cl in the world

Our Lady Is God’s Method

Julián Carrón

“What fills our lives with hope is the fact that Our Lady exists, the flower of Our Lady. In Being’s relationship with Our Lady, God’s method is revealed: to make man take part in that vortex of charity, which is mercy. We live inside this vortex.” Notes from Julián Carrón’s testimony

Introduction
Maiden yet a Mother, daughter of thy Son High beyond all other–lowlier is none… You are the living fountain of hope. [Dante]
Why? Because you are the clearest vindication conceivable against the apparent uselessness of life. In you, Mary, negativity, destruction, and evil did not win. You are truly the vindication against everything that looms as a menace over our lives. Therefore, we come to you, as beggars, as poor ones, to ask you for the only thing we really need: Jesus, the only positive sign in an otherwise absurd movement of time and space.

My friends, we travel the road conscious of our nothingness, because otherwise we would be formal, with our eyes fixed on her, “the living fountain of hope.” It is by looking at her, censoring nothing, that our lives are filled with hope. Whether the moment we are going through is a bad or a good one, dark or filled with light, with difficulty or joy, we travel this road, crying out, “Veni Sancte Spiritus, Veni per Mariam;” make Yourself present through the womb, the flesh of Our Lady.

1. You are the living fountain of hope
To us, who are, like everybody, frail to the point of arousing compassion, conniving with the evil that is all around us and within us, hope has appeared in the figure of Our Lady. Fr Giussani’s charity toward each of us has led him to place Our Lady before our eyes and point our gaze toward her. It is an invitation to look at her so that our lives will be filled with hope.

What fills our lives with hope is the fact that Our Lady exists, the flower of Our Lady. Our Lady is a fact. She exists. This flower exists. And no evil, no negativity can erase from reality the flower of Our Lady.

She, one of us, a human creature just like we are, achieved her destiny. In her was fulfilled the promise that is life, the desire for happiness, despite all the disasters present now or yet to come. This is why she is the clearest and most profound vindication against the apparent uselessness of life. No one, not even we, can remove this flower from reality. She is a fact that defies our skepticism, our lack of expectation.

This is why, if we look at her with simplicity, without offering any opposition, our lives are filled with hope. “Among all the nations of the universe you are the living fountain of hope, an endless source of hope; again and again you offer hope as the meaning of everything: the light of lights, the color of colors, the other of others.”

2. In her is manifested the Mystery of Being-Charity
Being is charity, love. It is impressive that Mystery deigned to train His gaze on a human creature. We are used to taking this for granted, and so we are not impressed by it, by the fact that the Being who makes everything takes an interest in man, by Being’s gaze on nothingness.

But this is precisely what strikes Our Lady, as she says in the Magnificat: “The Lord has looked at the nothingness of His handmaid.”

In her, Being looks at everybody. He looks at me; He looks at you.

In the warmth of this love/charity, this flower of Our Lady germinated.

Man is germinated only in the warmth of a love like this. It is the only love that corresponds and therefore the only one capable of generating the “I.”

In Being’s relationship with Our Lady, God’s method is revealed, which is to make man take part in that vortex of charity, which is mercy. We live inside this vortex. Therefore, no errors of any kind, no relapses can stop us. This is certainly something more than mere correctness!

In this vortex of charity, of mercy, is revealed what Mercy is, and precisely because we are part of this vortex and experience it, we accept the Mystery, as Giussani points out: “The matter is simple: what exists, the mystery that is, the reality of Being, can be accepted only by virtue of an experience whereby one has become God’s object. You are caught up in a whirlpool that is happening now, that has a history, but history is always starting again hic et nunc, otherwise it is not history, and there is no history. From this a civilization is born; otherwise, we are swept away…. This is why I want to bring everything back to this: Being is Mystery. The Mystery exists. How can we affirm this? When we recognize that it exists! It exists! The Mystery exists!”

3. Being children
“Being is Mystery, mystery that exists. The being that exists! The tragic situation of man is that he does not recognize this.” In order to take part in this vortex of charity, we have to recognize it, like Our Lady, that is to say, we have to be children. Giussani goes on to tell us, “I urge myself, I have always urged myself every morning of my life to pray to God, in other words to be a child, because being a child means feeling this totality of grasp, this possession which an Other has of us. An Other: the Mystery.”

Only by letting ourselves be taken up without offering any opposition, like children, can Being make our flower germinate, the “I” of each one of us. He can exalt the individual, our nothingness. “One is not saved by his own efforts, his resolutions, because it is an Other who saves him and the world through a new thing He has caused to be born in history. Being! Everything comes out of the flow of Being!”

Since we do not save ourselves by our own efforts, the expression of an “I” that is fully self-aware is prayer. Therefore, “prayer is the most reasonable gesture that man engaged in the daily struggle for life can make.”

Education as relationship with God is prayer.

“May prayer become, on the edge of our horizon, the outpost, the outpost of our humanity, of our humanity at war.”

4. Imitating the Mystery of Being-Charity is communion
We have been urged to imitate the Mystery of Being-Charity. How can we imitate the Mystery?

“By imitating God in the way He acted, and the Lord acted with a method, creating a method, the method of living together and communion.”

The Mystery of Being as it has revealed itself lasts only in the communion that generated it. In fact, the first thing Jesus made was a communion among the Twelve. Jesus reveals God’s method.

Imitating God is accepting to be part of this communion. And this is an invitation to sequela, that is, to participate in this communion. This is the real decision. The opposite of this is moralism, i.e., thinking that our “I” is generated by an effort of our own.

The conversion to which we are called is to participate in this communion.

Its opposite is personalism: an attitude that does not open to the community, that does not open up to a new thing.

This communion is the womb where we experience the love of Being, in whose warmth is germinated the flower of our “I”.

Therefore communion is not optional, but is the hinge of salvation. “Caro cardo salutis.”

Or Communion and Liberation: by participating in this communion, we experience liberation, liberation that is for us and for everybody.