EDITED BY PAOLA BERGAMINI
pberga@tracce.it

KIBBUTZ SASA, ISRAEL
Inexorable Positivity
Regarding a statement by Fr Giussani published on the cover of this issue of Traces: “If others go so far as terrorism, we have to go so far as a conscience that bears the ultimate consequences of the life that the Lord has created. This is the contribution that Christians bring to the so often incomprehensible mess of the world: the affirmation of an inexorable positivity of reality which makes it possible to keep starting over in life.”

Dear, great, blessed Fr Giussani: I am not a Christian, but as a good Jew I have been carrying this inexorable positivity with me for centuries. That is why every day I start over despite everything. That is why I seek the just, I seek a sliver of light, I seek to put out the fires of war and misunderstanding, and I seek desperately to shine a light on some so that others may know them and perhaps come closer to them. I know what it means when something is so beautiful that it “makes you weep.” I, thanks be to God, live these things every day… on the clouds, under the clouds, during my lessons, looking at sunsets, rainbows, when I listen to music, watching my children as they rehearse a scene. And I think that if I did not have all this, I would not be able to survive!
Angelica

BUCHAREST
Romanian Adventure
Time: 7:50 pm. The train moved slowly out of the station. The slow train would travel all night, crossing Romania from south to north, to reach Oradea and then Satu Mare the next morning. It would take at least 15 hours to finish its course. Flaviu, the boy traveling with me (we were returning from a meeting with CL people from various Romanian cities), stopped an instant as he was arranging his couchette and said to me, “Fr Renato, I really liked what you said this morning at McDonald’s.” We had stopped at McDonald’s around noon to get something to eat with some high school girls we had met this summer at the CL vacation. We had talked about what is happening in the world and about the Christian origins of our civilizations, of what a great fortune it is to be Christians and of our task to share this gift with others. Then it had grown late. I had only added that you need companionship, you need friends, so as not to lose sight of this important thing, and this was the very reason the Lord had made us meet each other. I have been in Romania for almost a year and if there is one thing that continues to amaze me, it is seeing people like these (and they are almost always very young), amazed and excited about the same things that fascinated me and so many of my friends in Italy: the presence of Christ among us, in the Church, which makes a greater taste for life possible even among difficulties and despite all our errors. And yet, here there is a different reality. There is a very visible poverty. We often happen to see people going through the trash or begging in the streets. And even normal families frequently live in need, with rising prices and salaries that may or may not reach a tenth of Italian wages. They have fifty years of Communism behind them, which have left their mark on the mentality and political practice (favoritism, corruption, and so forth). There is also a particular Church reality. Along with the Orthodox majority, there are Greek Catholics (who follow the Eastern rite), Roman Catholics (who follow the Latin rite), and Protestants of various extractions. During Communism, persecution was aimed mainly at the Greek Catholic Church. There were authentic martyrs to the faith, while the Church was stripped of all her property and, above all, of her freedom of action. Now freedom has returned, but not all the problems have been solved. Flaviu, my young traveling companion, is Orthodox. He asked me if this was a problem. I answered that in any case he too is a Christian, which means that Jesus is as important to him as He is to me. He nodded, reassured. This summer at the vacation, there was a Pentecostal girl, who afterwards sent me an e-mail saying, “What I liked… I cannot put into words… I felt the presence of the Lord in our midst from the very first day. I don’t know what can be more wonderful than having a friendship with brothers in the Lord!” We went on talking as the train moved through the night. Flaviu told me about his town, his family, the friends he has in Satu Mare, with whom he would like to do School of Community and build a deeper friendship. I promised him I would go see him, that we’ll eat a pizza together and he will let me meet his friends.
Fr Renato

NAPLES
At Home
Dear Fr Giussani:
I write you this letter in deep humility. You do not know me, but I have heard a great deal about you and what you have done. I am 19 years old and am from Naples. I was abandoned by my parents, but thanks to my friend Marcello I have come to know the friends from CL. Here I have found many persons who love me and show it as no one has ever done before. I have lived for the past few months in the CLU student residence, and even if I do not spend time with them, because of the difference in social class, and I do not go to School of Community, because I would rather be in the streets, I am nonetheless attracted by the reason they stay together, and I have understood that the reason is that God is there. In here, wherever I go, I see pictures of you, and every word that I like in what I hear being said around me, they tell me that it’s something you said. So I want to thank you for everything that, without you, I would not ever have come to know.
Ciro

