LETTERS

The Beginning
We print here an extract from an essay on “The rediscovery of the need to ‘think’” written by a young American who studied six months in Italy, attending the fifth year of Artistic High School at the Sacred Heart Institute in Milan.
This is my last week of a semester of study abroad, here in Milan, in Italy. In the beginning, there was a lot of difficulty with the language, and it became clear that this had to be the point from which I began to build. The Artistic High School was all new for me, too. It had never occurred to me that I could take a pencil in hand for anything other than math problems. But all these things have already happened; I am left in the present, and I will be leaving Italy in ten days. How can I keep studying Italian, and continue engaging with the friends I have found here in Italy, when I won’t see them again for several years? “I don’t think I could keep living if I didn’t hear Him speak anymore” (J.A. Mohler). I arrived, eager to learn, and the first thing I learned was how great my dependency was. Everything beautiful that I want to do, I can’t manage to do. There are things I want to say, but no words for them. I arrived not knowing the language or how to express myself, but with the awareness that I was seeking something great. I have found it. In the midst all my limitations, with all my great dependency, the possibility for great friendship has been born–not from the things I am able to do, but from the love of an Other. How great God is, and how small I am! I’m not the one who chose to exist; an Other sings my existence! This is why I am writing an essay now, and in this way I too am saying my “yes.” This is the beginning.
Jim, Minnesota

Without Abstractions
Dear Fr. Carrón: I’m not sure how much I’ve understood from these beautiful and dramatic Spiritual Exercises, but one thing seems clear to me: if the form of Christ’s response to my desire is Christ Himself, His sweet Presence, it can’t be something abstract. While you and Cesana were talking, I looked around me. If this people is His sweet Presence, it’s not abstract. Nor can it be generic. If Christ’s sweet Presence is the face of my family members, friends, colleagues, the children I have at school, the people to whom we bring the pack of food every 15 days, the middle school kids who do the Grail [a commitment to Christ proposed by Student Youth (GS) for middle school students], the GS kids, and on and on with all those I have been given, including you, then yes, I can give my life for the work of an Other, because this work is right in front of me every day, in every moment. The more I give my life for the work of an Other, the more it becomes mine, both the life and the work. Thank you for reminding us that what we miss is Christ, and for making the Mystery more familiar to us with your testimony, to the point of calling it by the intimate You.
Antonella, Adria (Italy)

The Friendship
of Gis
“Gis,” as she is called by her friends, is one of the first friends of Chiara Lubich [founder of the Focolare Movement], and she came to our Memores Domini house here in Buenos Aires a few years ago, when she accompanied Chiara on a visit to the communities of Latin America. I received this letter from her recently: “I was deeply moved to participate in the solemn Mass for dearest Fr. Giussani, as I watched the live broadcast on Italian television. The first thing that comes to mind to say is, ‘What a beautiful thing is a saint!’ Truly, it was all a song of praise and thanksgiving to God, to Mary, for the extraordinary gift to the Church and to all of humanity, in giving us Fr. Giussani, and giving him a special charism of the Holy Spirit. I imagine you and everyone must feel this loss very greatly, and I am with you in your pain and prayer. But the certainty of the Risen Jesus, present in His Church and in your midst, also makes me happy to live with you this moment of public recognition of the greatness of a father and teacher like him. Give those with you my deepest remembrance, and my full union, together with my prayer, uniting with that of Chiara and the entire Movement for Fr. Giussani and, most of all, for the entire great family of CL. Most humbly, in the Risen Lord, Gis.”
Sergio, Buenos Aires

Inheritance
Dear Alberto: I received with your welcome letter of April 13th the latest issue of Traces and the “Special Issue” dedicated to John Paul II.
Thank you very much. I congratulate you on this beautiful initiative with which the Fraternity of CL has testified to its grateful memory of a great and beloved Pope, by joining Him in the memory with the figure of its unforgettable Founder. May the Lord enable us to embrace their inheritance, following their footsteps on the journey of an unconditional love for Christ. With warmest regards,
Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko, President
of the Pontifical Council for the Laity

Fraternity
Most Reverend Fr. Julián Carrón: I wish to personally express my heartfelt thanks to you and each of the members of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation for the sentiments of joyful gratitude and ardent and filial affection expressed for the election of Holy Father Benedict XVI. Let us give thanks to our Lord Jesus because, after our great Pope John Paul II, He has not left us long orphans of his Vicar, granting us the gift of a Pastor after His own heart, who “guides us to the knowledge of Christ, to His love, to true joy.” At this beginning of his Petrine Ministry, let us pray that the Holy Spirit may grant strength and consolation to our Holy Father in his service to the universal Church and the unity in the faith. I entrust to the Most Holy Virgin, Mother of the Church, the commitment and the journey of your Fraternity to be truly adults in the faith, in faithfulness to the original charism of Fr. Giussani, rooted in the friendship with Christ, so that the men of our times may know, “Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide… is the great potential of human existence truly revealed… do we experience beauty and liberation” (Benedict XVI, April 24, 2005). I bless you from the heart.
Bishop Josef Clemens, Secretary of the Pontifical Council
for the Laity

