workers and they’re doing School of Community. Accompanying them there is that same jeans jacket. Scene three, the long, narrow common room of a parish youth club in an outer suburb: Tables lined up and a hundred people at dinner. Again, there are a lot of young people. There are mothers with strollers. General cheeriness. And just look where they are looking and you see at once that the point of reference is again that guy in the jeans jacket, Claudio Bottini, a 54-year-old banker, married with three children. To read his CV, the classic quiet guy. To see how he spends his days, the contrary: a permanent earthquake–even more, an alive man.
You just have to watch him, handing out leaflets in the street or in the back office of his bank agency, attending Mass or a union meeting, on a platform before dozens of people, or face to face with the latest arrival, who is always welcomed unmistakably with a straight look in the eyes and an embrace. Call him what you like, but someone who flings himself into reality like that is not doing a work: he is one. Strange work, true: no office, structures, or fundraising. Just an “I” that lives reality intensely, to use the expression of Fr. Giussani, which Julián Carrón often picks up again to go straight to the heart of things.

Eager to grow up
Come to Redecesio, northeast of Milan, and take your place at one of the tables at the dinner held every month, the expression of a friendship born a few years ago in the simplest way. The first two young people met “Bot” and shared a fascination. The companionship has endured through the years, spreading “in concentric circles,” explains Bottini. “At first we used to meet and read Giussani’s Can We Live Like This?. Then we felt the need for a method, a continuity in the work.” One thing led to another, and another… And this place bloomed, populated by a varied humanity, from the post-adolescent who’s just clocked out at the supermarket to the freshly married thirty-year-old.
They’ll tell you about themselves, about their jobs, their children, their problems. “They share life,” says Bottini, “and I share it with them.” So you hear people like Emanuele (27) telling you about his “eagerness to grow up” and his plans, which clash with the limits on them. “I wanted to be a photographer, but I ended up in a truck working for my uncle who’s a car wrecker. I was disappointed. You end up not feeling any respect for yourself. But I experienced all this in here. Embraced. You know that here there are friendly faces and a dish of pasta for you. And if you err, they’ll help you back onto the path.” You meet Giuseppe, the same age, who found out about it on the web. “When school ended, I got a job. I didn’t need anyone. Yet there was something missing. And a summer chat with a guy from CL left me feeling wrenched. Months later, I did a search on the site and sent an e-mail. They gave me Bot’s number. It was the start of a friendship.”
Bora explains, “I was taken for what I was. I haven’t been asked to change anything–passions, tastes... nothing. I like cooking, for instance. Well, here I do it, for 70 to 80 people at a time. But I’ve learned to do it better.” Listen to Silvio, 28 years old, a mathematician, who describes “a place that opens you to life; it doesn’t make you want to clam up inside yourself.”
Much the same words of Sara (“That embrace confused me; I felt welcome”), of Marco, 27, a bartender, with one child and another on the way (“But if I hadn’t come here, I’d never have gotten married. This place is awesome. It gets you, and you go a stretch of the road together.”) And of Jacopo, who met Bottini at a party on May 1st. “I was deeply struck by it: the idea of someone else coming to look for you, and accompanying you in many aspects of life–without trying to supplant you, but leaving you all the pleasure.” An example? “Sometimes Bot will throw out a remark: ‘Say, how’s that friend of yours? Why don’t you contact him?’ In short, he will suggest something, and he does it because he cares for you. So you’ve got to do it.”
Bot adds, “You see? They aren’t afraid. They don’t avoid relationships. It means they feel at home here.” Okay, but why is this your home too? I mean, what’s a bank clerk got to do with educating young people? “If we don’t bring up men, the organization will be the loser. I’m not concerned about whether you end up in CL. I want you to be yourself all the way through. I’m not bothered with formulas, but with relationships. They challenge my freedom, and I challenge theirs”–like the girl who turned up one evening and said, “I want to go live with my boyfriend. What do you think?” “I said, ‘It’s great that you want to set up house with someone you love. But can you construct something by consuming it? Think it over. Then we’ll talk about it again.’ An embrace. Without moralizing. She thought it over. A week later we talked about it. And she said, ‘You’re right, Bot. We’d better wait.’”

“That’s the spirit!”
This helps you understand why the center at Redecesio has produced charitable works, centers of reciprocal aid (a splendid idea was the “businessmen under 30” group), and fraternity groups. In practice, a more intense life. “Self-awareness is always the point of attachment to reality,” says Bottini. “It is a gaze one has received and receives, and which educates.”
