Once Again, You

More than 6,000 young people in Rimini for the annual Spiritual Retreat. A student’s impressions as she grapples with a fact that is already known, but unexpectedly new

by CATERINA GIOJELLI

The shuttle bus between Precotto and the Università degli Studi Bicocca, Milan, is punctually 35 minutes late, but this morning anyone watching would have been surprised to see me concentrating on my mobile phone rather than leading the countless choruses cursing the local transportation service. I am a “CLer born and bred,” which means: CL parents, baptized by Father Giussani, brought up at Zolla and Tommaso Moro schools and then Berchet High School–the experience of climbing those three steps was perhaps my first real experience of feeling moved. But you have to understand this, and you have to understand me. The principle is a simple one: the life of a born and bred CLer is studded with a myriad of gestures repeated annually (there are no prizes for doing them more than once a year). Particularly fashionable is the weekend in Rimini during the off-season, with unlimited access to the Palazzetto and the evocative vision of the various CL big shots. All-inclusive formula. Forgive my boldness and maybe my irreverence. Talking like this is not a sign of bitterness. It is simply the fruit of many years spent repeating the gestures of my life, being content with a strong surge of emotion that evaporated on the way home from Rimini, overcome by a thousand other concerns. I was there, I put together reflections that would have moved an Islamic fundamentalist, and sent back great smiles of complicity to all my friends, who truly were moved, almost as though going to the Spiritual Retreat brought about a face-lift capable of making concrete the expression they use most frequently. “Your eyes are changed, you look different… I can read it in your face.” I was still there, and yet I was light-years away from the authenticity of what I was living, and my career as a “Pope fan,” to use my boyfriend’s expression, was not worth even one second spent at the Retreat by any new recruit. This is who I was until a week ago, wrapped up in the strong guilt feelings generated by my not ever feeling as struck and enthusiastic as my friends… a sentimentalist imbecile, to sum things up. But imbecile that I am, I kept going back. I would not call it a great sense of tradition, but rather the sincere desire to light the little fuse that I have always had in my heart and that would warm up in these meetings, but had never been sparked off. It goes without saying that the One up there who causes everything to happen, knowing me divinely (can I say that?), had the idea of bombarding my months before the Retreat with small events that were illusory and painful, very few in my prevalently radiant life but important enough to throw me off balance and to make me realize my inability to render judgment on these surprises. So I went back.
And this is what happened, and happens…

In the auditorium
Friday evening: the auditorium is always an evocative sight. I look around me: in the silence accompanied by the beautiful notes of the great classical composers, the room is filling up. Students from the Polytechnic are careful to fill every single seat, directing traffic in an orderly and patient fashion. Those who are already seated pull little notebooks out of their backpacks and purses. Those still on their feet are almost certainly experiencing the classic sense of bewilderment, when you feel torn between keeping silence as Father Pino asks and letting out a howl of “Help, I got lost among three thousand identical buses, and my community that was in front of me until two seconds ago has disappeared!” In a word, even the smallest gesture of each one in this great hall evokes the image of a huge heart beating through every little part, with all the awkwardness that a wounded and always a bit ambiguous heart brings with it and all the hope and boldness that a beating heart carries forward. We are here (and this is a fact; I repeat, a fact) from all over Italy and from forty countries throughout the world (and this is a fact, in constant expansion), attentive and faithful to that age-old shout of joy, and that age-old sadness in the face of the disproportion aroused by that cry, and the age-old and inexorable entreaty that being human is, the same one that led Peter, John, and Andrew to acknowledge and follow Jesus, the same one brought by Carlo, “Carlone” (“Big Charlie”), the man of Memores Domini who burst on stage for the first time and said things that not even we poor, yes poor, born and bred CLer’s expected. No, they had not yet told me this. There is something new and surprising here, and the idea and initiative of the one (the One) who wanted us here is always truly surprising. These are the same initiatives and the same entreaties that have led so many before me to love and follow Father Giussani–the same, precisely the same ones that my parents followed and that now lead me to the Retreat of the Jubilee Year.

History repeats itself
The history of the Movement reproduces the history of the apostles, and this too is a fact. It happens again, a Fact happens again that manifested itself two thousand years ago. It is astounding for me to feel myself a part of this history and to live these three days with this awareness, just a touch of it but already reason enough to trust in following such a different path with no fear of disappointment. Fear… I wouldn’t know how else to call all the objections I made as I enjoyed the art of protest. It was a generic term, an excuse to hide the commitment to make use of my original freedom and to take a position before just one question: did something happen or not? (You cannot deny any of this fact, you cannot deny anything of your origin, you cannot deny the attraction and beauty that you have always wanted.) So why were you content with so much less? (Stupid questions, I thought to myself, questions it’s better not to trouble your head with.) But faced with Cesana’s experience and that of so many other friends of ours whose letters and testimony I listened to, there can be no objection. In front of the songs and the memories of those among us who lived like heroes and call us to do the same, there can be no refusal. In the face of the humanity of Zacchaeus and the Samaritan woman, there can be no doubt. Only the correspondence generated by a face guarantees a certitude in which all doubts are overcome, and what can be more concrete than the faces of my parents, Ceci, Pigi, and all the others? We’ve had enough of this “rich young man” fashion, looking at Christ but wrapped up in himself; in our heart the desire is digging its way in to imitate Peter’s famous “Yes,” so simple and free despite his betrayal, fearless of limitations. Father Pino looks like a lion; he is moved, he shouts, and gets excited. We are talking about life, we are talking about man and as such we claim man’s nature, origin, goal, and greatness, conscious of the reduction of our desire that was introduced by original sin, so that attraction tends to decline into pettiness. Something antithetical to human nature comes to bear on the original dynamic (“Follow me,” the “You” conceived of Himself in terms of the “I,” He created a humanity in act and He conceived of Himself as this humanity’s Savior by being made flesh), calling forth rebellion or a priority affirmation of the “I,” making an instrument of frailty and proposing that I give up my natural desire for happiness in order to be happy. Man’s greatness becomes his condemnation. Bringing into focus this judgment of reality is paradoxical–it is not discovering that the earth is round, but I have never felt myself put on the line like I was in that moment, and frightened by what Father Pino said. He said that it is very simple for man’s awareness to be born again with a childlike simplicity (like inexpert children, but faithful ones, attentive children with their eyes wide open, children who know how to love because they know how to be moved and to recognize the hand that is leading them, and the tunic in which they hide their faces is that tunic and only that one). At the final assembly Saturday evening, a Protestant friend from Lugano and the head of the Political Science collective at the state university spoke. Why did they come? The Swiss boy out of curiosity and friendship, the other because he was invited and that was enough for him. And two questions were sufficient. The first boy thanked us for having him and asked: My tradition is different, how can we acknowledge each other? The second quoted Montale: I don’t feel the urge to go any farther, but I see it in your faces. The road is the same, says Father Pino, the original experience is the same for all. The encounter took place, it is in the material of these faces. The rest is a “question of freedom.” And it is no different for us born and bred CLers. It is always a question of freedom.