To speak of an experience. Is
A journey of discovery, tracing correspondence with writers and voices of the past and of the present, following the thread of Fr Giussani’s interview with Gian Guido Vecchi published in Corriere della Sera, October 15, 2004. Man’s elementary experience before the Great Presence.
Christmas is the remembrance of the way
in which the Lord became present.
The Lord is never a past.
So Christmas is the remembrance
of the Lord who has become man,
a child, like every one of us
has been, and is.
Luigi Giussani
Passion, love and surprise at reality
My point of departure was a way of looking at things as a “passion for,” as “love,” an open attitude that doesn’t let you start off alone and generates a relationship. It is impossible to tackle a situation that has to do with life without this context causing bewilderment, a surprise. When this astonishment happens, then enthusiasm in speaking to the youngsters becomes logical, all the commitment will be subordinated to the work of intelligence, for it would be a mistake to follow someone without a reason; in the human brain there is a linchpin that demands the explanation of the reason. In other words, without the surprise of reality as the launching point, man would remain more or less bogged down by the mere need to do things--but to do what? And he would feel anything he attempts to be useless.
In spite of all his errors, a person who loves reality, or Creation, will not go wrong. If you love reality, you are inside it, you already live inside it, and you embrace your theme, life, without need for abstraction. You need only to love reality, always, in every way, even in the reckless and approximate way I have done; but you have to love it. Apart from that there are no rules.
Giovanni Testori

In an interview, when asked how he felt at the age of 108, he answered, “Like a man on a trapeze.”
Finally, as he prayed, he no longer asked for anything, but gave thanks; he gave thanks, movingly, gladly, tenderly, watching from the terrace the trees shaken in the distance by a silent breeze. He knew that every day, every minute, every second was a gift. And he knew that to give thanks was to prolong life.
Giuseppe Pontiggia
The Residence of the Chinese Shadows

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me --
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire --
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.
Edgar Lee Masters
Spoon River Anthology – “George Gray”

Clearly, my view of the things of the world, on objects, is not a natural view, not the view of an unbeliever. I always see things as a bit miraculous, every object is a bit miraculous. I have a vision that, always in a formless way, is in a certain sense religious.
Pier Paolo Pasolini

It must be like a car that suddenly finds itself before a brick wall and tries to steer away. What appears before you had no premises. It happens and arouses astonishment.
Something is created between the conductor and the orchestra whose chemistry cannot be technically anticipated; it is a mystery, a mystery that brings astonishment.
Riccardo Muti
An act of life, not a discourse
Firstly we have to correct the normal conception of faith. The whole new beginning of a Christian experience—and therefore of every relationship—is not generated by a cultural point of view, as if it were a discourse to be applied to things, but it happens precisely as an experience. It is an act of life that sets everything in motion. The beginning of faith is not an abstract culture but something that precedes this: an event. Faith is taking note of something that has happened and continues to happen, of something new from which everything starts off, really. It is a life and not a discourse about life, because Christ has begun to “leap” in the womb of a woman! It’s this perception of Christianity and of the Church as life that has been lost in recent centuries, and with it we have lost the possibility of the beginning of an answer to the questions of the youth. If the beginning is missing, there is no tackling the problem posed by man’s nature: the need for an answer to the demands of his reason. So, to speak of faith to the youth, but even to adults, is to speak of an experience and not to repeat a discourse on religion, however correct it might be.
This is the fact, and a fact is the most stubborn thing in the world.
Michail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita

You educate much by what you say, more by what you do, but much more by what you are.
Ignatius of Antioch

You know very well: you fail at something, you are tired and you can take no more. And suddenly in the crowd you meet a person’s look–a human look–and it is as if you have come near a hidden divine presence. And suddenly everything becomes simpler.
Andrej Tarkovskij
from his film Andrej Rublëv

Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes, and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully deciphered and copied and re-copied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one that "contended, or cried out," or drew attention to what was going on; but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning, and a city.
John Henry Newman,
from Historical Sketches, Volume 2
THE END OF MAN
There is no diffidence on our side, but the well-founded awareness of a very problematic situation that finds its expression in a poem by Carducci, Su Monte Mario: “until gathered below the equator, pursuing the calls of the fleeting heat, the exhausted offspring have only one woman, one man who, standing erect and bruised amidst the ruins of the mountains, among the dead forests, with glassy eyes will watch you, sun, go down over the immense expanse of ice.” These words mark the end of man. It is an attitude caused by a negativity in the conception of what man is and by an incomplete development of his sensitivity and intelligence.
What is man? A worm crawling over a stone, earth, a grain of life floating aimlessly in the measureless vastness of the universe.
Every doctrine that describes man as an animal with a distinctive attribute tends to obscure the problem that we are trying to understand. Man is a specific being who wants to understand his uniqueness: not his animality, but his humanity.
Abraham J. Heschel

We were a bunch of clumsy beings, embarrassed at ourselves, we had not the least reason for being there, not one of us, each being, confused, vaguely unsettled, we felt too much related to the others. Too much, it was the only relationship that I could establish amongst those trees, those gates, those cobblestones.
I tried in vain to count the chestnuts, to position them in relationship to Valleda, to compare their height with those of the plane trees: each of them fled from the relationships in which I tried to enclose them, tried to stay alone, and brimmed over. I felt the arbitrariness of these relationships (which I persisted in sustaining to delay the collapse of the human world, the world of measures, of quantities, of directions); they no longer had a grip on things. Too much, the chestnut, there before me, a little to the left. Too much Valleda…
And I, exhausted, languid, obscene, in digestion, full of dark thoughts – I, too, was too much.
Jean Paul Sartre
from Nausea

