Testimony
Enzo Piccinini
Christianity
Is for
Man’s
Happiness
The Christian fact reduced to moral precepts,
this is today’s drama. That God has become flesh needs a verification:
it must be seen. The challenge of the Church is the witness to a presence that
determines the relationship with all of life. Enzo’s testimony…
by Enzo Piccinini
May 14, 1999, only a few days before dying in a car crash (on May
26th), Enzo Piccinini was invited by the Archbishop of Ferrara, Carlo Caffarra,
to give the closing conference of a cycle of meetings proposed for the youth
of the Emilian city. He was given the theme, “Living the Church: Culture,
Charity, and Mission.” We offer here some ample excerpts from notes of
that testimony, because the details are important for remembering him.
The Christian position is the human position in the true sense of the word; outside
Christianity, the human is not fulfilled. The Christian experience is the human
experience and the Church is the teacher of humanity. This is the theme of this
evening, precisely through the usual things, those that seem relegated to the
sacristies or to those who have a few extra religious problems.
What I’m talking about is for the life of all men, of every man, precisely
because the human experience requires, in order to be itself, the Christian proposal.
Christ is everything for the life of man. Everything. Nothing in a man’s
life–if he loves to the core and with sincerity his own humanity–nothing
can exempt him from the relationship with Christ, because it is the heart of
the life of every man.
I wouldn’t remain in the Christian experience if it weren’t for this.
I would rebel even at the thought that being Christian means being (as so many
think) a bit less of a man than others, or with a few problems more. If I have
chosen to remain in the Christian experience, it is because here I find all of
myself, that which I have always sought.
Now, that Christ is everything for the life and the heart of man has to coincide
with what the Lord said in Deuteronomy: “Man was made for happiness.” For
this word, that marks the life of each of us–we wake up in the morning
to be happy, we have done everything to be happy, we’ll continue to do
so to our last breath–precisely for this happiness Christ sets Himself
as the answer for man: for the happiness of each of us.
What’s it got to do with life?
Let’s look around ourselves. I see, for example, my life, my colleagues,
the university environment, the students, etc. What surprises me is that most
of these people are baptized (and Baptism is the introduction to the Christian
experience). But where is Christ? If you ask, “But hey, if you’re
baptized and you’re inside the Christian tradition, what’s all this
got to do with what you do?”–they’ll look at you as if you
were saying something really weird. And if you sit in front of kids and ask them, “Do
you believe in God?”, you’d rarely find one who’d say “yes” with
the naturalness of someone who adheres to a true reality.
How come? I invite you to run an experiment. Take some children who’ve
never heard about Christ and tell them about Christ. If you tell these same children
that coming home one day you saw, on the curb near your house, your apartment
block neighbor who had taken it upon himself to clean the windows and take care
of the chimney pots for everybody in the building, they’d look at you laughing,
asking you for the punch line of the joke. Telling them about Christ isn’t
any less strange, but they don’t rebel. Why? Because it corresponds, naturally.
But now, what has happened? Why is it that the facts and the episodes that describe
and introduce the Christian experience, as such, don’t have anything to
do with life anymore? I believe it’s because Christianity is no longer
an event. Christianity is either an event, or it has no impact on life. What
is Christianity? A series of rites to participate in, a series of moral precepts,
a way, a certain standard of behavior to measure ourselves against, is this it?
If this is what it is, we’ll lose the battle, because a lot of others talk
better or seem to do better (above all if they’re in power). Then it’s
got to be something else, it’s evidently something else, because to the
degree that it’s reduced to rites, rules, behavioral standards, good manners,
duties, and participations, it no longer matters. Christianity is an event, something
unforeseen and unforeseeable, unthinkable and unimaginable, that happened 2,000
years ago. The Mystery, through which everything was made, suddenly comes to
meet man and becomes a possible experience.
He has to be seen
But if God who became Christ–the possibility for man to encounter, to experience
Mystery, and the answer for life–has to be seen, He can’t remain
a series of intentions of some intensely pensive person who enters the convent
or has had youthful disappointments. He has to be seen in the Fiat factory worker,
in the great intellectual, in the street sweeper, in the psychologically troubled
guy, in the hero of our national sport. There is a verification: He has to be
seen.
So here, then, is the problem. You have to be able to see Him and you need to
try to understand just where it is that you truly see Him. How does the Christian
fact (that is, an event that surprises us) determine a change in man, by which
man is truly man, by which man is the humanity that he has desired to be?
Two things are necessary for a true verification:
1) A totalizing educational commitment to the proposal that is Christ. This unity
and experience of belonging, of friendship, is the Church. You need a life wholly
committed to the proposal that Christ is.
2) You need to accept the proposal in the terms of the proposal itself. In the
relationship with an object, the object must determine the method of the relationship.
