Spe Salvi  Dialogue with Fr. Eugenio Nembrini

A Companion on Our  Journey
The certainty of the present,  the value of the “witness,” hide-and-go-seek, trips to Kazakhstan… Continuing our work on the encyclical, we reread it together with an unconventional educator. Here is an account of this path

edited by Alberto Savorana

Fr. Eugenio Nembrini was recently appointed Rector of the Institute of the Sacred Heart in Milan (grades K through high school), on his return from Kazakhstan, where he lived and taught for many years. Here he discusses Benedict XVI’s new encyclical (see also Traces, Vol. 9, No. 11 [December] 2007), focusing on the first part of Spe Salvi, where the Pope relates hope to faith and declares that only by virtue of the present can man look to the future without fear. “It is as if your father, who cares for you, were to say,  ‘Sit here for a moment. I want to talk to you about something important: Do you realize how wonderful it is to be a Christian, knowing and loving Jesus?’  Reading the encyclical is like having the Pope by your side. He has my happiness at heart and wants to tell me things that he feels are valuable in our lives in this very moment.”

A man who takes you by the hand and leads you along the same reasonable and affective human path that he is following himself…
He immediately asked me about my work at the school, where I meet with parents and their children who essentially have just one thing to ask: “My heart cries out my love. But with my husband, it’s impossible; at school, it’s impossible; and yet, my heart cries out. So is it truly possible to love?” The encyclical confronts me with this responsibility: being an educator means having the patience and the freedom to take each person by the hand and say, “Let me come with you. What you seek, though it seems impossible, is truly the simplest and most reasonable thing in the world.”

And yet many people feel good is impossible.
The only spur that moves a person is the intuition that life is not a cheat. When someone says good is impossible, there is always some pain being suffered, some betrayal endured, a sin being committed, as if they were unforgiven, and they end up judging all the rest of life from this perspective. So Jesus, at most, remains a kind of psychological support, preventing that weight on the heart from stifling them.

Then why is what we seek the “simplest and most reasonable thing?”
The Christian proposal is openness to good seen as immediately possible, bringing the hope of peace into the disarray of life. Seen in these terms, the theme of hope is fascinating because it seems almost contradictory. The Pope expresses it well: hope is what we desire most yet what we doubt most.

What path will take us beyond this contradiction?
Not speech, but something present, an event, a friendly face that enables us to encounter Jesus in our everyday lives.

Is It Possible to Live This Way? begins by speaking of faith as a method of knowledge and stresses the value of “witness.”
The witness is one who is close to you, one who loves you and looks in the same direction, like Peter and John running to the sepulchre in the painting by Burnand. He is a companion on your journey who takes the heart seriously and says, “Come, let’s go together, because it’s possible!” The Lord did not cheat you by giving you an infinite heart and then making you live life as the experience of an impossibility. The Pope tells me, “Eugenio, it’s possible because I’ve seen it, I do see it and love it.”

You said that we cannot start again by virtue of speech or an explanation. My daughter Maddalena came back from her first catechism lesson saying, “It was lovely! Father Eugenio told us lots of stories and examples.” The Pope and Fr. Giussani place us within an experience that they had before us; another’s experience enables them and us to understand.
I always give children the example of hide-and-go-seek: “What’s really special about it? When someone finds a really good hiding place. And why do you go and look? Because all the fun is in finding him. Where’s the fun if someone hides and you find him at once? Jesus does exactly the same with us, children. He’s everywhere, but He wants us to discover Him in everything so we can have that wonderful surprise when we sing out, ‘I’ve found you!’” This is not very different from what the Pope says, because the dreadful thing is that stress and sin force us to conclude that it’s not true. It is the terrible choice of freedom that we all make and that leaves us dissatisfied when we come up against what we are. Tonight, I’m going along to my “beer group.” It began a year ago when some of us got together and said, “Let’s meet every so often to have a beer and remind each other that life’s wonderful. The last time we met, there were 240 of us. What’s so special about getting together and nibbling a slice of salami? And yet people write me: “I’ve rediscovered pleasure, joy, and peace in my life.” It just happened like that, the experience that wherever God is living, man’s heart immediately returns to life. So then you think, “I matter, I count, it’s possible for me, too.” Then, everything is reborn. This doesn’t mean the pain and effort have vanished, but life begins again. The encyclical invites us on a journey, like the experience Fr. Giussani gave us at the School of Community: “Come with me.” Either the adventure of reason finds a present experience or everything becomes complicated.

Is it because of this inability to find something in the present that the future so often becomes enigmatic, frightening?
Lots of people identify the future with a question: “Who can ensure that in doing this I’m not making a mistake, that this person really is my beloved?” When you say no one can give them this guarantee, they’re frightened because the thing that underpins their present life has no substance, except theoretically. Drawing on my experience in Kazakhstan, I can say that the lack of security, even of material necessities, is embraced and loved as a good lived. If there is no experience today, the future is troubling, and so you feel forced to invest in something that’s going to happen. You burden the future with the fulfillment of the certainty that you lack in the present.

