family - Jubilee

“Culture of Life and Culture of Death”

by LUIGI GIUSSANI


The remark at International Theological-Pastoral Congress on “Children, Springtime of the Family and Society,” organized by the Pontifical Council for the Family on the occasion of the Jubilee of Families
Rome, October 10-12, 2000

1. “God did not make Death, he takes no pleasure in destroying the living.”
Today’s man, like the man of yesterday and tomorrow, belongs to the Mystery who made him through the countless things to which he belongs, whether favored and consciously sought or unconsciously endured. The word in the Bible that God has given to man as light for judging his actions at the deepest level where action is born is available for everyone to understand.
The culture of life is opposed to the culture of death already in the pages of the Book of Wisdom.
“God did not make Death, he takes no pleasure in destroying the living. To exist–for this he created all things; the creatures of the world have health in them, in them is no fatal poison, and Hades has no power over the world: for uprightness is immortal.” (Wis 1:13-15)
This is the promise with which God created us, and this is justice.
And yet, the Book of Wisdom continues, “the godless call for Death with deed and word, counting him friend, they wear themselves out for him; with him they make a pact, worthy as they are to belong to him. And this is the false argument they use, ‘Our life is short and dreary, there is no remedy when our end comes, no one is known to have come back from Hades. We came into being by chance and afterwards shall be as though we had never been. The breath in our nostrils is a puff of smoke, reason a spark from the beating of our hearts; extinguish this and the body turns to ashes, and the spirit melts away like the yielding air. In time, our name will be forgotten, nobody will remember what we have done; our life will pass away like wisps of cloud, dissolving like the mist that the sun’s rays drive away and that its heat dispels. For our days are the passing of a shadow, our end is without return, the seal is affixed and nobody comes back.’” (Wis 1:16; 2:1-5)
As always, the Bible text is a great prophecy cast onto the life of man. And perhaps the words we have just read have never before been so well suited as they are to this tragic time of ours. In his encyclical devoted to the Gospel of life, John Paul II has written, “The Gospel of life, proclaimed in the beginning when man was created in the image of God for a destiny of full and perfect life, is contradicted by the painful experience of death which enters the world and casts its shadow of meaninglessness over man’s entire existence. Death came into the world as a result of the devil’s envy and the sin of our first parents. And death entered it in a violent way.” (Evangelium vitae, 1819)
For the men of our epoch, reality–things, persons, desires, plans–thus acquire the frightening aspect described in the Book of Wisdom. Everything seems to share the common name of nothingness. And everything seems to be drawn into this vortex that makes one say, “Our days are the passing of a shadow.” How terrible is a human position that feels the blow of an absolute, total negativity, with no possibility of remedy!
But this attitude is not in keeping with man’s nature; rather, it is the consequence of falseness, the fruit of the insinuation of something foreign into human life as God conceived of and created it. For man is not born as negativity, but as a positive promise. The baby emerging from his mother’s womb cries out his desire for life with his very first breath, which is the very substance of his identity. Only a mistaken training over time can weaken this original structure by introducing doubt, by introducing the idea that everything lacks a meaning. Doubt as the starting point for an approach to reality cannot be the base on which personal existence is founded, also because it does not correspond to anything real.
The words of the Book of Wisdom, it seems to me, help us to understand the theme that has been assigned to us, “Culture of Life and Culture of Death,” since they are a judgment on the mentality that governs–whether consciously or unconsciously–people’s lives today, many times even the lives of those who say they are Christian.
Death dominates the common feeling, spreading over everything the veil of appearance that lasts for an instant and then vanishes like snow in the sun. And this negativity leads one to exalt the fleeting instant of a momentary satisfaction, since there is no hope that anything else can last.
For this reason, Wisdom goes on to describe the attitude of men whose humanity has been diminished in this way: “Come, then, let us enjoy the good things of today, let us use created things with the zest of youth: take our fill of the dearest wines and perfumes, on no account forego the flowers of spring but crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither, no meadow excluded from our orgy; let us leave the signs of our revelry everywhere, since this is our portion, this our lot! As for the upright man who is poor, let us oppress him; let us not spare the widow, nor respect old age, white-haired with many years. Let our might be the yardstick of our right, since weakness argues its own futility. Let us lay traps for the upright man, since he annoys us and opposes our way of life, reproaches us for our sins against the Law, and accuses us of sins against our upbringing. He claims to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. We see him as a reproof to our way of thinking, the very sight of him weighs our spirits down; for his kind of life is not like other people’s, and his ways are quite different. In his opinion we are counterfeit; he avoids our ways as he would filth; he proclaims the final end of the upright as blessed and boasts of having God for his father. Let us see if what he says is true, and test him to see what sort of end he will have.” (Wis 2:6-17)
Here is all the world as we know it, at least in recent centuries: an exaltation of the appearance of things as the only reason for living; an acclaimed hostility to those who in some manner say that the substance of things is different and different is the reality that is made manifest in experience.
Like the just man in the Bible, we too today have been called to live a responsibility toward our fellow men, who are as though they had been blasted by some toxic cloud that makes them reason wrongly and obscures their vision. And the first victim of this general poisoning is the family, that basic level of friendship between a man and a woman which has a specific task assigned to it: to collaborate with God in spreading life on the earth through the generation of children.
Now, on what level is the problem of a culture of life situated? To help us to answer this question, we must look at our elementary experience to which the Church responds with the announcement of Christ who died and rose again, and thus is alive for all the time of history until eternity.

