Usa

Ground Zero Within Us

The Diakonia of the North American communities was held in Washington from January 17th to 20th, with the tragic events of September 11th as its starting point. The testimonies, songs, history, and the words of Cardinal McCarrick, who celebrated Mass

By Marco Bardazzi

There is a recurring theme in the songs of the American blues tradition. For decades, traveling from the great Mississippi Delta to Chicago and then New York, the interpreters of African-American music, the soul of America, carried from one part of the country to another melodies that revolved around one guiding thread: “Nobody in the world loves you, certainly nobody loves you for what you are, and if you love somebody… this somebody surely loves somebody else.”

The sadness of this seemingly unavoidable proposition has taken form in songs laden with longing for an unachievable happiness. These songs, led by the guitars of Jonathan, Riro and John, were offered on one of the three evenings of the Diakonia of the North American CL communities, in a convention hall on the outskirts of Washington, DC.

It is impossible to avoid being struck by the hopeless beauty of these songs and by the import, for America and the world, of the words of Giancarlo Cesana, who attended the same meeting in Washington: “Being loved means being chosen. Being chosen for our happiness. Discovering that we are necessary, important, fundamental to someone else. And this someone else is God.” Again, “Happiness is given for a task. And it is not the opposite of sadness, but it is the opposite of desperation.” And finally, “Being loved is possible only if you look for love, if you are poor. My wish for each of you is that you always perceive yourselves as an entreaty.”

Given this perspective, it becomes easier to fill the personal Ground Zero that September 11th has left in the hearts and minds of everyone. The questions raised by the new reality that emerged from the terrorist attack on America dominated a good part of the Diakonia, and it could not have been otherwise. The wound is recent and went too deep–especially in the United States–not to act as a constant provocation in the daily life of the American communities. The position taken by the Movement from the very first days, with the Traces editorial entitled “America,” represented a decisive step, and certainly not a simple one, for those who, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, found themselves face to face with those words and above all with a concept of “evil” no longer limited to a label to attach to the mug shots of the terrorists.

The same violence
The fruits of this labor soon emerged in dozens of testimonies. Danny Patterson, recounting the events and feelings experienced in these months by the Fraternity of northern California, said simply and frankly, “I know I am capable of the same evil as the members of Al Qaeda. I know I can respond with the same violence.” For Chris Bacich, the sight of the Towers crumbling in front of his eyes reawakened an immediate awareness: “I felt that what was happening had something to do with my own betrayals.” Fr Rich, on Staten Island, thought long and hard in the beginning about whether or not, and how, to use the flyer that spoke of original sin. His hesitations were dispelled by talking it over with his friends, after which it was clear that “the judgment coming from those words was a merciful hand that brushed away all my hesitations and grabbed my humanity.”

In the Memores house where Cristina lives, the work on the judgments proposed by the Movement in these months “made possible a new intelligent look at reality,” the fruit of “an encounter with a fatherhood that follows us and does not desert us.” It is an awareness that enabled a different way of reading the news in the media, but also of seeing real miracles, like the Protestant woman who asked us to take care of her children, “because this is the way they can find happiness in their lives” and the atheist who confessed she had never heard Christ talked about like this (“You make me want to know Him”).

“What remains is what has been judged,” said New Yorker Angelo Sala, summing up the past weeks: “The things that have left a trace in me are the ones I have judged and that are part of my consciousness of reality. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter how enormous what happens is, it doesn’t have the power to change my life.” For Fr Jerry, in Rochester, comparing the judgments of the experience of the Movement with the patriotic rhetoric prevailing in the United States after September 11th suggested a new awareness of the limitations in the relationship between Americans and the God who is named constantly, invoked in songs, printed on the currency. Jonathan dwelt on the immediate desire to seek out the faces of friends, from the earliest moments after the tragedy, as the only rational response to what was happening.

The evil inside us
The terrorist attack, in the end, seems to have cleared many doubts off the field. “Evil is not only a possibility, but a reality, something we have to deal with every day,” Cesana explained. In responding to September 11th, he observed, without this awareness there is the risk of a reaction that is merely sentimental. “Evil is among us, it is inside us,” as the terrorists themselves demonstrated, camouflaging themselves within the heart of American daily life. “Terrorism is a cancer in society just as sin is a cancer inside us,” said Cesana. And we are frightened and still affected by September 11th because we are aware of this presence in us.

