| LETTERS Mary, Certainty and Hope Dear Fr Giuss: My 28-year-old cousin, Anna Rita, died during childbirth together with her baby. Nobody expected it. She had no problems during the nine months of pregnancy. She was a very strong woman, in both body and character, with a great will to live. When I saw my aunt, Anna Rita’s mother, she hugged me and asked over and over what sin she had committed against Jesus Christ, that she should receive so much suffering–today, her daughter and the little one, and only eight years before, her 21-year-old son, in a car crash. It was a difficult moment for everyone. I was undecided whether I should go on the pilgrimage to Loreto, or stay home with my relatives, but my wife Valeria told me it was important that I be in Loreto, to make my cry heard to Our Lady. All the way home from Loreto afterwards I continually asked myself whether Our Lady had heard my cry, my aunt’s cry. In this moment–and this will stay with me for the rest of my life–I realize that my only certainty is you, having met you, and it is only because of this certainty that I can entrust myself to Our Lady, the certainty and hope for my future. I send you my aunt’s embrace and my own: we really need prayer, above all so that this pain and suffering may become a clear prayer to God, and not anger. Rino, Cerignola It Happens in Our Schools In the middle school (which was born of the initiative of a few CL families in Lugano) where I work as principal, we have had a Buddhist teacher for two years now. When she came for the job interview, she was the only candidate available for her subject. After having explained to her the philosophy of our school, we agreed that she would stay for a trial year, to give both us and her the maximum freedom, and, at the end of that period, we would decide whether we should continue this collaboration, and she would decide whether or not to stay with us. Soon after the first lessons, some students from the first-year class ran up to me, saying, “Angela doesn’t pray; she makes us pray in the morning and before lunch, but she doesn’t pray with us.” To find out how it was going, and to get them to talk more, I asked, “What do you mean, she doesn’t pray?” They replied, “It isn’t that she doesn’t pray, but she doesn’t pray with us, because she prays in another way; she says she’s Buddhist.” “And what did you say?” “That she should show us how she prayed, but she said she couldn’t do it during the lesson, so we talked about it afterwards.” Many such discussions between this teacher and her students followed, and continue to this day. The students are very curious, but some, she regularly tells me, have a strong desire to understand why she isn’t Christian, and all the students, practicing Catholics or not, want to talk together about this topic. Toward the end of her first year of teaching, she was the one to come to me to remind me that the trial period was over. For my part, I had no doubts. The experience had been positive from every point of view. She would be the one to decide. She said, moved, “I’ll stay. In the public schools, nobody knows who I am, and I never had to say what my religion is; here, instead, right from the first day, it was easy to present myself with my identity.” This year, a similar situation happened. We needed a substitute teacher for German, and there was no perfect candidate in sight. Among the various possibilities, I chose a Belgian woman, experienced in teaching, whose mother was German. She declared right away that she wasn’t a believer. She was glad to take on the hours, but was concerned that she wouldn’t be suitable for a Catholic school. I didn’t really have much choice, so I hired her. From the very start, her relationship with all the teachers was quite cordial, so much so that an intense collaboration developed with the other language teachers. She participated in our periodical meetings to judge various situations, showing great attention and interest. One afternoon after school, she came to me, somewhat anxious, telling me she needed to talk about what had happened in her class, during the prayer before lunch. She told me, firmly but a bit fearfully, perhaps thinking she had gotten involved in an issue in which she had no part, that she had had to interrupt the prayer, because the students were praying badly, lazily and sniggering. She repeated what she had said to the class, “I am atheist and I don’t pray. You’re not obliged to pray either, but if you do it, do it well, because your dignity derives from it.” I thanked her for her action, and said it was a reminder for me to live more consciously what I am, and told her as well that I would speak to the students about it. She later confirmed that after this episode, not only the moment of prayer, but also her work with that class changed. Roberto, Lugano Life Is Beautiful Dear Fr Giussani: My daughter Adele is two and a half months old. A sonogram in the sixth month of pregnancy revealed that there were grave anomalies in her brain development, which would cause serious handicaps. The technician told us, as the only consolation possible, that we shouldn’t worry, because “even though Italy forbids abortions in the sixth month of pregnancy, there are other countries where it can still be done.” My wife and I returned home ripped up with anguish. We felt like the apostles the day Jesus died. We felt that God had betrayed the promise of fecundity He had made to us on our wedding day. That evening, having spent the entire day closed in at home without wanting to see anyone, I turned