"The Movement should not worry so much about the spread of its message, but about the spread of its impetus: The enthusiasm that is born from beauty is incomparable to the enthusiasm that is born from dedication." How is our presence judged by this observation made by Father Giussani?

1. The question of the impetus of life starts out as the perception of a desire, the desire for happiness and fulfillment. The Mystery has made us this way, our life is lived through the gymnastics of desire, (as St. Agustine said); the Mystery as expectation intensifies desire, the relationship with reality, the relationship with Mystery itself, lived in circumstances. This is what Father Giussani, in School of Community, calls "structural disproportion:" desire as the mover of a person's actions, as the original mover of action, as the expectation and hope that reality will reveal something, as the waiting for a miracle.
If this happens in a person, if this is the original, innate dynamism of the heart, we must however recognize that the impetus does not belong originally to the person, it does not originate in the person. The fact itself of desire, the demanding nature of life, is a sign of another origin, it is the sign of something else.
Desire, the greatness of human desire, throws the emphasis of the question back onto the "I," the subject, the interest in the subject as the first emergence of experience-this is the beginning of the Father Giussani's Equipe lesson, On the Way [see Traces, Vol. 2, No. 2]-but what reveals the root of impetus and desire, what gives hope its foundation of certainty in the present is another thing, unexpected, unpredictable: the event. It is an event that founds, that clearly constitutes the I as the fundamental mover.
Impetus is not just talk if we recognize that its origin, the originality of what we desire, hope, and of which we are certain, is something else that comes before us: it is the event, as the fundamental mover of knowledge, as openness, recognition of the original openness of the heart-reason and affection. It is the event of this Presence that we have encountered. The encounter with Christ as corresponding to the desire of my heart is what my certainty is based on, it is the foundation and the substance of the I.
Therefore, the problem of impetus becomes historically, existentially, a question of relationship. Above all, it is the recognition of a fact, the fact of Christ who has been met, and the decision to follow Him. The trajectory of security as a psychological phenomenon, thus in itself ephemeral, is different from that of certainty as the evidence of a recognized fact that corresponds to the desire of the heart, the desire for happiness. It corresponds because it is exceptional, and hence bigger than I am. Freedom and time are necessary for correspondence to become conviction, the established way a person is, the all-encompassing horizon of existence.

2. Without the perception of one's own limits, there is no impetus. We are speaking of ontological, natural limits: what makes me is not I, what causes me to exist, what gives me substance is not the fact that I give myself life, but that I recognize that I am an Other. In the encounter with Christ this takes form as a relationship, as a path we travel: there is One who gives me life, who gives me being, who reveals to me, introduces me to the meaning of things, and who forgives me.
So that, really, certainty is at the beginning: it is the certainty that is born from the encounter, from the evidence of a fact that imposes itself on your life and makes you face-and here lies the question of risk-even what you do not know, what is unfamiliar to you, what you cannot yet see, starting from the recognition that the substance of things, of reality, is the substance of the one who saves them: Christ.
It is only this that makes us risk, that makes us put our freedom on the line as a passionate affection for things: positiveness, the positum, what is given. But what is given has within it, as a seed and a promise-seed (thus in the circumstance, in the given, the generator of the given) and promise (the horizon of development of what is given)-the fact of Christ as the substance of all things. This is for us a persuasive, fascinating, involving, cogent result in our encounter with the charism, in our encounter with the Movement, where "what comes before," what precedes us and comes to us from something else, has reached us, touched us, and changed us forever. Forever, which is to say, definitively-not defining, but definitive, in the sense that the possibility itself of desire, of certainty and hope is marked by this encounter, by the fact of the charism.
The entire second part of On the Way (which providentially, to my mind, the Movement proposes to us to take up again) marks this inexorable step, ontologically founded in Baptism, and which continuously reveals its dynamic, its impetus right in the existential encounter, in the acknowledged belonging to the charism of the Movement.
In this text there is a beautiful passage on the endurance of the beginning, on the initiative of the Spirit as lasting, as the repetition of the encounter and as the endurance of the encounter over time. The encounter is not something that lies in the past, because this can be, at the most, a source of a "discourse" or "dedication" that is moralistic. The encounter is something that happens again now. But it happens again if I recognize what comes before, if I recognize that the impetus comes from the Movement, that is to say from the contemporaneousness of Christ in my life. The impetus becomes mine, it becomes my action, if I recognize that it is always, originally, continually the event that precedes me and reaches me. To say that the impetus belongs to the Movement means indicating an inexorableness of trajectory, a definitive horizon, within which our freedom moves and takes risks.

3. Impetus indicates the perception of one's personality as a proposal. This perception is born of the certainty that what has reached me is a response to my humanity and is a response to all. We bear the secret of the world, which is to say, we become a proposal-I am thinking of the young people we meet-if it is evident that we follow an Other. We do not ask them to follow us or our capacities, but something else that has burst into our lives and is present, and is the point where everything is constantly being born again. It is this that makes us crucial, not our will, not our efforts, not our desire to be the master of situations and persons: the communication of this event as the decision of a gesture, which is born of the recognition of what comes before us, of what always comes first. No one of us will ever be able to take possession of the charism, because if someone tries this (and we all fall into the trap sooner or later) he realizes it immediately and the others realize it as well, because everything falls either into theory or words or an organized and organizing moralism. The decision to make the gesture occurs when the action of the I, the initiative of the I, is aware of the meaning it bears (gerit); it bears a meaning, but the meaning is not given to it by us-we recognize it as present in life.
For this reason, precisely because we are responsible, the emphasis that has been given to co-responsibility is so important.
First: the responsibility is total; it is not toward a piece, nor toward what I have understood and I do directly, but the responsibility is such if it recognizes above all what has come into my life, what is involving my life now, the dynamism of unity of the person and of unity of persons, which is the ontology that is revealed as testimony. This is the first responsibility.
Second: responsibility can only be exercised as co-responsibility, because without it we do not have the dramatic perception of today; our judgment does not become a historic judgment, on what is at stake now.

4. Attachment to the origin is not possible, and it is not possible to live within oneself the origin as proposal except in the request, in an ascesis of one's own freedom, of one's own life in the relationship with Christ. This is the first move of the charism, as we lived it also in St. Peter's Square on May 30, 1998: man as beggar, as supplicant. But this supplication is addressed also to the other (to the other who is leading with us, to the other who might be the family about to leave for Detroit, the friend in the little town in Friuli, anybody at all), in whom the Spirit, the charism lives surprisingly as newness, or as a need and a cry that awaits a response, or as clear evidence of a creativity and fecundity in action.
Beggars, not masters of others, but moving always and above all toward the salvation of themselves, that is, toward the discovery of where the miracle takes place, where the newness acts, with humility and a capacity for indicating and obeying what the Spirit calls forth. This eliminates the danger of personalism and of the role among us, and renders the relationship between us a dramatically friendly one, aimed at affirming the thing that is dearest to us: the shared destiny that each of us has-destiny not just as ultimate fulfillment, but also as the daily road toward it.

The Movement should not worry so much about the spread
of its message,
but about the spread
of its impetus:
The enthusiasm that is born from beauty
is incomparable
to the enthusiasm that is born from dedication
Father Giussani