CL

The Mystery of Difference. The Courage to Forgive
Reflections by a noted psychoanalyst on Fr Giussani’s proposal to the Host Families. The radical newness of an experience during a time of inhospitality. Excerpts from a talk given at the Cultural Center of Milan

by Claudio Risè

This book by Fr Giussani, Il miracolo dell’ospitalità (The Miracle of Hospitality), is particularly valuable and timely, because today the pathology of inhospitality prevails. Nobody welcomes anybody anymore, not even himself.
Fr Giussani’s text urges us not to fall into this abyss, proposing a radical, and at the same time totally everyday, vision of hospitality. His is a vision very different from the one that became established in the years after these essays were written, in the prevailing “discourse” on hospitality. This latter was a discourse that (rather than being radical and concrete like Giussani’s) was at the same time generic and abstract, certainly functional for the rhetoric of the “politically correct,” but very far from revealing how hospitality engages us in every relationship, in the truth of everyday life.
Giussani begins by citing, as a “scandalous example,” the relationship between man and woman, between husband and wife. He starts on a low key, but then dwells on it more and more in each essay, to the point finally of citing, as the necessary starting point–and at the same time goal–of hospitality the welcoming of self: “The first mission is the one with one’s husband or wife, or rather, to put it better, the first mission is with oneself” (p 114).

A culture dominated by narcissism
Now, it is the prevailing culture’s tendency today, the expression of a lip service paid to the right feelings, to proclaim universal hospitality, but not to welcome, not to take in on the level of primary relationships, beginning with the relationship with oneself. In this way, once a person has refused to welcome himself, no one else can truly be welcomed. It is no coincidence that our culture has been called narcissistic. But a narcissist is a person who does not accept himself for what he is… taken up as he is by an ideal, grandiose false image that keeps him from truly loving himself, and thus loving others. All the pathologies that exemplify the malaise of today (not eating, eating too much, the use of drugs, or the maniacal forms of plastic surgery) have to do with this lack of hospitality. We are not okay just as we are; we want to be different, adhering to an ideal image that, like Narcissus’ image in the water, the more we try to grab it, the more it eludes our grasp. And in this chase, life eludes us, our life as we are, as destiny and as God wanted us to be….
Thus arises, sooner or later, the refusal or abandonment (or withdrawal of affection) of the companion on whom the continuation and development of life and love depend in society.

Hatred of one’s own flesh
Paul rightly connects conjugal love with self-love in his letter to the Ephesians. Husband and wife form one flesh, and “no one ever hated his own flesh,” says Paul. Thus just as one loves himself, he loves also the other part of his body, the other person he has welcomed as his spouse. However, this is no longer true, precisely because many hate their own flesh. In the country that is usually an indicator of the direction the West is heading, the United States, one out of every two marriages ends in divorce.

The forces of power against the family
The distancing of the father from the family, brought about by juridical (divorce) or economic (overwork) means, is (together with abortion), the major way in which this society effects its attack on the family that, by its words, it assures it wants to defend.
So a very great merit of these texts is that they remind us how the social context, which depends heavily on the ideals of the power elite, cannot avoid being “unfair to such an original phenomenon as the family,” and how, Giussani says, “it will tend to use it for its own purposes, more than the purpose of the people who make up the family, and the purpose of the family itself, which is to bring about God’s plan.”
It is necessary to keep clearly in mind this sort of radical polarity between power and the family, between the bureaucratic elements of dominion and control and the human elements of welcoming and love. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand why, in today’s Western world, the main ally of all the forces and destructive impulses that are tearing the family apart, and life with it, is precisely the power elite and the social context it inspires.
The legislative and juridical norms, implacable and perfect in dividing a woman from a man, children from their parents, are not there when it is a case of defending the union, of reconciling dissension.
Another valuable aspect of these texts, also from the psychological point of view, is their emphasis on hospitality as a miracle. Like the friendship of which Simone Weil speaks, it has “the nature of grace.”

Hospitality reduced to civilization
The risk, for hospitality, is that it, too, like everything else, may become secularized, detached from the religious sense, reduced to civilization. However, this is not hospitality, but its disguise as “good manners,” and it is not lacking in aspects of an instrumental use of the person receiving the hospitality. How many children have been adopted out of moralism that superficially covered up a need to hide an emptiness in the marriage, a lack of welcoming between husband and wife? It goes without saying that these simulated forms of hospitality, whose value on a moral plane is certainly not up to me to judge, here or anywhere else, have psychologically problematic results. They do not resolve the couple’s problems (unless a miracle occurs, and luckily this happens too), and they create other problems for the person who is taken in–because without grace, without a miracle, no one is truly welcomed as a person, but at the most is taken in as an extension of a “plan for the family” marked more by the arrogance of the ego that drew it up than by the Father’s generous welcoming.

A difference forgiven and loved
And here, of course, we are already in front of the mystery of difference as a source of love, which is realized by means of the process that Giussani here crudely, but authentically, calls forgiveness. Contrary to the superficiality and hypocrisy of any code of good manners, Giussani has the courage to tell the uncomfortable truth: difference first has to be “forgiven” in order to be then welcomed and loved. It has to be forgiven, from the psychological point of view (this is my part, but it is naturally a “minor” part with regard to the complexity of the experience), because every form of difference is a challenge first and foremost to our ego, but then, more profoundly, to our identity–identity of gender, man/woman, or cultural, class, or national identity. Welcoming the challenge of otherness makes us grow as persons. But, in order to welcome it, we first have to forgive the challenger, with his irritating different-ness. And so, when the miracle happens, when we truly welcome the other, loving him in his otherness, in his being a person different from us, the other event takes place, which also has the nature of grace: the fact that we are finally ourselves. Paradoxically, it is precisely the different one, in his otherness, who by calling us to an encounter endowed with meaning, enables us to grasp the profound image of ourselves.
We are no longer Narcissuses lost in pursuit of elusive ideal images, no longer despots engaged in manipulating others, no longer starving children in need of possessing and devouring. We are humans open to the other, the emblem of the divine Other, to the experience of welcoming and loving, of giving and of receiving, without possessing. This is the foundational experience of being men, brothers, children of the Father.