The encyclical is a great introduction to the Church as present...
And the Church is a true point of experience. In Is It Possible to Live this Way?, we read how the encounter arouses a sense of fascination and the desire to understand. The Christian event begins like this: “Rabbi, where are You staying?” “Come and see.” In their three years together, Jesus took them on a journey toward the future.

This describes the human experience tout court. The experience of witness is usually restricted to the Christian field: if you have faith, believe the witness.  And instead?
One of the most fascinating moments in my life was in Kazakhstan, when I took a group of students on a field trip. They were atheists or Muslims by tradition; they knew nothing about Jesus. We went to Charyn Canyon. At the start of the day, I said, “Just think, your ancestors hated this place because they were animists; they thought it was haunted by evil spirits. Perhaps this is the first time a hundred young people have come here to look at it. It’s there for us. We’ll look at it!” On our way back, a girl told me, “I couldn’t see much, because I don’t know to look. So I spent the time watching how you and your friends looked at it. It was wonderful!” This is a good description of the witness, which shows the structure of man. That girl learned it not in books about Jesus but by an encounter with someone.

In our everyday relationships, we often experience dualism. Jesus is perfect, but we encounter Him through a sinful reality, so that meeting me, you, our friends, is not in the least like meeting Jesus. 
That’s what cheats us! We think that if they were really and truly Jesus, then of course we would recognize Him. But when we read the Gospels, we find that didn’t actually happen. A lot of people met the “real” Jesus and yet they were scandalized by Him. That shows this is not the real problem, because your “I” is involved, and that’s free. It’s as if the Pope is telling me in this encyclical: “Look, it’s got to be you, with the heart God has given you, with all your reason. If you fail to commit yourself, with the biggest gift you have, which is the quest for truth, even if the truth were to appear before you, you wouldn’t recognize it.”

Fr. Giussani says everything is engaged in the search–“all the cogs and wheels: reason, eyes, heart, everything.”
If you grasp this, then it is no longer a case of saying, “Oh, if only he was Jesus!” but rather, “Jesus is here.” How do I know He’s here? Because I understand that you and I are together, that every circumstance is for us, even the limit. But for this to happen, we need a place, a friend who won’t allow me to give in to pain, to evil. So even if I’m wandering in a fog today, I refuse to say, “The sun doesn’t exist any more.” We need an eye and a heart not full of ourselves, but free to look where our gaze will rest on someone else. This is what enables us all to start over again.

This is the educational genius of Fr. Giussani, a sort of documentation of the truth of the encyclical. And for someone like you, who have undertaken an educational responsibility, it is decisive.
It becomes decisive and it can also become sorrow, as when a family removes a child from the school. You realize that leaving the school will not change his life. And this calls me and my teachers into question every time we are incapable of testifying to the beauty of which the Pope and Fr. Giussani speak, and which is the only thing that can move the young people whom the Mystery entrusts to us.

This is not the least of the fruits of the upheaval being caused among us by Fr. Carrón, with his relentless challenge to the “I” in its relationship with reality.
In this, we have to help each other. I met two mothers who were aggrieved: “For nine years, we entrusted our lives to this company. Now something has happened….  It shows that the nine years weren’t true.” They call everything into question. That’s how the devil cheats us: “So you see, it’s all false!” The devil presents himself as the impossible. “God promised you too much. Forget it; don’t trust Him.” But the experience Carrón is forcing us to live through supports our hope in the testimony he offers us. We’re almost amazed when we see what is happening to us; we’re beginning to say, “Hey! It must be Jesus!”

Time to wrap it up. Fr. Eugenio gets up from his desk and, stopping in the door of his study, he adds, as if thinking out loud: “The Holy Virgin…”  I take the notepad out of my bag murmuring: “Excuse me….” And he gives me this pearl.
The Holy Virgin strikes me as the picture of hope. The angel descends, and he promises she will become a mother. This is not the second, third, fourth or fifth time she has given birth. It’s the first. I think of this woman when her son was born, of the curiosity, from that day and through all the days of her life, that prompted her to gaze at the child, and I think, “I know where He comes from,” curious to see in her daily experience what the Mystery would achieve, until the Passion. If the Virgin had not been sustained by a certain experience, she could never have borne all this. Hope is this curiosity to see in what form the Mystery will encounter me today. I know it will be revealed to me; I have it before me; it is this child eating, drinking, weeping, and I am all bent on understanding. It is a present that has yet, at every instant, to meet me. I’m not afraid of this. I’m curious, certainly. Even if you fail to realize it, the instant is full and charged with that Presence you have before you. So hope is not “let’s hope that….” Think of the Virgin. She never had an instruction manual. She learned how to hope, moment by moment, with the certainty that Christ was hope for herself and the world. And yet she was spared nothing, spared no sorrow. Being together like this is a wonderful adventure.