01-05-2013 - Traces, n. 5
EDITORIAL These words were from 1991, but they seem to summarize the malaise we experience here and now, in a situation twisted in on itself like a screw, in which the problem of “who is right” has been carried to the extreme, to the idea that the other is an objection to eliminate rather than a good to take into consideration. We see it in the way we often face politics, work, family, and relationships, as if the decisive point were theories, ideas, some solution that can “settle” our problems, and not the drama of living that we bear within and that makes such problems useful, even precious, in some way, notwithstanding the difficulty, because, as Fr. Giussani reminded us, “in the face of questions, problems, and difficulties, that which man loves comes to the surface.” The stronger the malaise and the harder and deeper the problems, the greater is our need to strip them of the intellectualism, the chatter, and the superficiality, down to the necessary basics: “evangelical poverty” and the question of how one can live, what use faith is in all this. The Spiritual Exercises booklet (available soon on our website and included with the next issue) travels this itinerary, and it should be meditated upon and explored because it is a decisive work for one’s life. The goal of this issue of Traces is to help us look deeply at our need, realizing how the greatest obstacle is often our resistance to facing it, as if we have within a strange resistance to asking, to opening wide the question of fulfillment that underlies our “toil in living.” Instead, when the event of Christ happens, one of the effects is that it makes us realize the importance of our need, the importance of what we are. This is precisely what has been happening in these weeks because of the new Pope’s increasingly decisive steps, which often call us to go to the root of our “deepest need,” as these steps will be met on their path by “the only Saviour of the entire human person and of all people”–Christ. |