Rimini Living Is Beginning Anew with Your Own Yes Every day From December 3rd to 5th, six thousand university students from all over Italy gathered for the annual CL University Students’ Retreat. The impressions and the thoughts of a journalist who is no longer a university student but shares the same passion for life by Gianluigi Da Rold The Iranian girl speaks tentatively, for fear of stumbling over her Italian. But Fr Pino helps her, asking with a smile, “What’s your name?” She answers politely, “Asade. In my language it means ‘free.’” You can see that she is struck by the atmosphere of these “Exercises for University Students,” where many questions are asked, of oneself and of the others. She, a Muslim, is in the midst of six thousand of her Christian peers who’ve gathered in Rimini from all over Italy. On Saturday, December 3rd, the traditional image of Rimini is distorted, and in the rain and cold, you can’t even recognize this summer season “good-times-factory.” The shops on Via Vespucci are closed, the hotels seem like discrete homes, barely lit, and nobody even notices the beach. Only the large spaces of the “old conference-exhibition center” belie the Rimini you’ve seen for years, that of the great gatherings of the Meetings, where everything under the sun is spoken of, where everything mixes in a continuous “happening,” where you ask yourself about everything. But this time, in silence. And you feel inevitably involved. Vocational instant The summer heat or the winter cold become distant perceptions, almost nonexistent. The memory and the faces you have before your eyes immerse you in the same atmosphere of desire to know the others, to explain the purpose of life, to review the stages of your life and understand how many times you’ve fallen and, yes, certainly yes, I have trouble believing, but I can tell you that, at the end, you have to face the problem, you can’t dodge it: Who is Jesus? He truly existed, I know. But is He always there? Is it true that He’ll never abandon me? Is it true that He is God? What is this “vocational instant” that Fr Pino is talking about? What exactly is this restlessness you feel, in the search to grasp the infinite? True dizzy spells that cross your brain, and the same old ironies about yourself. But in the meantime, you’re choked with emotion and you can’t subdue it. The students ask personal questions–sensible, maybe naive, maybe obvious. But, in the final analysis, they’re the thoughts of a real life, the one you have to deal with every day. They’re also a request for help, from themselves and all the others, to resolve problems you live with every day. And there, in such a huge community, in a silence that seems unreal, you and those students seek to extricate yourselves from the daily carpet bombings of “commonplaces” unleashed by the enormous cultural apparatus in which we live. Evidence of the heart Giancarlo Cesana is consoling when he says, “God is so big that you can’t comprehend Him in and of yourself. It’s impossible.” He doesn’t solve the problem for you–on the contrary–but you feel like about 20 drops of an anxiolytic drug have gone down your throat. You think, “I can’t manage, but maybe it’s good to seek, to continue to search, in the midst of decay and decline, pettiness, and roguery of all kinds. Then it happens that Fr Pino adds a splendid metaphor: “Living is beginning. Don’t worry if you’re capable or not; don’t worry if you’re consistent or not, but continue to walk, continue to search. Don’t let anything come between the evidence and your heart.” It happens that a short time later, you’re sitting at a sumptuous table, and the thoughts swirling in your head don’t conflict at all with the needs of your stomach–mushroom risotto, fish kebobs, and fried mixed seafood, which I always eat in Rimini with my friend Pino. The kids talk a mile a minute. Dima is sweet and implacable in reaching some kind of conclusion, in proposing rational trajectories, in identifying objectives to attain. Fabio Baroncini eats with gusto, and every now and then interjects, mischievous, artful, and affable; Fr Pino observes, interrupts, listens, and qualifies; the others have a freewheeling conversation, seeking almost obsessively the meaning of everything that passes through their brains. There’s such a climate of freedom that it’s scary. Then, at a certain point, you feel you’re being observed, and you don’t know what exactly you’re supposed to do. Should I say what I think, or not? Fr Pino and Fr Baroncini flush me out: “Who are you? I want to know who you are.” Miguel Mañara and S¹ostakovic¹ A good reporter should bob and weave around the situation, find the professional antibodies for that question. But, fortunately, in this situation we are all “politically incorrect.” You feel bound to tell the truth that confuses your thoughts, and you tell about your experiences. You