CHARISM AND HISTORY

The surprise of new stimuli arising from the dialogue between the Responsibles of Communion and Liberation and Father Giussani. Focus on two recent dialogues, January 2001

The thing that has most struck me recently is that whatever moment a person is going through–no matter how dramatic, even when everything that happens is a new blow–he can calmly offer it to God. And immediately you remember that you have told tens of thousands of persons that one must do the will of God and that the will of God lies in the concrete things of life. So if you did not offer what you do to God, your life would not reach the level of the Savior, it would not participate in the Savior’s life, in Christ’s redeeming action. But–and this is the most interesting point (entire pages of the Psalms speak of it)–God is not stopped by your evil, by your sin; He would not stop were He not to find an awareness of grace received. The Church, the Body of Jesus Christ, goes forward; she opens for herself a path in the middle of the storm, of all storms, in the midst of the confusion and disarray that occur in this earthly life. Right on this level a wellspring is created that is not in man–it cannot be there except as an attempt–a wellspring that is a force, the force of a love mysteriously, inexplicably capable of forgiving evil: mercy (this is why our attitude toward Him and toward all around us should be founded, ultimately founded, on grief at one’s own evil. And then on forgiveness. And then, after this, peace and consolation).
Since all our weakness is left by God to the very end, mercy is the secret aspect, the most secret word of God’s. In terms of its origin it is the most secret one, and is the most vast in terms of application.

The Event is mystery
God cannot be understood, God is mystery, and if Mystery revealed itself in a Man, that Man is understood by those who acknowledge that He Himself is Mystery; by those who look to Him as Mystery. Indeed, the first apostles and their early followers “grumbled” among themselves, as the Gospel tells us, but in the end they were silent, struck dumb in front of the Mystery, the incomprehensible.
The greatest paradox lies right here. How can we explain that Giancarlo, after the tragedy that befell him, could be helped, could find strength, could find what he found even in the confused garble of grief and lack of hope which that moment could have been capable of giving? The event is a mystery, but it is a mystery to which we can refer to explain the existential origin of everything.
The locus of this Mystery, where Mystery makes itself felt–felt!–is the presence of Christ in history, that is the Church. This is why only he who develops the knowledge of the nature of things as tradition delivers it to us, is in the correct position before the Lord. A correct position before the Lord does not mean one who does not or did not make mistakes, but one who does not have pretensions (pre-tensions); he does not have any pretension before, before His coming. This is why the word mercy must be purposely lifted before the eyes of the Christian people as much as possible. Because it is the only word we can utter without hiding under the shield, behind the shield of something difficult, of something that reaches us in a very easy way, yet is the hardest to accept.

The antecedent
The “I” is made up of knowledge and freedom. But we cannot properly identify the steps to knowledge and the motions of freedom, except by already having as our antecedent the consciousness of the “I.” Where is the “I”? What is that thing that there is in the world, whose self-awareness and freedom are like tools for learning?
Before speaking of the dynamic of knowledge and freedom, then, there is an antecedent of which we must become aware: the “I.” It is not a case of “becoming aware of the I” established at a psychological level, but a “becoming aware of the antecedent of the ‘I’ as an historical fact”–there is the event; here, there is the event.
What is this piece of diamond that is here on the earth and that we call “I”? Before doing a chemical analysis of the material of a gold nugget you find by the shore, you find the nugget. Therefore the “I” is something you find, the person is something you find. Finding it, you turn it over in your hands, you observe it, you read it. But first you have to find it.
The first thing that we must understand in order to become aware is the connection between this gold nugget I find on the shore and the great waves of history. The origin and explanation of this connection is the Hebrew people, the events of its history.

Event and history
The event comes to us through a history. Having to develop the most important chapter of what we have to say–the education of the “I” to knowledge and freedom–let us ask first: how does this entrance of the event into reality come about?
Reading the Breviary in these months, I have been surprised by the Psalms as a whole and how the Church assimilates the Psalms. All of the Liturgy is a comment on the Psalms, or better still, a looking at, a discovering of things in terms of a unity that the Psalms have as dynamic factors of a history. So struck by the event you touch–you are touched by or have seen the event–this is the point: what this event is, so that you are then able to speak of the “I’s” connection with it.

Abraham
Without Abraham, if Abraham had never been, then we would not be here now.
Hebrew Psalm-writing or Hebrew prophesying, Jewish commitment or the Jewish manner of living in the world, are not like clothes on a figure, but are the origin of the figure, the figure in its origin. So that we cannot understand what the “I” is, the “I” who weeps, laughs, commits himself, the “I” who lives or dies, a man cannot understand himself, nor can he love others as himself, except through God of whom he is born. Otherwise the shape of the event falls apart, blurring its sharpness. Most Christians–especially those who have studied theology–have not yet realized the value of the history of the Hebrew people for themselves. Because all the moves God makes with man pass through that history, those names: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah… the history of a preference, the expression of God. This is the essence of Jewish thought, and this is our first move. We cannot understand the “I” if we do not start from Abraham. God called Abraham. What does this story teach us? That the “I” is vocation, a choice as preference. So that, from the day of that call onwards, the “I” is understood as an event within history. An event of dependence on God and of belonging to God. History is the “I” revealing itself in this vocation, which becomes belonging and dependence. The “I” is understood in time, in this relationship with God that is a history: the Covenant.
Jesus is understood in the unfolding procession of men starting with Abraham, Moses, David… . Only from within this history is the Christian conception of the “I” and of reality developed–a revolution in the way of looking at the world.

Where does the “I” come from?
On this “I” which formally dominates the situation, can we ourselves take some decisive steps toward a clarification that will facilitate what we are saying, make it flow, render it more fluid? In this sense let us ask ourselves: where does the “I” come from? And from where does an assurance in this “I” move forth? What kind of assurance is this and how does it arise in us? What this assurance consists in must perforce sum up the way history embraces us, our relationship with the great Mystery.
This He, this Man, this Humanity must be studied in the most elementary sense of the word, because it is this element of history–the Event–that produces, saves, and assures, to the point of making it become the all-inclusive coefficient for the life of this “I,” a companionship of which the Mystery itself becomes the center or the ultimate and total origin, a total explanation of the assurance, on which a great obligation, a great duty always depends, which can document the grandeur a man can come to live. As we move forward into something new (new both in its origin and texture), we describe how this “I” became great, how He chose to demonstrate and document the greatness that He is in our life and what He wants and has wanted from us–history and greatness of action, greatness of thoughts and action, of action for good, of operating for good, of work for good.

And there’s something far greater!
It is something new and we are not capable of it. For me, consciousness of the event results in prayer. To say, “It happened,” I get down on my knees to recite: Salve Regina, Ave Regina Coelorum, Ave Domina Angelorum, Jesu Dulcis Memoria. It’s not something sentimental! The essential thing of the creature before its Creator is prayer. Prayer knocks off all tops, sweeps away noses, ears! There is something far greater in what we do, something Other which throws light on everything and makes everything fall into place, makes everything fit.