LETTERE

CHILE
Letters from Prison

A group of friends who have been doing charitable work in the Correctional Center of the Colina penitentiary in Santiago, Chile, sent us some letters from inmates addressed to Fr. Giussani

Good friend: The reason I am sending this note is to tell you about something that for me was an important experience. For my part, I learned what life is, together with these friends who are so special and who have taught us many things that have turned out to be really wonderful. For example, they tell us about all the things that are in this world and that one doesn't notice. But with the experience I have lived in this period, I have realized how wonderful our dear God is, how beautiful this world is, and that by a simple mistake one can suddenly forget about this life. But one should never forget that there is a God who loves all of us, and these friends have taught me to consider life as something truly special.

Ricardo



I address you with great respect, Fr. Giussani. Besides greeting you, I would like to tell you that this experience I have been living for more than a year now has been very beautiful and very important for my spiritual life, because I have found peace, happiness. It doesn't matter that I am in prison, because this peace and this happiness that the Lord has given me are something more than everything there is in the world, they are something more than all the material things to which one has a right. I firmly believe that God is my Savior. For this reason, Fr. Giussani, I am writing to you so that you will know that we think of you and your messages always. With this, I greet you warmly.

José



SESTO SAN GIOVANNI
The Jews and Us

At 70 years of age (it was either this year or never), we accepted our daughter's invitation to accompany her on a tour of New England in the United States. Thus the four of us set out-we have a daughter and a son-to see new places and to visit old friends whom we had repeatedly hosted in Italy over the past 24 years. So many different people showed us an extraordinary welcome, from Italians of immigrant families to Americans who had been there for generations; from Chinese friends to the elderly painter of Russian origin, Rhoda, just recently widowed, who offered us hospitality in her home for twelve days. Rhoda is a practicing Jew, and so on Thursdays she is busy at home preparing bread for the Sabbath, which she celebrates even if she is alone. This time, instead, there were also the four of us Christians. On Friday she cleaned the house. She lit the candles before dinner, called us around the table, and sang the blessing of the wine and then the blessing of the bread. She passed around the wine and broke and gave out the bread, and we all took some. The preparations, the candles, the chanted Psalms, the breaking of the bread all took us right to the heart of their customs, with the same gestures that were perhaps the ones done during Christ's time. How disconcerting it must have been when He did them on Thursday instead of Friday, and when He said, "This is my body"-what an impression of astonishing difference! But at the same time, this gesture brought us together as brothers and sisters. Through the long story of faithfulness to God that these gestures expressed, it was truly evident that, as the Pope told us, the Jews are our older brothers. It was very clear that we are a part of that same story, and that Christianity is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. On a rainy afternoon, while I was reading a book on the Holocaust, our Jewish friend was reading The Religious Sense, which my daughter gave her. That evening, talking to her daughter, Rhoda advised her to read it because, she said, "It is not a book written to convert people at all costs, but to make them more human."

Piera, Enzo, Giulietta, and Giovanni



MILAN
New Beauty

Dearest Fr. Giussani: Countless thanks for all the things you have told us this year, during the numerous visits to the novices [in Memores Domini], all the way up to the lessons on "Mystery and Sign" and the Fraternity Retreat. Close and methodical attention to the texts, together with prayer-to which I have been faithful, even forced by circumstances-made me read these things in the context of the experience I was having. The discovery that I live what you say was a wonderful one. I also literally devoured L'attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction that Is Jesus] and… it's really all true! I didn't understand everything, but the depth of experience, even if it is only the crumbs of a beginning, makes everything more clear, true, and engaging. I am very grateful to Jesus for letting me experience the fact that "Mystery and sign coincide." Without a deepening of my relationship with Christ it is really evident that it would not be like this, because either one "cuts out" Christ or "cuts out" others. But how awful this would be! Instead, I am so happy and glad to have this experience, strong in the knowledge that on this path no one sacrifices anything-the hundredfold is there, it really is! If you accept the sacrifice, much more "comes back" to you, unexpected and truly wonderful. If I truly give everything, without holding back, I get everything. Then there comes a continual reassurance that the Lord keeps His promises. I ask to become ever more able to love as Jesus loves because it is really beautiful, it's a total experience: for this reason I ask to be able to love always as He does. One of the things that struck me most at the Retreat were the people who stopped me to say:"How beautiful you've become!" It's incredible, if I think about the terrible months I have passed! Do you know what it is that makes the difference? I'm in love! I'm more in love with Jesus! I realize that these months have been a Grace, and I ask that I not forget any of it. When I get up in the morning I can't help remembering that another day has been given to me, and that months ago, every morning I had to deal with how much pain I was feeling. In any case, what we were told at La Thuile about our mission is magnificent. I realized that everything was already there in what you said to the Fraternity, but I had not grasped it like this. This living the mission, which is life, is just what we of Memores have to do, isn't that right? Isn't our way of life a continuing and total witness?

Name withheld

MILAN
Companions in the Fight

Dear Fr. Giussani: On Thursday, September 16th, I went to lunch with the patients in the house at Seveso (for terminal AIDS victims) and it came out that one of them, Davide, 35 years old, used to be a member of Lotta Continua [left group active in the Seventies] and that in the 1970s he occupied the schools in Bresso, often attacking also members of CL. In that community which he did not love, there was the seed of the place that would take him in, because the house for AIDS victims was created from the labor of adults who grew up in that company. Davide, who because of his illness is almost completely blind and paralyzed, three days ago wrote the letter enclosed here.

Alessandro



I was twenty years old, but I will not let anyone say that this is the best time of life. Time has flown (now I'm 35) and I have found myself fighting against the mortal illness called AIDS. In this interval, for me nothing happened: denial, the illness that struck me at the root of my thoughts, and I find now, years later, that I lived only in the memory of those who are close to me and near me: my parents and the people who work in this house where I have been living for little more than a year. I have picked myself up and have been able to make it only thanks to some people whom I have found to be truly exceptional. It is thanks to them that I am here dictating this letter. For a long time I went to bed early at night, the lights went out and I was alone. Alone in this solitude I may have found a meaning and some answers that presuppose a question. I asked only to be able to continue to live, to continue to hope. I would love not to have felt those needs or vices that pushed me toward an unexpected freedom. It is as though my life has begun again, in the place where I am now. Here the past exists only as a bugbear, one into which I can always fall again. I have made it, then: that calamity called drugs did not beat me, and now I am free. Freedom, this is the name I give to the place where I am living now. I am present in these last ten years of my life without a memory. I am alive in the memory of those traveling the path with me. Like a drowning person who gets his breath, I too have felt like I was born again, but I have not yet defeated the worm of the inevitable discontent. I am asked to keep on living, even though I keep on "always crashing in the same car." (David Bowie) All this brings me back to the blackness of my current state: to say blackness is for me today the best metaphor to express my pain (that of not being able to write, read, see). Here they have led me to face my weakness, they have taught me what I had unlearned: living life also means letting oneself be led, in every need this is a true affirmation.

Davide

This is the dedication that a Romanian girl wrote on her diploma to some Italian friends with whom she had stayed as part of the Hospitality Families program:

I was alone in the desert and felt the emptiness I had inside…. I was sad, lonely, and a veil of fog was over my eyes. Then by chance I met some people who took the fog away from my eyes and made me see the beautiful things I had around me. I began to trust them, I began to feel less lonely, and the most important thing is that they talked to me of Another. I began to love Him and them and in this way I began to walk on the path of happiness. Thank you for everything.

Monica, Romania