south america
Responsibles’ Assembly

That Which Doesn’t Change
Another stop on our South American itinerary. This time we return to São Paulo, where more than 300 people from throughout the continent have gathered to verify whether “there is something that remains within everything.” Three days of dialogue with Fr. Julián Carrón focus on freedom, School of Community, and work–and on experience, laid bare...

by Alessandra Stoppa
photography by Kika Antunes

“After this song, we have no more excuses.” “Todo cambia” (“Everything Changes”) is the song of a Chilean exile. “Everything changes in this world. And that which changed yesterday will change again tomorrow. Everything changes, but my love doesn’t change, in this faraway land.” “What a dominant idea in the songwriter! When, in the midst of all the changes, we lose ourselves, it’s because we lack this dominant idea. Instead, when one lives a love that is worth more than life, then everything else can change, but there is something that remains. This is the verification that we have to make: if, in all of the circumstances of life, there is really something that persists and remains. We are here so that the awareness of that which remains can grow in us.”
Father Julián Carrón speaks to the 340 Latin American “responsibles” seated in the meeting room–and to Lucas, a Brazilian from Aracaju, who comes to the microphone to recount his experience, and his fear that Christ might become only a word. Carrón provokes him, “Where is the life that we’ve lost in living?” This is a question that will resurface again and again during these days together. “And not because we do crazy things, commit grave sins. But life slowly deflates. Our interest in Christ diminishes; we lose our life, and Christ, in living. They fall from our hands. That He come to interest us again: this is the challenge.” It is one of the many dialogues of the three days of the ARAL (Latin American Responsibles’ Assembly) in Mariápolis, outside of São Paulo.
For the third year in a row, the gathering of responsibles from throughout the continent takes place in a reception center belonging to the Focolare Movement. The theme can be seen on a banner: “In every moment, something new begins”–a challenge without reductions to each person’s experience, played out in a friendship. As Carrón expresses from the beginning, on Friday afternoon, “It’s necessary for us to be here with our whole selves; with all of our restlessness, our unresolved issues, our questions”–like the Queen of Sheba in the First Book of Kings. She goes to Solomon to find the answers to the questions that she has in her heart, and he responds that “they are not just the words that you hear, but all that you see.” The palace, the food, the attendance and garb of his servants... She sees all of this and remains breathless, Scripture says.
It is the same here: everything is part of the answer. The silence, the Mass, the way of staying together, the songs, and the 42 volunteers who were on sentry duty in the airport at dawn, waiting for one flight after another, with their orange shirts and happy faces–and  they don’t stop now, shifting from welcoming to serving meals. “The Mystery’s answer proposes itself to our life in everything,” begins Carrón–especially in the faces of all who are here. “The presence of people doesn’t surprise us. They could have chosen not to come, they could have left. Nothing is like it is ‘just because.’” The best part of reality is its emergence from nothing. 

