retreat

From Beginning to Beginning

We offer here notes from Fr Giussani’s address at the end of a Memores Domini retreat, held in Bellaria, Italy, on October 6, 2002.

Forgive me if I am impertinent, but last night I was given a thought by St Gregory of Nyssa (those were the days, when journalists, or philosophy or literature teachers, or musicians had thoughts like this, were capable of thoughts like this!): “Those who run toward the Lord will never lack space… One who is climbing never stops, he moves from beginning to beginning, according to beginnings that never end.”1 How well your figure is defined, Our Lady, by this impassioned gaze lived by our early father in the faith!

The road each one of us is on is a beginning that never ends. To live it, then, entreaty is the resourcefulness that dominates space, the spaces of our time just like the spaces of our hearts. Let us wish for each other that these beginnings, these reprisals may never end.

We thank you, Our Lady, because you are truly our mother, even perceptively, by making our path so clear and open to our eyes, so clear and easy to follow. Help us, Our Lady, to be able to want being, what being truly is.

You, His daughter, daughter of this your Son, do not let us ever go to sleep at night without this certainty that picks up again the beginning of all things in us. As soon as we draw breath, the attitude we must have as we think of you is clear: humble, but higher than any usual creature (“Maiden yet a Mother, Daughter of thy Son, high beyond all other–lowlier is none”2).

Thank you. Excuse me, but I did not know how else to take part myself in what you have contemplated during these days.