01-01-2008 - Traces, n. 1


LETTERS

Irreducible
Experience
I have always felt clearly that my life is connected to a Mystery, considering both my personal history and the vicissitudes of my life. This feeling, however, has always been dominated in my daily experience by a sorrowful (and, in the end, suffocating) note, so that I was not able to live freely. I never understood why the One who put me in this world would allow such an experience. This is why, a year ago, feeling fed up and completely skeptical, I stopped attending CL events and I even ceased receiving the sacraments. I didn’t see why I had to stay connected with a reality that, I felt, did not enable me to experience real freedom in my daily life, in my friendships, in my desires, etc. At this time, there was someone who looked at my life seriously and with a commitment to my humanity that still moves me today. It does not move my feelings, but rather my person; it sets my person in movement. I did not realize this, but in my relationship with him, in the reverberation of the seriousness, tenderness, and absolute freedom with which he looked at me, I was beginning to experience what it means to be loved and free. I lived everything followed by this look that slowly became part of the feeling I had about myself. This is because I let this happen; I gave in to the absolute convenience and beauty of this experience. My life had not changed. My pain remained. I was still going through a hard time. Some kind of new and completely different experience, however, was starting to become clear in my life. He kept talking to me about Carrón, so I began going to his School of Community in Milan occasionally. I wanted to understand and experience the origin of this new thing that I saw.  I saw in action a work method that convinced me deeply; it fascinated me. The way that Carrón would look at people who had my same questions or different questions pointed out a road to me, a very concrete way to have his same experience. This grabbed my interest. By being there, I understood, little by little, the steps I needed to take to live that intensity. It was an intensity that fascinated me because it had gradually helped my heart give in. The year started all over for me in a totally new way. I want to do School of Community and charitable work, while a year ago I did not want to hear about these things. Everything is extraordinarily simple,  but not ingenuous at all. I think life is full of drama, sometimes very complicated, as I have seen in my life lately, like with Mattia’s death.  I prayed for him and for his family tirelessly, although I did not know them. I just wanted them to have an experience of liberation within that event. It’s an experience that makes everything simple, and eventually brings peace. It is the existential recognition of the fact that I am. I consist of this relationship with the Mystery that makes me irreducible to any antecedents of which I was a prisoner until not too long ago. It is an experience from which there is no turning back.
Elena, Bologna, Italy

Traces in Cambodia
For the past two years or so, I have given Traces to my parish priest every month. At the beginning, I felt a little hesitant about it, but then when he told me that he had been inspired by an article in Traces for a Sunday homily, I was more and more certain that this was a good thing to do. Last Sunday, I brought him the November issue. He thanked me and said, “Do you know where the October issue you gave me is? In Cambodia!! A missionary priest came to visit me before leaving for that country. He saw Traces on my desk and asked me if he could have it. He wanted to take it with him and read it since he is already familiar with this magazine.”  The ways of the Lord are really endless!
Antonio, Varese, Italy

From the Caribbean to Belo Horizonte
The Event can become perfectly useless in life. After we have met the Movement, we may go our own way without realizing it.  This happened in our family. After 20 years of life in the Movement spent in GS and CLU, in Young Workers, and as members of the Fraternity, happily married, having enough income, little by little we stopped asking for His Presence in the face of our friends and in our faces as husband and wife as well. As the priest who had married us told us with paternal hardness, we had become bourgeois. Life, then, put us on the horns of a dilemma. There was a growing uneasiness. We had to review everything in our life. We questioned the sense of everything and could not find an answer. So we asked Father Alfredo to help us, from the most banal choices to the most important (work decisions, use of money, our son’s education…). Working on School of Community has become for us the primary need in our daily life. We keep reminding each other about it and our mutual love keeps growing. Everything happening to us touches us directly. We even questioned each other about our usual summer vacation in the Caribbean because we realized that, at the end, all that was left of our relaxing time on those enchanting beaches was one more stamp on our passports. Then Rosetta invited us to spend our vacation in Brazil. Two weeks later, we were in Belo Horizonte with our 4-year-old son. It was a beautiful–yet different–reality from ours. Our initial, shy “yes” needed to be constantly renewed. Rosa asked us to lead the combi, to go grocery shopping, take care of the children in the “Felicidade” daycare center, and to re-do the bathroom in the daycare facility. That “yes” we repeated every day became more and more certain. There was no more room for fear because it was a “yes” to Christ. It did not matter what we could and could not do, or how many times we had betrayed Him (or would betray Him). What mattered was what and whom we looked at. Rosetta witnessed and reminded us that Christ asks us to give Him everything. Our gift of such a true experience is evident in our communion with our friends of the Ascoli community who participated in this journey with us through their prayers, e-mails, and text messages. We were moved by the surprise good-bye party Rosa and the others organized for us, as well as by the wonder and joy clearly visible in the faces of our friends of School of Community. Now we live our reality with intensity and  are finding a new and incredible meaning in everything we do.
Elisabetta and Antonio, Ascoli Piceno, Italy

