New World
Omaha, Nebraska

The Discovery
of Preference
From college roommates to bartenders, the encounter with a true friendship has changed the pace of life for many in the Cornhusker State, whose largest city hosts a home within a home–a CL community bursting with wonder in answering the invitation of every day: “How do I stay with Him?”

by Martina Carelli

“It’s incredible to see these 15 faces from Omaha here when two years ago I came alone,” reflected Emily G., looking at her friends gathered around a big table at the restaurant in the Manhattan Center during the New York Encounter in January. It’s even more incredible when thinking of how everything started in this city in the middle of nowhere–with two college roommates and a book left on the counter.
Four years prior, her roommate Rachel had started going to School of Community at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. One day, on her way to the chapel, Emily picked up a book Rachel had left in the kitchen and she was immediately drawn in as she read the first lines about knowledge through a witness and correspondence to the heart. Later, after the two graduated and moved to Omaha, they decided to continue reading the book together. “We didn’t know how to ‘do’ School of Community... For the first months that we attempted it, our meetings were Rachel, a friend of hers, and I in the living room of our tiny apartment with Is It Possible to Live this Way?–and a bottle of wine!” The occasional visits to Omaha of three friends teaching at Benedictine College–Lorenzo, Salvatore, and Daniele–sustained that beginning. The way these three men were living every circumstance and spending their free time filled in the many gaps in the girls’ understanding of the writings of Fr. Giussani and the charism of Communion and Liberation.

A quote in a notebook. For several months, the meetings in Omaha were a tiring and inconsistent coming and going of faces. This changed after Emily attended the New York Encounter in 2011: “When I saw all those people there, so truly alive and following their desire to its depths, I experienced such a great sense of belonging. With that came a desire to take more seriously the work of School of Community, and an urgency to communicate the experience I had to the others back home. That year, a miracle happened in my life: the community in Omaha truly became a companionship.” People began to consistently return every week to School of Community, and then to barbecues, nights of singing, biking trips, and birthday celebrations.
One of these was Emily M., who came to Omaha to start graduate school and moved in with Emily G. when Rachel got married and moved out. What initially seemed simply a practical solution revealed itself to be much more than that. The  first months in the new apartment coincided with a series of difficult circumstances in her life. Attempting to overcome the struggles of that period, she started writing inspirational quotes in a notebook–things like, “Stay focused,” “Get your work done,” “Facebook will kill you!” One day, her roommate wrote on it, in a corner, “You are loved.” This small gesture enraged her, “because I knew she was right and I could hardly accept it.” But then, “in the coming months, I was able to give in to it under the patient and loving gaze of my friends, who never failed to show me a greater affection than I had for myself.”
Soon Meredith came to live in this apartment, which was aptly nicknamed “Narnia.” She wasn’t lacking friends, with many school acquaintances to hang out with on the weekends, and yet she craved true relationships. “The Movement came to me through the faces of people who were living their lives with so much joy that I couldn’t help but start to follow them.”

School of Community. Kelly had first run into Communion and Liberation during her freshman year at Benedictine College, but “after a few School of Community meetings, I stopped going, because I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.” Yet, four years later, when she moved back to her native Omaha after graduation, she longed for the close sense of friendship experienced in college, and so ended up at a School of Community again. “They were working on a talk Fr. Carrón gave to the GS students for their graduation. It was a totally new way of viewing vocation that seemed so much more authentic and simpler–relying less on my own ability to put together the puzzle of my life, and more on a faithful following of reality and openness to whatever God shows me.” She hasn’t missed a meeting since that day, “and in time I realized I often reduced my faith to an idea. Now it has become a living relationship with a real Person who is active and present in my life.”
Therese verifies the essentiality of their work and time together. Invited to School of Community after leaving the convent, she was completely enamored when the first meeting started on the notes of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. “After years of ‘offering up’ my desires as the virtuous thing to do, Giussani’s proposal of following my heart felt at first scandalous and selfish. Never did I think that singing songs, hiking, or taking ridiculous pictures in the cornfields would be the key to bridging that distance from Christ I had always experienced.” The same accent on desire struck her colleague Ashley, met in the hallways of their hospital: “Growing up, I was pretty shy and I wanted to belong so much that I often blended to fit in with my friends, without ever developing a strong sense of who I was. The Movement has taught me to never choose less and to have the simplicity to follow what I most desire.”

Diving and exploring. For a third Emily, Emily T., the vivid memory of a talk at her university on education by a certain Chris Bacich, CL National Responsible, drew her, two years later, to join the group of friends in Omaha. And Tom bumped into them four years after reading The Religious Sense in a graduate class in South Dakota: “When I realized that the same Giussani was the founder of this movement I just met, it was a source of comfort to know that I had another chance to dive into his work and explore what I missed out on the first time around.” On the other hand, Bryce, who moved from Sacramento to Omaha for his master’s degree, was at first very suspicious of the notion of a “movement within the Church.” But then, intrigued by some Giussani readings a friend e-mailed to him, he showed up one day at a School of Community. There he was met with a surprise: in front of those people “living so sincerely, through struggles and joys and all the rest,” the theology student realized that “my false piety, phoniness, and clichéd outlooks were just routines that I hoped would make me a strong Catholic, but now appeared absolutely absurd to me.” His previous efforts to “reach a quota of good deeds, readings, and prayers–as if by doing these things I could earn Christ’s intimacy over time”–have been transformed into one simple question: “How do I stay with Him?”
Similar encounters have continued to multiply in the past months. Armando, a physician from Mexico who went for brunch on a Sunday morning at a downtown restaurant, was struck by the attitude of his waitress. “In a moment when everything in my life was desolate and arid, that woman looked so at peace. I wanted that for myself.” And so he started following her to the School of Community. Justin, a bartender who asked for the phone number of one of the girls of the group who came to his bar, ended up being invited for a dinner with the community a few days later. His eyes were opened wide with amazement in front of these new people, as he wondered, “There’s something different among you. I have many friends, but none so close like you are with each other. How long have you known one another?” Monica, who just moved to Omaha from Florida to start medical school, replied, “A couple of months...”
Then, a month ago, the New York Encounter beaconed. Tom decided to go, after realizing that “meeting these friends has been my ‘Zaccheus moment,’ coming down from the tree where I was.” Gerardo, a call manager at AAA who went to his first School of Community just a few weeks before, promptly responded to the proposal of volunteering at the New York Encounter and spent his nights there guiding tours for the Chesterton exhibit.

Just one thing. Jessalyn bought her plane ticket after reading the title of the NYE, “Experiencing Freedom,” on the CL website. During the previous months, several facts in her life had urgently brought up the question: What is freedom? “If this weekend in New York can help me answer this, I’m in!” Did it? The day after the NYE, she was overwhelmed by the news of a dramatic circumstance a dear friend found herself in, while at the clinic where she works she spent the entire morning cleaning up the body of a patient–“one of my favorites!”–who had died just before she got to work. “Then I remembered Joshua’s words read Friday night at the Encounter. If he is free in prison, how can these circumstances define me?!”
For Emily M., the days at the New York Encounter were filled with awareness of the surprise that the friendships that had been growing in Omaha are not contained just there, that her small group of friends is part of something much greater. “At one moment at the NYE, I was so moved I had to tell my friends, ‘Our companionship in Omaha and this are the same thing!’ How can it be that such a gift is given to me, while I am so broken and wretched?! I have no other explanation but that it is the preference of Christ for me.”