People: Familiarity with the Mystery

The talk to the Diocesan Executive Council of CL in Milan on January 27, 2003 The Christian community as communion of origin, purpose, and means

BY GIANCARLO CESANA

If I think about what the community is for me–the community in Carate, the community of CLU, the community in Milan, the community in Italy, the community in the diocese–if I think that I have something to do with all of these, the image of a people comes immediately to my mind. The community is a people, in the strong sense of the term. Community: communion of origin, communion of purpose, and communion of means to achieve that purpose.

The community is the people to which I belong. However, I belong to it and am interested in it through certain people, because I am not with all of them in the same way and with the same intensity. I am with some of them very frequently, and have been for years, even for decades. What I mean is that through certain people, through my familiarity with some, I perceive that I belong to a people. The community is the most concrete and visible expression of what this people is.

Close familiarity
The community is a people to which I belong through a Fraternity, where the word fraternity–in my experience–means, certainly, meetings, the monthly retreat, etc., but it also means something else. For example, there are people with whom I am in the Fraternity even though we do not have meetings together, because we come together to eat, we talk to each other, we meet together; because we support each other, because my house could not go on without this presence, because I could not go on.

It is precisely because there is an ideal extension within this close familiarity that this close familiarity with some always throws me back into the people. So much so that when I meet someone I have never seen before, but who belongs to this people, it is always an occasion for familiarity, surprise, and discovery.

The ideal extension, determined by the familiarity with some, is a sign, at least for me, of Christ’s presence in a way that cannot be doubted. That is to say, it makes me understand that this close familiarity brings with it the Mystery that holds an entire people together, so that the world may be changed. It is a community in which the Church herself, as it seems to me the Pope once said, is reflected concretely as experience, because the origin is Christ, the purpose is Christ, and the means for achieving it is to follow Christ.

The ideal extension that derives from the Christian Fraternity, from being together with some, is not the extension of an idea. The way one looks at the people is not the extension of an idea, but is the extension of an occasion for familiarity; it is the extension of an occasion for encounter; it is the possibility of an encounter. It is the perception of a consciousness of a common home, a common purpose.

This is why gestures like School of Community, the Company of Works, and all the others that characterize our experience are truly the extension, the spreading out of the familiarity in which we recognize Christ–the presence of Christ–concretely, every day, through what is given to us.

Ideal proposal
So we understand why, being part of a Fraternity or a group, we then do School of Community with other groups, and we have larger gestures. We understand why we eat together, why we meet together. We understand why we help each other; that is, we understand the image and make-up of our Movement. The Movement has within it a powerful ideal proposal, to be sure, but it has a powerful ideal proposal in it, in as much as its matrix, its structure, is not words, but is familiarity with the Mystery. It is this familiarity with the Mystery that makes us look at all those who share, who were baptized with me, who have been brought with me into this same history. It is this familiarity with the Mystery that makes us look at all these and feel they are ours. It makes us look at all men and women, every one of them, as people who await the revelation of this. I am always struck when, for instance, in the CL community there is someone who is an “odd-ball,” or someone who is penniless–the community is made up of all those who seek familiarity with the Mystery. It is familiarity with some that introduces me to this, and without the people, I would not know what to do with this familiarity with some, because it would not be so that the world may be changed, it would not be for our destiny, but would be suffocation. In other words, it would be a relationship that dies inside.

So, the first alarm that a closely shared life should give is when this closely shared life–whether of friends, or of husband and wife, or of friars and sisters–does not make us look toward something else; when it does not broaden its familiarity. There are manifold ways for this broadening to take place: it could be the parish or the environment; it could be anything–any occasion for extending the particular encounter that one lives every day and to which the particular encounter refers. From this point of view, if the Diakonia, if the locus of responsibility is not, for the people who live it, a familiarity on this level, it is over before it has begun, because the fundamental aspect of familiarity among us, which calls us back to the mystery of Christ, is that the familiarity among us, above all when Responsibles are involved, is what enables us to see what happens. It shows us what happens; it is not what makes us formulate the strategies to make it happen. For, despite all the strategies we can come up with, the Spirit blows where, when, and how He wills: He blows, He has blown, He is here, He is present.

Familiarity must make us look at this, because this is the soul of the community.

The aspect that moved me this evening is that at the “Conference on Ethics,” Tosoni and Achilli were immediately struck by a common accent that, precisely, makes us perceive how the distances–I don’t know how often Tosoni and Achilli have seen each other–are immediately shortened, and are shortened because one lives his Fraternity with some, and the other with others, but for both there is this air of community, i.e., of a people.