Eternity in the Everyday

A assembly for those who will offer their time as volunteers to work at the great gathering in Rimini. Talks by Giancarlo Cesana and Marco Bona Castellotti. An introduction to this year’s theme: “All of life asks for eternity”

Marco Bona Castellotti
My remarks will be brief; it would be hard for me to go into the details of the meanings of this title, which is taken from the song Povera Voce. You will find some of the details in the summary presentation that I have read over and that seems helpful. Instead, I would rather express succinctly the reflections that I have recently been making, which don’t seem off the subject. “All of life asks for eternity.” This was inspired not only by the song, but by the fact that at the previous Fraternity Retreat a year ago, Fr. Giussani at least twice stressed this phrase with great passion. During the last Meeting I kept saying, “It’s obvious! It’s useless for me to say it, because it is already on everyone’s lips!” The emotion that these six words aroused was so strong, first of all in me, that even though I am perfectly conscious of their value, at the same time I find it difficult to explain them too analytically. The truth of the attitude which led me to propose this title, and also of the attitude with which it was accepted, comes through with strong emotion which has been corroborated recently by other things I have read and on which my mind, my heart, and my time have been fixed, a certain type of reflection from which I have a hard time coming out of, since I am still in the phase of going into them more deeply. I leave you the room to give living form to these fantastic words of Fr. Giussani, which have had enormous impact on my life in recent months. May it be a strong living form; may they become experience, because that life ask for eternity can be experienced. That is to say, that life leave space beyond life itself, even though passing through the banality of the quotidian, that this space be felt, is possible as experience… possible! Our life is not just physical, in the banality of things it is not only physical.

Doing and being
I read one of the letters Fr. Giussani sent in 1962 to the first people who went on mission to Brazil. Rereading it really tore me apart because, despite the difficulty of the appeal made to them and made to us with the same intensity almost forty years later, despite the difficulty, I have realized how this type of spiritual experience is something to be desired, something to ask for. Fr. Giussani wrote in 1962, “It is not important what you succeed in doing, it is crucial what you succeed in being. This aridity of result, this difficulty in communication will give you a sense of loneliness… and the more your efforts are devoid of results, the more they will be the way to your Christian personality.” Then he said, “My young friends, what you may or may not succeed in doing does not matter; all the tentative bitterness for not being able to do anything else is nothing more than the call to the essential, namely God and His Christ.”
Here, in my passionate and yet fragile search for the essential, the fact that life is a road the more it is devoid of answers (in other words, of claims), is an extraordinary opening. “Don’t substitute your small measure for Mystery.” The call that I feel I should make to myself and the education that follows in everything that we try to do, this extraordinary opening to Mystery is what has taken on the greatest concreteness. There is nothing spiritualistic about it; it is a true commitment, full of answers, especially in the moment when we do not ask for answers. And to stay even closer to the theme of the title, I would like to read another passage from this booklet, Holy Week Exercises at Varigotti in 1961: “Things, events, persons are a sign, they are not an end; they are not what we were made for, they are the thing through which we move toward the meaning of and the love for life.” And listen now to how the title of the Meeting could be explicated by this line, “Whatever is a sign is never consumed.” All of life is a sign, all of life is not consumed because it asks for Eternity.
It is not an eschatological Eternity, one to come (even though it has an eschatological component) because satisfaction can never be total here, but everything is present in the moment in which a gesture is conceived for the infinite. This is not preaching, not empty words, it is the commitment of your life from the instant you wake up. “Things, events, persons are never consumed. Christ died for having taught that everything is a sign and everything that happens to us is by the Father’s will and there is nothing to fear, because everything is to be prized.”
I don’t feel like saying anything more; I can’t. It is so compelling that all the rest can only bend to this truth. It is the search for the essential, and the essential is what is here. The essential is this infinite, concrete present, which passes even through the banality of our life. This essential has to be sought even at the cost of losing much of our instinctivity, much of our time-wasting, much of our idiotic protagonism, many of the false problems we create for ourselves, many of the little resentments that are nothing more than the measure of our pettiness.

Giancarlo Cesana
What makes this gesture which we call “Meeting”–which has such a weighty, serious, and significant impact even on our society–get revved up and started again? I believe that a great gesture is based on daily enthusiasm; what brings a great gesture, a great expression, into being is the intensity of daily life. When I say intensity of daily life, I mean that of one who daily perceives, feels, the problem of the meaning of his life, of how his life stands in relationship with everything that exists, and affirms its positivity, even if this feeling makes one weep. Either it is perceived as a challenge or it is lived in aridness. But it is the perceived harshness of a truth that is there, every day.
A great gesture rises out of everyday life. We must pray to God to help us understand, every day, our task in the world, because the Meeting can come out of this, not out of the idea of the Meeting. The Meeting testifies to the existential challenge that our experience–that we call Movement–lives.
In this sense, the Meeting comes out of how one is a plumber every day, which does not mean not expending effort. In order to expend effort, to accept and bear up under laborious effort, to overcome fatigue, you need enthusiasm–in other words, a reason for living–otherwise you can’t stand the fatigue. It does not mean not being sad.
You know Fr. Giussani’s aphorism: “Life is sad, but it’s better that it be sad because otherwise it would be desperate.” Life is sad, life is not fulfilled, but the fact that it is sad means that, even in the consciousness that it is not fulfilled, it is pointed continually in the direction of its fulfillment. The Meeting is born of the fact that these things are understood, otherwise why would you all be here? You are here because in your life of every day you are aware of these things and so you are interested in expressing them in a common gesture. Since this is your interest, you work without pay to give concrete form to this expression that we call Meeting. The origin of the Meeting lies in the dailiness of experience, and we must help each other to live the dailiness of experience.