2. The starting point for constituting a culture of life is the acknowledgment that life is a mission. Jesus says, “I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full.” (Jn 10:10) The purpose of the life God gives is something that seems to be canceled by death.
We have the Christian vocation. And this comes long before being a man or a woman, “since every one of you that has been baptized has been clothed in Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female–for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:27-28) There is a profound principle which gives a very different meaning to the experience, albeit very pleasing and at least initially so fascinating, of the affectionate relationship between a man and a woman, a principle that, alone, can guarantee continuity and faithfulness over time. This is literally true: without the awareness expressed by St. Paul, the worldly mentality–we can also say the modern mentality –looking at things with the eyes of the flesh, seeing things the way everyone sees them with their natural eyes, cannot help, for example, having in divorce its ideal of humanity, of compassion, because otherwise the truth of the relationship is truly impossible. In fact, what makes continuity possible is not the love of a man and woman, but the love of the man and woman that is made possible by Something else. We have been touched in our being by this deep seed: this gesture is called Baptism, this sign that is otherwise so insignificant, by which Christ has wanted us, has touched us, has chosen us.
For what has He chosen us, and why? Because we are more consistent and better than the others? No. “Just as the Father has sent me, so do I send you.” Life as a mission is the only exhaustive definition of life according to Jesus, therefore awareness of life as a mission fulfills our self-awareness and the value of everything that is born of us. If we do not start from this, we put something else (taken from the worldly idea of life) first: success, the material care of children, hospitality. But even the pagans do the same; it is not necessary to be Christian to have these practices.
What is our mission? For what purpose have we been sent by the Mystery to whom we belong? John Paul II reminds us, “When he presents the heart of his redemptive mission, Jesus says, ‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.’ (Jn 10: 10)” (Evangelium vitae, 1801) And Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John specifies, “Eternal life is this: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (Jn 17:3) And “everything belongs to you, whether it is Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, the world, life or death, the present or the future–all belongs to you; but you belong to Christ.” (1 Cor 3:21-23) The encyclical continues, “To proclaim Jesus is itself to proclaim life. For Jesus is ‘the word of life.’ (1 Jn 1:1) In him ‘life was made manifest;’ (1 Jn 1:2) he himself is ‘the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us....’ (1 Jn 1:2) This Gospel of life is one with Jesus himself.” (Evangelium vitae, 2067)
Therefore, the point of departure is the conversion of the individual to Christ, the liberation of the individual, by which life is lived in an increasingly mature and conscious way as the duty to proclaim the Good News. The marriage liturgy says this too: God grants children so that they can regenerate themselves (following the ancient Gospel formula). Here, then, again, is the point of departure: life as a mission. The heart of each person makes all the rest spring forth from this, but not automatically, because freedom enters always and in every case, the freedom that God has chosen to be the method of His relationship with His creature, man. At any rate, from this beginning, the possibility of a culture of life that involves every aspect of existence and society takes shape. The family is for a man and a woman the daily and continual beginning of a new society. It is the relationship structure that most humanly witnesses to what qualifies us for our mission: the sacrament of Baptism. Every other sacrament is a further qualification to it. Marriage has this precise meaning: to determine the complete face of myself as a subject of mission. And the first mission is with one’s wife or husband, or rather, better, the first mission is with oneself. An error into which we have all fallen is thinking that mere living together creates communion, whereas it is the mystery of Christ in us that creates communion.