But being aware of this fact is not enough; it is not sufficient for us to change. At the most we become sad, like the blues singers. “But to change, we need something positive; something negative does not change you,” Cesana went on to say. “To change, you need a positive presence in your life, that loves you for what you are–not after you have done something in order to become someone else; it loves you for what you are now.” It loves you with all your frailty and the “forbidden desire” that emerged several times, intangible but present, in the dialogue in Washington. This is a desire that in today’s world is sometimes painful, because it has to measure itself against a society that rewards the drive to do something great, but then is able to respond to this demand only with the tools of competition, pitting one against the other. “This is the forbidden desire,” Cesana emphasized, “that there may be someone who loves me for what I am.”

Being loved means being chosen. The fruits, in America, are abundant by now, and Giorgio Vittadini recalled them by reviewing the steps made in these years by the Movement. He underlined Fr Giussani’s instructions after the success of the presentation of The Religious Sense at the United Nations not to force things with lots of projects. “In an unforeseeable way,” Vittadini said, “it happened that people from the most far-flung parts of America started realizing what Giussani describes in his writings: man as entreaty, as desire for the infinite. The desire for God to reveal Himself, because otherwise even if God appears as dominating everything, it is not enough. Wonder at Christ present and at the Church that embodies Him.” Awareness of an encounter with Christ in the historical form of the charism, he added, “makes us want to belong to the Church in the form of a companionship, as happened with St Benedict in the sixth century, while the Twin Towers of that time were falling down.”

The Cardinal’s words
The affectionate presence at the Diakonia of the Archbishop of Washington, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, who celebrated Mass for the community, is certainly connected with the action of Mystery in the life of the Movement in these years in the United States. Besides entertaining the 200 people present with a series of anecdotes about his long-standing friendship with Msgr Lorenzo Albacete, the Cardinal explained that he is “firmly convinced of the importance of movements in the Church” and urged everyone to be “witnesses, wherever you are, to the presence of Christ in the world.” A flood of brief testimonies showed the Archbishop what CL is today in the United States, from GS and CLU to the communities scattered in more than 70 cities. Cardinal McCarrick thanked those attending for their “presence in our Diocese and for the fruits that I see bursting forth here and throughout the country.” The Archbishop was applauded with heartfelt gratitude, as he asked for prayers for his work in a city where he is called to bear witness for Christ even inside the White House.

Wrapped in the whiteness of a great snowfall, which made the backdrop to the meeting in Maryland even more beautiful, the long weekend of the Diakonia enabled those present to go to the depths of the American spirit and to retrace the history of its best musical genres, like jazz, blues, and pop music. But they also traced in the history of earlier centuries and the mentality of the Founding Fathers the key to reading current events. A meeting with Msgr Albacete and Dr Robert Tobin, professor of political science at Miami University, helped the audience to understand better the origins of the complex religiosity of America and the system of freedom in the United States.

The discovery of judgment
Fr Fabio Baroncini had the task of introducing the text of the next School of Community, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, and his itinerary of reconstruction of the historical confrontation between man and the “problem of God,” marked forever by the event of Christ, enabled him to deal directly with crucial aspects of American culture. Starting with Jesus Christ, the relationship between man and God “is no longer established by a tradition, whether ethnic or cultural. I do not believe because I have my hand on my heart, because I am looking at the flag, or because I am of Italian or Irish origin. I believe because I have measured myself against this impressive challenge.” The greatest danger today, Fr Fabio warned, “is not Islam, but the massive reduction of the Christian experience to pantheism or nihilism.”

Many other moving fragments of the work done in Washington stay with us: the touching testimony by Maureen, a “head hunter” in a large Manhattan firm, to whom September 11th gave the chance to discover the Movement; the report of the presentation of Fr Giussani’s book in Houston; Mike Eppler’s passionate words about the adventure of the “Evansville, Indiana band.” But what remains, above all, as Vittadini stated, is the discovery made in these years in America of the word “experience.” “Faith as judgment. The most important way we can be helped to say ‘yes’ is to become aware of what has happened. The exercise of judgment, the most important gesture of our friendship, the way in which everything I encounter can be compared with the original proposal, with the original desire. The presence of Christ as judgment is true for everything.”