School The Équipes of Italian CL students and teachers

“The Impossible
Correspondence” Exists
Students and teachers in movement
Young people and adults tell about an experience that puts everything into motion. The facts of everyday life enlarge within a horizon that is ever greater and deeper. “We belong to the unity that happens with the kids and with those who are close to us”

edited by Maurizio Crippa and Elena Ugolini

GS – Student Youth
They had said farewell to each other at the beginning of September, with an invitation to verify whether it was true that “faith grows if it is put into play in the circumstances.” They met again on December 8th in Milan at the GS Équipe [a meeting of CL student responsibles] “to document” after these months, the truth of that judgment. Filippo from Ferrara began: “This year, I attended my first Équipe of responsibles. The Équipe isn’t important because you find solutions to your problems, but because you come up against a question. This question is a beginning. I’ve begun to see those around me differently, and to commit myself in both GS and school. It hasn’t been easy at all, because I’m the only GS member among 500 kids, and I often feel alone and helpless in front of the others. Then, I began to look around me and I realized I wasn’t alone. One day, after we finished the class assembly on Vittadini’s article, ‘The Difficult Discipline of Forgiveness,’ a classmate who I thought hated me came and said I’d done well, and that she wouldn’t ever have been able to conduct such an assembly. So I asked the people I knew if they wanted to run with me for Student Council and, to my amazement and joy, one of my classmates agreed. We prepared together the Institute Assembly. I read the ‘Beslan Is Here’ flyer and spoke about education, and about the fact that we hold an assembly to begin working together, with the goal of distinguishing between what’s good and what’s bad. It was the most beautiful assembly of recent years. A school caretaker who had been listening came up and gave me a hug. After such a great fact, how could I destroy everything by taking the credit for it myself?”

Evening Classes

Without intervening comments, Giada from Milan continued. “I attend evening classes for the last year of classical high school, and the young people with whom I’m in contact, between the ages of 18 and 25, come from disastrous situations. They look at life with distrust, and they’re already bitter. In the beginning, I was sad and upset. Coming from an experience of authentic life, I couldn’t be content with ‘survival level’ work. But I also thought that if I happened to be in that class with those people whom I didn’t like at all, there must surely be a reason. In fact, I came to understand that I was loved by Christ precisely through that circumstance. This put me back in the condition of being able to accept what was asked of me, that is, to continue with more strength to be there for the others. I began by providing for the needs of each person in the small things and, above all, by treating all my classmates as if they were my dearest friends. With time, the gazes changed. For my part, I’ll never stop visiting the nearby church before school to say the Angelus and supplicate Our Lady to grant me the strength to be there for everyone each time, the strength to be able to accept her Son.”
“ What made Filippo’s classmate tell him, ‘You’re great’? Why did the caretaker hug him? Why is Giada this way with her classmates? It’s their encounter with Christ,” said Fr Giorgio during the Équipe. “The origin of everything is this: there was a day when an encounter happened that encompassed all the meaning, all that is desirable in life, the gusto, the beauty. This is how it was for the first people who encountered Christ; they didn’t have a critical awareness of what was happening, but they had felt a promise of life. There’s just one problem, which is how to stay in front of what has happened. Our first task is to make memory, to learn to make memory.”

Memory, not recollection

Fr Giorgio continued, “This is what Giada told us about. Making memory is praying; it’s acknowledging this Presence, putting yourself under the influence of this Presence. It’s not a recollection. When we say ‘You,’ we say something alive, present, so present that it moves life and indicates the same presence to those who are around us.” It is the story of Simone from Modena: “These first two months of school have been characterized by a period in which we had at least one test every day. The terrible scores that ensued led three of my classmates to decide to change schools. The teachers didn’t say anything better than, ‘Leaving in senior year is a mistake for them and a regret for us,’ an expression that continued to fail to satisfy my need for a real why. I got the idea of writing what I thought and presenting it to the class and the teachers. I wrote, ‘Dear Professors: Just two months into the school year, the situation is such that it can’t be left without a judgment. I would like to have before me an adult who loves the subject he studies and teaches the beauty he has seen in it to me, who, if I’m loyal to what I have before me, will try to understand it, dealing day to day with the topics proposed… From such a person, we wouldn’t even get tired of the scholastic results that tempt us to consider giving up. This is what I ask: help us so that we can always have this beauty present when we study.’ It was a revolution. The most beautiful thing I discovered is that in my class there is a heart that desires to love and be loved.”

In a place

If a Presence exists, it’s in a place. Making memory is putting yourself once again under the influence of that encounter. The Apostles, after the death and resurrection of Christ, were together because He was there. As School of Community says, the Church is the physiological continuity of Christ. Acknowledging Christ present in the companionship makes you live it differently. It makes you live it with a question, not with a false claim.
“ Faith is the belonging to Christ in the circumstances,” explains Fr Giorgio, introducing Andrea from Verona, who wrote, “The newspaper il Lunedí (Mondays), which comes out in numerous schools in Verona, was born about a year ago out of a friendship among us GS kids. From the very beginning, a big responsibility was asked of me: to be its editor. It is beautiful to see how this becomes a gesture full of fecundity. For example, this year a new history and philosophy teacher came to replace the one who’d introduced me to the Movement. The beginning was difficult, because the difference between the two is notable, and because the new teacher had immediately belittled our newspaper. But now something has clicked in him, and he asked me if he could write some pieces for the newspaper. All this came from il Lunedí, which is the means for showing ‘our faith in the face of the world.’”