Otoney’s prayer. “He became flesh because of this lack of amazement, in order to reawaken all of our affection... But we have already understood even this ‘becoming flesh,’ and we repeat it automatically,” Carrón will say the following day. “So the Mystery makes a charism happen in men that fascinates them. This is what happened to us with Giussani.” Sitting in the meeting room are people from 19 different countries, from Mexico to Argentina. “We are here because God came to get us, each one in his place. His restlessness for us has reawakened our own.” Carrón takes up the Pope’s homily from the Epiphany: “God’s heart is restless for us. He looks out for people willing to ‘catch’ His unrest.”
He is looking for hearts touched by His question. This is apparent in the evening’s witnesses: Maria, Stefano, and Otoney. The latter is a lawyer from Salvador de Bahia (Brazil). His business is growing, and his relationship with his collaborators is very difficult. “I ask myself: is it worth it? Especially when I realize that we are not up to the challenge that reality poses to us. This forces me to see that the problem is the absence of the ‘I.’ If the ‘I’ is absent, there is no task. The work on The Religious Sense was the greatest help to me. It made me aware that the problem is not what to do, but to mature: the tiredness and the loneliness are not eliminated, but above all I never eliminate the fact of Christ. Of being able to be myself.” In his city, the police went on strike for 10 days, and it was chaos. There were 200 deaths. “I wasn’t sure if I should write a public judgment. Julián de la Morena [the responsible of South America] told me: ‘You need to ask the Mystery.’ I discovered that prayer is the first judgment, and it is the right judgment. I realize that the drama of life, lived in this friendship, permits us to give ourselves back to Christ.”
Stefano, on the other hand, is a student of astrophysics in Milan. He speaks about the death of a dear friend, about making the choice of what to do after graduation, and in all of this, “about a link that cannot be broken.” He saw it in the father–son relationship with Carrón. “I felt a demand for fulfillment that never ended, and I asked him if I was normal. He said, ‘You are normal, and this need is the greatest thing that you have. If you look at it, you discover a companionship that never ends.’ For me, to be embraced like this is the experience of Christ, the awareness that I am a relationship with One who continually draws me.”
The verification of faith is in the difference in affection for oneself, and for others. This from Maria, who is Portuguese, and has lived and worked in Haiti since the day of the earthquake, “where everything came down, even the soul.” And yet, a week after the quake, at a Mass where she was the only white person among people who had lost everything, she heard a song. The choir sings it here in the meeting room: “De mon coeur Seigneur, merci” (“From My Heart, Lord, Thank You”). “A continual gratitude...” One day, while introducing herself to some foreign visitors, she found herself saying, “I’m Haitian.” “Immediately, I thought: what did I say?! Instead, it’s the truth: right now, it’s the way for me to say that I am Christian, because Christians are the followers of Christ. And the Haitians are the circumstance in which I say: You are me.”    

He turned toward me. The witnesses are introduced by Bracco, the responsible of Brazil. “Today, while Carrón was speaking, I thought about John and Andrew, and I asked myself: when is the last time that I followed Christ? But then I thought about Christ’s gaze toward John and Andrew in the instant in which He turned toward them. That’s what was happening to me in that moment: Christ who turns toward me. I am myself because of this gaze toward me.” And it happens again on Saturday morning, in hearing Carrón say with profundity: “While we were praying together, I thought, ‘How many of us are experiencing the same astonishment that the Virgin Mary experienced?’” He repeats, “Who, this morning, with all of his freedom, was moved that Our Lady says, ‘Be it done unto me according to Thy word’? The Angel of the Lord announces it to Mary, and he announces it to you, today. To me, today! This is the most precious thing that happens to us every morning. But we lose the preciousness if our freedom is not there.”
Freedom. It is one of the most powerful points in the assembly. Intense questions, all morning and afternoon. Giampiero from Mexico asks if “there is a moment in which we grow up, or if freedom always starts over from zero.” “In every moment you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Christ!” responds Carrón. “Listen, what is more fascinating than hearing ‘I love you’ now? Do we prefer that it be the result of habit, or that it be true now? What seems like a burden to us, is the most fascinating thing in life: freedom. It’s what makes life life. He made us free! But we are not surprised in front of this mystery.” The work is that we can begin to perceive freedom as a fascination. “Instead of complaining about having to say ‘yes,’ we will begin to feel that the instant is an occasion for saying: my Christ.”

