Abraham: The Birth of the “I”

The annual Spiritual Retreat of the Fraternity began with a letter from the Pope and concluded with an address by Fr. Giussani. Twenty-six thousand were in attendance at the fairgrounds in Rimini while others listened by satellite link. This dialogue between two participants chronicles the event

by emiliano ronzoni

Hello, you too here in these parts?
- Yes, me too, like so many others.
- There really are a lot of us. They say almost thirty thousand. It’s odd. I have been participating in the Retreat of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation for many years now, and every year it is as though I expected something, that something be revealed to me. Who knows where this expectation is coming from… I think I have seen you before. Have you, too, been coming here for a long time?
- Yes, a very long time. From the beginning, one might say.
- Certainly, this year, too, the title is odd: “Abraham: the Birth of the ‘I’.” Already the idea that the “I” is born is not something you think of every day, and then Abraham... Anyway, if I were to ask myself what the “I” is and if it can be found someplace, and where to search it out in order to know it, I would be hard put to do it.
- If you like, I’ll give you a clue. Try to reflect on this: if there is no history, how can there be an “I”?
- That’s rather thin. In any case, thank you. Because, you see, despite being neglected, this question of the “I” has been bothering me for a long time: “Everything conspires to be silent around us…” Certainly, something more than a clue is needed.
- Look, in order to understand things, it’s a good idea to investigate them at their origin: Abraham, or, in other words, the birth of the “I.” Try for an instant to imagine God, as He addressed a man–Abraham–personally for the first time. Try to imagine that call, that relationship, and that promise. There, that time, God came in as a factor among the usual terms of things; there, in Abraham, began the deepening of awareness of mystery as something other than himself. Later, with Moses, God was able to reveal Himself more completely: “I am he who is.” But it is there with Abraham that this opening of a relationship begins, a new factor among the usual terms of things.
- Forgive me for insisting, but this matter really interests me. Indeed, hearing you speak makes it take on a whole new interest. Would you be so kind as to make the connection for me between your first clue, history, and Abraham?
- For Abraham, that opening of a relationship caused a new consciousness of himself as made by an Other. A new consciousness, a new name, a task. From that moment for him–and after him for everyone–the content of consciousness is a task. That is to say, that content makes its way into history, becomes history.
- Do you know why I am asking you this? Because everything you are telling me is intriguing, and to tell the truth, I have the feeling I’ll have to come back to it. These things appear to me to be too great to be contained in the brief space of a dialogue. But in the meantime, what comes to mind and I feel to be a pressing issue is how that beginning endures today. Because, you know, I wasn’t there, in that beginning under the tents, the starry sky, the deserts of Ur; there were other peoples, other epochs, other circumstances. It may seem banal to you but, so to speak, I would like to understand it in terms of the circumstances I am given now. I have to deal with these (and parenthetically, also many times to undo these), and not with others.
- I understand your interest. Indeed, I am glad about it. I’ll give you another clue. No, rather, this is more than a clue; it is an element on which you can lean. With Abraham, that content of consciousness becomes a people, and a people is something that lasts in history. At that time it was the Hebrew people. Today it is that other people, you know which I’m talking about. And note this: the call, the vocation we would say today, always implies a when and a where. Keep this in mind; it will be useful to you.
- Why do you care so much?
- Because it introduces a concept and an experience that is today deliberately and sadly kept hidden; that is, the experience of choice. We, like Abraham, have been chosen. Why? So that–and with this we return to the starting point of our conversation–the answer to the question about the “I” lies in the mysterious opening to the relationship between “I” and a people. And remaining in this people is the path willed by God for understanding the positivity of everything.
- Can we stop talking for a few minutes? You are saying things that, it seems to me, I’ll have to spend my whole life thinking over. And then, you see, these things we’re talking about, on one hand seem to be being revealed to me as we speak, and on the other it is as though I have always known them. Or desired them. The only thing is that in my life I find them in bits and pieces scattered here and there. Brief emergences of consciousness and experience. I know how things go; it certainly will not be I with my abilities who puts them back together. It is as though I had been condemned to keep on waiting for Someone.
- That’s the way it is. God, by promising Himself to Abraham, awakened the expectation of fulfillment. There is no expectation without a promise. On the other hand, you know by experience that the lack of true expectation makes any answer lose its value. Wait. I see that despite your request for silence, you’re about to ask me more questions. Allow me to introduce a new term, Christ, into our discussion: Christ is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. Christ is the progeny of Abraham. If in Abraham we learn that the “I” is vocation, choice as preference, event in history as dependence on and belonging to an Other, in Christ we see its fullness. Christ lived His human experience as dependence and belonging. If someone among the very many He met had asked Him (and even if today someone asked Him), “Who are You, what is Your name?” “I am sent by an Other.” Christ is life as relationship with the Mystery which makes it. Abraham saw the day of Christ and rejoiced in it. In Christ, the One who promised (and by promising awakened the expectation), also fulfills the promise.