CARATE BRIANZA
Heaven Is Not Mute
At the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Italy this summer, I was present at the meeting of Fr Pino and Rabbi Kopciowski. The title intrigued me: “Abraham the protester.” The rabbi recounted that Abraham’s father had an idol shop and that sometimes it happened that when he had to go out of town on business, he would ask his son to tend the shop. Abraham, however, had no patience for this business of idols. For example, one time, a warrior came into the shop looking for something suitable, and Abraham made fun of him: “How can a big boy like you need a little statue to make you feel like somebody?” In his book, Joseph and his Brothers, Thomas Mann says that Abraham had such a high opinion of himself that he could not stand being subjected to any idol, but only to the one almighty God. This summer, I took part in the Kracow-Czestochowa pilgrimage in Poland. After walking 290 miles, my feet sore and bleeding, when I arrived in front of the sanctuary I was certain that Our Lady would listen to anything I asked of Her. And this has been my experience in these years in the Movement: what I am, what I desire, is important; I am worth more than the mountains, because if I were not there to look at them, they would just stand rotting; everything is for me. And this is always true. The idea I had about the contradictoriness of reality is mistaken. Reality does not contradict desire, but is made for it. Fr Giussani made me understand this in what was for me the gravest contradiction: reality is not contradictory, but mysterious, in the true sense of the word. The Mystery is not something unknown, impenetrable, unreachable, and thus contradictory, but a Man who two thousand years ago in Galilee said, “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life.” He said it to his friends. His friends told their friends, and they told the people of the first century. Those of the first century told the people of the second… all the way to my mother (he says), and my mother told me, and I tell you. The day my mother died, last year, Giussani phoned my house. My father was in Paraguay, the house was full of people who were praying, crying, hugging me and my sisters. There was a lot of confusion. When they told me Giussani was on the phone, I hoped he would console me, say the right words to me for me to keep going and to repeat to my sisters. Instead, the first thing he said was, “Now your father is ready.” Then, when we went to see him, he welcomed us into his house saying, “Your mother’s death, and Enzo’s, have been the two moments in my life in which God has spoken most directly to me and to the Movement.” For Fr Giussani, heaven is not mute, it speaks. For him, what happens has a meaning. Reality speaks. We talked about these things with Fr Fabio, whom we were lucky to have at our CLU vacation this summer, and he said that not only does reality talk to him, but it talks to him about his vocation, about the task he has been assigned by God, about the Movement.

“Not only is the desire you have important, but it is for the whole world; this is vocation.” This was the closing sentence of the assembly at La Thuile, whose title was just this: “The Event is vocation.” The world needs people like this, people who are certain in the face of the mysteriousness of life, because the Mystery has become their companion. The world, which is crying out, needs to know Christ, and needs Fr Giussani to present Him to it.
Giovanni

“Meetings” for Work
Dear friends:
Because of work, I have had a chance to live (with my wife and children) first in England, then in Libya, and then again in England, where we returned about four years ago. However, my work leads me to travel quite frequently in Southeast Asia, and especially in Indonesia. God’s mercy sometimes gives us the grace to find ourselves in places where a companionship already exists to help us on our way, like here in London, or sends it to us, as happened in Libya with our friends Roberto and Iolanda from Pavia, and so many others who joined us later. At the beginning of March, I went to Indonesia, where I stayed for about three months, almost always without my family. The rhythm of work and the environment itself might have led me to live three months holding my breath, as it were, waiting to return home, but I met Franky, an Indonesian colleague who grew up as a Protestant and this year will come into the Catholic Church together with his wife. I also met Danhoe, a Catholic boy I had already met two years ago in other circumstances, when he was still a student at the Catholic University in Jakarta. I proposed that we all do School of Community together, and despite the hardship (Jakarta is a city of 12 million inhabitants, where it takes two hours to travel a mile), we continued to do it for the entire three months of my stay. This simple gesture totally changed the meaning of my stay there. In a concrete way, without our even realizing it, it led me and my family to live this time of suffering with a serenity that would otherwise have been impossible. Now Franky, his wife, and Danhoe receive Traces regularly.
Paolo, London

