word among us

Intrepid will to make the world more human

Essential points for the formation of a Christian personality

We offer this passage from Luigi Giussani's book, Alla ricerca del volto umano [Seeking the Human Face] (Rizzoli 1995, pp 128-138), because it describes perfectly the characteristics of a mature Christian life and the results this can give for the life of the world

Introduction
Witnessing to the faith is the task of our lives. This is because Christians have a specific task in life, which is not to practice a particular profession, but faith; to witness to faith, witness it within their personal life circumstances.

Your family exists, your profession exists, but “the” task is to witness to the faith. This is why we have been chosen.

John the Baptist, in his work as a prophet, proclaimed that salvation was already present, and thus he showed it to men. We can compare the attitude that is required of us by our task as Christians with his attitude.

In this way, we express our personality, not as priests, not as nuns, not as workers, not as professionals, nor as heads of families, but as Christians, whatever activity occupies our time, by affirming that salvation is already present and by showing it, testifying it to others.

So it seems to me that the essential points of the type of Christian experience which characterizes us could be the following:

1. Christ is salvation in history and in life

A faith without life turns out to be useless and gets lost, just as a life without faith is arid and has no goal, no overarching purpose. And faith is acknowledging that Jesus Christ is salvation, present in history and in life–present in the same way that husband or wife, mother or father, friends, or workmates are present, present like the events talked about in the newspapers, even if no newspaper talks about this Presence.

Salvation does not concern just the next world, it concerns all of man, in this world and the next, on earth and in heaven–all the more so since heaven signifies the truth of earth made manifest. And the truth of earth is Christ, as St Paul says in the Letter to the Colossians, since in Him “all things consist.”

Christ is the exhaustive meaning, for example, of the clear windy sky this evening, of my person, of our persons, of all the world. To state that Christ is salvation means to delineate a road on which everything must be realized and accomplished.

Time has been given to us in order to bring this faith to maturity, to bring this consciousness to maturity, to bring the acknowledgment of His Presence to maturity.

Christ in history is like the sun of a day that is just beginning, like the dawn. A man who had never seen the sun, who had always lived in the night, would be full of wonder at seeing the dawn emerging. Things would start to take on their form, albeit in a blurred and still unclear way. And such a man, even if he cannot imagine the sun in its midday splendor, nonetheless begins to intuit that something new is happening, that the dawn is a beginning–the beginning of day.

The earth, existence, history, for Christians, are like the beginning, the dawn of that full day to which God has destined us.

In the Christian experience of night, in which men are submerged and where they know things only by groping, something begins that makes everything start to have a meaning. The clearest proof of this is that it happens even with the most ordinary, everyday things. Thus our routine, too, takes on a dimension of greatness and gladness.

This is summed up by the Christian gesture that in the language of the Church is called offering. In the definitiveness of this gesture, at this point large or small things no longer exist, but everything tends to be converted into the immensity of the relationship with Christ. Verifying that this is not words, but a life experience, means beginning to understand in what the resurrection–the new world that has begun–consists.

This does not mean that weakness and sin disappear, but that desperation is eliminated, and that man can walk through all his ills, and continuously overcome them.

When the disciples went to Christ and asked Him, “Are you the Messiah or should we look for another?,” He replied in the words of Isaiah’s prophecy, “The blind see, the deaf hear.” This was a message to be understood by the humble of heart; it was not tailor-made for the clever and intelligent, even if it was open to all. The Year of the Lord’s Grace had begun, and His message was a hope, a possibility for festivity in all of earthly life.

Thus, the first point that gives the fundamental tone to a Christian personality is this: the living consciousness that salvation, liberation–words which mean the same thing–have an answer in a reality that is already present in man’s life, Christ.

The opposite of this first point is seeking salvation–i.e., the meaning of one’s actions and those of others, the meaning of time and of work–by locating it in something made by man’s hands. This happens in our personal life, for instance, when we complain that our dreams, our demands are not fulfilled. We are disappointed because we placed our hope only in what man can do. During Nazism, for example, many really cared about Hitler the way one could care about God; we might even say that they worshipped him. The same thing is true for the people who placed, or place, their salvation in Lenin or any other leader. For the leader is the embodiment of ideology as the proclamation of hope placed in the work of man’s hands.

This is the alternative to Christianity, and it is the “world’s” position. It is not the Christian’s position, because the Christian is, by nature, in open opposition to “worldly” hopes.

2. The reality of Christ is in the Church

This presence that is the reality of Christ is located–“lies within”–the unity of believers, and therefore within the Church. This means in the Church as Christ founded her, with the authority, the bishops, and the mysterious gesture of the sacrament, a gesture that involves all of life, because the sacrament is the locus forming all of life.