the cell phone back on and began receiving scores of messages from our friends. Two in particular struck me. One was from a girl who had been coming to our School of Community for a few months. She wrote that we were the ones who had taught her that reality is positive, and that she continued to believe it to be true. This blew me away, because I didn’t know how to respond to her, and at that moment I couldn’t see the positive at all. The second message that struck me more than the others said that in such a difficult moment, I had to be a man of faith, because when the sometimes unbearable veil of appearances does not make evident the good face of things, the man of faith is the one who conserves this positive in his heart and prays that it be manifested. This prayer has become for me and my wife the point of work and sharing with our friends from which it has been possible to begin again. The next day we went to Loreto, and the next weekend we organized a pilgrimage with our Fraternity friends to the sanctuary of the Madonna di San Luca. During the same period, at the university where I work, about twenty of my students and colleagues gathered spontaneously in a classroom to recite the Rosary. From that gesture came the proposal to recite a Rosary together once a week until Adele was born, and a score of friends participated every time. Each time, we read quotations from Giussani, in particular his last words at the Exercises (“Life is beautiful, it is a promise made by God with the victory of Christ.”) The Fraternity of Bologna and the community in Cesena where we live began to organize initiatives of prayer for my family a bit everywhere. Parallel to this, friends from the Movement began to plan the most effective medical program possible, looking all over Italy for the best specialists to help my daughter. So, in a short time, a whole people gathered around this child, asking for the courage to affirm the positivity of living. As time passed, I understood that in asking for Adele’s healing, each of these friends who supported and support us found in themselves a more urgent need to see the true and the positive inside things manifested. In the relationship with my daughter, each of them could find a possibility for deepening their own experience, a support in recognizing the ultimate positivity in the face of life. We are witnessing this miracle: whoever approaches the fact of my daughter with simplicity of heart finds their desire for good in the world renewed and, through our companionship and that of our friends, also finds the answer, which is Christ Risen. My daughter, born sick, is thus becoming a presence capable of making the world more precious and true, a presence able to draw forth from men “the positivity that makes things reasonable.” For this reason, in the cross of looking at her and asking, “What will become of her?” I no longer feel the anguish of the first day. Alessio, Cesena A Train Trip In the Milan train station, I reached platform number twenty-one and asked a woman who was getting on, “Does this train stop in Imola?” She answered, “Yes!” I found her later in the compartment and sat next to her (her name is Caterina). We chatted a bit, and discovered that we were two grandmothers traveling for the same reason: grandchildren! I was browsing through the copy of Traces Caterina had kindly given me (which I didn’t know existed), and stopped to read the article on the Meeting desired and promoted by Msgr Luigi Giussani, the founder of Communion and Liberation. At this point, I remembered an experience of my youth, when I was a fifteen-year-old student in high school (in 1965) and was part of GS. On Saturday afternoons, I used to go with my brothers to the meetings with Fr Giussani. I realized right away that this priest didn’t just talk about prayer, faith, going to Mass, etc, but asked me to immerse myself in the reality that surrounded me (Christ did the same, didn’t He?). And so it was that, at 7 am on Sundays, we met at Piazza San Babila and took a bus to go spend the day with children who lived in the hinterland of Milan. To reach them, we traveled dirt roads, in the middle of the countryside wrapped in the fog. We spent the day with them playing games, singing, and praying; sometimes we also did homework, and snacked on cookies, candies, and drinks we had brought. In the evening we returned tired but happy at having shared some time with children who otherwise would have been alone, since they lived far from town centers, in the farm houses of “the last vestiges of peasant farm life.” Fr Giussani showed us the road and knew how to transmit his passion to us. When I returned home, Caterina phoned me, telling me to write about this experience of my youth, because in 1965 we were “pioneers” of the thought of Fr Giussani, which began in Milan and then spread throughout the world! Donata, Bergamo Unexpected Encounters The Spiritual Exercises for university students in Germany, preached by Fr Romano Christen, were held in Waldfishbach-Burgalb from December 10th to 12th. We were moved and persuaded as we discovered ourselves anew as participants and protagonists in the great embrace that Christ daily brings to our life, through that “generous challenge to freedom” that is Fr Giussani’s charism. In a confused and anonymous world, which dreams of “systems so perfect that no one will need to be good”(as Fr Romano reminded us, presenting T.S. Eliot’s Choruses from The Rock the second evening), the event of Christ breaks through powerfully, generating a companionship in which