3. The family fulfills its calling through bringing up its children, because the purpose is not simply to procreate, but to educate them to the meaning of life. Our Movement’s beginnings immediately formulated a song that expresses this: “Poor is the voice of one who does not exist. Such is our voice if it no longer has a reason.… All of life pleads for eternity.”
The fruit and the symptom of a missionary awareness, and therefore also of the communion which unites a man and a woman, is the raising of their children. Children grow up watching how we live our lives. Therefore training children means making them participate in the reality of the communion of the man and woman who gave them life.
“It is above all in raising children that the family fulfills its mission to proclaim the Gospel of life. By word and example, in the daily round of relations and choices, and through concrete actions and signs, parents lead their children to authentic freedom, actualized in the sincere gift of self, and they cultivate in them respect for others, a sense of justice, cordial openness, dialogue, generous service, solidarity and all the other values which help people to live life as a gift. In raising children Christian parents must be concerned about their children’s faith and help them to fulfill the vocation God has given them.” (Evangelium vitae, 2108)
Whether or not the work of training is taken seriously by a family living in the current social climate is not as obvious as it might seem. The theologian Jungmann defined education as help in entering into all of reality, but this requires a rich range of concerns that today’s climate tends to encourage people to avoid so that the life of the adults may be as tranquil as possible. And too, the current climate is apt to justify everything unreservedly, eliminating even the distinction between good and evil. Therefore, if, on one hand, it seems evident that the family is the first sphere of education (it is the first dynamic structure in which nature fulfills its capacity for generation and development), on the other, it is not to be taken for granted that the proper training of their children is what guides the presence and actions of the parents. In the confusion of values which characterizes today’s world, how the children grow up from the human point of view has become secondary to other concerns, such as health or preparation for a good job and thus for a good position in society.
It must be said, however, that any climate, at any moment in history, cannot ever elude what man carries within him by nature, and thus can never suppress the anxieties and needs that God-given nature causes to vibrate within the human heart. The most important thing, the necessary thing for educating, is also the first thing that is lost today. In earlier times, the social climate kept it going even if people were unaware of it; today instead this rips it away from us. To understand what this thing is which is so necessary for bringing up children, imagine a mother who goes into her child’s room in the morning to wake him up. Suppose that this is a lucky moment when she can stop a few feet away from the bed and watch this little creature sleeping, this child who came out of her body, who was not there before, almost going beyond the fact that he is hers, and suppose now that she thinks, “Who knows what life will bring him, who knows what will come his way?” and then, again, “This child has a destiny, otherwise it would have been unjust and useless to bring him into the world, because bringing a child into the world means exposing him to the possibility of the greatest pain.” It is a human feeling that this child is yours, mother, but is not yours. His destiny is so much his own! In Christian terms we say, using a very meaningful term, that he has his vocation; in other words, he has been called by Something that is not you and this Something calls him toward a goal, toward an aim that is not you, father or mother. This prepares the way for a culture of life, that is, for a positive development of the promise with which we have been drawn into existence.
I believe that the first condition for being able to train a human creature–the children who are the springtime of both the family and society–is that there be this sense of detachment, of respect; this sense of fear and trembling before the Mystery contained within that child, who is so much yours and yet not yours. Without this, how can a father or a mother respect and aid his steps along a path that no one can discern, not even the one himself who is walking it? Parents inevitably end up fulfilling the terrible prophecy of the Book of Wisdom by possessing the child and, as they embrace him, they suffocate him with this possession.
On the contrary, the detachment of which we are talking is somehow the feeling of not being able to exhaust the relationship with the child by holding him in one’s arms, taking him by the hand, or urging him toward what we adults think is the most right, most true, most suitable thing for him. It is a real detachment, but there is no deeper union with one’s child than the bond lived by the father and mother who try to guide him, keeping always before their eyes this tremendous and mysterious thing that is his destiny; having this thought always before them: that he is a creature in relationship with Something much greater than we are, toward which I must accompany him and toward which he will go, using, hour-by-hour, the things, the events which will come his way. Therefore I must help him to use things, to take life as much as possible in a way that his journey, instant-by-instant, may be always in the direction of his destiny. Otherwise, it would be useless and unjust to have given birth to him, because in that case, indeed, living would be useless! The “godless” in the Book of Wisdom would be right.
One trains a person if he fosters in him the opening up of an ideal, meaning by ideal something ultimate, something greater than oneself, so that everything one does is not done for oneself. This is the abolition of selfishness and the beginning of a defense of life as a journey toward the destiny that God has prepared for each of us.

