01-04-2013 - Traces, n. 4

Latin America
Assembly of CL Responsibles

With
open eyes

They had been challenged by the profound gladness of Benedict XVI, and would return home to see on television the face of a new Pope. Three hundred responsibles for CL in Latin America gathered for a weekend of assemblies and encounters at the annual “ARAL” meeting to share their journeys of the past year. “Only a flesh that touches us changes us.” This article recounts the experience of some of the participants before, during, and after the ARAL weekend.

by Alessandra Stoppa

Un sueño del alma que a veces muere sin florecer: a promise that is not kept, that dies before flowering–a bluff... “Life is not this way, because Christ is a true promise,” but one cannot believe by keeping one’s eyes shut. “It is necessary to verify.” This is why 300 CL responsibles from 18 countries gathered in Mariápolis, outside São Paolo, Brazil, for the Assembly of Responsibles in Latin America with Fr. Julián Carrón. They experienced three days of a continual call to live, to know more deeply that profound gladness on the face of Benedict XVI, the same that, returning home, they would see in Pope Francis.
In those days of lessons, assemblies, and testimonies on the theme, “Life as Vocation,” participants had questions and difficulties, but were desirous for a truth to follow–“not a discourse, but a face,” Carrón often repeated. For this reason, this article does not report details about the Assembly, but describes those whose lives are alive, recounting their experiences.

Silvia | BraZil
“Christ is a theory for me! Maybe if He walked through that door...” said Marcelo, a journalist, and an atheist. Silvia heard him, and knew that she was there for that and nothing else, because through that door an unexplainable fact had been entering for the last year, every two weeks. In that home in a central neighborhood of São Paulo, a group of friends, believers and unbelievers, had been meeting. This had not been part of Silvia’s plans for her life. As a professor of Philosophical Anthropology in the  Faculty of Arts at the University of São Paulo, she had initially only taught music students, but then was assigned fashion students as well. “It was the last thing I wanted, because I thought they were too superficial.” At a party, she happened to meet Carlos, a former colleague. He had never been part of the CL Movement, but had read Fr. Giussani and was convinced that The Religious Sense described the creative process, and told Silvia, “If your girls learn this method, they will become great stylists.” Silvia’s lessons became more intense, her love for her work stronger, and she sought some teacher friends to talk with and compare ideas and experiences.
Over time, this little group enlarged to include other professors and also those who weren’t teachers, and especially non-Christians. “Now it’s a friendship, in which we talk about what happens to us and compare experiences.” Those who come invest themselves fully, asking question after question, passionately, especially those who are unbelievers. “They ask the questions we forget to ask,” said Silvia at the ARAL.
Carrón introduced the Assembly by saying, “In the year that has passed since last year’s Assembly, how have we matured through the challenges that life has not spared us?” He was asking about the fact for which each person was in that room, the faith that has surprised our life: “What pertinence does it have to our needs?”
Silvia thought of her group of friends, all adults (with an average age of 50), people who have already seen that “life is complicated,” some with two, three marriages behind them. “They know existence without Christ well. So then, their interest in coming with us is a continual question for me. It makes me ask myself why I can’t live without Christ.” They experience the answer together, in the friendship that continues to grow among them. During the CL responsibles assembly, Carrón said, “Why are we interested in the faith, if not because it increases by a hundredfold the gusto of life? We are only asked to grow in affection for Christ. In this way, places generated by His gaze are born.”

Alejandro |  Venezuela
The night Hugo Chávez died, Alejandro was on the plane to the ARAL, alone with the news and his heart for the whole journey. “It was incredible. I realized that I was neither sad nor happy, like many of my countrymen.” Alejandro is from Caracas. After 14 years of the “omnipresence” of the caudillo in the life of every Venezuelan, Alejandro thought of him as if for the first time. “His death spoke to me of myself”–a man who lived and fought for his project and held power in his hands. Considering the empty crown of a king, man thinks of his destiny. “I felt compassion for him, for his suffering in being ‘defeated,’ in losing even his most powerful weapon: the ability to speak. But the Wisdom of God knows what we have to experience to understand the true sense of life.” He thought of Chávez and thought of himself: “I think about how I risk clinging to my own strength, my own idea. But I have encountered a fact, Christ, who is the only true consistence of life. Everything offers me the chance to know Him.” This is true now in his country, where at the end of Chávez and the beginning of his “myth,” a period of great uncertainty is unfolding.
At the ARAL, some of the most intense discussions were about politics. People compared their country’s experiences with those of the Italian elections, talked about the relationship between one’s own commitment and power, and looked at the situation of Venezuela, and its April 14th elections. “Wherever we are, in the face of political chaos, social fragmentation, and the triumph of ideologies, the one true contribution we can make is the clear consciousness of what we are–the Christian community.” “In other words, me,” said Alejandro. “After the gaze I received here, it is even clearer. I have everything I need to judge what happens, even when I am alone,” like that night on the plane. As Carrón said, “What is the pressing need? An education that brings forth the criterion of judgment that enables us not to become lost; an education that helps us to find that place of criterion in our heart.”
Bernhard Scholz, the President of the Companionship of Works, recounted the experience of the Italian elections and said, “If we don’t engage with reality, we don’t discover the potential of our ‘I,’ and we depend on others.” Only a free humanity is not overwhelmed by the powers that be, whether it is Chávez, or whoever comes after him, or any other figure we see as our safety net. “It’s very easy to lean on another ‘idol’ right away,” said Alejandro. “For this reason, I need the journey, to follow what I have encountered in life, which makes me free.”
Luz also comes from Caracas and works in a government office. Many at the ARAL asked her how she manages. She spoke simply: “I do it well, because it’s my work. I live for the experience of love I have.” The participants saw this same love when they returned home and saw the new Pope on television. He overwhelmed them, not because he is Latin American, but because “of the faith that he showed us from the very first moment.”