So, placing one’s hope, one’s salvation in Christ implies judging one’s hope within the Christian community, in the piece of the Church that arises in the environment where we live, maybe a little and petty one, little and full of flaws, since it is made up of people like us, but (if it is faithful to the established authority) it is still a function of the whole Church and a sign of our journey.

This is why, externally, the method of faith is to bring forth and live in a community, and this community is a group of persons who acknowledge Christ to be salvation, and thus they are immanent in the whole Church, guided by Authority, which is Christ as salvation–not of the soul, but of life present and future–as road and as goal; as destiny.

The opposite of this second point, essential for a Christian personality, would be to reduce the relationship with Christ to the relationship with the image we invent of Him: an individualistic relationship with an abstract image, whose only concrete link would be the words of the Gospel in accordance with each person’s interpretation of them or the interpretation chosen from the various methods of the exegetes.

Christ’s presence is manifested, on the contrary, through the experience of the Church within the community to which we belong, whose value thus lies in binding us and opening us to all of the Church. It is the experience of living the Church where we are: home, parish, university, factory, neighborhood, office.

3. The consciousness of faith as the fruit of an encounter

The existential consciousness of what faith is, and thus of what Christ is; the living discovery of the value of our unity, of our communion (in other words, of what the Church is), are not the fruit of reasoning or study. They are the fruit of an encounter.

Encounter means the event of the relationship with a person or a community, rich with an accent that to us rings so true that we feel struck by it as by a light and summoned to a different and truer life.

In this encounter, the value of all of faith and the value of the historical reality of the Church begin to appear in a concrete way, not in an abstract or theoretical way but in a real way, to the point that it provokes our person to give a total response–because when the person is really provoked, he feels that all of his life is at stake.

If this is not the case, if it is not a question of all of life, then what we have is not yet the discovery of faith, but simply of a knowledge and practice of religious forms.

We can say, paradoxically, that Christianity is not a religion, but a life.

The opposite of this factor, which characterizes the formation of a Christian personality, is identifying one’s relationships with Christ and the Church as some established gestures, and not as a totality of adherence, as though Christ and the Church were extraneous to certain needs and interests of life. But in reality, when my “I” is struck and drawn in, I am influenced and determined in everything I do.

This is called entirety and integrity, while the opposite, partiality, lives as ritualism or administrative and associative bureaucratism.

In fact, Christ is the whole of my person; the experience of the Church is the experience of my entire self. Christ and the Church are salvation for me, and I am still the same person who eats, drinks, stays awake, and sleeps, lives and dies, as St Paul says; who studies, works, and does everything else.

Christ and the Church are the profound inspiration that is etched in the very structure of my actions, in all the things I do. This is why the encounter is an “event,” which tends to influence in a new way all my relationships, with things and with people, and the very way I have of looking at my sins.

4. Constructiveness as the affirmation of an “Other”

This profound inspiration tends to create a different web of human relationships with everyone, but above all with those who acknowledge this inspiration, i.e., the people of the Christian community.

So the community, within the characteristics of the environment where it lives, is the location of a different, more human humanity whose fundamental rule is charity.

Charity means that in relationships the dynamic tends to affirm the other and not ourselves, because affirming the other means increasing, growing. And in practice, charity is developed as attention to the person of another, as the intention to adapt oneself to his situation, in order to shoulder with the other his wants and his needs.

This makes the community that arises become a source of initiatives, of unlimited initiatives. They produce a humanly more desirable portion of society, in which, for instance, the birth of one person’s child is sincerely a reason for joy for everybody; the marriage of two people in the community is equally a reason for celebration for the others. Or it is where the sick are cared for, or the eviction of one family falls onto the shoulders of the whole community, within the limits of possibility and of the freedom of each person. I am not speaking only of an ideal, but of things that are done in the Christian community.

The world and society change by means of the human realities that are already changed in this way. But we have to remember that a truly new change cannot come about except from outside of man, from a radically different “Other.” This is the Grace of the Presence of Christ acknowledged and loved in the mystery of His Church, which takes shape daily in the ecclesial community lived in one’s own sphere.

The opposite of this fourth point is moralism, which is thinking that we can be upright by applying laws of behavior, doing good according to our instinct or our conception, or walking on top of those closest to us, our nearest neighbors.

Our neighbor is, first and foremost, one whom Christ has put next to us. There is no neighbor greater than those who, just like us, acknowledge Christ as salvation–that is to say, our brothers in the community.

Through them, through the human experience of the community, just as it unfolds, a person becomes capable of being converted into someone more human, more just, more full of initiatives also with those who are outside the community, with society as a whole, in which the poor have a right to priority in our decisions. It is like a stone that falls into a pond and produces concentric circles that spread and multiply. However, the point of departure cannot be avoided. This point of departure is those whom Christ puts next to us, puts near us: our brothers in the faith.

