Dear Father Giuss, After meeting with you I feel I have to tell you what I have retained as the thing that is most valuable, rich in indications of a method and, all things considered, the newest thing in my life. When you said, "At 76 years of age you can't succeed in judging anyone badly," you said it out of discretion, for our hard heads, almost as though it were an "option" of old age. Instead, I see how this is the culmination of your wisdom, that you are leaving to us as your heritage. The things you are leaving to us are a bottomless well, just as the wisdom of the Church is unfathomable: we don't understand, they aren't things for us, we can't possess them. But we inherit them and we have the experience of understanding something, sometimes, once in a while, when we least expect it. One believes that things should always add up and feels that he or she can ask, "Why is this thing like it is, why is another like that?" Why. Instead, with you one understands that reality is something else. Even when I was young nothing made me feel worse than this type of correction, which always arrived when I least expected it. It was the irruption of the Mystery. This is the way one understands the smallness of one's heart and the measure of the Other: this clash with otherness that after a moment (or two, it depends) becomes gladness. Today I understood from your words that the greatest experience of caritas is gratitude. And gratitude brings with it the good of our brothers. This, the experience of caring, is the experience that is least ours, the least possible on the face of the earth. For this reason, it happens as gladness. What would our life be like if we hadn't met you? How could we live with the solitude of our justice?

Name withheld

Dear friends, We are a Mexican couple who, responding to an AVSI initiative, "ended up" for two years in the Dominican Republic. What we encountered there far exceeded our expectations. Life in the city and the way the people were sometimes represented a dramatic shock with respect to our habits, so that our adaptation was slow. Our work situation and economic condition were also decidedly different from what we expected. A student with whom I was talking about these things said to me, "If everything is different from what you expected, then why do you stay here?" The fact is that the things we have encountered have signified for us as persons a great Grace. In the first place, the openness of the community that took us in, in the fullest sense of the words, has been a real help in living the circumstances that a change of country imposed. And then, the astonishingly real, paternal aid brought by the charism of Father Giussani that we share as part of our belonging to the Fraternity, not to the Fraternity as organization and structure, but to the close, dramatic, exhausting, joyous, beautiful, and hope-filled friendship with our friends. At times, living certain difficulties, one feels that the most useful way of facing them is to receive an embrace, a caress, a tender look from one of the others. But we have discovered that this is not true. A meaningless caress is worth nothing. The truest aid that we can give is to help ourselves along seriously in being introduced to a larger way of looking at life, that is, to be helped to discover and go more deeply into the reasons and implications of our baptism. Understanding why is the true help, the truest tenderness. And in this regard, we would like to thank the Lord and Father Giussani for the beauty and helpfulness of the letters he wrote to the first missionaries in the Movement who were in Brazil (Traces, January, 1999). At first, my wife and I identified with Italo, Franca, Lidia, and Giancarlo, because we shared with them the situation of being far from our native country through an act of obedience. But sharing these letters with our friends in School of Community, a beauty and a gladness opened up to us so profound as to lead us to discover that we were saved, that is, we were the objects of the Father's mercy. This impressed us: the Kingdom of God comes about by the offering of a sacrifice, since only the cross can save the world. Normally we want to live the sacrifices that life imposes on us instinctively, that is, as a reaction we want to get away from them, run away from pain. But life is not all sweetness and light, and sacrifices exist, they are a part of it. How we have wasted them! How many times have we lived them only by "taking on the burden of pain!" But the truth is completely different. These offered sacrifices save the world! They are useful for salvation! For our salvation! They are useful for our happiness! This is the greatest (and at the same time most revolutionary) thing that could have happened to me and my wife. Certainly pain and hardship cannot be eliminated, but at least we are not running away any more, looking for the most comfortable corner in life, where nobody can hurt us. This reality makes us open to life without obstacles! It is the beginning of a life that is truly free! Because you know to whom you belong. We belong to the Father in this community that is the Church. The promise that Christ makes us is of a life that is beautiful and true!

Rocio and Pablo

It happened suddenly one day, without making any noise, without forcing anything, a childhood dream came true. We were here at home with a number of friends from the community and guests from Rimini. For the arrival of Marina Valmaggi we put together an evening of song. We invited Father Maurice Cocagnac. We ate pizza and French cheese and then we sang. Marina told of her encounter with GS, the community's first steps, marking off her story with songs. When she started to sing Zachée Father Cocagnac couldn't resist; he asked for the guitar to reinterpret it with humor, joyousness, and imagination, and he told us how he composed those songs. It was as though he had experienced in his own way the Bassa [a place in the country near Milan, where the first CL charitable work began]. He had been asked to go to Villépuif-on the southern outskirts of Paris-to teach catechism to children who were very lively and incapable of listening for more than five minutes. To help them to know the Bible, Maurice wrote the songs that they listened to and then learned. I was 14 years old the first time I saw Father Cocagnac at a Dominican convent in Paris, where he gave a lecture on St. Paul's travels in the Holy Land. I already knew his songs, and to my surprise I became excited about his illustrated children's books on the Bible. I discovered with admiration all the richness of his work for the magazine L'art sacré and his collaboration with Father Couturier. What struck me was his openness to creation, his youthful spirit, his culture tied to a profound spirituality. All this gave a sense of the stature of a religious commitment that was attractive and forward-looking, fully inserted into today's world. So many years later, that first meeting seems to me like it happened yesterday. Today we are together once again; we sing, we eat tiramisù. Time has not separated us, time fulfills. A few weeks ago I went to talk with him for the first time. I told him about the retreat with Memores Domini which Father Giussani had opened and closed with his songs. In 1969 I met a sculptor, Dino Quartana (one of the first GS members), who entered the Dominican order in France, following Maurice Cocagnac. From the beginning of our first meetings he always quoted what he had heard a certain Father Giussani say, "Everything will grow ever younger as we travel our path." At the time I listened to him amazed, without understanding what this youth was, this eternal present. Now I can understand better how it is true for me, for Maurice Cocagnac, for all of us.

Marie Michèle

Father Giussani's message for the 40th anniversary of CL in Sicily "Gratias agimus Tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam." The event of our friendship that began forty years ago bears in the faith an eternal destiny. The meaning of the cosmos and of history is Christ, this Destiny that, in some way, we have been able to see and touch. Jesus, son of Mary, of Nazareth, the Word of God was made flesh; for this reason in the liturgical prayer we remind Him, "Non horruisti Virginis uterum," You felt no repugnance at being formed in the womb of a woman. Our friendship has as its only purpose this God who became flesh to affirm the Mystery that destines all men to Him in love for the happiness of the human person. Thus He asks to live in the memory through every conscious act, a companion on the road. But "when the Son of Man returns will he still find faith on the earth?" The fact of our friendship renders the Mystery present in the eyes of all, a unity of humanity that is unpredictable and everlasting, in our mother the Church and in society, the battleground on which man is usually defeated by the father of lies. "Non nobis Domine, sed nomini Tuo da gloriam." Even if this glory appears as an affirmation of our all belonging to Him, in the person of Monsignor Francesco Ventorino [responsible for CL in Sicily], we have the visible and exemplary beginning of the event through which the charism, that is, the action of the Spirit in the Church, has effected and mobilized your life. To him, in this moment, goes our human gratitude.

Father Luigi Giussani
Milan, March 12, 1999