The Christian Event as Encounter

Preparing to work on the first chapter of Generare tracce nella storia del mondo (Generating Traces in the History of the World), which will be the text for School of Community in the months to come

Edited by Stefano Alberto

“The event is a mystery, but it is a mystery to which we can refer to explain the existential origin of everything” (L. Giussani, “Charism and History,” Traces, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2001).
At the conclusion of the work done in School of Community on The Religious Sense, we tackled the great hypothesis of revelation as the unexpected initiative on the part of Mystery itself to respond to man’s cry for a meaning, to his desire for salvation and certainty in his journey toward Destiny.
The hypothesis of revelation, of God’s breaking into human existence to the point of identifying Himself with a particular in history, implies a radical change of the method used in facing the problem of one’s own destiny: “In the proper sense of the word, ‘revelation’ does not signify the outcome of man’s interpretation of reality, human nature in search of its meaning. Rather, revelation means a possibly real fact, an historical event, which the human person may or may not recognize” (The Religious Sense, p. 143). This is why, before systematically approaching the factors that make it reasonable to recognize the emergence and affirmation in history of Christ’s claim to be the all-encompassing answer to the cry of our humanity in its entirety, we must dwell particularly closely on the newness itself of the method chosen by God to communicate Himself to man and on the existential dynamic involved in this.
Thus, we have decided to work for a few months on the first chapter of Generating Traces in the History of the World, devoted to “The Christian Event as Encounter,” using it as a long introduction to the decisive second step in our “PerCorso,” At the Origin of the Christian Claim.
We must, first of all, understand the reasons for the difficulty that everyone lives today in accepting and recognizing the newness of this initiative of Mystery as a real fact in man’s life. Secondly, we sketch briefly the four fundamental passages that in the first chapter describe the dynamic of the Christian event.

Premise
The context and a difficulty: confusion between religious sense and faith
“Today the fact that Christ exists–who He is, where He is, what the road is to go to Him–is lived only by very few, the remnant of Israel, as it were, and even these are often infiltrated and blocked by the influence of the prevailing mentality” (“Living Reality,” message to university students in 1998, in Traces, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1999).
This observation by Giussani highlights the historical context in which tackling the originality of the Christian proposal is so difficult.
He observes that the word event is the hardest to understand and to accept for the modern mentality, therefore also for each of us. “Of the entire Christian language, nothing is perceived with a greater resistance” (Generare Tracce…, p. 19). The hardest thing to accept is that “what awakens us to ourselves, to the truth of our life, to our own destiny, to hope, to morality, is an event” (Ibid.). This difficulty exists not only because of the frailty of our nature, our fragmented “I,” which leads us to fall back within the narrow horizon of existence, but also because of a “deliberately pursued systematic confusion.” This confusion surrounds the way of tackling the question of the reality of the origin and purpose of one’s life, giving priority to the instinctiveness of feeling and the imagination’s constructs over the simplicity of recognizing a Presence that is decisive for existence. This is the willful confusion of religious sense with faith: “To modern man, ‘faith’ would generically be nothing more than an aspect of religiosity, a kind of sentiment with which he could live the restless search for his origin and his destiny. … All modern consciousness attempts to tear man away from the hypothesis of Christian faith and to reduce it to the dynamic of religious sense and of the concept of religiosity, and unfortunately this confusion penetrates also the mentality of the Christian people” (p.22).