CL life
london

(Re)discovering the Origin
A three-day meeting in London with Julián Carrón gathered 450 CL friends from English-speaking Europe. It was an occasion to understand the gift within every circumstance–including crisis and illness–when lived in the certainty of a Presence.

by Gianluca Marcato

We won the lottery! At the draw that took place in Reading, 40 miles from London–where, the weekend of January 11th-13th, 450 CL friends from English-speaking Europe gathered–a certainty emerged: in life, Something (or better, Someone) happened to us that is not one prize among many, but the only one that can fulfill the needs of the human heart. Many countries were represented, in addition to the United Kingdom: Tom and some friends drove from the Netherlands, Eileen and family flew from Norway, while Margaret and others from Ireland arrived fresh from a series of encounters with Fr. Julián Carrón, who had spent the previous days in Dublin. There were also friends from Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Denmark, and Malta.
After the surprise of seeing so many new faces, or being reunited with old friends after some time, a quick dinner preceded the challenge launched by Fr. Carrón during the introduction. There were few affirmations, but many questions that touch the heart of the experience of each of us: “How have we faced the challenges of recent times?” It is an invitation to continue the journey that we started at the Beginning Day, when a hypothesis for facing circumstances was offered: everything is a call from the Mystery; circumstances are the way in which the Mystery calls us to our maturation. “How have we used this hypothesis to face circumstances? Are we more enthusiastic about or disappointed by our faith? What conversion is asked of us at the beginning of this year?”
We left the meeting hall in silence, amazed at having seen a man “seized by the restlessness of God” for men and women. Do we, too, have this restleness? Are we “seekers after God”?
In the morning, an English breakfast fuels us for an assembly that immediately takes off. It is a fierce battle between reality and our perception of it. Everything changes after Maddalena speaks of the encounter that she had with some people in Battersea (London), including Jane, who is “neither Catholic nor from CL.” It is evidently a friendship that is beautiful and useful for life. “But then, what is the first step of conversion?” asks Fr. Carrón. The response is hesitant, so he answers: “The first step is recognizing Him. The question is whether or not we recognize everything that is happening there, the Lord who is at work there. If you skip this step, you lose everything.” Herein lies our difficulty–stopping at appearances, even beautiful ones, and missing out on the best part of reality. Then, when we are confronted with the difficulty of life, we get lost. Like Stefano, who answers the question, “Are you among the fortunate or the unfortunate?” with “The unfortunate.” We don’t realize what has happened to us in life, that we have already received the most precious gift. What is wrong is our relationship with reality; we miss the point all the time. We don’t realize what is happening to us now. This is the real battle: “We live in a virtual world. We have to return to reality!”
After the assembly, I stop in the pub for a quick drink before lunch and find Jane (whom I know well). She says, smiling, “Hi. I’m the one who’s not Catholic and not from CL.” “For how long?” I ask. Jokingly, she responds, “We’ll see.” This quick exchange also reveals what is happening in these countries–we meet people who embrace Christ to the point of asking to belong to Him through Baptism or Confirmation, or who return to Him by rediscovering that origin that was never really lost, persisting in the heart’s perception of something missing.

A new subject. The dialogue on Saturday afternoon was sparked by a dinner in Dublin a few days before, at which Carrón and Massimo (the director of a bank) took some questions seriously: Is the economic crisis ending, as many people are starting to say, or is the worst yet to come? And is there a place where there is a point of truth in our gaze toward reality? A place where we can help each other to look at things as they are? What is the nature of this crisis?” Based on that dinner conversation, Massimo was asked to kickoff the dialogue with an intervention on the crisis. Everyone is asked to compare themselves with reality and with their work, since many people here are employed in the world of companies and markets. “Carrón was at the helm, pushing us further,” recalls Mauro. “What is our contribution in this situation? To be better people? Do we wait for the storm to blow over before we start living again, or do we want to enter into reality as it is, with all of ourselves, and face it?” At dinner, Alicia, from Limerick, who is participating in this type of gathering for the first time, says, “I understood what it means that we need a new subject today, and just how dramatic this necessity is.” The evening is dedicated to art. A friend shows us frescoes from the Dominican friary of San Marco (Florence), painted by Fra Angelico upon request of his prior to help his brothers to deepen their personal relationship with Christ.  
In the meantime, Fr. Carrón and the Memores Domini of London went home for dinner with Dionino, whose illness (cancer) prevented him from attending the encounter. After a warm embrace, a dialogue begins and it is in absolute harmony with the work that took place during the day. “How are you?” “You know, lately I can’t complain. And I am realizing that I don’t have to be afraid of what happens because it is for me; everything is for me. And this gives me strength, an abandonment within things that allows me to say: I trust, because I am part of a story in which everything loves me. Thus, I can live, hope. And I am grateful for this; it is a race toward Destiny.” Fr. Carrón asks for a copy of Giussani’s L’attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction of Jesus]; he reads and comments on a passage that he will then use to conclude the weekend. It helps us to go to the heart of the challenge: Christ has His own autonomous personality, whose features are unmistakable. And if we don’t search for that uniqueness, if it doesn’t become “object (memory), spoken (invocation), contemplated with wonder and relish, so that it transforms into joy for a presence”[Carrón comments: “If we don’t understand that, in meeting Him, we have won the lottery...], then we live like everyone else. The Mystery did everything for us by becoming man in order to fight this battle with us. This is the verification of faith: opening our life to His presence, our life changes.”