A Different War
“Lebanon enjoys a strategic position in the Middle East, because it constitutes the crossroads of the cultures and land of the Cedars. We are the descendants of the Phoenicians, the great people of that era, who created the alphabet and conquered the world with their historical ships…” This was the paragraph that was repeated every year in our history book, and we learned it by heart to the point of inheriting all the pride of being their descendants. Pope John Paul II, during his historic visit, said that Lebanon is not a country, but a message of culture in the Middle East. As a little girl, it made me very sad when everybody said to me, “You were born in 1975, the year of the war.” For all the children, the “war” slowly became a habit, something normal, part of daily life. It was normal to phone the school office every morning to find out if we were to go to school that day or not. It was normal to spend every two or three months in a different place like nomads, from Beirut to the south at Jounieh…. The course of the war determined everything. We were forced to take very efficient advantage of the “calm” time of the day. I remember well a particular moment of my life in 1989. We had been shut up for more than twenty days in a little refuge in Beirut. Since we had run out of bread, a group of our neighbors decided to cross the line of demarcation to go buy bread and medicines. I stared my father deep in the eyes to beg him to take me with him. And thus I took his hand and we went through the area of the Museum (Mathaf), which was a very dangerous spot at that time. My father held onto me tightly with a cold, determined hand, to the point that it hurt me. We did not say anything to each other, there was nothing to say to describe the deserted, destroyed streets. The pieces of broken glass and the detritus of bombs crunched under our feet… There was a bit of everything there. A section of our path was a minefield, and the soldiers had already cleared a very narrow passage for those adventurous enough to try it. I felt a great confidence in my father’s presence; I thought, “Whatever happens to me, Papa is here for me, Papa is close to me.” Now he has been gone for ten years. I will never be able to forget how he held onto me on this particular day in 1989. The war is over, and so many of my friends are going abroad in search of a different citizenship and a different identity. A flight toward a “safer” land and a “less complex” civilization than ours, where eighteen rites live together in 4,037 square miles. Will the terrifying collapse of the Twin Towers succeed in making us open our eyes to understand that peace and serenity are the fruits of trusting in Him? Will it teach us to have a part of the confidence that our ancestors have always had for Lebanon? My parents chose to remain in this country, defying everything and everybody. Will I be able to keep up this challenge and truly to love my destiny, “offering myself” to my reality?
Berthe Jean Youakim, Lebanon

About a Cover
We offer our readers a letter sent to Paolo Mangini, Vice-President of The William Congdon Foundation, about the cover of the September issue of Traces

Dear Dr Mangini:
I have been one of the correspondents of the ANSA agency in the United States for more than a year, and my job is to recount this extraordinary country every day to Italy and its mass media. As I jot down these few lines, I have in front of me the cover of the September issue of Traces, which has become for me in these incredible weeks an icon to look at in order to try to make sense of the apparent madness of reality. For whoever, like me, went–because of work–on that September 11th to the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, it was a moving surprise to see this cover, which juxtaposed the remains of the Twin Towers with a Crucifix by William Congdon. I appreciate the creative intelligence. That Crucifix alongside the place where the lives of more than 4,000 persons were disintegrated reflected better than any other image the meaning of the words pronounced in those days by John Paul II: “Even if the forces of darkness appear to prevail, those who believe in God know that evil and death do not have the final say.” New York and all of America, wounded by terrorism, are now the land of a people that seeks as never before a profound meaning in their lives and asks to be able to look to great personalities who know how to respond to the questions of their hearts. Once the wave of patriotism has passed, and the echo has died out of the notes of God Bless America, which today seems to suffice as comfort, a void will remain in the hearts of this outstanding people. The cynicism and banality of everyday life are ready to settle once again in consciences and to spread a layer of cement over the wounds. In this context, Congdon’s return to America seems to me to be exceptionally important. Looking at his history, the suspicion arises that his thirty years away from his homeland takes on the appearance of a good plan on the part of Destiny, as though everything had been a long preparation to restore Congdon to the Americans precisely at the moment when they really need him. I too at this moment, even though I know virtually nothing about art, feel that I “need” Congdon and his capacity to transform the surges of rage that he breathed in the New York of the 1950s into an ineffable testimonial of love for the Mystery.
Marco Bardazzi