explain that you’ve always been attracted by the “daily bread” policy, and by reading history as an “infinite passion,” by the charism of men. You remember that you looked at reality, but you always wanted to foresee and correct it; the problem was to modify it, to look for “remedies”–the problem was to make your ideology and the course of reality fit. Your words are confused, full of jumbled memories and sensations that don’t seem to follow a logical order. Then you try to explain Giussani’s gaze meeting yours, the encounter and the new encounter years later. You get lost in the vertigo of “encountering Christ;” you are deeply moved as you explain Him in the world; you feel apologetic for not knowing how to find Him. But you feel an impulse of interior rebellion: at least you met the humanity of Giussani and you’re proud of it, and you cling to it for the rest of your life. “I can say that I wouldn’t have managed without Alberto, Giorgio, and Giancarlo; that is, without Giussani.” Baroncini is an authentic, excellent, big-time provoker. He thanks me for my testimony and adds, “Now, however, you have to tell us that you love us like Giussani. Otherwise, I’ll get really annoyed.” You react like a child who jealously guards a fundamental relationship. You wait, out of pride. Then you say, “Yes,” convinced. So you go hear him, Fr Fabio Baroncini, while he reads some of the most meaningful passages from Miguel Mañara. He has such enthusiasm in reading, commenting, and explaining that he makes you re-live it as if you were at the theater. The next morning, the Exercises conclude. Fr Pino draws together the loose ends and you remember the passage he quoted from Matthew’s Gospel, the yes some men say to Jesus. It is a formidable, unembellished, essential report. And me? What kind of report am I doing on this great gathering of university students? I only wanted to relate “the moments” it gave me. I return home in the rain, happy to listen to the great Waltz 3 of S¹ostakovic¹. Testimonies of an Experience We offer here a few selections from the letters Fr Pino read during the Exercises First of all, I perceived, and perceive, like a dread, a fright. When Fr Giussani says that we live in an era of ideologies in which “one tries to manipulate reality to make it cohere with a preset construction fabricated by the intellect,” he describes a way of living that can be, and often is, mine (and others.) Often, I consider the appearance of a new feeling (for example, affection for someone or an unease) as something that distracts me from the road. So, instead of giving a true judgment that (as in any case often happens) leads me to say, “You” more truly to Mystery, I erase what I feel as if it were a dangerous temptation. It seems the opposite of what Fr Giussani says and of what fascinates me in those who live Christ. Above all, it is the opposite of what always happens every time I consciously live my vocation. There’s a passage from V.S. Grossman’s Life and Destiny that exemplifies this dangerous situation: “It was sweet to be indestructible. Judging the others, he affirmed his own interior strength, his ideal, and his purity. Here lay his comfort, his faith. Not once did he back away from the mobilization of his party. He had willingly renounced the maximum salary of the party functionaries. For him, self-affirmation consisted in self-sacrifice. He went to work, to the meetings of the college of the commissariat of the people, to the theater and, when the party had sent him to Yalta for his health, he always strolled along the shore with the same old jacket and boots. He wanted to resemble Stalin. Losing the right to judge, he lost himself. And Rubin intuited this fact. Almost every day he deluded himself about the weakness, the ignobility, the petty desires that infiltrated his ‘concentrationary’ soul.” Marco Last Monday, I had lunch with a classmate. Her background is Catholic, but she told me that in this period she’s trying to eliminate every religious aspect from her life, so she can say to herself that she is a living being. “If there’s something superior to man, divine, this can be nothing other than spiritual, and thus something man cannot experience.” She continued, “You people from CL are together in a truly fascinating way, but this way is yours because you’re ‘religious’–you’re all set.” I tried to challenge her, documenting how my life is a cry for happiness and that this “principle” of which she spoke I’ve touched personally and encountered in my experience. At the end of lunch, she said, “I see that for you the desire for happiness is a strength, while for me it’s a defect, and that’s why I try to eliminate it.” I was struck by such a desperate affirmation, and her carefully studied attempt to eliminate that which is. For my part, I’ve discovered that the greatest sign of the presence of Christ in my life is