Hope The monks of Cascinazza

A Companionship on the Road that Brings You Closer to the Origin
A reality in which hope has the physicality of walls and of relationships. A conversation with Fr. Sergio, Prior of the Benedictine Monastery of Cascinazza, in Milan

Edited by Giuseppe Frangi

Fr. Sergio is laughing. He has good reason to laugh, for outside his window he sees a stunningly beautiful day, with a clear azure sky and a breeze wafting the scent of summer’s arrival. Fr. Sergio is laughing, because in this beauty he discerns the powerful echo of the beauty that struck him thirty years ago. At the time, he was a railway employee in the Bolzano district of Italy, and had devoted himself, heart and soul, to politics and labor union activism. But he felt as if he were surrounded by a desert. One day, without having wanted it or sought it, he had an entirely chance encounter with the newborn CL community. That day his life, which had lost every hope, ran into an entirely unexpected hope. Needless to say, from that day on, his life was changed.
Today, Fr. Sergio Massalongo is Prior of the community of monks in the Monastery of Saints Peter and Paul in Buccinasco, known as the “Cascinazza.” We wanted to speak again about hope, which he has been experiencing daily for the past 30 years.

What makes hope an experience of life, rather than an aspiration or a false claim?
The mercy of an encounter that saves everything of the human.
A fully human encounter in which you perceive the presence of the divine, that the Lord is here, that He is present, and that He is for me.
Hope becomes an experience of life through the grace of running into the event of Christ, who takes all my life and introduces a new principle into it: everything subsists in Him!
This fact, recognized and embraced, opens a positive gaze on life, no matter what state you find yourself in, because in the fragment of the particular that you have in your hands, you see the beginning of the final fulfillment to which your heart aspires.
Thus, hope does not rest on a human ideology; it isn’t a utopia. It rests on the certainty of the presence of Christ. He is so present that He can be encountered and known, so present that He can grasp and change your life, and lead it to fulfillment.
For me, the best synthesis on hope was in the Easter 1996 poster:

Hope is certainty in the future based
on something real in the present.
Christ’s presence, made known
to us through memory,
makes us certain of the future,
therefore a tireless journey and a limitless tending
forward are made possible,
starting from the certainty that
as Christ possesses history,
so will He reveal Himself in it.

If, instead, hope rests on mere human strength, it becomes a utopia. From here, the passage to impatience, false claims, and violence in all its expressions, is rapid and consequent.

What is the opposite of hope: desperation or the flight from reality?
Psalm 62:1-2 says it well: “In God alone is my soul at rest; my help comes from Him. He alone is my rock, my stronghold, my fortress: I stand firm.”
Only God can be the foundation of hope, man’s support in attaining happiness.
St. Benedict also reminds us in Rule 4.4 to “place your trust in God.”
He is faithful, and capable of bringing to completion His promises, what He has begun.
If, instead, hope does not aspire to God as its maximum good, if man trusts in himself, his own strength, his own capabilities, his own knowledge, then he is no longer open to the infinite horizon and prefers to reduce himself to a petty place where his reason atrophies, and desire keeps him chained: man is frustrated.
You flee from this in dreams, the attempt to find meaning, working from your own imagination. This dissolves the human, and even though you live in reality, you no longer touch it; everything eludes you and you are led to desperation, in many forms–that is, to lack of confidence in existence, because by yourself you can’t attain what you desire.
This error of perspective is sin, and it is the fruit of disobedience.
You don’t accept being loved by God, and this makes you incapable of loving yourself and others, so you are alone with your refusal, which you hate.
Certainly, to the extent that you realize what is going on, you get on your knees and pray for forgiveness; it’s always possible to begin again. This is why St. Benedict exhorts us to “never despair of the mercy of God” (Rules 4:74). The love of God is greater than all our sins.

