Event

On Saturday, June 24th, the CL National Council met in Milan. At the end of the session, Father Giussani offered a few thoughts summarizing the CL year just ending. We present it now to everyone, as a judgment on the life of the Movement and as a point of view toward the next Meeting in Rimini, which in this Jubilee Year has as its theme the event of the Incarnation, the event on which our present depends–and thus our hope for the future.

The most beautiful thing is that, unlike in all the other times, there is a manifestation, a testifying of the Spirit of the Lord inside your hearts, when you emphasize in this way, so close-up–almost touching, almost touching its deepest depths–the only word that can clarify the road that must be traveled, what we have to bring to it: the word “event.” I confess that I have never felt so clearly the value of this word as you have made me feel it today.
The focal point is an event, a fact, a case, we would say.
It is that something happened in the world that lifts the term “Christian event” to its true value, its great and synthesizing value.
It is not a question of “creating a unity” but of welcoming each other and welcoming something: what happened and what happens. What happens is what happened.
In fact, it bears a name, a name that is the name, the name of the Lord (“Lord,” he is called in the Bible): Jesus. May this word convey, may in it be seen and heard, thought, seen and heard coming all together, everything that Jesus came to bring to the world!
The challenge is the word “event;” today you have clarified it for me in an evocative way.
What happens with us is something that has already happened! And here we see how we cannot live the relationships between us except as a desire to receive the input of the new, the new as the most acute report on our life. God teaches us this in this moment, in past moments; God, the Father of the risen Jesus! He is risen! He is risen means that the world has been won, it has been conquered–and that also the flesh has been conquered, this mortal flesh in its weakness and its plans.
Let us love this word and let us put it on every page of our book, the book of our life: “event.”