that my life throbs; it expresses to the utmost the exigency that constitutes it. Aldo This year, a new CLU apartment was born. It has been clear that our effort to live well together by establishing rules and turns, etc, doesn’t hold up. What holds us together is reminding each other constantly of the purpose: “the acknowledgment of His Presence.” When someone takes seriously what is close to my heart, he becomes “presence” for me, to the point that a gratitude is born. This is especially evident when we call each other to our gestures, from morning lauds to the invitation to theRetreat. And this is what also changes the attention to the other. Another item: A psychology student was given the responsibility of writing the invitation flyers for School of Community in the university. One afternoon, while we were on our way to post them together, she said, “It’s strange, you know. Not a year ago I went around with my friends ripping up your flyers, and now I’m the one writing them!” Signed letter I study philosophy at the State University. The assistant of one of the so-called “laboratories” explained that his method usually involves giving us texts to read without revealing the author, so that the philosophical reflection would not be conditioned by the method of ipse dixit. The next time, I took the initiative and proposed that for once he should be the one to read a text without knowing the author, telling him only that it was a text in which I had found a concept of reason that I felt was more realistic than his. So the assistant spent a week reading the fourth section of the fourth chapter of The Religious Sense, in which Giussani addresses the nexus between tradition and the present. The next lesson, he was so interested and enthusiastic about it that he proposed we all read and discuss it together with him, without my revealing the author. And so we began a kind of passionate School of Community held by an atheist, anarchist, and anti-Christian professor. The section that most fascinated him was the part on the present, and he insistently underlined its philosophical profundity, and the writer’s acumen and humanity, as well as the concreteness of style, which, he said, could only be that of a materialist. After two hours, when I revealed that the author was Fr Giussani, my classmates’ reactions ran the gamut, from amazed to annoyed to apathetic, but the assistant, who was just appalled, silenced everyone by saying, “Today, we all have to be grateful to Michele because he has helped us learn to think!” Naturally enthusiastic about his openness, I decided to give him The Religious Sense. He began the next lesson saying that he was furious about what had happened in the previous lesson: “I’m livid because the libraries I went to didn’t even have The Religious Sense!” When I told him I had bought it, his face lit up and he said jokingly, “Come here and give me a hug!” adding that, thanks to me, now he can even consider Giussani a friend of his, specifying that he doesn’t care “whether it’s Giussani or someone else; the important thing is the chance to meet something interesting, wherever it might be.” Michele One day in the general chaos of the emergency room, I stopped and looked around, and saw how much misery there was: terminally ill people, suffering people, women battered by their husbands, a six-year-old girl who’d been beaten. I had before my eyes all the fragility, all the physical and moral limitation of man. But this is partial, because all those people, as soon as I approached, asked for help, asked why. Beyond the finiteness, there dominated a quest for meaning, a desire to live, and here lies the greatness of man. But we need to know, to see whether there is an answer to this urgency of ours. Looking around, I saw in a little room an old woman alone, gasping for breath, while everyone else was eating their pasta, and the first thing I thought of was to go to her, not because of any great technical capacity of mine, because I still haven’t acquired any, and anyway, it wouldn’t have been useful. I approached her with a colleague of mine and took her hands, asking, praying that I could look at the lady the way Jesus would have, to be able to live that circumstance as Jesus would have, not in desperation, because Jesus showed us that life wins over death. I understood that dependence is not only a fact, but also a convenient and necessary one, because to live that circumstance deep down, without censuring anything, without despairing, I needed to depend on He who saves circumstances. I think this is the value of the Christian life, to be collaborators of God; that is, to identify ourselves with the humanity of Christ, for us the possibility of experiencing the good meaning in everything, and for the world, as a witness to the reason–which begins to make us different, to change us–which is Christ. Alberto