01-06-2013 - Traces, n. 6

CL LIFE
FRATERNITY

MY FIRST LOVE
In his lessons at the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity, Fr. Julián Carrón spoke of the encounter with Christ, asking participants whether for them it is an event that continues to fill their lives, or just a memory, one among many things that are important in our lives. Three CL members from the origins of the Movement recount how, after many years, this first love is a passion that has not been lost, but is active and continues to move them as it did at the beginning.

by Paola Bergamini, Luca Fiore, and Davide Perillo

“You have endurance and have suffered for My name, and you have not grown weary. Yet I hold this against you: you have lost the love you had at first.” These are the words from Revelation that Fr. Julián Carrón quoted at the Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity. On Friday evening, he asked, “Where is our first love?” But what does it mean to truly “expect everything” from the fascination of this being in love, from the “fact of Christ”? During the lessons in Rimini, Italy, and by satellite and video around the world, it was shown how this first love is the great Presence, preferred to any other thing, which was worth more than life itself for Zacchaeus, the Apostles, and Mary Magdalene, an event that constituted all the meaning and gain of their days, exactly as happens again among us, 2,000 years later, and as we will read in the stories that follow, describing an existence that, step by step, coincides with this relationship.

“YOU KNOW WHERE TO GO”
When Susanna Pagani was 13 years old, she knew very little about who Jesus was or what the Church was. She had just emigrated from Argentina to Milan with her parents. They sent her to a school run by the Ursuline Sisters, where she met Sister Teresa. That encounter is still impressed upon her heart 40 years later: “She bubbled with joy, faith, and energy. I discovered Jesus. It was the first time He came to look for me.” Susanna was talented in drawing and passionate about fashion, so when she finished middle school she enrolled in the Marangoni Fashion Institute. She also looked for a place where she could live that fascinating experience of faith and, one day, a friend brought her to a meeting in someone’s basement, where she met the people of CL. She began to spend time with them. When she was 18, she was working in a publishing house. She was good at her job, nice, had many friends, and someone fell in love with her. Everything was normal, but “I was looking for something else. I sensed that the Lord wanted me. It wasn’t easy; I struggled up to the end to say no to Him, because there was my work and my passion for fashion... I wondered, ‘What road should I take?’” In fact, that was the problem: the road.
She met the order of the Little Sisters of Jesus inspired by Charles de Foucauld, and began a period of reflection in Assisi to discern whether she should become one of them. Everything seemed right, and she was ready to enter, until a friend told her, “Suzy, the point is not the form, but virginity.” It shook her up. “I didn’t need to look for the suitable form that corresponded to me, but to love Jesus, to return to that encounter and to love Him. He would take care of everything.”

When she returned to Milan, she called Fr. Giussani, and they began meeting. He never told her what to choose, but to look at what her heart was seeking, to take into consideration, for example, that she loved her work very much. “It was liberating. Jesus wanted me with my talent, my passion.” When she was 24, she became a member of the Memores Domini, and moved into the house in Gudo Gambaredo. The first year was tragic. Seen from the outside, it had seemed like such a fascinating reality, but instead “when you are inside, you come to see the difference between yourself and those around you.” In addition to this, she had strong stomach pains that forced her to stay in bed one week a month. “After various exams, they diagnosed an inflamed appendix. But those days of confinement were a gift from the Lord, because I began to go deep down into why I was there. Fr. Giussani told me to pray to Our Lady, to offer it up, asking for faith and affection for Christ. Something broke through and Jesus became more and more a friend. I began to live in the house not as something I had to measure up to, but understanding that every gesture was for Him. Everything became simpler.” In those years, Giussani lived in Gudo, so their shared life was fascinating, but also forthright, no minced words. “Something passes through to you by osmosis.” Life goes on. All the puzzle pieces were in place until, one day, a friend asked Susanna to help a girl who had problems with her family and with work. He entrusted her to Susanna, and the relationship that ensued was intense and, at times, dramatic. There was neither night nor day; the girl called her whenever she was in need. For Susanna, at almost 50, this was a new beginning, and not only that. The Lord was asking something else of her. Near Gudo, a big farmhouse complex called Santa Marta was being restored to host a charitable work of hospitality. She asked Fr. Giussani if she could move to the Memores house there.
So in 2001, after 29 years in Gudo, Susanna moved from her house of 18 persons to a house with only 4 women she barely knew. “The Lord was taking me by the hand. He was saying, ‘Look at Me.’ These were years of learning, of silence, of even more intense attachment to Jesus.” Then in 2005, one evening at the Spiritual Exercises, Fr. Carrón said, “Erasmo and Cente at the Cometa center for hospitality need Maria Grazie to help them with the foster children they host in their families. Who wants to go with her?” Susanna raised her hand. Of course, Erasmo was her partner at work, and it would save her commuting 60 miles to and from her job every day, but this was not what made her say yes. “Now that I could retire, the Lord was asking me to begin something new, to welcome Him in a new dimension, but it is the same experience I lived with Fr. Giussani in Gudo. The Love that so fascinated me when I was 13, that embraced me over and over in the faces and facts of my life, is now even more essential, because today there are no more ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ or entangled thoughts. This is why I am happier now, and why people tell me, ‘I’ve never seen you this way before.’”

