"Here, where a stupendous landscape surrounds me, here I am living those questions which no man can answer. I believe nonetheless that you cannot remain without an answer. Live these questions now." (R.M. Rilke) Thus Father Pino started his remarks to the 7,000 university students who had come from all over Italy to Rimini for the Spiritual Exercises. His was an impassioned plea to take oneself seriously, not to stifle the questions shouting in everyone's heart; an invitation to look now for the answer to what we cannot help wanting. Live these questions now.
"If there is a reason why we all come together, it is above all to tell each other how great the I is; we are made for infinity, within the frailty of our being, within our awareness of a disproportion. But what is this disproportion? It is the difference between the potential greatness of what we desire and the smallness of what we are."
The great surprise and change comes when this inadequacy, which we have sensed, felt, and suffered so many times, acquires dignity. The disproportion, and the sadness that is born of it, is a source of knowledge.
Leopardi a century ago talked about it in these terms in his Zibaldone: "Nothing demonstrates the greatness of the human intellect more than man's power to know, understand, and feel his littleness…. It is a great mind that has understood things so superior to man's nature."
But some of us, talking about ourselves, help to explain it. An example is Pietro, in his second year of studying philosophy: "Sadness is the symptom of a search that is always going on. Desperation is a squelching of the desire for knowledge, based on the false belief that you already have the answer, taking everything for granted, seeing everything as the reproposal of the same old thing." Anna added, "I realize that I can look purely and clearly at this 'desire for a good that is not there,' recognizing the weight and significance it brings to bear on life. I understand that sadness is not a 'manufacturing defect,' but a factor of unity between me and others. Usually, when I feel this sadness, I start to think-as though I could understand, find the solution, the mistake to be fixed. But the rest of me wants somebody to come tell me, give me what I'm missing."
This sadness is a source of knowledge, that is, a chance to face everything with a question, with the desire that reality respond to what we are. Censoring it would mean giving up oneself.
This is the example offered by the end of Novecento, a dramatic monologue by Alessandro Baricco. Novecento is a great pianist, who has always lived on a ship. He has never stepped onto the shore, and he will not have the courage to do so even to follow the girl with whom he has fallen in love. Facing 88 keys on a keyboard is easy, but facing the infinite breadth of reality is too risky. "Land, that is a ship that is too big for me. It is too long a trip. It is too beautiful a woman. It is too strong a perfume. It's music I don't know how to play. Forgive me, but I won't get off. Let me go back."
You understand better now how important the invitation given at the beginning was: live these questions now, without being afraid of disappointment or limits, without censoring the fever for life that you are. As a girl from Kazakhstan wrote, "Now I have been awakened, and I want to throw myself into the life I am living. I want to live everything intensely without laziness. I will be faithful so that I can encounter the answer to what my heart is seeking. Maybe I simply don't know it yet, but it is there. You have to know how to wait."

Someone from the horizon…
Imagine a man facing the sea and looking at the horizon. "That line of the horizon is like an enigma from which something will come to him, someone bringing unimaginable riches. Suddenly a speck appears on the horizon: a boat. It draws nearer and he can see the details. There is a man in it. And the man who was waiting embraces the man arriving from the otherwise enigmatic and unknown horizon. Christianity is born like this. It was like this for the first people who met Christ. Simon was there with his eyes fixed on that person who was waiting for him still at a slight distance, filled with that curiosity which characterizes a man the less 'polite' he is and the more he is full of vitality. When he saw Him there, three or four meters away, the way He looked at him was something he would never forget! How He looked at him, how He stared, how He scrutinized his nature, how He discovered what kind of person he was. 'Nobody ever looked at me like that before.' He was overcome by a phenomenon that the dictionary calls 'wonder.'" Christianity is this very human embrace: the man waiting embraces the man who comes.
After an event like this, the temptation could arise to establish a 'tactic' to make this fascination endure and develop. But, even years later in life, one can start out only from this encounter and from the wonder that arises from it. It is not necessary to plan and organize how one should make the relationship with this Presence evolve. All you have to do is ask for it, even if all you have had is an "embryonic perception" of who He is. The point of new departure is always an attraction that can amaze you. "It is the encounter with Jesus, it is the encounter with Christ. The 'something that comes first' is the encounter with Christ, even if it is not precise, even if you are not really aware of it. The thing that comes first, grace, is the relationship with Christ: Christ is grace, He is this presence and your relationship with it, your dialogue with it, your way of looking at it, of thinking about it, of focusing on it."
A sacrifice is asked of us. This is a word that has been misunderstood so many times, and in reality it means leaving room for what has happened to us. Sacrifice is not stopping at appearances; it is abandoning one's own measure of circumstances.

A new culture
From the discovery that "everything consists in Him"-that only this Man who embraces us is the meaning of things-arises a new way of looking at and treating everything, with unimaginable tenderness and poignancy, like Christ in front of the widow whose son had died ("Woman, do not weep.") Or like Teudis, a Catalonian friend, facing his mother's illness: "I know that if the same situation had happened to me three years ago, I would have been furious with the world. Now, thanks to some faces that are always near me, I can find the positive side even to something like this, because I know that everything is for me, because if this too were not for me, then nothing would be. The serenity and maturity with which I have been able to love my mother in this period, to be close to her, trying to do my limited best, have been made possible by a Presence, the only possible answer to a pain so great."
We do not have easy solutions to every problem, but we struggle constantly in the circumstances that befall us, keeping this Presence before our eyes. And the horizons slowly open up for us. Thus Luca, Dino, and Lele have been to Jakarta to personally meet some friends in difficulty who sent them an appeal: "It is striking to see that on the other side of the world they are living and fighting for the same thirst, the same desire that moves us. And a yearning is born in us that through our efforts the beauty that makes us men can be communicated." Others of us, involved in university politics, after our action aimed at defending the rights of students at the University to be present and to express themselves, said, "We are beginning to understand that the One who made all this possible is for the world."

Only a "yes"
There still remains one last objection: that one's own incapacity can be an obstacle to the recognition of Christ's presence. Father Fabio gives an illuminating reading of Milosz's Miguel Mañara. The abbot reprimands Miguel who, having met Christ and being faced with the change he has undergone, would like to decide by himself the way, time, and methods of this change. "Love and haste do not go well together…. Why are you afraid of losing what has been able to find you?" The method by which to follow this Presence is given by the Presence itself. All we have to do is say "yes," as Father Giussani wrote, surprising us as always: "Why do you compare what you don't have to what I do? Why, what do I have? I have this "yes" and that's all, and it would not cost you one bit more than it costs me."