Pray for Me
Dearest Fr. Giuss: I am writing to thank you for what you have given me, starting long ago in the days at Berchet High School. But, above all, I am writing to exult with you and for you, now that you are living in the light of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I believe that the simplest way of doing this is to remind you of a section of a letter that I wrote to a mutual friend of ours in CL, who was crying because of your death: “When A. told me what he had seen on television, I was caught off balance for a moment, but then I realized that now that my Giuss (each of us can call him “my Giuss”) is gazing upon the Face of God, the dialogue can finally re-open between him and me. I can’t say he’s dead. I say, instead, “He fell asleep in the Lord last night.” I ask him to pray for me, to keep watch over me, with all the love that he always has shown me. Now Fr. Giussani is found again and sees me. I was praying for him, and now he is the one praying for me. This is true for each of us. He, who generated me in Christ in the Berchet classroom, and thus is my father, now points me out to the Father; he who made me encounter Christ, now shows me to Him. And since he explained to me who the Holy Spirit is, maybe he will ask the Holy Spirit to help me write again. He is a living Presence that will never leave me, until we both can embrace again, when God wants.”
Mimmi Cassola, Florence

Life After
the Exercises
Dear Fr. Carron: I wanted to express my appreciation for this year’s Fraternity Exercises as they were a reminder to me of why I belong to this companionship after periods of time when that question seemed to be lost. I especially thank you and the leaders of the Retreat for reawakening in me a perspective about my desires for happiness at work, with family, and with friends, and the true aim of these desires that never stop in their thirst for the Infinite, of which I have had a taste of in these days with the others who accompanied me on the Retreat. Upon coming home, I was struck by the new awareness of love that I felt for my wife and our life together. I also know from the Exercises that, as time goes on, this positivity will be hard to sustain on my own without coming back to see those faces I saw on the Retreat, which are a sign of His presence, here and now. Gratefully yours,
Chris, Philadelphia

More Alive than Ever
This is an e-mail received by Stephen, from a new friend in his School of Community.
Stephen: I want to thank you for being here at St. Mary’s in Brenham and introducing me to the Communion and Liberation Movement. As we studied the book At the Origin of the Christian Claim for over a year in School of Community, I had no idea how much CL would eventually mean to me. After attending a couple of CL events and reading some of the Traces magazines and your blog, the Movement started coming into focus for me. I remember driving to work the day that Pope John Paul II died, thinking: the Pope is dying and I am becoming more alive than I’ve ever been in my life. This is a wonderful surprise that I had no idea was coming. Everything is changing for me–the way I think, pray, work, and deal with other people. Father Giussani has a wonderful way of teaching about Jesus Christ. I am more aware of Him in all aspects of my life than I have ever been. To suddenly realize that a joy and happiness that I’ve been looking for all my life has been found is something I’m still coming to grips with. I pray for you every day and CL worldwide but especially here in Brenham. The Movement is such a blessing. I encourage everyone that I can to come to School of Community and pray that they will stay long enough to experience some of the spiritual blessings that I have. If there is anything that I can do to help you or the Movement, please let me know.
Tim, Texas

Studying Psychiatry
I’m Victor–the medical student from Nigeria you met last summer at the CL Responsible’s Assembly in Italy. In this period, I’m doing my clinical posting in psychiatry (I have been doing this posting for about 8 weeks). For most of the time that we have been doing psychiatry, there has been strike action by the resident doctors so, apart from the lectures we received from the consultants (they don’t go on strike), there was not much to do since we get most of our clinical experience from watching the residents interact with patients. However, the consultants encouraged us to go to the wards and interact with patients that were already admitted so we could develop our clinical skills. Going to the wards was optional and open to our freedom since there was a strike. It was amazing, however, how most of my colleagues complained that we were still receiving lectures and going to the wards while other students doing postings in other departments were doing nothing (they wanted to join the other students in doing nothing!). Such love for nothingness is tragic. While receiving lectures in psychiatry, I came in contact with lots of theories and explanations concerning the human mind and human behavior. Also, I was taught a lot of psychiatric symptoms and signs. I remember vividly how a symptom I often have–an urgency for something great, something imperative, something that I cannot explain–could easily be passed off as a delusional mood. And my experience of not feeling like doing anything could just be that I have low dopamine/serotonin levels in certain parts of my brain. In front of these explanations, I was shocked. How can such dear experiences be so trivialized? (Of course, there are bases for these explanations but the point is that it cannot just be these explanations; there’s got to be something more!) Also in this period, I began my first interactions with patients. The psychiatric patients really are unique because a lot of them present at the hospital as a result of inadequate perception of reality; they present with psychosis (distortion of reality). So I have seen first hand the effect an inadequate perception of reality can have on someone (for instance, I met a man who developed severe psychosis and walks around nude because he failed an examination). Also, it is very easy to meet severely depressed patients who have lost hope in life and so are unwilling to live. In front of these patients, I am provoked to ask, “What is my hope? What gives reason to this hope?” I desire that through me these patients may experience hope and see that indeed life is beautiful. In the coming weeks, I will be finishing the posting in psychiatry but these questions which I’ve been provoked to ask will remain with me forever.
Victor, Lagos (Nigeria)