- But how can He fulfill this promise? I won’t hide from you that one day or another I would like to collect.
- Don’t blaspheme. You have already collected. And a lot. In any case, here is what I think. But I’ll tell you in just a few words because this is something that, indeed, you will have to spend your whole life thinking about. Christ did things in a simple way; He was a presence, a presence so intriguing that it made whoever encountered Him become more of an “I.”
- You’re making things too easy. I know well what you are telling me. I know what it means to say “Christ of whose love all things are good, Christ of whose splendor all things are beautiful.” And yet hearing this Name, I cannot calm down; it is as though a sweet, painful passion calls me and gives me no rest.
- Yes. As a poet has said, “I stop to distinguish between the voices and echoes, and among the voices I distinguish just one.” Just one corresponds to the “I.” Let’s make a deal: let that voice (which is more than a voice, it is a Presence) do its job; stop and reflect on the experience that is born of it. It happens that Someone looks at us like no one else and in that gaze the “I” begins to understand itself; the constituent elements of the “I” come to the surface. The “I” comprehends itself. It comprehends itself as event in history. The beginning of awareness is thus an event. And the attachment to that gaze, to that Man begins.
- Yes, that’s right. That’s just how it is.
- Thus, whoever is Christ’s becomes a descendant of Abraham, an heir according to the promise. And like Abraham he becomes a blessing for all. He becomes more religious; he begins to recognize God as “all in all.”
- That’s it. That’s how it is. In this history I have even seen grievous events become blessings for all. I don’t know how this happens, but it is certain that it does, and certain that it is a great mystery.
- Thus there is only one new thing in our life and in the world: to become aware of that Presence. It is so new that it even breaks the instant; even the factor closest to nothingness is saved. You see now, bit by bit, we are pulling the threads together of our discourse; the true reason to belong to this people is that it leads us to the recognition of that Presence. And the recognition of that exceptional Presence educates us to recognize the Presence of God, everything in everyone.
- But despite so many years of belonging to this experience, I do not always have the vivid consciousness of His presence.
- You don’t need to. You don’t need to be thinking always of Him. Nor is it necessary to remember Him all the time. It is necessary to make memory of Him.
- A bit like breathing?
- A bit. It would be better to say that it is like feeling the blow of His presence. It is necessary that we love Him. Loving Him, that we desire Him. Desiring Him, that–in pain and longing–we ask for Him. Who desires Him painfully? Who truly cries out? Whoever belongs to the path of that people, whoever is faithful to the path even before being faithful to the gestures of that path. If you don’t belong to that path, it is a desperate case, you don’t hope for anything any more. Therefore, the point of departure is truly that Presence, facing and looking at everything with that Presence in our eyes, starting with our very selves.
- I see that, in all that we have been saying, in the end you always bring me back to the question of belonging, and the relationship between the “I” and the people.
- And I see that we are beginning to understand. The consciousness of the people is necessary for a consciousness of the “I,” because the “I” affirms itself by belonging to the people. There is no cry without a people.
- How quickly these hours have flown by. Did you see what a beautiful day it is? All this sunshine. And the trees up there at the top, in the wind. How great the world is and how small we are.
- How beautiful the world is and how great God is.
- Will I have a chance to see you again?
- That’s why we’re here.
- Maybe next year, on this same occasion. If we should meet again, do you know what I would like to talk about?
- What?
- It’s sort of blasphemous, but I would like to chat about how to put Christ to the test. How to introduce Him into circumstances and see that He redeems them, that He takes the instant and redeems it. He takes interests, affections, plans, preferences, and redeems them. Everything, in a word. The question, for me, is how Christ can remain interesting, day after day, all the way to the end. For no particular reason, you know, but because there is as it were a yearning to render Him glory. And not only that I, or we, render Him glory, but also the world, just as He deserves. Forgive me, I’ve gone a bit too far. Tell me, do you see anyone coming?
- No, no one is coming.
- And yet He should be coming here, they told me that maybe He would come. He’s bound to come, I feel it.
- No, I don’t see anyone coming.
- And yet, maybe He is already coming. There, there I see Him, He is coming…
This and other things were discussed on the road to Emmaus, at the end of the prehistory of each one of the thirty thousand who had made a date to meet for the Retreat of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation in Rimini.

