CL LIFE
SCHOOL OF COMMUNITY

Just Like John
"It's too difficult. A wasted opportunity..." After inviting two of her friends, Anna wants to run away, and so do the others, but Agata's father goes home changed. Brunella did not understand everything, but "it's interesting for my life." Francesco, who came for a joke, is changed when he hears the Gospel passage. These are the experiences of those who attended the presentation of The Religious Sense for the first time, but they point out the novelty for everyone.

BY PAOLA BERGAMINI

January 26th, 10:40 pm, the video link with the Palasharp 8,000-seat sports stadium closes; Fr. Carrón's presentation of The Religious Sense is over. As I put away the notebook I had not even used, I heard some comments like, "It was difficult; very hard to follow…" "I invited a colleague; he probably didn't understand a thing." At the exit, an old friend came up. When I was at the university, I used to do charity work in her parish. She said, "This 'thing' that faith has to do with the religious sense is very interesting when expressed in this way. I was expecting something quite different, but instead I am really happy." I got the same impression; after all, I already "know" the religious sense, but that faith fulfills, responds to that bundle of original needs that God gives man so that he can meet Him, and even reinforces it, is something that reawakened me. I thought, "It's happening now." There is no longer anything we already know, so we can set aside that "cordial mediocrity" in which at times we float. And the phrase "faith as the verification of the religious sense," which at first seemed accidental, assumes quite another meaning. Here, we begin to give reality another look, and the first proof of this are those who tell how, for the first or the umpteenth time, they let themselves be grasped by that Event "that overtakes men in the same way in which, two thousand years ago, the angels' message in Bethlehem overtook some poor shepherds: an event that happens, prior to any other consideration, to a religious or a non-religious man." You just have to look at the facts.
On the floor of the Palasharp, Ramiro, 14, turns around, suddenly, and asks, "Which one is Carrón, the one singing or the priest?" Renata smiles: "The priest." "So why is everyone looking at the one singing?" "Watch carefully what happens, and try to understand." Renata thinks she has done the right thing in inviting students and her fellow teachers to come early. Otherwise, there would have been no chance of getting seats so near to the stage. After a few minutes, someone else turns around. "Miss, what a lot of people! Young and old, and they are all silent, looking at him as you told me to, and they are all taking notes. Should I do the same?" "Watch and listen." Ramiro had come a few times to the "ray," the GS high school group meeting, and to the winter vacation in Rome. The following day he stopped the teacher and asked, "Where can I buy the booklet?" He meant the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity, entitled, "Can a man be born again, once he is old?" Renata has plenty of retreats, Triduums, and "rays" behind her, but the look on that boy's face brought the novelty back to her again. Nothing is "already understood" and filed away any more. It's always a new beginning–you just need to have the humility to say yes.

A NEW ACCENT. Fr. Carrón has only been speaking a few minutes, and Anna wants to be a thousand miles away. She invited two of her neighbors who are light-years from the Church but with whom a friendship has flourished thanks to a common interest in their children's education. She had thought and thought about it, but she seemed never to have sufficient reasons. "What will they understand? Nothing." Or so she had decided for herself. Those people, those songs, those new words in which they had perceived a new accent with which to look at life, something they could bet on–that gesture had struck them. "In our hands, books; in our eyes, facts," St. Augustine says. At the exit, at the bookstall, they say, "Let's buy the book and begin reading it." Anna was astonished; she was the one who was missing the chance to see Him by stopping short at appearances. So, quite simply, she proposed, "Let's read it together. It's just what I want to do with you."
Thirty miles away, Paolo comes out of the Great Hall of Como Polytechnic, where he had watched the address with others by videoconference. He is taking home a group of students he had invited, 30 in all, students of Oliver Twist High School and of the Cometa Technical School. They had followed very attentively, even though they normally find it hard to sit still for ten minutes in silence. Behind him, he hears a voice: "Paolo, I didn't understand much, but that man's presence is enough." Someone else says, "I was told that you meet on Saturdays to make up the food-parcels for the Solidarity Food Bank, to sing and talk… Can I come?" It's simply Him at work.
Ramiro and his neighbors, the kids from Como, and Renata, Anna, and Paolo, were all grasped by something that happened, catching them unawares, in a simple way. It's not easy; the Christ-event doesn't make life easier, but it makes it finer, more attractive. That "more" is the difference that made Andrew come home after meeting Jesus, and he "was Andrew, but more Andrew." Francesco, a student from the Milan suburbs, wrote, "I accepted the invitation to the Palasharp almost as a joke; I went with the skepticism of someone who likes action movies and goes to see a love story. But, that evening, God had switched the program and my skepticism vanished with the first note of silence. The story of how Andrew went home to his family…. Thanks to that evening I feel I am 'more myself,' marked by a 'more Him.'"
In Gravina, Puglia, southern Italy, Agata, in her final year of high school, is sitting next to her father. This time he came along–he even got up early so as to finish his work in the fields in time to be there, her mother had told her that morning. Agata knows he has a lot of questions about life inside him, because they have talked about it; questions that have not found answers, so much so that more than once he warned her, "Be satisfied with what you've got; don't fly too high. I have tried, but it's all useless." Now he is there. "So, papa?" "Now I know that my questions are good because there is an answer." Once they get home, he begins joking with her mother and brother. It's not something usual for him. "…Andrew embraced his wife and kissed his children: it was him, but he had never embraced them like that!"
In Gualdo Tadino, near Assisi, Fabio is already prepared for the videoconference when he sees her come in. He really didn't expect to see Brunella. He had come to know her in dramatic circumstances. In the hospital, he had treated and reanimated her husband after a car accident. Over the five years in which the man had remained in a vegetative coma, their friendship had strengthened, continuing after the husband's death. Before Christmas, Fabio had invited her to the presentation. Now, there she was; so at the end, he went to meet her. "It's the first time since my husband's death that I have gone out in the evening, leaving my two children at home. I didn't understand everything, but the bit about John and Andrew, yes. It's what interests me for my life."

PREACHING AND BEHAVIOR. Fabio, an usher in Parliament, has been following School of Community for some weeks. He was invited to the presentation at Urban University. The impact with the videoconference is not immediate, but he doesn't miss a word. Upon reaching home, he tells what he has seen and heard on Facebook, and concludes, "Listening was like opening the windows in the early morning. Fresh, clean air for getting your breath back after a long series of nightmares." A friend replies, "CL people preach well, but behave badly!" Fabio says, "I heard teaching and reflections without preaching. I didn't see how they behave, but it's enough for me to know that I came out wanting to behave better myself."
As Camus says, "It is not by scruples that a man will become great. Greatness comes, God willing, like a lovely day." Then you have the whole of life to understand it. Like John and Andrew.