THE THEME OF THE MEETING

“IS THIS HISTORY REALLY CONVENIENT FOR ALL MEN?”
From the conference of Javier Prades, Rector of the Theological University of San Damaso, Madrid.

In a recent article in the Spanish press, the writer Gustavo Martín Garzo describes today’s cultural scene. Drawing inspiration from Sofia Coppola’s film, The Virgin Suicides, he claims that the director intended to translate into images “the eternal dissociation between reality and desire that has always troubled and hurt man.” And he goes on, “Every one of us must accept that the life awaiting him is too limited to accommodate all those aspirations and desires we have inside us.” Quoting Walter Benjamin, “He affirms that ‘one of the problems of today’s world is the poverty of experiences.... [T]he incapacity to have experiences and to transmit them is perhaps one of the few certain facts that [today’s man] has about himself.” The banality of our life is bound up with the banality of the greater part of the culture and of the world that surrounds us. ...Today’s men and women live without placing any restraint on their desires and, despite this, they have rarely had so little to tell each other.”
Martín Garzo notes a disproportion between reality and desire, and denounces the banality of our time, which he attributes to the poverty of human experience–that is, of those lived experiences that are capable of changing life. As proof of this penury, he observes that it is very rare today that anyone wants to tell others something worth telling.
The journalist Pedro García Cuartango also denounces a social climate of onerous banality. The new element compared with the previous article is that Cuartango senses that this superficiality derives from the elimination of God, which arouses a rebellion in man, because he cannot accept that he is insignificant; he believes that life must have a meaning.
“They have always reproved me for my need for the absolute, which, moreover, appears in my characters,” observed the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato: “This need traverses my life like a stream or, rather, like a nostalgia for something I have already reached.... I have never been able to calm my nostalgia, or domesticate it by telling myself that this harmony existed once in my childhood; I would have liked that, but it wasn’t to be... for me, nostalgia is a yearning never satisfied, the place I was never able to reach. But it’s what we have wanted to be, our desire. It is so true that we are unable to live it, that we could even believe that it dwells outside our nature, if it weren’t that every human being carries within him this hope of being, this feeling of something we lack.... Nostalgia for this absolute is like the background–invisible, unknowable, but against which we compare the whole of life.”
Ernesto Sábato’s words are an attempt to tell others of the nature of the desire that identifies us as human beings. It is not difficult to recognize in this literary description the imprint of that complex of evidences and needs that constitute elementary human experience, and that the Bible calls “the heart.”
Here is how Fr. Giussani describes it: “All of the experiences of my humanity and of my personality are filtered through the sieve of a primordial ‘original experience’ that constitutes my identity in the way I face everything. ...Any personal affirmation, from the most banal and ordinary to the most reflected upon and rich in consequences, can be based solely on this nucleus of original needs.”

An essential factor of this complex of evidences is that, at the center of elementary experience, there is an openness, an indomitable tension toward the infinite, toward “something” that is within reality and at the same time refers us beyond it, that we experience in life as something that drives us forward, toward a mystery whose true face we are unable to discover, but cannot cease to seek.
In the ambit of pluralist Western culture, where various different expressions of relationship with the infinite co-exist, one can listen to the experience of one singular relationship with the infinite: the story of the first men who met Jesus and acknowledged Him as the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, the Son of God.
The Gospel is a long account of this type of experience. Many people ran to tell others of something that had changed their lives–the encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. What did they see in Him? In an extreme synthesis, we could say that in that “encounter,” they recognized an exceptional presence, quite beyond compare, in which they sensed that God was coming near, or rather was there, with them.

Referring to the theme of the Meeting (“By Nature Man is Relation with the Infinite”), we could say that when those men came to know Jesus, they had a singular experience of relationship with the infinite, because that Man bore the infinite; He made it felt, seen, and heard, and in that way they sensed that their life found a superabundant fulfillment in that relationship. During the time they lived with this extraordinary man, they went on discovering the unmistakable traits of a new way of knowing the infinite mystery of God and, therefore, of knowing themselves. The infinite stature of their “I” surfaced, to the point of discovering with admiration and surprise that their “I” was greater than the world.
I have not found a more effective way of describing this surprising estimation of themselves and of their destiny, as the fruit of their encounter with Jesus, than the words that Fr. Giussani addressed to Pope John Paul II in May 1998: “‘What is man that You should keep him in mind, mortal man that You care for him?’ (Ps 8). No question in life has ever struck me like this one. There has been only one Man in the world who could answer me, by asking another question: ‘What would it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and then lose himself? Or what could a man give in exchange for himself?’ I was never asked a question that left me so short of breath as this question of Christ! No woman ever heard another voice speak of her son with such an original tenderness and unquestionable valuing of the fruit of her womb, with such a wholly positive affirmation of his destiny; it is only the voice of the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. And even more, no man can feel his dignity and absolute value affirmed way beyond all his achievements. No one in the world has ever been able to speak like this!”
What the first disciples had perceived, what Fr. Giussani had perceived with this dramatic sensitivity, and what perhaps each one of us has been able to discover with wonder and humility, is that, in the encounter with Jesus, our true stature emerges, the stature of man and his desire, of that nostalgia for the absolute that flows through human cultures.
Those who met Him could discover themselves, the world, and God, in a new unimaginable way, and could look at everything with an infinite gaze, with God’s gaze.
Is this particular history really universal? Is it convenient to all men? Does it have the cultural power and dignity to bear comparison with the conquests of the natural and social sciences, which seem to reduce it to a mere subjective feeling limited to the private sphere? Unlike in the past, no need is felt today to eliminate the Christian faith; it is enough to close it up in the ghetto of subjective opinions that can be professed in private, provided they don’t claim to speak the truth about man, the world, and God. It is as if we were vulnerable before these objections and could give in to the suspicion that the encounter we have had does not teach us the truth about man, and therefore is not convenient for everyone.

It is evident that the first cultural responsibility we have before this challenge is that of living the newness of life that has reached us, that is born of Christ’s look upon us. So it’s a question of being Christians, living the life of the People of God, which is the place where the risen Christ manifests Himself, becoming our contemporary.
For each person, from this life is born the responsibility of deepening a critical and systematic reflection on the reasons for the experience we are living. When we speak of a newness, a diversity that attracts, or a companionship that is different, are we alluding to something that is more of a mood or a feeling, albeit respectable, but incapable of giving reasons for itself? Can we affirm that those existential traits are founded in human nature and can therefore be explained reasonably and proposed to everyone? The dimensions of this cultural work are immense and cannot be described in generic terms. Everyone has to verify, for what concerns his concrete environment, how this change in the schemes of the world, to which St. Paul urges every Christian, happens: “Do not conform yourselves to the mentality of this world, but renew your minds so as to be able to discern the will of God, what is good, acceptable to Him, and perfect.”