Prayer for a child
Make him different from us.
May he have neither parents, nor children, nor family
Nor teachers, nor disciples
Nor place of refuge
May he never meet Conquerors or Generals
Nor even Saints.
May he know neither Law not Order,
Nor Fatherland nor Religion.
May he be neither poor nor rich,
Have no success
May he never know the bitterness of victory
Nor the rancor of defeat
And not even the illusion of peace.
May all men be for him father and mother and child
May his mind be his master
And he his own disciple.
May heaven and earth be his home,
his fatherland and his Church.
May his order be firmness and goodwill his law.
May imagination and courage be his wealth
and his power.
May he never let fall his sword
and may conflict for him be both victory and defeat
may the joy of the present moment
be life and death for him.
Lord,
may he be not like us
And may he, at least, believe
That you exist.
Marcello Bernardi
written for the International Year of the Child promoted by the UN in 1979
The divided “I”
Today, man is living a sort of existential dyspepsia, an alteration of his elementary functions, which divides him, like the man-woman relationship described by Carducci: when they don’t consider themselves together at the origin, they are divided, two separate entities that will never meet, not even at the end. It could seem easy, for example, to consider the product of a page of art only as the outcome of one’s own capacity. The same happens with work, the same with love for a woman. This is a widespread fact.
She says she loves her family, but has been separated for 35 years. I still want it. I adore my daughter and my grandson, and would like to see them more often. And I often go on trips with my wife. Do you follow me? Man is always divided between love and freedom, but if you have one you don’t have the other. I have found a middle way: friendship with my women.
Luciano de Crescenzo

The feeling of boredom is born in me from that absurdity of a reality that is insufficient or incapable of convincing me of its effective existence.
Alberto Moravia
Boredom

He let the whole world weigh down on him. For example? Well, for example, what does it mean to be a man. In a town. In a century. In transition. In a crowd. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to terrible controls. In a condition determined by mechanization. After the recent failure of progressive hopes. In a society that had nothing of community and undervalued the individual. For multiplied power of numbers that made the “I” negligible.
Saul Bellow
Herzog

Then the wounded
man must live desiring that child
of his own mind, that image of love,
containing so much of the Olympians
in itself: in all its looks, and dress, and speech,
equal to that lady the rapturous lover desires,
and thinks in his confusion that he loves.
Now indeed he serves and loves the idea,
and not the lady whose body he embraces.
He is angered at last to realize his error,
his mistaken objective, and often, wrongly,
blames his lady.
Giacomo Leopardi
Aspasia
A “generous challenge” to man’s freedom….the victory over what would otherwise be misfortune
What makes man’s perception change is the incumbent dependence that must be attributed to everything before embarking on any enterprise: “Sweetest, mighty/ Dominator of the depth of my mind,” Leopardi sang. Thus, to the brutal loneliness to which man calls himself, as if to save himself from an earthquake, Christianity is offered as an answer. The Christian finds a positive answer in the fact that God has become man: this is the event that surprises and comforts what would otherwise be misfortune. It’s inconceivable for God to act towards man unless as a “generous challenge” to his freedom.
I would never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy

God’s Logos came condescending out of His goodwill to us and to reveal Himself to us. He took pity on our race, sympathized with our weakness, accepted our corruption, but did not tolerate the dominion of death, He took a body for himself; and He did this out of love.
Athanasius of Alexandria
The Incarnation of the Word

All the world’s slavish subjections are not worth
one fine look of a free man,
To this freedom, to this gratuitousness I sacrificed everything, says God,
To the taste I have for being loved by free men,
Freely,
Gratuitously,
By true men, virile, adult, firm.
Charles Péguy
The Mystery of the Holy Innocents
God’s magnanimity, measure of man’s participation in reality
The modern objection that Christianity and the Church reduce man’s freedom is nullified by the adventure of God’s relationship with man. Whereas, thanks to a limited idea of freedom, it is inconceivable for man today that God should commit Himself in a straitening relationship with man, as if denying Himself. This is the tragedy: man seems more concerned to affirm his own freedom than to acknowledge this magnanimity on God’s part, that alone fixes the measure of man’s participation in reality and thus really frees him.
A pearl shines even in filth and a sparkling limpid gem reflects even in mud. This is the promise our Lord made. “I will glorify those who give me glory.” Whoever wants to can hear quite easily these things as regarding the future… I for my part am seeing that that promise is fulfilled in him even for this life. We have received more than we have given. We have left trifles and find ourselves in possession of great things; Christ has kept his promises with a hundredfold interest.
St Jerome to his friend Pammachius

There are stupid men who say, “Could not the Divine wisdom have freed men in another way without taking humanity on Himself, without being born of a woman and suffering all this for sinners?” To them we reply, “Certainly He could have; but had He done differently, He would have displeased our stupidity all the same.”
Augustine
The Christian Fight

In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing: the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation.
C. S. Lewis
Surprised by Joy

The true nihilist, who disregards every absolute and every certainty, sways naturally between doubt and tolerance, between skepticism and piety: intellectual and psychological conditions that are irreducible, and even clean contrary to violence and terror. (…)
It is to be hoped that modern nihilistic thought, instead of being denounced and condemned, might be spread in consciences as the best antidote against all dangerous messianism.
Mario Andrea Rigoni
Corriere della Sera, November 14, 2004