A piece of glass. Renato is from Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and, with regard to the Movement, he always felt like someone who was channel surfing. “The criterion was what I like.” And yet, he never left, “by a Grace that I can’t explain. Today, I feel like a rock that, for years, was struck by many drops of water, which eventually made a crack. And there the river started to flow.” Carrón picks up his point: “This happens to us, too, if we remain faithful to the place where God continues to embrace us.” He continues to speak to us, in a silent and persistent way, within reality. “Life is this dizziness; we have to respond, circumstance after circumstance, to the signs with which the Mystery speaks to us. But we are so attached to circumstances that it seems that they take everything from us.” He speaks of a 55-year-old woman, who confided to him that, every day, she woke up grateful. She was so amazed  even in telling him, she was moved anew. “We cannot convince ourselves of gratitude. Either I have an experience of something that frees me at the start of the day, or I have to put on a mask in order to appear happy.” So what is asked of us is “that which has been the greatest challenge of my life: to consent to learn what I already knew.” One can know perfectly what love is, but “there is an abyss between him and the fullness of life of one who is in love. Whoever lives formally doesn’t know what kind of intensity life can reach. And we have to decide if we will have the experience or not. Each one of us is faced with this dilemma.”
And this is urgent, immediate, during the breaks or at lunch. Around the table, it’s impossible not to talk about how the question that has brought everyone here finds an answer. And it finds one, because it becomes more acute–to the point of the gratitude of Sister Sonia, from Paraguay: “I joined the Movement one year ago. But here, now, I ‘entered,’ because everything that I hear and see corresponds to what my heart desires.” The answer happens. “I have everything,” says Augustin from Montevideo (Uruguay). “This morning, I left the meeting room certain that, if I live the awareness that we heard about, I have everything. This generates within me the desire to risk.”
In the afternoon, the assembly picks up again with a piece of a glass bottle, which Gaudí puts in the Sagrada Familia and makes into a masterpiece. “Because it reflects the light in a unique way,” explains Marco from Chile. “If I don’t expose myself to the light, I remain opaque.” “The first activity is to let oneself be illuminated,” emphasizes Carrón. He then responds to Gonzalos from Uruguay, who quit his job because he had a “turncoat” boss. “Do you have something that sustains you? If not, we’re always starting over. We put all of our hope in novelty: we wait for this to change, then that to change, until there’s nothing left to change, and then what do we say? There’s no solution! And we become skeptical. But the novelty is Christ Himself. The answer to life is a Presence.” He rereads the passage from the Gospel in which the disciples return to Christ, triumphant because of the miracles accomplished. And He, with an infinite, infinite tenderness, says to them: don’t rejoice because of this success, rejoice that your names are written in heaven. “None of us would have said it! This is enough to make us understand that Jesus is God.”
That evening, there is a video of John Waters’ witness at the Exercises of the university students. He speaks about his recovery of a true relationship with reality, after the false liberation of alcohol and having deserted the Christ whom he had known as a child. Leaving the room, Cleuza is moved. “What happened to him, happened to me. If, in everything that I’ve done in my life, I’ve never lost what I believe in,” she puts her hand to her chest, “it’s because He loves my heart more than I do.” Outside, under the tent, the party starts. In the middle of the crowd, Adriana stands with her dearest friend, Glorinha. The two Brazilians are a fraternity, but this is only the second time that they’ve seen each other in person. They live 2,500 miles away from each other and talk every day on Skype.  “It’s a friendship that has changed my life,” says Adriana, “because of the same desire to look at each other and to look at Carrón.”
 “When I see people flourish far from the ‘center’ of the Movement, it is the confirmation, for me, of the truth of the proposal. But this truth happens only by making the journey,” says Carrón the next morning at the synthesis. There are three points to work on. The first is School of Community :“I don’t have personal proposals for you; I don’t have anything besides following Giussani. This is also the only thing that captivates me, and not because I am guiding the Movement. I do School of Community in order to be able to put up with myself, and to be able to see the gaze of Christ. I need to re-enter into a relationship with Giussani every day; it’s necessary for me to live.”

A changed “I”.The second point is the relationship between authority and personal responsibility: “Authority stakes everything on pure freedom. If we love our friends, we desire that they will be themselves. Either we are in the Movement to have a nice little group, or to generate.” And finally, the last point is charitable works: “They are the expression of a changed ‘I.’ The Movement helps you to do works by generating your ‘I.’ But it is necessary to overcome the dualism between being and having to be. If not, we continue to labor like the others–without newness, manipulating reality. A work is doing your job in such a way that it provokes a question in others.” Now, in this same meeting room, there will be a presentation of At the Origin of the Christian Claim, with a video link to all of the Brazilian communities. As the notes of Et incarnatus est play, images of the Grotto of the Annunciation in Nazareth stream on the screen. “The Mystery happens again, continually,” Carrón had said yesterday, “to redeem us from the life we lose in living.”
(The previous installments of this Latin American series reported on the life of the Communion and Liberation Movement in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.)