I am my People

We offer our readers the notes of Father Giussani’s remarks to the CL Responsibles Assemblies held on March 6 and April 4, 2001

What I like best, what is as easy for me to understand as it is difficult to achieve, is that the Movement is one with our life: our life and event. Event, we could say this: our life and the event are like a space that has to be filled, and the more we go forward, the more the attractiveness of the commitment will win us over and make us victors over all the most negative opposition.
Just as limitations, all limitations, shrink away from the imperious will of our heart, so is the will of the heart in turn something truly great: it materializes in its greatness when we understand commitment as prayer.
The Movement is our prayer made objective.
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I have been here since the beginning, listening to what you have said today, which is so right as to be moving, because it is right and beautiful. Above all, I am glad to hear Father Pino so completely identified with the position in which I was placed by God.
What I would like you to keep always in mind–may Our Lady obtain this from God for me–is that the origin implies things that our attention and our convictions cannot yet fully grasp, completely know.
The fact of the correspondence between origin and belonging emphasized by Giancarlo Cesana is a great one: origin and belonging, that is to say, nothing comes to the surface unless it is an expression of something which belongs to what it expresses.
Moreover, it is really impressive how much this changes things. This observation changes: it pulls down the walls surrounding our awareness of things, because it knocks away, rips apart–in a sense–our self-assurance.
The answer to the question of the “I” takes on the mysterious opening which is the relationship between “I” and “people”: I am my people, out of me is born that for which and in which I have become able to collaborate with the Mystery which makes all things. Thus Mystery becomes action on the earth and on me.
The dimension of people is at the origin of the stance we take or our acceptance or recognition of ourselves.
Precisely because the origin coincides with the discovery of a belonging, origin and belonging are just the measures of the space that the words we use begin to define and to fill. A Jew of ancient times would never have objected to this, for one was the people in which he had been chosen.
In a nutshell, we must pay attention from the start to the undermining of all our certainties, as they are or as they could be in our life. The originary “I,” the “I” as the origin of how we view ourselves, of our reactions, the reactions we have to things: it’s either the “I” as this origin or “I” as part of an epic. No one can speak of the earth, the sun or a star without thinking about, without defining as he does so, without beginning to define the whole sky, the whole “astronomical” value of our observations.
Growing without this finale is like growing without growing. I say “finale” because it is the point where the eternal will be one with the event–also as eyes, as heart, as mind, as our grasp.
The “I” and the people: the rest is up to you.
Thank you for what you are.