What I am like as an adult was born and grew up in the encounter and the measuring of myself with the charism that I met, living the actual aspects of a companionship that took hold of me at sixteen years of age and has never let me go.
This has determined in my life a continuing rediscovery of the meaning of the word obedience as a condition for my freedom to find its way among the concrete choices in life.
I shall tell my story through three main points in my life: when I started work, the beginning of the Company of Works, and the present moment, now.
When I finished my studies, I was advised to stay in the university, but the only occasion that offered itself was that of devoting myself to a field that was not mine (statistics). It seemed to me that I obeyed, but the fact that I had always felt more drawn to the humanities, that I was very disorganized, that I didn't see the usefulness of my work, and that I wanted even then to build things, generated from the very beginning a distaste for the job. To this were added real objective difficulties: I had no salary, and after winning a fellowship for the doctorate, professionally I was not doing very well.
I remember that I was always going to see the older ones in our company because I wanted to quit, and I was always angry and was always asking them what telling me to stay in the university had to do with the Movement. On top of this, I was encountering the first great difficulties in life and had become dejected. The person guiding me would always say to me, "With what you have encountered you have no reason to be sad," and would urge me to resist, until one day he revealed to me the true reason for my deep dissatisfaction: "Don't you know that your work is already useful, above and beyond the fact that you accomplish everything or not? Offer what you do, whatever comes your way."

Creative intuition
From then on, even though the difficulties, my anxiety and fear of not making it, and my initial hostility to the subject remained, this advice never left me. Bit by bit I became aware that one's daily work, done in remembrance of the presence of Christ and as an offering, is that act which mysteriously contributes to saving the world.
Remembering this, over time, I found that I had the ability to see that every aspect of my work was positive. Above all I discovered, thanks to a professor (a master that I came upon almost miraculously), that the creative intuition at the base of a scientific article-made up of formulas and proofs-was a way of introducing me to reality. But I discovered that even the humble, boring work of every day (daily routine) is just as positive.
Having to correct formulas hundreds of times, being careful about the position and the details of all the letters, is truly something extraneous to my nature. I discovered, in this way, that work arises from the earth-as a flyer said many years ago-and that in the final analysis, precisely for this reason a university job is no different from that of the housewife who takes care of her children, because in every job a certain amount of humility is needed to be able to bend to outside circumstances.
Then offering becomes a gaze that sees where others do not see, and creativity is obedience to something that you do not choose, but you love because bit by bit you discover that it is positive. And thus you build.
So, while my university career started to take off, my point of reference remained always that little group of friends who, while not having anything to do with statistics, knew how to talk to the self that was I, and in concrete and continuing comparison showed me the positive aspect of every circumstance.
At the most crucial point of my career, not long before the examinations that would have given me a permanent post at the university, I was asked to become involved, within the sphere of what was then the MP [popular Movement] (this was 1985-86), with the economic commission, that is, with "works." This proposal left me somewhat perplexed, because it seemed to contradict the choice to remain in the university, and my most recurrent and skeptical question was, "How can I do both?"

The Company of Works
That question was answered like this: "You will not be a Nobel prizewinner in statistics, but you can do your job well in any case, and you will learn to use your time better, because you only have one life." Now I am a professor, I love my work, and I devote some time to the part of my work that is to help the Company of Works to grow.
There was also a second problem, and that was that I did not know where to start in getting involved in the works, so I asked Fr. Giussani what criteria I should follow in this new task. He answered, "Our friends in Alcamo make wine and this is their livelihood, but no one helps them to sell it. What does it mean to say we are socially involved? Do things in such a way that everything that someone makes can exist, help them." So I did the only thing I had learned to do well at the university: I went to see everyone who had a business, to listen to them and to ask their help, and I made the proposal that they get together to try to respond to emerging needs: to help the Solidarity Centers which found jobs for people but were disorganized; to stimulate more advanced entrepreneurs to go invest in the South in order to give jobs to the unemployed in those areas; to help small businesses to grow; to find work for those who, like my friend Lorenzo Crosta, gave an occupation to persons with handicaps but couldn't manage to break even; to set up works like the Food Bank; to travel around the Third World to help the projects of AVSI in support of our friends in the favelas of South America and the bidonvilles of Uganda.
I remember, during that period, a profound sense of skepticism surrounding this beginning: even people in the Movement thought the birth of a company of works in a world dominated by market mechanisms was impossible.

Sharing need
I too was dominated by this skepticism. My most recurrent thought on this subject was, "I don't know if we will make it," or rather, "We certainly will not make it." Fr. Giussani's confidence seemed to me out of place when, coming to the annual Day of the Company of Works, he would impart to us certainty and faith.
In addition, we were not exempt from making mistakes. It seemed to me that many of my companions were not moving toward the right goal, and so I would try to make them do what I wanted them to do, without looking at them positively as an event to encounter. And yet our leader, instead of saying they were wrong, often said that I was wrong, telling me, "You can make the others a terminal project of yours, but instead you have to understand their needs, help their freedom to express itself, both spiritually and materially."
In this dramatic confrontation and rife with disobedience, the Company of Works became more mature: we discovered that the aim was not above all to resolve needs, but to share them, to make Christianity as we had encountered it present in every aspect of life: we met many people, many of us created services and businesses, the group grew larger, there was even a capacity for public judgment born which the Meeting brings to light. Our petitions for subsidiarity for private schools are the sign of a commitment to guarantee liberty and democracy to every person and every reality in our country, even if they are very different from us.
But there is a last phase, the one that is still going on. I am part of the Memores Domini, and because of this frenetic activity I was always out, I was never at home. So people would ask me, "Do you have a house? Who is your family?"

David and Goliath
My working method had a weak point: it was in some ways a flight from myself, a covering up by activity of the ultimate questions that are the origin of everything.
I began to discover for the first time in an adult way that action is weak if it does not start out from a deepening of an origin lived in a specific place (for me this was the vocation to virginity and the house of the Memores Domini as a "scale model" of the world, for others the Fraternity group and the family).
The greatest discovery was that of a more mature way of following, one filled with the risk of my freedom, and less mechanical. Risking all of one's freedom, intelligence, and affection in what one does, trying to move the way the one who originated all this moves.
So, unceasingly, the charism that we have encountered tends to become the form that the relationships with my housemates, my friends, and my colleagues takes. Everything becomes a dramatic confrontation, because every relationship is between two "I"s, one who follows and one who leads, in whatever circumstance.
What we are doing is participating in an epoch-making act: to serve an Event that has already changed history in precise places. Let's think of what this means: at home, when we talk to government leaders or give newspaper interviews, when we build businesses, we challenge (like David) with the strength of our judgment the Goliaths who dominate us.
Thus, we discover that humanly everything is impossible: friendship, love, work, building a society; impossible to man, to me with my limits, but possible to God who became flesh among us.