In the moralistic attitude, the point of departure is the opinion or plan of one’s conscience.

5. The community, the locus of faith within the world

As I have already said, the Christian community, which is the locus of faith, is inside the body of society; it is in the world, it is a part of this society and this world, and lives all its problems.

It does this either by intervening in a united, “compact” way in certain problems, or by educating its members so that, responsibly, they intervene personally.

Therefore, the sign of a lively Christian community is that in the consciousness of its faith in Christ, and in the consciousness of its belonging to the Church, it faces all of society’s problems either directly or through the commitment of each of the members of the community.

Two fundamental aspects of this commitment should be pointed out.

The first is that the solution of a problem is false, illusory, if it does not respect the values of the ecclesial community, the values by which it lives, which is the conception the Church has of man, the meaning of history proposed by the Church.

The second is that the consciousness of belonging to the community, the consciousness of our unity, of our communion, is a determining factor for the consciousness itself with which the Christian approaches (also individually) the problems, great and small, of society. The community is an ideal point of reference, one that illuminates the conscience of the Christian in the commitment with which he faces the problems that come up or with which he shares the intentions of other men of good will.

The opposite of this fifth point is dual.

On one hand, we can conceive the Christian life as shut up in itself, without any effect on social problems, i.e., without reference to the context in which we live.

On the other hand, we can reduce the influence of faith and the Church on our social and political action to an extrinsic impulse, a mere inspiration, as though the ecclesial experience pushed man to take an interest in social problems, instilling in him an ethical thrust toward them, but without having any effect on the way he approaches these problems.

This is very important today. For example, people say, “The Gospel pushes me to take an interest in the poor,” and this is certain. But if one stops here, then the Gospel tends to be only an ethical, moralistic urge. Instead, the Gospel has something to say also about the method, the structure of judgment, and the behavior with which the problem of poverty is approached.

In a certain city, a lecture was held, entitled, “The Christian and the Marxist.” Who is the true Christian? Someone who wants to do justice to the poor. Who is the Marxist? Someone who wants to do justice to the poor. Therefore, the Christian today has to be Marxist. This was the scheme that was developed, as was the custom among many people during those years. A little old lady in the audience raised her hand and asked timidly, “Then what is the difference?” The lecturer, after an instant of perplexity, answered, “The Christian sees Christ in the poor; the Marxist does not.” So a friend who was present in the room stood up and said, “Then I could say that the Christian is a visionary.”

We should reflect at length on this episode, because the reply is a meaningful one. If Christ does not change the way we approach human problems, Christ is a fantasy. This is why dualism, which divides man into the religious or Christian man on one side, and the civic or political man on the other, is to my mind one of the greatest errors today. Many baptized live this dualistic position, according to which the Christian is “Christian” in certain given moments, for certain–basically religious–activities, but the rest of the time his faith remains, in the best of hypotheses, like a vague ethical urge. For his other activities, the Christian is “a man like everybody else.”

Instead, the newness of the world which is faith, maintained by an authentic experience of community life, fills all of life, creates a different subject, a “new creature.” And the entirety of this man’s activity, his judgment about things, his view of man and history, his relationships and his behavior, cannot cease being determined and qualified by this faith.

Faith fills all of life, and is a proposal for the life of every day.

Conclusion

I believe that these five points, with their opposites, can be the object of work toward the discovery of a lively and incisive Christian life, one that is capable of assuming our condition as sinners on one hand and as children of our times on the other.

For a new life, all that is needed is grace and to be poor in spirit. In other words, it is necessary to acknowledge the Presence that is in the world.

The saints are those who recognize God’s plan, that is to say, the presence of Christ, and through their sequela of this, try to work together for the good of mankind in accordance with its authentic and profound destiny. While all ideologies build on scandal and violence, the new thing is the peaceful miracle of the life of each person who risks everything within an ecclesial life.

A thousand years ago, man traveled on the back of a mule and could be more human and happier than today’s man who streaks through the sky in a jet. “Progress” is desirable, but human good is not necessarily identified with the development of technological civilization, which can, on the contrary, turn out to be counterproductive in terms of human civilization. In fact, it has constructed an enormous number of means for alienating man within power.

The main problem is the humanization of man, the truth of the subject. The task of the Christian community for collaborating in this lies in the ripening of its faith. This is the best instrument for creating agents that utilize technological civilization “for” man. When we say, “Thy kingdom come,” we are asking for salvation for the entirety of the human fact in the world.

Such is the ideal, and it is the opposite of dreams or utopia, images made by man. The ideal ends up changing, little by little, every step of the human journey. This is why the ideal is the most concrete thing that exists.

This ideal is in faith, which is our whole life.