Claudia | Peru
“The last two years of university in Italy, I had a great desire that the life I had encountered would open up to the world.” She wasn’t thinking about departing for anywhere special. “I wasn’t worried about anything; I just lived normally, but with this desire in my heart.” Then she was asked to consider a year of volunteer service at the Sedes Sapientiae University in Lima and so, four days after graduating, she left Bari for Peru. Claudia recounted that she arrived in Lima “without the least idea of what to expect, but following everything, with the one certainty that God is always the one who initiates.” The climate, the traffic, the music at full blast at 7:30 in the morning, everything generated tension, but the biggest difficulty, not knowing the language, was what reminded her most strongly that she “depended” in everything, everything, and made her acknowledge that “I don’t make myself. I am made. The anxiety disappeared, replaced by the truest need, to let myself be embraced.”
A few months later, the professor with whom she was working had an accident and asked her to teach his lesson the next day, for the first time. She didn’t have time to prepare as well she would have liked and, to make things worse, she fell and hurt herself. That night she slept fitfully and woke up in pain. “I didn’t know what to do, but just then my professor called, and I told him my problems and he asked me, ‘Are you sure you can manage this?’ That simple question introduced me to a dialogue with the Mystery. Is this the true reason I don’t want to go? No.” It was the fear, and the image of how her first lesson should be. She wanted to escape, or at least she thought she did. “I asked myself what I truly desired, and what I desired was to say yes–not out of moralism, but because I needed Him,” because of her desire to let Him enter from the first hour of the day. “Saying no to what was given me would mean closing the door on You.” After this prayer in act, she immediately felt secure, in a way that had been impossible before.
Claudia’s year had been full of such experiences, admiring the continual transcendence of the limits of human ability. “One day after the other, I discover that life is You who invade me with Your presence.”

Alejandra | Uruguay
She had been waiting for a response for six months, but still no reply. Alejandra had written to the priest from her home pobrito, Villa Rodríguez, 50 miles from Montevideo, because now she was living in the capital and felt the need of a community. Then, when she was no longer hoping for an answer, the letter came: “Yes, I know a group....” This is how she found a School of Community, and ended up coming to the ARAL for the first time.
“The encounter with the Movement revolutionized my relationship with the faith; it made it real, flesh,” to the point of even changing her way of composing songs. She is a psychologist, but also writes music. “Before, I started from what the others expected, from themes that would interest them. Now the music flows from me, because this journey puts me in contact with myself.”
The day she wrote “Tu amor por mi”(“Your Love for Me”), she was sad because her family and friends didn’t want her to spend the weekend alone, and insisted on seeing her. “But I didn’t want to go. I needed something else.” Reading The Religious Sense, she came upon a poem by Tagore: “By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free.” “I realized how we love, how I love, and instead how He loves.” Alejandra sang it from the stage at the ARAL. The rhythm is fast, in crescendo, a cry, a “demand” for freedom. The words are those of the poem, which Carrón then picked up again in the assembly, to answer those asking for help in the decisions they had to make. “We would like to solve the other’s problems, or would like the other to solve ours. But this takes us away from the Mystery. Jesus didn’t give a solution to the two brothers fighting over their inheritance. This seems small or abstract to us, but instead only in educating ourselves to the Mystery, to the Infinite, are we free.” The poem continues, “If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart, thy love for me still waits for my love.” Alejandra said, “To be loved like this is real. For this reason, it costs me nothing to follow.”