Only One Answer: Christ
Dear Julián: I’m writing to you from Asunción, Paraguay, where I work in Father Aldo’s clinic. “How can we know if we have understood?” This question you asked us at the “Equipe” [CL leaders meeting] re-awakened my humanity and my intelligence as a challenge. I realized that it makes no sense to stay in the Movement without giving it all my life. Now I desire more and more to verify a new criterion first-hand; I want to verify whether I have seen a change, whether I can say, “It is, if It is at work.” I came to Paraguay with the same question. It’s amazing how the Lord answers. By talking on the phone with my friends in Parma, I realized that something new had happened in my life while staying here. We were talking about the final day of the prep-courses. I asked what they would say to those 300 young people with whom they had spent two weeks. The answer was: “That we had done those prep-courses because we have an exceptional friendship that has conquered us.”  I could not stay quiet. An exceptional friendship is not enough! It’s not enough to have great ideals or good missionary and organizational ideas. Ever since the first day in this clinic, I have wondered: How can there be a place in this world where a patient is treated like a man, where, in addition to receiving medicine, women can have their hair done with colorful hair bands and pins? How is it that here is a place where pain is embraced; a place where, in time, the fear of death goes away, because we are no longer alone; a home where patients can smile again, say “thank you,” and ask for Baptism and the sacraments? I have spent the last few days using all of my reason and intelligence to find an answer worth accepting and following. I want my home, my friendships, and my relationship with my boyfriend to be this way. The only answer is the Presence that loves, embraces, and saves all of humanity. His name is Christ. This answer does not block out anything; rather, it opens up the desire to know Him more and more–just as happened when I fell in love. He responds to my desire to be loved, and at the same time raises in me the desire to share my whole life with Him. So I told my friends in Parma that prep-courses are no different from this clinic. We do them because our friendship recognizes and lives for His Presence.
Margherita, Asunción, Paraguay

Saying the Angelus
Dear Fr. Carrón: Every morning, after leaving my children at their pre-school, a group of moms and I say the Angelus together with Father Sandro in the Pescarenico Church. Their friendship is a precious gift for me. Saying the Angelus, or meeting in the morning to read the School of Community, is a way to face my day, my life. It is not, though, a breath of oxygen that one needs because one’s daily routine is suffocating. It is learning to say, “You are making me;” it is submitting to Christ at every instant. Every instant means in both good and bad times, when everything goes right, and when I am at home washing dishes and changing the tenth diaper of the day. I say this because one day–one of those days in which I wanted to say, “Still diapers to change? Still dishes to wash? When will You Lord respond to my desire for fulfillment?”–my friend Manu (who for a few months now has been alone with four children since her husband went up to Heaven) told me, “The condition you are in is the best the Lord has prepared for you.” Everything has changed. I expected… who knows what? It is in my reality, though, that I have been asked to stay. That is my place. So I find myself looking with wonder at the things I need to do, the children who ask to play, and a small job opportunity. I have learned to ask to be able to recognize His Presence that is there; it is already there in the reality all around me. I am certain I’m not alone because the people walking with me are signs in the flesh of His Presence near me.
Maddalena, Lecco, Italy

Beginning
from What is There
Dear Fr. Carrón: I’m a 43-year-old architect, married with three children.   When I came to the Fraternity Retreat, I was right in the middle of an existential crisis: I felt inside of me an uncontrollable energy. The desire for beauty I had in my heart was growing more and more, but most of the time I let it out by screaming or crying inconsolably. I told a friend this, and he replied, “What you are looking for is Christ!” He was right. His words were clear. After ten years of life in the Movement, one can also convince oneself of this. But these are only words. Having spent three days at the retreat hearing this over and over was not consoling me and was no longer enough. All this affected the way I worked. I’ve always been attracted by what can be built by man’s creativity. Even this was no longer enough. Rather, looking at certain buildings that had nothing to do with what was around them, often architecturally ugly, was beginning to bother me. The realization of the presumptuousness that often characterizes our projects was unbearable. My question was unavoidable: “Where is the beauty? What is missing?” So I started doing the simplest thing that had been suggested to me for ten years in the Movement. I began using the tools that the Movement provides (Father Giussani’s texts, the booklet of the Exercises, Traces) with a different awareness. I started reading those pages not to complete an assigned homework, or for a clean conscience, but with the desire of someone who is starving and is desperately seeking food. I was looking for the reason of what I was going through. Everything changed! All of a sudden, a light came on that pointed out what I was experiencing, meeting, and feeling inside of me. I was told to begin not from what is missing, but from what is there. Everything changes. Everything looks different and takes on a different meaning, a hundred times more beautiful. My husband, my children, my friends, my job, and myself. Everything becomes an opportunity to find out who “I” am. It’s still hard work. But this does not determine my actions. It’s not a factor to be eliminated but, rather, a point of departure. Becoming aware of how hard things are is an opportunity to understand that I am doing something, that I am in action.
Marina, Brescia, Italy