Without end
So then my second observation is that we must help each other understand the title, “All of life asks for eternity.” What is eternity? I remember that as a child, whenever I thought of God, I thought of Someone, of Something, that never ended, and I would get dizzy and anxious from this impossible thought, from an imagination that could not finish what it started. Thus, when Marco [Bona Castellotti] proposed this title, I asked myself: What is eternity? Where do we see eternity? Eternity cannot be an effort of the imagination, it cannot be the thought of a world that I don’t know, otherwise I feel like I don’t have enough air, like when I would listen to what the priests were saying in catechism class. I understand that the experience of eternity happens when we see a correspondence; it is the experience of meaning, of the possibility that the connection with things that I am seeking does exist–that is to say, that the thing which answers to the desire of my heart does exist. If there is someone who answers to the desire of my heart, this means that the desire of my heart is not there for nothing, but there is someone who answers to it. If there is someone who answers to it, then there is a sense, a meaning. If there is a meaning, then there is something that is affirmed forever: there is eternity. Just like when someone, meeting the girl he loves and feeling himself loved in return, without thinking about it says “forever”–“I will love you forever,” this life is “forever.” He doesn’t even know what he is saying when he says “forever,” and yet he says it, because the correspondence, the discovery of the connection, the discovery of the sense affirms the “forever.” I understand “all of life asks for eternity” as this: all of life asks to discover this correspondence, asks to be able to say this “forever” impulsively. All of us have had the experience of this correspondence in one way or another. However, it is as though we had reduced this experience which introduces us to “forever,” to eternity, to an emotion. It is as if we had not made it become a judgment, something that endures whether life goes well or badly, whether things go as you expected them to or not. A judgment is put forth like a stone, a rock, as something that lasts: the experience that I have had of the correspondence becomes the point of reference around which I build my search in life.

Through a work
Now, all this can be understood only through an education, through a work which helps us to form our mind in such a way that it always refers more to the experience we are living, to reality, not to abstract imaginings. An encounter is an unforeseen event which leads to an educative experience. I believe that people come to the Meeting because, in some way, they perceive this.
Emotion is a fleeting thing; it comes and goes. Judgment is a stable experience, that is to say, what is experienced becomes a point of reference for our life. Education is the help we give each other so that human experience may be reinforced within a judgment, in a judgment, which makes the positive in what we encounter become a life reference. For what does the Beyond mean? What does it mean concretely? What does God mean? It means that if I have this experience of positivity, first of all I affirm it over everything I live, because what has value concerning what I live is the positive that I have seen, as a possibility of redemption, of salvation, of progress for my life. Otherwise, my life would be a poor thing, something to be thrown away. This positive that I have seen is something that I discovered; it has been given to me, because this correspondence is not something I invented. The discovery of this correspondence is something given; I have seen it, I have recognized it and felt it to be good for me, but it was given to me. Who gave it to me? The Beyond–what is beyond my measure and does not fit into my measure–is who gave me the positive experience of existence that I have. Prayer is entreating the One who gave me this possibility, by which my life did not come about by accident, for it is not a chance occurrence, and is not something I can throw away. I am not like a fly that can be swatted; there is something more, something more and definitive that does not end, that cannot end–which I find in my experience because of the correspondence that I have lived–even if later “I am run over by a truck.”

Constant reminder
So, judgment is maintaining this awareness, but to do this we have to help each other, and this help is called reciprocal education. May it constantly recall us to what we should do, because otherwise there is no reason to live. May we recall each other, may we constantly recall each other to seek the One who gave us the possibility of being; this, as Marco quite rightly said, is praying, which is by no means a formality–even when we use formulas without really having our mind on them it is not a formality, it is an entreaty. I shall always remember my provost: once, during Confession, I said to him, “I pray badly,” and he answered that the Gospels don’t say, “Pray well,” but “Pray all the time.” It is not that I had not had certain experiences before encountering the Movement, it is only that before encountering the Movement they were not a point of reference. By encountering the Movement, I found someone who had turned the experiences I had had into texts, into references. So then my life became different, because I discovered the difference, that is, the greatness, the perspective, the eternity of what I was living. Before, instead, these experiences were drowned in uncertainty, in confusion. I don’t know if you have read the latest things Fr. Giussani has written about the calling of Abraham: Abraham was drawn forth out of the confusion of the gods, out of the confusion of his thought, out of the confusion of the peoples all around him, out of the confusion of life. Someone touched him and told him that he had to look to Him, and this pulled him out of his confusion. Well, this is what happened to me. We have encountered someone who pulls us out of confusion, because there is always confusion, we are inside confusion. Fr. Giussani said, “Life is a mystery,” then twenty seconds later he said, “…it is a great confusion…” God pulls us out of confusion; what we have encountered, which is called God, pulls us out of confusion.
Thank God, the Meeting is not held every day (we would go crazy!) but is only once a year for a week, and yet what we live at the Meeting, that is to say, its reason, is there every day. The reason for the Meeting is not given by the Meeting. It is the reason for the Meeting that gives reason to the Meeting.