Rosetta | Brazil
The people you hire, train, and then who leave you, the growth of responsibility, the volume of work, the relationships with collaborators, the administrative problems... “In all that you say, we see first of all that the entrepreneur is a person,” said Fr. Carrón in the Saturday afternoon meeting on charitable works. The same need for the ideal to remain alive in their work emerged in the words of those who spoke, even though they came from different experiences. “The ideal remains alive if I live. Jesus didn’t send letters. He is flesh.”
Rosetta has nothing else. “I came to this gathering as a beggar.” She is certainly not a “fresh recruit.” She has been in Brazil since she was 23 years old, and spent 46 intense years building the Fr. Giussani Educative Works of Belo Horizonte, which care for over a thousand children and adolescents, and comprise four centers for small children, a hospitality house, a social-cultural center, and a sports center. The previous months had delivered one blow after the other. The project head of the apprenticeship program left, and the government blocked some funding because of accounting problems. They appealed it, but then there were other complications. She feared that the others would leave. She got to the point that the work felt bigger and heavier than she could bear. “I would wake up at night, worried. I wasn’t based on Christ. Yet I said to myself, yes, I am based on Him...” with the space for a ‘but’ which slowly but surely closed in upon itself.
“Where do you set your foundations?” This question opened up everything again. “Carrón’s question, the words with which he challenges us, were no longer just words, but the flesh of a friend there with me, who moves me because he gives me back the truth of who I am. The Mystery has made Himself palpable.” This didn’t automatically make everything turn out right, but she looks gratefully at what exists, including the crisis and her weakness.  “I was naked before the Mystery. I wondered what I would do. I thought everything was over.” At the gathering, she cried, at having thought this way, “because everything is given to me, to me, to the nothing that I am.”

Carlotta | Suriname
“Suriname!” Applause broke out. Carlotta, from Varese, Italy, with her beautiful and anxious face, spoke of the solitude she had experienced over the past year, in the smallest country of Latin America, where she and a few friends are the only members of the Movement. Yet, watching her speak, nobody would have imagined it, because she looked so happy. Carlo, her husband, an engineer, had to move to Paramaribo for the construction of a refinery. “Will you come with me?” he had asked. “He had always wanted to have an experience abroad, but I never did. I was so happy in Varese.”  But move they did, with their three children–and the clash with another world was immediate. On the road from the airport to their new home, “I began asking right away: ‘Lord, why have you taken away the richness of life we had in Italy?’ Slowly, I realized that it wasn’t a question, but a doubt.”
One sleepless night, Carlo asked her a question that made her blood run cold: “What are we doing in this place?” In an instant, she realized her husband’s difficulty provoked her more than her own. For a month, she had coped by depending on her husband’s initial certainty. Instead, “I understood that the journey and the certainty are personal. I began to take myself seriously, to step away from the doubt. A true question grew in me: ‘What am I here in the world to do?’” They experienced months of uninterrupted rain, the constant temptation of boredom, and Carlo was always away at work. “But even the discouragement, the moments when the sense of emptiness is strong, there is a great opportunity for that question, and to beg that the Lord show Himself. And He never leaves me alone.” The first companionship that grew was with Carlo. “One day he said to me, ‘All the toil and difficulty we’re living through are worth it, because of the way I am looking at you now.’ Not even when he asked me to marry him was he this way.”

Fernando | Argentina
Our preconceived ideas recurred often in the dialogues at the Responsibles Assembly. “If we don’t judge them, they become gigantic, and we give them a volume and consistence they don’t have,” said Carrón. “We know that such images don’t fill life, but this isn’t enough to free us. We are only changed by an experience in the flesh that touches us.” A few months earlier, Fernando, an Argentinean, had learned that his wife Carolina had cancer. He was assailed with questions of ‘why,’ with anguish for their six children, with thoughts about the promise of marriage... But when Carolina told him, “What I have is for you,” everything changed. “No poetry,” he said, “and a big work began. Every morning, I had to decide which was more true: the fear or the recognition that I am a son, the son of a Father who loves me now. So who am I to know the design for Carolina, for our children, for me? Only the experience of this recognition enabled me to live this circumstance.” Then, they discovered that the diagnosis was mistaken. He decided not to sue, “out of gratitude for what I had discovered.”
The daily grind resumed, as did evidence of his shortcomings. Fernando was immersed in preparations for the vacation of the Argentinean CL community, with the weight of the organization, and the worry that all go well. “I said to myself that I was doing all this out of affection.” And though this idea sounded good, he lived the present as a toll to pay for a future. This became clear for him in the words of Fr. Julián de la Morena (responsibile for CL in Latin America): “It’s not that I do everything so that something great will happen at the vacation. It’s in what I do, within the search for a hotel, that the Mystery calls me.” Fernando experienced a rebirth of the desire to “take advantage” of what happened to him. “Only in taking seriously what reality evokes in me can I see an Other break through from outside.”
This happened when he heard “Georgium Marium.” He was at work in his legal practice in Buenos Aires, and saw on television “his” Archbishop come out on the Vatican loggia. He was incredulous. He thought of the question the people asked about Jesus, “But isn’t He the carpenter’s son?” “I said to myself, he is the man we have met and listened to; who, if you met him in the street, would hear your confession behind the newsstand, and who called you on the phone. Yes, it’s him. But more than him. He’s the Pope. What a mystery, that the Lord calls in spite of our inadequacy, just asking for our yes.” A few days before at the ARAL, he had heard these words: “John and Andrew did not convert thinking that they had to do something. They had only the challenge of not losing the Presence they had before them.”