4. The family leads to participation in the culture of life not by itself, but together with others. Families who come together in unity and become an example followed by other families constitute the flow of the Christian people.
We have said that the family is fundamental as a factor of education. It must be added here, however, that its power is brief and above all fragile over time. It is like a house, like a room that is continually being crossed by bolts of lightning. The family is now under fire from social forces to the point that it cannot in any way safeguard its educational capacity by itself. I remember the novel The Garden of the Finzi Contini: that family’s ideal was to live safely protected by the walls of its great park, so self-sufficiently as to seem autonomous, but a chance change in history overwhelmed them.
It is neither intelligent nor sincere to want to educate only by the instrument of the family. This has always been true, but in our time it is much more so and assumes a greater value, so that if at one time the resistance of the family or its influence on the children could have been estimated at 70%, now it can be estimated at 5%. What can the family do in the face of all the force of a society that has the whole family in its hands through television? What can it do in the face of the school, where teachers can do anything they please and can tamper with the conscience of the child in any way they please, doing so systematically? What can it do about advertising? A family cannot stand up to all these by itself.
Therefore the educational concern of a family is intelligent and human in as much as they are prepared to set aside their convenience–albeit deserved–and to establish relationships that create a social fabric capable of withstanding the dominant social pressures. The proper locus of this is the communion of the Church. In his encyclical Mater et magistra, Pope John XXIII indicated freedom of association as one of man’s ten basic rights. John Paul II writes, “We have been sent as a people. Everyone has an obligation to be at the service of life.” (Evangelium vitae, 2064)
Having children to raise is the greatest opportunity God gives to reawaken faith in us. There is a moment in life when, perhaps because of others’ examples, or mobilized by a sense of impotence in the face of the duty to behave in a certain way, faith appears as something important not only for eternity, but also for this life, so that it rises on the horizon of our life like the dawn of a new day. “The Gospel of life is for the whole of human society. To be actively pro-life is to contribute to the renewal of society through the promotion of the common good.” (Evangelium vitae, 2137) We begin to perceive a meaning to life, a taste for life, a usefulness of life that by the very fact of defining the “I” of each person inserts a new perspective into the worldly context that seems inevitably destined to death, that is, to nothingness. But “God did not make Death, he takes no pleasure in destroying the living. To exist–for this he created all things.” (Wis 1:13-14) This is the great promise that the Christian announcement fulfills forever with sureness, through the energy of the risen Christ who has vanquished and vanquishes the world.
“The Gospel of life is not simply a reflection, however new and profound, on human life. Nor is it merely a commandment aimed at raising awareness and bringing about significant changes in society. Still less is it an illusory promise of a better future. The Gospel of life is something concrete and personal, for it consists in the proclamation of the very person of Jesus.” (Evangelium vitae, 1896)
Thus the Gospel of life becomes the culture of life, according to the words of John Paul II: “A faith that does not become culture is a faith that is not fully accepted, not intensely conceived, not faithfully lived.” (M.E.I.C. Congress, January 16, 1982)