The Embrace
We Know
I need to tell you about how happy I’ve been lately. You know that due to a number of reasons, I was asked to take charge of the St. Cyril Community... but now I understand that it was given to me. There is a guy there, Omar, who you will get to meet while you are here. He’s a very simple and to-the-point type of person. He told us that, after he met us, he went home and felt like God had just embraced him. Because he’s quiet, and hardly speaks English, I doubted this gift. But I am so moved by his openness... and his desire. We have slowly developed a friendship that is helping me in my life. What is really incredible is that this fruit was planted at the most screwed-up book event in the history of the Movement (when we first engaged St. Cyril with The Risk of Education). Who can deny these miracles? So, I used to be very confused when someone said that these book events are for my happiness. What does that mean? They take time, commitment, and work... But I cannot deny that God has blessed me with Omar’s friendship, with someone who is helping me. So when you come down to visit, I am interested in a public event at St. Cyril, not because a larger School of Community would look better, but because I want to grow deeper in this embrace that Omar and I both know....
Jay, Houston

John Paul II
In 1978, I was living in Italy, as was my wife Silvia, though at that stage we had only just met. We remember the advent of this Polish Pope very clearly. During those years, we used to meet with a group of friends to reflect on our lives and what the faith had to do with the events of our lives. I later discovered that this group was part of a larger movement within the Church, called Communion and Liberation, and it is a great joy that we have found friends in Perth to continue this journey of discovery and faith through friendship. In 1980, the text for our weekly meetings was something I didn’t expect: a papal encyclical–not the sort of thing you would normally invite your friends to plough through. But this was the first encyclical written by the new Pope. I remember clearly the very first sentence: “The redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.” This wasn’t the sort of talk I was used to hearing, it wasn’t the usual religious talk–about faith, morality, etc.–but it also wasn’t the other sort of Catholic talk I was used to from my student days, all about Christianity and social justice, changing the world, and so on. No, this Pope was starting out with an amazing, extravagant claim: that Jesus Christ is the center of everything, of all reality, of all human history; that He is the meaning of everything, the answer to all questions. This made a huge impact on me at the time, and it has stayed with me as a sort of persistent thought that wouldn’t go away. John Paul II was very clear about this. Everything he said and did grew out of this certainty about the claim that Christianity makes: that the infinite Mystery of being–God–entered human history in a precise time and place, and now remains in the world as a living, real presence–that can now be encountered through those who accept Him. If you take this central belief out of the picture you have of the Pope, then he really looks like a sign of contradiction. And that is why, I think, the mass media have such a lot of trouble trying to decide who this Pope actually was. This contradiction was put very well by a journalist I heard on TV yesterday. He said something like, “John Paul II clung strongly to Christian tradition, but at the same time was able to reach out to people of different faiths.” But that is like saying that, in my marriage, I have kept my own identity and personality, but at the same time I am still able to reach out to my wife. Isn’t it the other way round? If I am able to reach out to my wife, it is because I have maintained my own uniqueness as a person. If I didn’t have my own identity, what would I be reaching out with? For me, the major impact of this Pope’s long term is his constant challenge to take the claims of the Gospel seriously and to continually rediscover what they have to do with my life. The deeper I go into my encounter with Jesus, the more I will discover that all my life is a gift, and the more I will want to share that with others and share their understandings of what it is all about. This Pope had such a deep certainty and understanding of this that he saw all human affairs charged with the grandeur of God. Back in that first encyclical in 1980, he was already talking about the Great Jubilee that was coming up in 2000. All time, all space, every person on the face of the earth, even me, was somehow part of the mystery of creation, and all things and all persons have an eternal, mysterious destiny that we can encounter here and now. He communicated this great faith in God and in humanity through the way he lived, and also through the way he died. Many of us have lost loved ones and dear friends in recent months and years; how reassuring it was to see the Holy Father face his physical sufferings with dignity and humility, and with the clear conviction that God can work through us, whatever the circumstances and whatever our condition. All we need to do is say, “Yes.”
John Kinder, Perth