Cl in the world

Is There a Man who Desires Life and Longs for Happy Days?

The title of next year’s Meeting in Rimini: what a challenge! This question cannot be taken for granted now, just as in the days of King David. Life is a vocation. Here is a short introduction to the theme

“Is there a man who desires life and longs for happy days?” The title of this year’s Meeting (in Rimini, Italy, in August of 2003) is inspired by a verse from Psalm 34, a psalm attributed to King David in which God asks man a few questions, or better, He poses exhortations. God asks man if he wants to see many days and if he wants to live happily, because the answer, which everyone would believe to be affirmative, cannot be taken at all for granted. It could not be in King David’s day and it cannot be now, in this time when man closes his eyes to the positive in life and does not have the certainty of being able to be truly happy. At the most he is contented with–or even wants–“the experience of a fleeting pleasure,” an ephemeral enjoyment; in this way he reduces the size of his desire. The Psalms describe God’s perennial dialogue with Israel as He enters into contact with His people. In Psalm 34, He spurs on His distracted children and, in times that, then too, must have been sad, difficult, and full of grief, He calls to them.

Complete freedom
God takes the trouble to call and leaves it to man to respond in complete freedom. The verse can be translated in two ways: “Who is the man who…” or “Is there a man who desires life and longs for happy days?” The latter puts a more dramatic accent on the question, because it is as though He were looking in the desert for a man desirous of being happy and living many days filled with joy. God foresees in man a shadow of skepticism and incredulity, precisely because happiness, according to current thought, is reduced to an image of our own: worldliness, money, and power. But happiness is, in truth, something else; the Christian, called and able to respond affirmatively to the appeal of positivity, lives the experience of this vocation not as a mechanical will to convince himself that life is beautiful. Being called is tantamount to welcoming something that fulfills and satisfies our deepest desire. Indeed, it reveals what we desire most intensely, even while it does not eliminate the inevitable dimension of pain.

There is no doubt that the world holds this vocation in low esteem, judging it scandalously irrational. The conviction is becoming more and more deeply rooted that everything lasts a short time, because only finite things exist, so that people say, “There’s no hope.” As Heidegger, one of the most frequently quoted philosophers in cultural contexts, says, “The question arises: what use are the supreme values if they do not give a sure guarantee that the ways and means for the ends they bring with them may be accomplished? But then, what use is whatever man does? What use is it, for example on the job, for man to do more than the bare minimum? The prevailing mentality gives an answer that bears the Puritan and moralizing imprint: because it is useful to society. It is as though we were simple cogs in a mechanism, servants with no dignity: the farmer is useful to agriculture, the engineer is useful to engineering, the teacher is useful to the school.”

Room for the Infinite
The experience of happiness can be lived only by the man who, in his life, leaves room for the Infinite. It is no coincidence that the call to a relationship with the Infinite is found, with the proper emphasis, in the Rule of St Benedict. That is to say, it is found in an experience in which physical and metaphysical, natural and supernatural are carried to an objective possibility for life.

“Which of you desires life and covets many days to enjoy good?” In the Bible, the figure of Jacob describes who this man is: Jacob is the personification of the strong man, the man who strongly wants to be happy. He is the one who sees the fulfillment of his promise, but at the cost of how much suffering. He is ordered to set out to look for a wife; in a dream, he is promised descendants who will fill the earth. Once he is married and a rich man, he is ordered to return to his father’s house, but Jacob is afraid of his brother Esau’s revenge. God appears to him once again, and fights with him all night; before blessing him, He strikes his thigh, leaving him lame.

This year’s Meeting announces that we can be men like Jacob, branded by the Mystery, but surprisingly alive and operative in the world.

Next year’s Meeting will be held August 24-30, 2003, in the new Rimini
Fairgrounds (Via Emilia, 155, 47900 Rimini, Italy).
For information, call +39 0541 783100.