Letters

 

edited by PAOLA BERGAMINI

 

SIERRA LEONE
Tireless Father

Dear Friends: I am writing to you from Winnipeg, Canada. You will wonder why I am writing from so far away from Sierra Leone, so far away from the war-torn boys and girls with whom I work, helping them take their place in civilian society. I have not abandoned them. I am here for them, precisely so that their problems, which are their problems but are caused by adults, can be taken into consideration by those who, so to speak, “count” in the politics of this world that is so sick. Here, in Winnipeg, a world conference has been convened on the problems of children who are war victims. The conference is sponsored by the Canadian government and Unicef. Along with me, three natives of Sierra Leone have been invited, at the expense of the Canadian government, and they will meet other children from Angola, Bosnia, and many other countries riddled by wars in which 80%-90% of the victims are civilians, and those struck the most are young people, which often make up 60% of the population. In these places, because of war, social unrest, the activity of rebels who do not answer to anybody, and irresponsible foreign armies, diseases like AIDS have become practically irreversible calamities. These are places where, in a not so distant future, civilian society will have to deal with hardships it has never seen in the past, hardships so great as to undermine the social framework. The orphans will be so numerous as to place an almost intolerable burden on society and entire families of orphans will be supported by children who are still minors. These are problems that cannot be solved in a remote corner of a small nation like Sierra Leone. They are problems that affect the whole world, which has by now become an enormous village. For this reason, we have been asked to provide support that is the fruit of a living experience. A small help, a little drop that, joined together with others, may move “those who count,” may ward off a catastrophe that touches everybody. No one can feel left out, no one can feel safe. It will certainly touch us as well… but together, only together can it be prevented.
Father Giuseppe Berton

 

SAN FRANCISCO
Among Flower Children and sequoias…

As part of my studies, I recently spent a week at the California Institute of Integral Study in San Francisco. This is a university that was founded 50 years ago for further study of spirituality and Asian cultures. Over time, the range of subjects taught widened to include psychology, sociology, and psychotherapy. Since 1993, the institute has initiated a Ph.D. program called “Transformative Learning and Change,” which studies the process of learning and change in the individual within the spheres of school, the family, the workplace, and, more broadly, in society. The program, strongly inspired by the New Age, brings together people who are a bit unusual, but in fact typical of America, or better, of California. There were, for example, environmentalists, human rights activists, and people attracted by spirituality and “transcendental” phenomena. The first day, each of us had to introduce ourselves, stating the reason why we had chosen that course. One of the participants said she had decided to enroll because of a promise she had made to a sequoia, explaining her interest in the preservation of nature, since nature is our most immediate contact with creation and thus with the meaning of ourselves. Even in their strangeness, I was struck by the fact that the interest my classmates expressed was not ideological, but a sincere human attempt to reach the infinite. But Christ, the only true possibility for connection with the infinite, is totally forgotten, or perhaps deliberately ignored. It seems as though everything has gone back 2,000 years. In the texts that illustrate human progress, dates are no longer indicated with B.C. but B.C.E., Before the Common Era. Moreover, Christ, the son of God made man, is never mentioned; generally the texts dwell at length on the epochs before Christ’s birth and then jump directly to post-modern times. The rare references to Christianity are very brief and reported as legends. During that week, I observed that we shared the desire to discover the ultimate meaning of things, but among all the hypotheses for an answer that could be found or invented, starting from ourselves and our sincere desire or our extended study, there was not one that indicated to us the true relationship with reality. Reality remains something peripheral, a starting point for research, but not the locus where the Mystery makes itself perceived. The infinite remains a measure, albeit very vast, in which everything can be comprehended, but it has no face and thus can never be experienced. In the various study groups, each one had to make a contribution, and my contribution was my statement that I am a practicing Catholic. This did not make me an outsider; rather, some asked me lots of questions full of admiration. At the end of the week the teacher who was our group leader said good-bye to me, saying that my contribution had been a truly innovative one! This really surprised me, since faith in Christ is something that happened 2,000 years ago and continues to happen. Evidently, not only is it not discussed any more, but the need for Revelation is no longer felt. It seems that everyone has taken refuge in the ultimate question, forgetting about the possibility for a definitive answer. One of my classmates (the only one who said she was an atheist), noticing that I went to Mass, confessed to me that she thought that churches, like schools, all closed during the summer! After my initial bewilderment, I did not feel like a misfit in this group of such unusual individuals; rather, I felt a sincere emotional concern and liking for each one of them, for their desire to reach the infinite, which I also share. The charism to which we belong is really great, because it enables us truly to embrace everything and everyone. Not by making a special effort or by a stoic openness, but because Christ who is present embraces me, thus embracing everything I come upon. Even the school with its Flower Children and environmentalist students. All one has to do is witness that the God we are all seeking was made man and dwells among us; He is the consistency of all of reality, including the tree to whom my classmate made her promise.
Lorna

 

MILAN
Individualism and Homogenization

From the very beginning, in the multinational company where I work I have sensed a very strong contradiction. I found myself facing a reality that tried to take over my “I” completely. A slow (but not too slow) process of working on me was begun, in an attempt to make me believe that my success in life, even my very substance, depended totally on the results I achieved, the degree of efficiency I would be able to demonstrate, the time I gave to the firm… Indeed, in a not too subtle way, I was told that the company should become my purpose in life, “otherwise you are not worthy of employment here.” Phrases like “don’t even think of having a private life” or “you have to work even on weekends, but it’s for your own good,” were everyday fare. What disturbed me most was seeing people around me who lived like this, who truly believed it. An exasperated individualism surfaced, in which each one was pitted against the others at all costs, where the goal was to “emerge” (often by taking advantage of others’ mistakes), and even friendship among co-workers was seen as something that was “fine up to a certain point, but you understand that you also have to show that you can make it on your own!” This individualism was clearly closely “controlled,” with everything one is and does being constantly measured and subjected to precise controls according to the sacred criteria of productivity, efficiency, ability not to make mistakes, desire to emerge, etc. The point is that in recent months something is changing. I see an attempt to move from this unbridled and somewhat inhuman individualism to a controlled collective homogenization, which is equally inhuman. At the last meeting this was said: “You must all stop thinking like persons! The person no longer exists, but now only the company,” and as always these were not just things people say, but instead go so far as to dictate precise changes in the actual organization of work. They now want to move from personal evaluations to group evaluations (with Alcoholics Anonymous-type meetings), from individual goals to group goals, from the suffocating measurement of your own work to the equally suffocating measurement by which you have to answer for the work done by your co-workers and even take theirs on if necessary. No longer one against all, but you have to try to disappear in the all, at least in your group, for the good of the firm. I seem to perceive the first hints of a new direction that is coming directly from the United States, of a new kind of organization, and quite frankly I do not understand what conception of man is underlying it. As I write, I think that there are also some good things in everything I have described; these methods are not totally wrong, if it were not for the fact that they are always taken too far and are given the dignity of ideology: a perfect structure, but based on an aspect of reality that is treated as unique, absolute, and that is thus always forced to exterminate something of the “I.” And inside all this, every morning I go back into this company with just one demand: to understand and experience that “work is the most concrete, arid, and exhausting aspect of our love for Christ;” with the demand to understand what the thing we have encountered has to do with this world that has been so brutalized; to understand what is meant by the words freedom, charity, obedience, and forgiveness in a place that seems to have forgotten the meaning for which we live.
A reader