Bologna

Without Presence, Absolutely Nothing

On March 27, 1999, two months before he died in an automobile accident, our very dear friend Enzo Piccinini met with a group of health workers in Rimini, Italy. These are some notes from
his talk

Only when you don’t love anything can things pass you by without leaving a trace, but because of the mere fact that they exist, they are already a big question. The real problem is whether you love or not, whether you go around with your face trained on your stomach or look at reality as a continuing discovery of something that is not yours. This is true for everybody, whether you are at home cooking at the stove or cleaning up the yard, or are in the operating room. Those who decide to love make the difference, but loving in this case is stripped of every sentimental characteristic: it is the affirmation of the other, pure and simple.
From this point of view, what has to change in our specific profession–in which relationships are confused often with a certain kind of heavy familiarity–is important. This heavy familiarity is not love, it is not humanity. Loving is, above all, a judgment and a profound bond; it is feeling that the other has something to do with you, and that what you do has to do with the other. The person you have in front of you is a whole person, not a “piece” to be dealt with. This is why our job is not solely a problem of technique. In fact, it has been proven by now that the psychological state of the patient, whoever he or she is, is decisive in the healing process from 30% to 40%, and in some cases even 50%. Why? Because man is a unit, and medicine is not only technique. Overall consideration is decisive in the relationship.
There is no reality without a meaning, because there is no reality without the Mystery. I did not make reality and it cannot be justified only with the detail that I see. There is something greater than me and you, which is mysteriously present, and responding to which there is truly what is. If not, there is only what you feel, what suits you, and what you have decided. In the insert on work (Tracce, no 11, December 1998), Fr Giussani is fantastic: he does not explain work, but tells what its fundamental condition is: he speaks of work as the ideal aspect of love for Christ. This poses the question: by working, to whom do you answer, to whom and to what? Certainly, you answer to your boss, but, in the end, the answer is to something because of which everything exists, because of which everything is worthy of respect and time. Without the Presence, there is nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even your wife is present without the Mystery. Usually, for us, she is present because you perceive her; when you don’t perceive, she’s no longer there. On the contrary, if the Presence is there, your wife is there even if you don’t perceive her, even if she doesn’t suit you any more. This is how life is. This is the problem; if you take this away, only instinctive relating to each other exists.
Therefore, either we reason like everybody else or we change. What we have encountered teaches us that the Mystery exists in reality, and this determines the impact we have on our work and our relationship with reality. Then we understand what it means to pray and what community means.
Do you remember the line, “Love those who say to others, ‘You cannot die,’”? Loving means affirming the other, that is, telling the other that he has to live, affirming his destiny, where he comes from and where he is going. The relationship between husband and wife is emblematic, in this sense: they are two freedoms that have to be complete and definitive; the terms of the relationship cannot be the idea that my freedom ends where yours starts. Marriage is affirming what really keeps us together: the event of destiny. Why are we together? Because we have understood that with all our love for each other, the guarantee of the horizon of desire that we have in our hearts needed something else, and we have called Christ to be the witness of our love. We have to change our mentality; otherwise, we are content with reasoning like everybody else does. What does it mean that we start from a different mentality?
First of all, it is necessary to acknowledge that different is not something we think, but something that happens: there is something that comes up, unforeseen. The different for us is an event; it is not a thought, nor is it a way of behaving. We do not have a certain handbook of rules of good behavior in the family (or on the job or elsewhere). This is not in the balance. The different for us–because of which we never give up–is that something extraordinary has happened: God became Christ, and this occurred in an existentially accessible thing that is called “encounter.”
It is a shock that happens in life. To the extent that we give it a home, this change expands and takes everything over viscerally, all the way to the very details, to the use of everything. How is this giving a home to something that happened documented in experience? In the fact that I become myself by following Another. Then the problem is no longer whether we make a mistake or not, but obedience, which gives a viewpoint also on error. Existentially, this is a journey, which makes the new man not someone who never makes a mistake; the new man is not the capable man, equal to the task.
For all this, one needs courage that he cannot muster up by himself. Every time I have gone to Fr Giussani to ask his advice on certain professional attitudes of mine, I never asked him to tell me what I should do, but to console me in the fact that I had to decide. If there is no consolation, one gets desperate. This is why we are together, in order to sustain each other in our daily battle.
All the work today is to make us participate in this undeserved life, and this begins to take a bit of affection in our life, but where is it that our life puts everything at stake? In the environment. It is clear that the environment is everything, but there is a point in the environment that either exists so that you can get money or exists for something else. Let’s start thinking about that.