“TODAY IT IS MORE VIVID AND PARED DOWN”
It was in 1966, just after Easter. Maria Rita Casalboni left Fr. Giussani’s office on Via Bagutta and went to buy lipstick–she, who had never worn makeup in her life. This is what happens when girls finally know they are wanted. Today, she is 67. She met the Movement 50 years ago, and has been a member of the Memores Domini for 40 years. Today, if you ask her when her “first love” happened, she returns to that day. She was attending the first year of university, and had met the Movement in her parish three years before. After her high school graduation, she was asked to take responsibility for the GS students of the community at the Carducci High School. She also followed the communities of the Movement born in 11 parishes of Milan, and taught in an evening middle school for adults. During this time, her dream of a relationship with a young man melted away like snow in the sun. She failed to take even one exam in the first session of her first year at the Catholic University of Milan. So she found herself one day in front of Fr. Giussani. “Miss Casalboni, continue with the parish work. It is a healthier environment,” he told her, already sensing that the storm of the 1968 student unrest would strike GS. But the conversation moved away from practical matters. “I don’t remember if it was the answer to a question but, at a certain point, I told him that my freedom was like a bird looking for a place to rest...” He answered with a question: “Would it be a problem to consider the idea of dedicating yourself to God?” “I perceived a horizon thrown wide open in front of me. I said no, that it wouldn’t be a problem. And that ‘no,’ became my first ‘yes.’” On that sidewalk of Via Bagutta, she felt like another person: “For the first time, I had the perception that my face, which until then I had felt detached from myself, had become one with me. I perceived the unity of my ‘I.’ I went to him with daily life problems and he brought me to the depth of things. It was there that my heart desired to go.”

After 44 years of teaching, Maria Rita is now retired and works for the archive of the Memores Domini. “At the Spiritual Exercises, I was moved by the way Fr. Carrón introduced the theme of what we have done with our ‘first love.’ He said, ‘I feel it is directed first of all to me, and for this reason I propose it to you, too, my friends.’ He is someone who lives in himself what he acquired from Fr. Giussani. Then I said to myself, ‘It’s true, you can’t live without returning to the beginning.’” Why? “The ‘yes’ of now is like the ‘yes’ of the beginning, because from that ‘yes’ you are born; before, you did not exist. Like the ‘yes’ of Baptism.” Has nothing of that ‘yes’ changed? “Today, it is more vivid, more pared down.” More pared down than what? “The story of my life led me to a point at which I no longer had the responsibilities in the Movement that I had in the beginning. I experienced this as a sacrifice. Then there was the separation from Fr. Giussani. It is a good kind of paring down; otherwise, the ‘yes’ is cluttered with overgrowth.” What is the form of this “yes”? “It is a discovery of recent times. Saying ‘yes’ again means doing things in front of the angels of God. I work in a basement office, and I’m pretty much alone, but my ‘first love’ happens again through the thought of my sick friends and the things this Pope says. It is what I truly need. At times, they are real slaps in the face, like his mention of “arm-chair Christians.” How does Christ fill your life? “Who can help me find answers to daily problems, with the aches and pains that are beginning to make themselves felt, with difficulties in relationships, if not Christ? I know I still need a lot of time to understand what this means. There is no doubt in my mind that He is the One who fills me, and this does not mean that I do not have close bonds with certain friends or students of mine–I have loved a lot in my life. But I do not think this means I have loved Christ less. It is an aspect of my love for Him. Of course, I make a lot of mistakes, too; I like to buy myself beautiful things. My confessor says that if they serve to help me love Jesus better... I hope this is the case. But do you know what I think? God will take care of stripping you of what is vain, and what is not taken is for Him.”

