01-02-2012 - Traces, n. 2

new world
north american diaconia


A Gaze that Unmasks Nihilism
The challenge to discover the “positivity of reality”–together with 300 others at the North American Diaconia–forced him to really look at what occured to him just before leaving for the New York annual event with Julián Carrón. A Canadian journalist describes the gift of “being led by the hand,” with others, to say “You!”

by Peter Stockland

In the days before I travelled to New York for the 2012 diaconia, our family gathered around a hospital bed as my wife’s mother took inevitable steps toward a death whose arrival is countable in days.
On the Thursday night, returning from her bedside, my son and I were almost killed when a pickup truck ploughed into the suddenly out of control taxi in which we were riding.
Paradoxical as it may seem to many, both events served to make the diaconia’s theme, “The Inexorable Positivity of Reality,” wholly reasonable. Demonstrably true. For if the statement that reality is inexorably positive is not a reasonable proposal, not demonstrably true, then all of us gathered in a gilt Manhattan hotel ballroom for the weekend were, in Father Julián Carrón’s characteristically direct phrase, “just wasting our time.” Or, as he put it even more brusquely, rubbing his hands together like a teacher removing chalk from dusty fingers: “If it is not true, we might as well all go home.”
But that weekend of January 13th-15th, we had not come to New York to go home. We had come to the diaconia, at least in part, to witness to the centrality of faith in our lives, to share with each other Christ’s saving power to bind our wounds, our desire to be in His presence ever more daily. Speakers spoke movingly on Saturday morning of heart-rending struggles against cancer, against stunning physical injury, against job loss and workplace difficulties and family crises. Listening, I could not help but think of the slow, debilitating tearing away of my mother-in-law by Alzheimer’s and the instantaneous, violent collision that my son and I survived through God’s grace alone. Positivity? In whose reality? “The only thing I can do,” one speaker said in describing difficulties with his young son, “is recognize that God is.”
But for Father Carrón, asserting the need to recognize that “God is” only opened far more questions than it answered about the inexorable positivity of reality. “Why? Why?” he asked like an energetic Spanish Socrates. “How do you know God is? If you don’t face that, you are only putting off the question another step. And I don’t want to put off the question of Christ.”

Detached from our humanity. It was a direct, vigorous challenge in what would turn out to be two days of similarly vigorous challenges. “I think,” a friend said to me during a break, “Carrón used the word ‘challenge’ at least 20 times this morning.”
So he might have, but what he was pushing us to move away from is language, and therefore by necessity thinking that traps and limits Christ entirely as feeling, as ideology, as rules, as Christian doctrine, as, perhaps worst of all, opinion. It is Christ as a marketing brand of faith or a universal good luck charm, an omniscient babysitter or supernatural day planner or Someone to pay respects to on Sunday mornings before going out to do all the things that the rest of the world does.“That,” Father Carrón said, “is not reality.” We mistake Christ for all these things, he said, because we have become detached from the foundations of our humanity, from the origins of our religious sense.
“We have a faith that is no longer very religious, a faith that no longer answers to religious sentiment, a faith that no longer understands itself. I need a faith that can’t be resisted in front of my reason. There is no Christian faith without reason.”
And the reason turns out be elegant simplicity itself: Christ is the Something that gives the lie to Nothing, that is to nihilism; to the delusion that reality itself is ultimately illusion. Christ is the Event that negates nihilism. Historic event, of course, locked down in time, traceable–as we testify in the Apostles Creed–by placement in a geographic setting through verifiable personages such as Pontius Pilate. But more, much more: Event, ever present, as a something, as a reality that is happening to me now. It is Christ as reality made utterly unavoidable by hard, cold, crunching facts, undeniable by reason.
Let me assure you there can be fewer facts harder, colder, or of greater impact than staring at an unstoppable black truck pointed toward you on a snow-blown road, waiting for it to bring death, then awakening with terror in your heart that it might, in fact, be your beloved son who has died beside you. Such a moment is as positively real as life can get. Therein Carrón situated the inexorable positivity of reality. “We don’t have to deny the painful face of reality,” he said. “In fact, we can affirm that reality is positive because (whatever happens to us as humans) is not the last word of Christ.” Christ’s eternal Word is, in Father Carrón’s words, the “gaze of mercy that confirms our humanity.” Whatever we fear, whatever we are awaiting, long and slow and abrupt and frightening, that merciful gaze is present to us, not just upon us for, indeed, we are as essential to its love as its love is to us. “The Christian Event is not present because ‘it is,’” Father Carrón said. “It is because it is present. God exists because He is present, not the contrary.” This was not, he quickly underscored, merely turning the sentence on its back and tickling it for semantic effect. God’s presence pushes us to reason to explain the presence we find ourselves before.

At the bottom of crisis. And the work of that explaining matters in what we commonly refer to as the real world, the political world, the world that was the subject of discussion during an afternoon session on how to respond to the 2012 presidental race.
On the table was a proposal to produce a four-page flyer similar to the one published in Italy to confront the economic crisis. The content of the flyer was not settled, though Giorgio Vittadini, founder and President of the Foundation for Subsidiarity and CL “visitor” to the U.S., welcomed input from all concerned in the form of suggestions, testimonies, judgments. But Vittadini was emphatic that even something as worldly as a political campaign pamphlet can be the work that leads to an encounter with the positivity of reality because, by its nature, it is an opportunity for personal change.
“It is not just something for an elite,” Vittadini said. “It is the opportunity for going back to the idea of the human under that positivity of reality.” In Italy, Vittadini said, the popular response to the economic crisis was defensiveness and unwillingness to acknowledge its true roots. Americans, he added, have the opportunity to push deeper, to accept the challenge of recognizing what is at bottom a crisis in understanding what it means to be fully human. “We are facing a deep crisis rooted in a spiritual crisis. But the beginning of American history is the desire for freedom–the freedom to change yourself.”
As Father Carrón pointed out in the final session of the New York diaconia, it is what is present before us that frees us from the fear created by the nihilist narrative. It is our illusory opinions that burden us and prevent us from grasping the positivity of reality. “In the middle of the human journey, it is possible to be free of this burden, to have this experience. Christ gives us the opportunity to encounter His gaze again and again. You have the possibility in front of you whether or not to accept this gift, this grace.”

Within the events. Leaving the diaconia on Sunday afternoon, leaving New York to return home, I was confronted by the reality of this gift. It is mine to choose, whether I am sitting by a hospital bedside attending the inevitable death of a woman who has treated me like a son for almost 30 years, or whether I am coming back to dazed consciousness in the rear seat of a wrecked vehicle desperately asking my own son if he is all right.
For there, in such moments, is Christ present. Again, certainly not as a lucky charm. Nor even as the inexpressible realization that life and death are bound together in meaning. No. Christ is present as the ultimate, and ultimately merciful, meaning within all human events.
I have believed, all my life, in the Something Happened nature of the Christian event. I have known Him as history, as Scripture, as rite, as comfort. After the confluence of events leading up to the diaconia, in the face of Father Carrón’s challenge at the diaconia, I begin to see the inexorable, positive reality of my place before Him.