If I had a bottle of Tocai white wine from Friuli (the best wine in the world),
uncorked it, stuck my finger inside, took it out, and then said, “Hey,
it’s dry!”, you’d say I was nuts. I “tried” the
wine, but I was the one who chose the method, and so I changed the relationship.
Wine has to be drunk because your tastebuds aren’t in your fingers. This
is a fundamental truth that applies to my research and my work, so why shouldn’t
it be true with Christ as well? If He is a presence (as He is a presence) and
if He is a fact (as He is a fact), if He is an event (as He is an event) that
surprised everyone and continues to surprise everyone, then He is the One who
says how we relate with Him, not us. And He said, a reality of men He chose,
who are involved with each other, make Him present. Not our tortuous roads, but
adherence to reality. So then the issue is to accept the method Christ placed
in the world.
Culture, charity, mission
What do these two conditions determine? “Those who follow me will have
eternal life and a hundredfold here on earth.” This is Christ’s promise.
He says, “Those who follow me.” Christ always starts out from an
affective aspect, because if there’s a crime in the Christian life, it’s
thinking that to go to Heaven it’s enough to observe the Ten Commandments.
Instead, Christ said, “Those who love Me will obey My law,” not vice-versa.
There’s an aspect of affection to be discovered, otherwise it’s a
disaster, because mechanicalness has never comprehended man and it never will.
Instead, the surprise of an affection is what makes you feel that everything
that comes from there you want for yourself.
And how is this promise described? By the three dimensions that measure the Christian
experience: culture, charity, and mission. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Culture. If Christ is a fact and a presence, then He is a presence that determines
the relationship with everything. From this derives a critical and systematic
consciousness of your own human existence, that translates into a different manipulation
of things, in a different use of yourself. Think of when you were little and
you did something in secret; suddenly your mother or your father appeared and
you realized immediately what you were doing. A presence determines a new consciousness
of yourself.
2. Charity. Everyone thinks of almsgiving and being good, but no! Charity is
the presence of Christ and thus it is imitating Him. He is the answer to life.
Charity comes from the Greek charis: free, gratuitous. It is the supreme form
of loving expression, because it implies the absence of “what’s in
it for me” calculations; free.
3. Mission. It’s like the warmth that a live body can’t help but
emanate. It’s never an initiative, but instead is the modality of life
that is born of how you are changing now, because of what is happening to you.
What are you doing
for Vietnam?
When I converted, at the beginning there were various problems because my friends
from before (who were fairly tenacious and tough; it was the period of the Vietnam
War) persecuted me. And the tone was, “You’ve cut out your little
corner, huh? You even go to pray. But what are you doing for Vietnam? Doesn’t
your conscience bother you?” I felt a bit blackmailed; I couldn’t
understand. Once there had been a protest, and as I came out of the university
cafeteria they surrounded me and began a really nasty invective. They saw I was
weak in my reasons. I felt terrible, I couldn’t respond, but at a certain
point an idea came to me and I told them, “For Vietnam, I’m building
the Church, here.” I’ll never forget it; this is the truth of the
question. Today when they see me they’re ashamed, because they’re
all in the professions that they didn’t want to do, and all that remains
of their “leftism” is their trips to the Orient, their environmentalism
or their scuba-diving and exchanging photos or walking the dog. This is what’s
left. Me, instead, I’m still going strong! Sometimes I ask one of them, “What
are you doing for Vietnam?” There’s a fantastic part in Eliot’s
Choruses from ‘The Rock’–“Where there is no temple there
shall be no homes.” Without the presence of the Mystery who loves us, there’s
no place for humanity. This is why it’s necessary to build the Church.
Building the Church
An authentic religious dimension is what saves man. These days, whether we are
ugly or good, we want to build the Church where we are, because this is the true
humanity, building the Christian community everywhere. But how does this happen?
We build the Church through our presence: being a presence is our final, decisive
indication and category; being a presence, whatever temperament you have. It
doesn’t matter what gifts you have, you need faith and faith alone. Presence
means the way of being within a situation, because you don’t live in thin
air, but within the relationship with your girlfriend, your parents, friends,
work, university studies, within the cultural and political moment… within
everything. Being a presence in a situation means being there so as to perturb
it; if not, you aren’t a presence. Christ came into the world upsetting
the womb of a woman, upsetting a great man called Joseph, and putting the pettifoggers
of Israel in a critical position (He didn’t say, “May I come in?”).
He placed Himself for what He was. Being a presence in a situation means being
there in a way that perturbs it, so that if you weren’t there, everyone
would notice, because it would be different; not because you do big things, but
because you are yourself. Being a presence means being inside a situation taking
Christ as an event in our person. It isn’t a matter of big discourses (it
leaves things as they are). Our true proclamation happens through what Christ
has perturbed in our life. It is a humble and sure boldness; it’s a paradox,
humble and sure, that is not founded on ourselves but on the grace that has been
given us by a Presence that will never fail (“I’ll be with you, even
to the end of time”). A boldness, a certainty for the future…