Bot saw that look in childhood. It was the look of his mother, Luigia, “who still has her rosary always in her hand,” and his father, Erminio, a worker and a Socialist, who on Sundays attended Mass at 5:30 am and then went to the Pirelli works to eke out his wages. “That was how he managed to send me to school. That was my tradition: Catholic and Lombard. But it was like a river that dwindles and then peters out. At a certain point, I felt everything was too small for me.”
He spread his lungs at a meeting at the parish of Santa Maria al Naviglio. “Those people struck me because they were really together.” Then he followed an invitation to the Easter Triduum in Varigotti (“I could hear Fr. Giussani from the end of the church. I understood little, but when I left I had a clear idea: this is a man”), then he was appointed secretary of CL. And then there was the direct impact with “Don Gius,” the exercises of 1974. “A physical impact, I mean. I went out onto the stage to issue the notices. When I ended, I felt a terrifying slap on my back: ‘That’s the spirit!’  He took me by the arm and we went toward the hotel”–much the same scene experienced many times as a boy, when it was his father who took his arm, in the oratory of the church, to go to confession together. “In a certain sense, my father was a bit like Fr. Giussani. For instance, he would often repeat: ‘Remember that life is not just what you want,’ while Giussani was a continuous summons to dependence. We’re talking about different depths, clearly. But it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”
Yes, it’s the same thing. The same look from his father. “Before getting married, Dora and I were uncertain about where to live. We went to talk it over with Fr. Giussani. But the bus broke down. We arrived an hour and a half late. I rang the bell. He opened the door and embraced me. It made such a profound impression. I can still see it. An embrace like that I felt again many years later, when I greeted John Paul II at the Workers’ Jubilee. Then I wept. That man looked at you and he saw Christ. And in seeing Christ, he saw you. You see, Christianity is not just a repercussion, a sense of wonder; it’s an embrace. It’s someone who seizes you and never lets you go. To me, what interests me most in life is that the world recognizes the beauty of Christ. And the only thing that you can do is say, ‘You come and see too.’”
The point is that “you,” in practice, means everyone you meet. No one excluded. Take Claudio, a colleague from Avanguardia Operaia [a far-left workers’ movement], whom Bot saw making the sign of the cross at table and asked him point-blank: “Excuse me, but what’s that got to do with a dish of pasta?” And just imagine: that question led to a whole new path that ended in Claudio becoming a friar. Or Domenico, a personnel manager, who was intrigued by a leaflet, picked up a book by Giussani, and began reading it. When he raised the first objections (“I can’t understand anything”), this was the answer he got: “Neither can I: let’s read it together.” “We began to do School of Community together. And after a while Domenico asked, ‘Why don’t you introduce me to Giussani? I want to see the origin of all this.’ He was right: what matters is a relationship that touches on the origin.”
The origin... Two atheist friends were also looking for it. They had only seen the “children” of Giussani, the crowd at his funeral in the Milan cathedral. They were curious. “Who was this guy?” And then they were caught up in the same dynamic: an immediate invitation, leading them to lay their cards on the table. “Claudio,” they said, “if the proposal you’re making has the same breadth as what I saw in the cathedral and the same freedom that I see in you, I accept.” And this flowered into a relationship–a real one.
Bot reveals, “Who makes me do it? A love that I receive. Perhaps at first I had the vanity to say: I’m me, I depend on myself alone. Now it’s clear there’s someone else. It is the Mystery that does it. And in this I have to thank my wife. The first thing she does when she gets up in the morning is to go into the kitchen to say the Angelus. So impressive, Dora. After thirty years of marriage, I find myself continually discovering something more in her. It’s extraordinary.”
But there again, it’s all due to an education and a look. “I learned a certain way of behaving with my wife by looking at how my friends behaved with theirs, just as I learned a lot from my friends in Memores Domini. I watched them kneel and pray, and I thought: that’s where they get their energy from. And so I gradually began getting up earlier, in silence, going to church to spend half an hour there before the Most Holy, before Mass. Because you see what it can do.”
Two months ago, Fr. Carrón came for dinner in the youth center, together with Bora and Marco, Jacopo and Lele, and all the others. He saw them living, he heard them talking. “And he told us two fundamental things: ‘You look at the experience you are having and don’t change the method, because the mystery passes by means of simple suggestions.’” Simple. Like looking at someone looking.