The Beauty
of Christianity
Dear Fr. Carrón: A few weeks ago, my friend Linute and I decided to say the Rosary every Tuesday morning at 7 am. Both of us needed to do it for help with various questions we have in our lives. Today, on the way to work, she told me, “If we told someone we wake up early in the morning to say the Rosary, they would think we are crazy, that we are ‘sick.’” I remembered something my dad asked me: “Why do you go to church every Sunday? Are you committing so many sins?” In Lithuania, most people think that only little old ladies should go to church, say the Rosary, etc., since they have nothing else to do. Then my friend added, “A friend of mine told me that for a Christian man life is harder,” due to the various provocations and reactions one meets in reality. I answered her: “It may seem true, but for me it is the opposite. I’m happy I am a Christian, and I could not imagine a different life–rather, I would not like my life to be different.” Right now, I can see my life as something united, unlike before. Saying the Rosary, going with friends to the sauna, going with them to the theater, or doing other things, are all important in the same way–i.e., everything speaks to me of Christ. Today at work, I can’t stop thinking about what Linute and I talked about this morning. Just the thought of having to live without Christ, without those friends who remind me of Him, of not being able to see the beauty of life, the sense of things (and this means being really unhappy), makes me afraid. Think about it… I have been in the Movement for seven years already! Only now, however, can I say with certainty:  This is the way to truth, to happiness.
Ausra, Vilnius, Lithuania

A Human Look
As I was standing in front of a local grocery store for a grocery drive for the Food Bank, I handed a bag to a lady who said, “Actually, I could use this food myself, but I’m too proud and not humble enough to ask for it. My husband has lost his job, I have three children, and we don’t know how to get by.” When she came out, I said good-bye to her by calling her name, and she was impressed that I had remembered it. So we started talking and she told me more about her situation. She seemed very disheartened and I asked what she needed among the food items we had available.  She began to cry, her feelings hurt, but she took baby food for her two-year-old daughter and some pasta. I was struck by this girl’s free asking, and I found the following statement to be really true: “You know it well:  you are not succeeding at something, you are tired, and you can’t do it any more. Then all of a sudden you meet someone’s look in the crowd–a human look–and it’s as if you had met with a hidden divine. Suddenly, everything gets simpler.”
Giovanni, Seregno, Italy

A “Certain” Hope
I began attending my “first grade” of faith and to live it passionately about 36 years ago, at the age of 55 (one morning at 5:30 on the Miramare beach while hearing a Mass for GS students that my son Marcello had invited me to). That date has left a mark in my heart.  It was quite a slow beginning, but Christ has helped me stay with this group of friends with growing passion and awareness. Now I am also starting to understand that I can enjoy and live this “passion” even within the challenges, pains, and contradictions of my everyday life, and even within my extreme misery that does not scare me that much any more, because I feel supported and guided by these priceless friends the Lord has blessed me with. I feel I need and want to hang on to this company of friends more and more as they support me with growing tenderness, so much so that now I prefer to replace the word “hope” with “certainty,” especially because it helps me have a foretaste of Christ’s tenderness, and to “learn” about life, the way to my happy destiny. I thank, appreciate, and love all of you, above all those the Lord has chosen as our leaders. I am almost 91, but I feel as if my heart were only 30.  I also feel it’s true that Christ did not come to save us from the hardships in our relationship with reality, but to make it possible to live them, and to make Himself a companion on our way through life.
Giancarlo, Rimini, Italy

A Good Sadness
Dear Julián: On November 1st and 2nd I went to Paris to visit a good friend. I was very happy and excited about those days that were going to be great. I would be visiting one of the most beautiful cities in the world together with my dearest friend. This  was a big desire of mine. But during my trip and when I first arrived and we began to tour the city, I felt something pricking me that would not leave me alone. On the third day, while walking among the Louvre buildings, I felt melancholic. Initially, this disturbed me a little, particularly because Agnese had realized I was restless. She was sad because she thought I was not happy there with her.  Soon after, though, it became clear what my problem was: I missed Him. I would never have imagined that this good sadness which is asking for His Presence, for proximity to Him, which I feel more and more often, could dominate even there, in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with the girl I love most. I immediately felt like being alone and asking for His company. While asking for this, those beautiful things vibrated in an unimaginable way. Their beauty increased my desire for Him. It was a big blessing for me. I understood that not even the most beautiful city in the world together with the person you love most are enough to fill your heart if He is missing. So I ask and desire incessantly for Him to conquer more and more my whole heart. By giving in to Him, I can begin to look at all of reality through His eyes. This is the possibility for passion, truth, and salvation in my life.
Name withheld