CL life
Our history

The Birth of a song
Il mio volto is a song, recalled at the Communion and Liberation Beginning Day, written by a young Italian girl many years ago. Today, Adriana Mascagni explains how those words of hers were born: on a luminous morning, in some moments of sadness... “If you put your desire in play, the day is full of newness.”

by Mariella Carlotti

“There is nothing more evident than the fact that we do not give life to ourselves... Then you are not alone; you are not alone. A presence that constitutes us starts to rise up before our eyes in such a way that it begins to give us the possibility–when we recognize it–to be reborn, to have a true affection for ourselves, a capacity to love ourselves. In fact, only when I come to recognize that You exist, am I reborn. Ask yourselves how many times you have walked this path; and instead, how many times, when we reach darkness, do we get agitated in many different ways, trying to cling to something else. This makes me think: who could compose a song like this today? This song was written by a 17-year-old girl, many years ago,” said Fr. Julián Carrón to the GS students (Student Youth) during their Beginning Day in Italy on October 6th. The song in question is Il mio volto [My Face]; that 17-year-old girl is Adriana Mascagni. We asked ourselves here, in Florence, with the GS students: Why so much insistence on that particular text?  We decided to invite Adriana, and ask her in person what experience gave rise to that song.
On Sunday, November 25th, we found before us a woman whose life and awareness of herself were changed by the Movement, many years ago as well as today.
Adriana tells us her story: one day, a religion teacher entered her class at the Colonna Institute in Milan; she was 16 years old, and thirsty for truth. That teacher, Fr. Giussani, had a strange way of proposing the faith: “He talked about reason, freedom; he was different from other people because he was real, and I had never encountered a real person before. There was no barrier between what he was and what he said.” Adriana started to follow his lessons closely, and she found herself in GS. The proposal was clear: everyone was called to verify whether Christ was real or not, in life, starting from the interests that he or she had. Since Adriana loved singing and the theater, those passions would be the privileged path of her verification. She recounted the steps of her life through songs, the same songs that would later become ours, and whose words reveal the discoveries, the moments of sadness, wonder, joy, and pain that generated them. That beauty that has always accompanied and instinctively corresponded to us blossomed from a very personal experience, so reasonable that it became ours, too.

The discovery. “That morning, I remember, was beautiful and clean, with a light breeze. I was on a motor scooter with a friend, and I felt a discovery come to life in me: ‘In the morning, Lord, my amphora is empty at the source, and in the vibrant, clear air, I know that you can make me great, Lord... I have but one desire.’ All of my desires converged into one: ‘To see You–and that is the morning.’ Seeing God is like beginning eternally, like eternally living a newness. We went to the Sormani Library, my friend started studying, and I wrote the song Al mattino [In the Morning].”
Then another song was born from another experience: “Every Sunday we went to the ‘Bassa’ [a poor area on the outskirts of Milan] to be with the kids there; we shared their situation, which was so different from ours. I didn’t go willingly. Once, I came home so scandalized by this experience that a thought came to me: there was something in me that wasn’t real. There was something that, despite what I was doing, revealed only my inadequacy, to the point that I felt insincere, in both the good and the bad things that I was doing. There was something deeper, an uneasiness that went deeper: original sin. I came up against my real sin: ‘The evil I do, it’s not my evil / I am more miserable than I can believe.’ This is the human condition–and so, what can we do? There is only one solution: ‘Let me encounter He who can suffer / He who can give right till the end / He who is sincere, He who is real [if not, reality is no longer real!], / He whom I can at least follow’–these are the words I wrote for Non son sincera [I’m Not Sincere], because human reality with original sin cannot do anything but follow He who is not like this.”

“Who am I?” Adriana  then talks about  another day, during a meeting of the GS responsibles with Fr. Giussani: “He spoke, with his ardor, with his exuberance, and I had a moment of reflection. I asked myself, ‘Who am I?’ And the more I tried to grasp something that defined me, the less I found, and the more I felt myself sink into nothingness. To say ‘I’ was like saying ‘nothing,’ a bottomless pit. And I was scared. In this fear, almost as an instinctive reaction, I went back to listening to Giussani, and like magic I found my consistency again: there I was, yes, there I was! A moment before, it had been like I wasn’t there anymore: ‘Only when I realize that You exist / do I hear my voice again–like an echo– / and I’m born again, as time is born from memory. / Oh, heart, why do you tremble? [I was scared!] You are not alone. / You don’t know how to love, yet you are loved; / you don’t know how to make yourself, yet you are made.’ This really consoles, and makes one want this ‘being’ even more: ‘As the stars up in the sky, / You make me walk in Being; / make me grow and change, / as you raise up and change the light from day to night.’ And then one is at peace, like at the GS vacations at Madonna di Campiglio, when we stood silently and looked at the Dolomite Mountains, dyed pink by the dawn, after having said a decade of the Rosary: ‘You make my soul take on color, / as the snow on Your precious mountain tops / takes on the sun of Your love’” (Il mio volto [My Face]).
A dialogue between Adriana and the students begins; the questions attempt to work out the secret of that beauty. Marta asks the most dramatic question: “I am fascinated by what you say; for you, the encounter with the Movement was an obvious newness that changed everything. Deep down, I am skeptical that this can happen to me, too. I was born into the Movement, so how can it be an experience of newness?” The answer is smiting: “Newness is the repercussion of an undertaking. It’s not true that the ‘children of the Movement’ have nothing to discover–the newness comes from taking seriously what is proposed to you. And this is  true for everything! A day in which you just let yourself live is without newness; a day in which you put all of your desire into play is full of newness.”
The encounter ends with Povera voce [Poor Voice], sung this time with a new awareness.
“There was a huge storm, one of those great summer storms, full of lightning. I was in a Fiat Cinquecento waiting for a friend. There was this light, these trees that were bending over, these leaves. And the windshield wipers were going, which suggested a melody. When my friend came back, we went to the GS headquarters. I met Maretta Campi and I said to her, ‘I’ve got the music. Let’s put the words together.’ It was a joy to make things together, for everyone! This is the spirit of communion, the spirit of a love that is free and enthusiastic, and when it is placed in God’s hands, unthinkable things come from it. And what came out here was Povera voce, which unexpectedly became a sort of hymn, because Fr. Giussani immediately liked it a lot. Povera voce is a song of certainty. Our voice cannot end, our voice sings with a reason! What more do you want? And so you have to sing it in another way, with vigor. And then you have to think, you have to be aware of the words that you are singing, as if they were born by themselves. They aren’t words made by another, no, they are your words!”
And with this thought, the gathering with Adriana ended, but the encounter goes on.  

“For me, too.” The next day, Caterina wrote to me: “I wanted to thank you for giving me the possibility to meet Adriana. Learning about the experiences from which the words of her songs–that are so true for me, too–were born, helps me to become even more of a protagonist in my life. And so this morning I prayed, ‘God, I know that you can make me great.’ I hope that this wonder and this request of mine will last forever. The certainty is growing in me that, even if I were to sink into endless darkness, because of this  companionship it would be impossible not to recognize His presence.”