“IT IS LIKE IN THAT SONG OF PRAISE...”
For 75-year-old Fr. Pigi Bernareggi, a missionary in Brazil these past 46 years, his first love for Jesus blossomed a bit at a time, in an unusual way. “I was a boy, and saw my mother praying in church, alone, in silence. I could see just the movement of her lips. I watched her, and understood that on the other side there must be someone. It was the first impression of the Presence of Christ in my life.” His first love started there, “from the impression of reality I had watching my mother.” It grew during his first two years at the Berchet High School in Milan, a place where “everything said the opposite of that Presence, but where one thing always continued to be evident for me: He exists. They couldn’t make a dent in this certainty.” One morning in 1954, Fr. Giussani “plunged into my class with his power. What he said coincided with this primary evidence I had.” Some classmates began to follow Giussani. Fr. Pigi took a while. “But it was evident that he was certain of Christ, dominated by His Presence. Well, if the ‘first love’ talked about in the Spiritual Exercises is this, it is the opposite of sentiment: it’s the very foundation of the being of a person.”

Little by little, Fr. Pigi discovered this foundation, its “unmistakeable features,” always passing by the same road of facts, episodes, an event... like the one that made him say “yes” to Fr. Giussani. “It was after the first meeting I went to at the GS headquarters on Via Statuto. We read the Gospel of the seed and the sower, and at the end Giussani summarized: the factor that makes the difference between the terrain where the seed falls is loyalty to experience. I said to myself, ‘It’s true, you have to be loyal to what you see. You have to say “yes.”’ I will never forget that meeting.”
And there was another important meeting, during which Fr. Giussani gave a lesson on the Ascension. “It must have been in ’62 or ’63. He said, ‘He ascended into heaven, but which heaven? This one where sputniks and Yuri Gagarin fly? No. Heaven is where the Father is. And where is the Father? In the innermost depths of your person. Christ, with His glorious body–with His human, physical, real body–settled in the innermost depths of our being.’ It was then that I understood that the mystery of the Ascension is the photograph of what happens in the life of people. Christ, in that moment, took possession of all the people of every era, even those before us, and of the future, including those who do not even imagine that Jesus exists.” For this reason, encountering Him “is like falling in love: you fall in love without knowing anything about that person,” but you find an objective, inexorable correspondence. “Then, you discover her bit by bit, because you can recognize what is already there. When we had the gatherings at Varigotti, we were always given a little booklet with a quotation. One was by Laurentius the Hermit: ‘I understood then that perhaps my whole existence would be spent realizing what happened to me. And the memory of You fills me with silence.’ Well, this is what my life has been.”
Fr. Pigi was one of the first GS students to go to Brazil on mission in 1964. Four years later, he was the only one to remain, resisting the tidal wave of turmoil in 1968. The newborn Movement in Brazil literally crumbled to pieces under the impact of student protests, liberation theology, and opposition to the military government. Everyone left. Why didn’t he? “I believe it was precisely because of this thing we are talking about. My religious experience was solid enough to bear up even under that tremendous pressure.” It also enabled him to live as he has for 50 years in Belo Horizonte: as assistant, parish priest, then in the favelas, “where there is an incredible humanity and a great experience of faith–there they participate in the Passion of Christ.”

And did your relationship with Him change over these years? Can you say you have more affection for Jesus now than 60 years ago? “In the way He calls me, no, because He always remains He: the Absolute neither grows nor diminishes. Humanly speaking, we grow, but divinely speaking, no. And since the Incarnation is the Divine in the human, it is not contradictory or incompatible; it is a mystery. How can the change of our humanity coexist with the changelessness of Christ? This is indescribable, isn’t it? But in terms of my heart, in terms of impetus, yes. The affection has grown.” Is it still a falling in love? “Yes, in the terms we are using now, yes, but with a greater profundity. It’s like that song of praise, you remember?” He looks for the words, mixing Portuguese and Italian. He finds the melody and sings, with a low, youthful voice: “His time is lost indeed who loves not Thee/ Jesus, sweet love, most dear and divine.” He goes on with the entire verse, up to the part that says, “Nor can he tell, who knoweth naught of this.” He ponders, “Well, who can describe the love of Christ?” And who can separate us from Him, in love with us?