The Touch of the Mystery

The text of a article by Luigi Giussani

nby Luigi Giussani

ìQuos redemisti, tu conserva, Christeî: those you have redeemedñthose you have wanted, planned for yourself ñ save them, keep them from harm, Christ. Save them in whatever circumstances you have them live. It is with assurance that we cry out our thankfulness to God.

ìKeep from harm those you have redeemed, Christ.î Those you have called. Every one of us has been called, touched by the finger of the Lord, kindled by His flame in our heart.

The response to this election lies wholly in the prayer we are capable of. Our response is a prayer, not a special ability; it is only the impetus of prayer.

We are about to begin the month of May. For centuries the Christian people has been blessed and confirmed in its reaching out to salvation, I believe, especially by one thing: the Holy Rosary. The Rosary is like the synthesis of all that the Christian people is able to think and say to Christ. The synthesis of the whole program of the worldís redemption, of the dignity to acknowledge, of a charity to live, in the victory over death in the crucifixionñno, not in the crucifixion, but in the resurrection. Because we are saved by the resurrection.

The use of the Holy Rosary, the meditation on what it proposes, the Mystery that reveals itself in it is the assurance of what the mother of Jesus can do for our life. Jesus did not stir Himself for us in order to waste time.

Thus the joyful mysteries, which come before the sorrowful, the joyful mysteriesñgaudiumñthe joyful mysteries tell us, remind us of the mystery of novelty: the Angelís announcement, Maryís charity to her cousin Elizabeth, the birth of Jesus, the purification of Our Lady, and the offering of Christ to the Father; the apparently insignificant life of Jesus at Nazareth. They are memories on which the grasp Jesus has on us, lines up and take flesh.

The sorrowful mysteries are the condition, humanly speaking, absurdñbecause sorrow is an inevitable condition (now that I am old I understand these things as never before)ñfor being part of Jesus, for belonging to Him.

Then the final joy, the final glory, in the glorious mysteries, acquires a foundation within the experience of our flesh; otherwise the experience of our flesh does not reach the resurrection.

Just as the mother of Jesus was the beginning of His being amongst us, so now the mother of Jesus continues to save in history what was predicted, predestined.

ìKeep those you have redeemed from harm, O Christ.î It is Our Lady who we can think of without any possibility of being deceivedñOur Lady is our mother. So it is through abandonment to Our Lady, prayer to Our Lady, entreaty to Our Lady that we can be assured of what Jesus wanted us to do, of what we are. It is in this abandonment to Our Lady that the assurance of our life is grandly affirmed, so that, looking at each other in this company of ours, we see how it is really the first echo of salvation, of a new human condition.

Whatever mood we are in, we ask our Lady every day for the grace that what Christ promised in her maternity for us, which is expressed in the truth of our vocation, come true concretely, making us change. Let every one of us, then, looking at the othersñas we look at each otherñweep with joy before the evidence that Our Lady, as the emergence of a redemptive novelty, will save totally in her Son the existence to which we were called. There is a nothingness, there is a nothingness that is not lost. A thing that is nothing could be lost, but no, it is saved!