Facing up to reality

Andrea learned to make the most of everyone’s experience. The community is a way of facing reality, with the goal of knowing Christ and witnessing to Him. This is the story of Francesca from Chioggia: “Starting school has meant offering ourselves right away as a presence, with a flyer for a ‘Good Start of the School Year,’ that said we wanted school to be a place of discovery, a place that helps us look at the often terrible reality that one normally tends to avoid (as with Beslan). Next to our words we quoted Pavese: ‘Living is always starting again.’ Right away, during mid-morning break, the Communists of our school started making fun of our flyer, so a little group of us went up to them and asked why. They said that Pavese was a Communist who committed suicide and so his words were nonsense. I responded, ‘But if someone says something true for my life, that corresponds to me, even if he’s a Communist, I’ll repeat it!’ They didn’t know how to answer, but the thing that most disconcerted me was how, in the face of experience, ideology falls apart. We often think that big things are needed to bring this Presence, but no: ‘If you belong, just your breathing is enough, and you’re a presence.’ It’s really so.”
For the Apostles, judgment was the continuous comparison between them and that Presence. Change isn’t putting into practice the discourses and initiatives of the community, but it is the profundity with which you live everything from withinyour belonging to the presence of Christ in the community. The use of the instruments is an exercise that enlarges the horizon and documents each person’s begging. The gestures, the initiatives, and the use of instruments are a test that help you live the companionship as an entreaty.

CLE

The expression that summarizes the testimonies we heard at the meeting of responsibles of high school teachers [CL Educators, CLE] last month in Milan is “the impossible correspondence,” the experience of a humanly unexpected correspondence, a happening of newness that becomes the central fact of your life, both in and out of school. Many teachers told how, out of this experience, the possibility of educating is born (or re-born), because educating isn’t a “form;” instead, it’s living next to the other, helping him recognize this correspondence when it happens. It is from this point that everything starts out(or starts out again).

Neapolitan freeze-frames

This was demonstrated by the quick “freeze frames” of Marcello from Naples. “I was walking in the city center while a march of organized unemployed people was passing by. Policemen were lined up. One of them came at me, making me a little worried. But he raised his visor and asked me, ‘Hey teach, whatcha doin’ here?’ I replied, ‘I’m on my way to Mass.’ He and his colleagues on one side, the unemployed demonstrators on the other. Then he asked me, ‘When’re we going to get together?’ And I said, ‘Wednesday, like always.’ Three years ago, at the CL Opening Day, we had shown Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which there is Henry’s sentence before the battle, ‘All things are ready if our minds be so’ (IV.iii.71). I remembered sharply the spark of that instant and the face of this young man who was present at the film. Now, in the confusion, his superior yelled at him, ‘Get back in file!’ Lowering his visor, he smiled at me serenely and repeated suddenly, returning to his place, ‘All things are ready if our minds be so!’ I was just going to Mass, distracted as usual. The impossible correspondence is a fact that happens, it’s a leap forward. There is no a priori. It’s something that surprises you and makes the memory flower again in you, like in the instant I thought to myself, ‘This one I am going to invite once again. We are going to pick him up again.’ Instead, I realized that I was the one who was caught up again, in that unity that happened again.”
He offers us another vignette: “A friend (who teaches at a very popular art high school) and I went around to visit some of the families for Christmas. When we entered one of these houses, we saw an image of Our Lady. It was as if we didn’t add anything, and our presence only made the buried historic presence re-emerge. The impossible correspondence isn’t something that we add to the history of a people. The image of Our Lady in the old houses is not an abstract sign of devotion, but the certainty of familiarity with the flesh of whoever knocks on the door. There are no strangers, no guests. This is how it must have been once, long ago, and how it is now for us.”

Impossible, but real victory

From Ostra, in the province of Ancona, come freeze frames of an experience marked by pain and failure, but also by the tangible experience of an “incredible, impossible victory.” Antonella spoke about a change that began in the intimacy of her own family, and went on to involve the school where she teaches. “My husband and I adopted a child who turned everything upside down, making it very evident that there’s Another who makes the programs. At the same time, a colleague of mine became ill with cancer. One day, she asked me to accompany her because she saw in me a sure gaze, and I put her in a good mood. We began to live her illness together with simplicity and hope. We went to the doctors, I came to her home, we went to church, and we went for walks. She wasn’t a believer, and she always asked me to teach her to pray. She was very struck by the figure of Our Lady. One day, she said, ‘What a character! She sure had enough problems to resolve!’ At a certain point, though, defeat came. Margherita’s condition worsened and helping her became too hard for me, because I was also studying for the government competition to become a permanent staff religion teacher. I asked help of some colleagues and, at Margherita’s bedside, a friendship was born. She died on June 28th. It was noon, and I had begun the Angelus, stopping repeatedly to explain the prayer to her, because she didn’t know it. She wanted to learn to pray, and now she has taught us how. The competition exam went badly and, after twenty years of teaching, I was excluded from a permanent position. Anguish, failure… Then these same colleagues from Margherita’s bedside decided to write a letter to the Bishop, with all their signatures. They told him the story of a friendship built during the years at school, through passion for the work (I didn’t realize I had garnered such attention and esteem!). They told him how we had together changed the IPSIA, and that they couldn’t justify my absence to the students. This year, I’m still teaching at that school. Now, we teachers can’t view each other the same way as before. One of the parents told us, ‘I willingly send my daughter here because you are friends.’ Everything is like before, but inside there is a radical change. I’ve experienced death and resurrection in everything. Death is dramatic, but resurrection is a victory that fills the heart, eliminates anguish and confusion, and continues in time.”
Fr Giorgio concluded, saying, “From the educational point of view, what remains of the correspondence, in the relationship with our students and colleagues, if not the correspondence itself? It’s as if this correspondence enlarges time, history, and the facts of life within a horizon that is ever greater and ever deeper. We belong to the unity that happens with the students and with those who are near to us.