the human is reborn. For this reason, we are grateful to Our Lady for this year, so dense with unforeseen encounters at the university, that made our community grow unexpectedly, and we look to Her, the certainty of our hope, so that this gratitude may always more deeply determine our days. The CLU of Germany The Book of the Month, in the Parish Dearest Fr Giussani: About a year ago, I noted at the left entrance of our town church an empty bookshelf with a blue flyer that said, “We want to make books fly.” I was curious, and read the rest. The parish priest invited the population to donate “simple” books together with a brief written judgment and to return them in the same way. Probably my little town isn’t made up of enthusiastic readers, because I haven’t seen many books on the shelf for a long time, nor have I read a judgment on the content of the few that are there. At a certain point, I thought of the possibility of making this a missionary gesture, starting from the education to reading that our Movement has given me in these years through the “Book of the Month.” I spoke about it to Angelo, the prior of our Fraternity, and from September till now, I’ve reviewed four books with his help, and put one on the shelf each month. I should also tell you that I’m not a big reader; I’m just a 58-year-old retiree with a fifth-grade education, so if it weren’t for the judgment on “all” of life that School of Community has taught me, and continually teaches me, and if it weren’t for the education to freedom that my Fraternity has given me and continually gives me, I wouldn’t have been able to make this gesture. Clelia, Gorla Minore Sure of a Presence We publish here a letter writter by Jen to her CLU (University Students) friends I just wanted to let you, my friends, know that my mother’s cancer has returned. In the end, she was only in remission for 3 or 4 months. They have found the cancer in her liver and on the lymph nodes around the esophagus. A miracle happened last time and I am praying that it can happen again. It is amazing to me that she told me now in Advent because in the days before my awareness of Christ in my life was huge. I was so happy, so joyful. When my mother told me the news I thought, “Christ must be present in this too or else my last few days don’t make sense. How can I be sure in one circumstance and not the other?” I am sure of His presence in my life and I ask you guys to pray for the miracle of my mother’s health, but also for my parents’ conversion so that they too can experience the same joy that I have felt in these days. Thanks guys! Jen, Santa Barbara, CA A Response to a Call It’s been a little over a year since we met Communion and Liberation through Phil and his friends when they began coming regularly to our Little Sisters of the Poor home for the elderly. It began in December of 2003 when we were looking for help to decorate our home for Christmas. We were placed in contact with CL and they responded generously to our call. Since then, a wonderful relationship has been established. A group of CL young people joins our community for evening prayer followed by an animated game of Bingo for our elderly residents, and to work with our residents. I don’t know who enjoys the event more, the residents or the young people. In October, we inaugurated a monthly evening of prayer for vocation discernment that includes listening to the Word of God and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Many young CL members join us for this event. The young people of CL have added life to our community. Their enthusiasm is energizing and their prayerfulness is very edifying. We consider ourselves privileged to have become a part of their association. We have also come to recognize that within this wonderful group of dedicated young Christians Christ is present and that some may well be called to give their lives to the Lord as priests or religious. We want to do our part to facilitate their response to the Lord’s Will! God bless, Sr Maria South-East Asia Earthquake Dear friends, the enormous tragedy that has struck South-East Asia, causing thousands of deaths and injuries impels us to give reason for the hope that is in us, so as to support the hopes of people who have no explanation for the mystery of evil in the world, and consequently live in despair or in blind distraction. Fr Giussani’s words on the Christmas Eve Television News point out the only way possible for evil not to conquer. “The old creation opposes the new, … In the recollection and in memory of that Fact, the witness of the Son of God emerges more and more powerful, and the impotence of evil becomes the figure dominating the whole of history.” So all the pain of these days is not without meaning but a participation in the Cross of Christ for the redemption of the world, because it makes each one of us more aware of the inexorable limitation that is in us and in all things, and makes our love for others more ardent. We invite everyone to gestures of prayer, and to support the AVSI initiative in South-East Asia, organized in agreement with the Holy See and the Nunciatures in the Countries affected by the earthquake. Communion and Liberation December 29, 2004 AVSI (Association of volunteers in International Service) is launching
a collection in favour of the populations struck by the catastrophe
in South-East Asia. An intervention is being planned in collaboration
with the Apostolic Nunciatures in Sri Lanka and Thailand. The collection
will be extended to other countries where the AVSI Network is present. |