How is an experience like the one you live a hope for the world?
Once, Fr. Giussani told us, “The Christian community does not miss monastic life, but it misses Christ manifesting Himself…” and he continued, “Now, where is Christ’s manifestation most visible? In monastic life! Because everything in us is a function of building the Body of Christ.”
Everything in us must serve so Christ may be seen, may be present within the organic-ness of life, so that He may be made manifest in the chaos of this world, a beginning, a dawn of humanity that is different and true, where everything is ordered according to the final goal.
The sign that enables people to see that Christ is present is the communion among us, the miracle of a unity that is not humanly possible, a unity that is still imperfect, but real.
Being able to encounter a locus like this can rekindle man’s hope that life has meaning. The monastery says that it is possible to attain the fulfillment of your own humanity! It says that Christ is enough!
There is a place where God’s forgiveness and mercy are embraced and regenerate the human. This place is the Church; it is the monastery.

St. Benedict also lived in a very difficult time in history. How did he propose the question of hope to the men of his times?
St. Benedict had the courage of the faith to respond “me” to the call of God. It’s all there! All the fecundity of St. Benedict was due to his being an instrument in the hands of God. Letting himself be possessed by God, he enabled the “I” of many people to be reborn. It didn’t involve doing extraordinary things, but simply being oneself, testifying with his own existence that salvation was present.
Your own response to Christ determines the possibility of fulfillment of everyone and everything. St. Benedict felt this responsibility touch his life, and he didn’t let it slip away. Out of this “yes” to Christ flowed forth his passion for the human, and from this was born a culture that founded Europe, a culture in which every people found its unity and the best of itself in the presence of Christ.
All this was seen in its embryonic form in the monasteries, in the common life of the monks. Through the beauty expressed by this unity, one understood that the Mystery of God is in history.
Recently, a priest in the courtyard of our monastery told me, amazed, “What silence here!” I was surprised because at the moment, it wasn’t silent at all. You could hear the annoying noise of the cars on the highway and the tractors in the fields. Evidently, that priest heard another silence, the reason why we are here: Jesus Christ. This cry is far louder than any noise.

What is the nexus between hope and happiness?
If the object of hope is God, we know that God became man to help man reach his happiness. Christ is the destiny that gives Himself in the present to help man in his walk toward God.
For this reason, believing in Christ is a desire full of trust, certainty, and surety. Even in the midst of trials, in tribulation, the prize does not escape us, because, as St. Paul says, “I know in whom I believe.”

How does obedience to a rule and prayer increase hope and make it truer?
Happiness is possible in accomplishing the will of God. How can I know what God wants from me? Through obedience to what He proposes to me, through obedience to the Rule, through adherence to the form of the companionship in which Christ makes Himself present to me today.
Obedience to the Rule assures me of the road, frees me from illusions, corrects deviations, helps new beginnings, and sustains the journey. So then, it’s not possible to hope in your own fulfillment without continually asking Christ to achieve it–that is, without prayer, without asking, without begging from the community for the presence of the Lord. Prayer is possible only before One who is there! St. Theresa of the Child Jesus said, “Your love is my hope, and I want to burn in it.”

Time is an obstacle to the experience of hope. It happens that you experience it in an encounter, but then it is more difficult for it to last. Why? What can sustain it?
In order to persist in the original encounter, you need a continuous movement of conversion. You can’t reach the goal without accepting this change; without passing through the death of Christ, you can’t arrive at the resurrection. If you are afraid of this sacrifice, you stop there, and the goal gets frozen up, crystallized. God exists, but He doesn’t matter any more.

If you don’t make progress in the sequela Christi, in following Him, you backslide. In fact, if you say you dwell in Christ, you have to walk as He walked. If you lose contact with Him because of your own laziness, your journey becomes more wearisome and difficult. “Our progress therefore consists in not presuming to have arrived, but in striving continually toward the goal” (St. Bernard).

What can sustain this tension toward the goal?
First of all, “a new beginning” is always a grace. It is the re-happening of a Presence who imposes Himself and touches us, raising us up again; it is running into a new human reality that makes the origin present. For this reason, hope is sustained by a companionship on a journey toward the goal, a lived and suffered companionship that is made new every day. It is sustained by patience. The time that passes, rather than distancing us, brings us ever closer to the wellspring of our being. Time is the mysterious unfolding of an already realized fullness. Patience enables us to enter into this possession. A fourth century Church Father, St. Zeno of Verona, said in one of his sermons on patience, “Patience grants poverty the ability to go forward happy, possessing everything, when it endures everything,” that is, when everything is offered up.