Homily by His Eminence James Francis Stafford, President of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, at the Retreat of the Fraternity on May 19, 2001
The first reading, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, describes the beginning of St. Paul’s second missionary journey, which took place in 49 A.D. ....
The vision of a Macedonian had revealed to Paul that he should leave Asia and set sail for Greece....
The Christian faith arrived in Europe from Asia, and this is a meaningful fact, because the provocative question, “What does it mean to be Christian?” was being put to Paul now not only in a Semitic environment, but in the context of the refined pagan culture of ancient Greece and on a different continent.
“Quid est christianum esse?” “What does it mean to be Christian?” An unknown Christian asked this question at the beginning of the fifth century. It was a moment of crisis, the time of Ambrose and Augustine, Jerome and Chrysostom, when the Roman Empire was rapidly becoming Christian. It is the same question that led to the answer of the Apostles and elders in Jerusalem in 48 A.D., the answer that Paul, in our second reading today, transmitted to the cities of Asia Minor and their inhabitants during his second missionary journey. Paul had already raised the question of the Christian identity of the uncircumcised at Antioch. His great letter to the Church of Rome on justification, faith, grace, and human freedom is one of the definitive answers to the question of Christian identity.
In times of crisis, that question is constantly present. Among the great sources of anguish of our time, the question “What does it mean to be Christian?” is central and fundamental. A crescendo of voices has been raised, first from the ruins of the cities of Europe as a result of two world wars, then from the dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the concentration camps, and, most recently, from the test tubes used for human cloning. These voices insistently ask, “Quid est christianum esse?”
“What does it mean to be Christian today?” Having crossed the threshold of the new millennium, you too, you here in Rimini ask the same question. The affirmation which inspires the Retreat of your Fraternity, “Abraham, the Birth of the ‘I’,” is clearly connected with this search.
It is Baptism which gives the Christian his identity. In Baptism, all sins are forgiven; all the faithful emerge from the water of regeneration without spot or wrinkle. But these realities do not exhaust the mystery of the baptized, who all still live in that meantime before the final coming of Christ, the intermediate period between the remission of sins, which occurs at the moment of Baptism, and the state of absolute perfection, reached once and for all in the Kingdom to come. Being baptized means that we live in this intermediate period of prayer, in which every day we plead, “Forgive us our trespasses.”
Yes, the identity of the Christian is founded in Baptism. And yet, through this Sacrament, the baptized have been started on a process of convalescence which lasts their whole lives. For Christians remain profoundly contaminated by the effects of sin and must observe Paul’s prohibition to pronounce any judgment before the due time, “until the Lord comes; He will bring to light everything that is hidden in darkness and reveal the designs of all hearts” (1 Cor 4:5).
The baptized come to accept themselves as powerless beings who stand at the foot of the Cross of Christ with nothing. Together with St. Augustine, they learn to come to terms with their dark sides and to accept themselves as essentially problematic beings: “See how I stand! Weep with me, and weep for me, you who in this matter bring about within yourselves some good from which like deeds issue…. But do you, O Lord my God, graciously hear me, and turn your gaze upon me, and see me, and have mercy on me, and heal me. For in your sight I have become a riddle to myself” (Conf X, 33, 50).
Abraham’s identity is not only a personal identity but embraces also a social identity. The letter to the Hebrews states, in fact, “Because of this, there came from one man [Abraham], and one who already had the mark of death on him, descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore which cannot be counted” (11:12). The spiritual descendants of Abraham turn their back on “privacy” and “turning in on oneself” as the most insidious form of pride, the root of all sins. Being turned in on oneself, isolated, is not part of the Christian identity. For Christians gather together in communities and together search for wisdom, a gift of the Holy Spirit, placing the emphasis on charity in the sphere of the community, whether this is the family or a larger community like Communion and Liberation. The Christian identity is closely tied to living in the ambit of a community in harmony and unity of intent.
The world of which Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel is quite distant from a similar vision of community. This is why the world hates Jesus and his disciples. It is very difficult to place the common good before one’s own interests, but a subtle pride like this undermines the community. It is very important to note that, from the time of the Fathers of the Church, the Christian community has been defined as the res publica of God, the City of God. St. Paul affirms the foundation of Christian identity by including its life in the sphere of the community: “What have you got that was not given to you?” (1 Cor 4:7). Even power is a gift, even the power of a mother and father is a gift from God. Here is the definitive answer to the question: “Quid est christianum esse?” St. Ignatius of Loyola defines the Christian identity in an unforgettable prayer: “Take, Lord, and accept all my freedom, my memory, my intelligence, all my will, everything that I have and possess. You gave it to me; to You, Lord, I give it back. Everything is Yours; use it according to Your holy will. Give me Your love and Your grace; this is enough for me.”