La Thuile

The Exaltation of Being
We offer here the lesson by Julián Carrón, who, using as his starting point the message for the pilgrimage from Macerata to Loreto, revisited the passages in Fr Giussani’s “Letter to the Fraternity” written in June. La Thuile,
Italy, August 20, 2003

“When we get together, why do we do so? So as to tear out from our friends, and if it were possible from the whole world, the nothingness in which all men find themselves.”1
Our coming together has this purpose: to tear us out of nothingness. The struggle is against nothingness. We are not together in order to organize things better or to manage them better, but because of a charity toward ourselves, because what matters to us is not to succumb to nothingness.
The first issue is to look at reality, to look at our experience, because an insinuation could worm its way into us: “Oh look, we are starting to philosophize.” Whoever thinks that the nothingness we are talking about is something philosophical can go see the film The Hours, in which the director has efficaciously succeeded in transmitting what a life without meaning is like (when I came out of the movie theater, I felt the weight of emptiness on me, just as so many times during the day a person can feel it).
Nothing serves to tear us out of this nothingness that looms over us too, because we are like everybody. We are not different because of the fact of being here. We are like all men, in the sense that we have the experience everyone has; it is impossible to live in a culture and not be influenced by it.
Nothingness looms over us in many ways. Fr Giussani has used various expressions. Speaking to the CLU students, he called it “vagrants’ cynicism.”2 Last year, in his interview with Libero, he spoke of “conformism,” denouncing the fact that so many people are no longer waiting for fullness (and this applies inside and outside CL, inside and outside the Church); there is no longer expectation.3 Or we can speak of “aridity of the heart,” of “coldness,” of “formalism.” These are all different methods by which nothingness takes hold of us, to the point of becoming a temptation of our culture. Paola De Carolis, writing about Buddhism in Corriere della Sera, said, “Eternal beatitude is nothingness”4 (The strange charm of Buddhism in our culture is that it conceives of eternal bliss as nothingness); or–but all the newspapers are full of this–“Boredom will save us,” says La Repubblica, “facing the fear of the void and becoming aware of it, or–better still–going on to the ‘becoming unaware’ that, alone, is worth more than a thousand sessions of self-analysis.”5
Nothingness. One of you, speaking about his experience in the Memores Domini but we can apply what he says to each one of us, said, “There is a mortal danger that I saw clearly at the beginning of this year: being in it half-way, being there without being a part of it. There is a struggle that wears one down beyond compare, more than any job or tension caused by outside circumstances, and it is staying in a vocation like ours without wanting to. ‘Doing’ without wanting what one does tears a person apart from inside, makes him unhappy, because it blocks his freedom, it dries him out to the marrow because he does not love what is there, and you cannot love what is not there.”
Nothingness “dries us out to the marrow;” we do not stay with what is there because, as Cornelio Fabro says, “We do not choose nothingness, we surrender to nothingness.” We surrender to it, we let ourselves go, we slide; we yield to a life without meaning. How many moments in our day are lived without meaning!
We understand, then, why Fr Giussani, in the “Letter to the Fraternity,” states (and all of us cannot help agreeing), “The ‘I’ must be continually exalted by a rebirth of reality, by a re-creation.”6 The “I,” our “I,” you and I, must be continually exalted by a rebirth.” This is why we are together. As the message for the pilgrimage from Macerata to Loreto says, “Ours is a ‘vocational’ relationship.”7 Life is vocation to happiness, to fullness. “A vocational relationship is just this: that on meeting us … a person, feels sort of grasped in his innermost self, redeemed from his apparent nothingness, weakness, evil, or confusion, and, all at once, feels as if invited to a royal wedding.”8

1
The exaltation of Being
Nothingness is vanquished only by Being. We can become friends, we can tear each other out of nothingness, only if in some way Being has won out in us, if our life has been struck by Being. Being! That Being may be! It is this that impressed Fr Giussani, as he himself says in his Letter, “Dante’s Hymn to the Virgin coincides with the exaltation of being.”9 And farther on: “Thus the first part of Dante’s hymn is the exaltation of the Eternal.”10
“ I could have started the letter like this,” he said to us a few days after he wrote it: “Dante wanted to speak about the Eternal; he wanted to make people understand; he wanted to talk about eternity to the people to whom he was writing; it was eternity that interested him. All the rest is like a stream of eternal light. To talk about eternity is to talk about Being. What all the people are missing is the problem of Being.”
This is our problem. Nothingness does not exist; we do not choose nothingness, we surrender to nothingness. But the problem is that, to us, Being seems abstract, without real impact on life. In the face of the reactions aroused by his letter, Fr Giussani observed, “I have been forced to discover in these days that Being is not resonating in anyone.”
The first point of the Letter thus is normally “skipped.” It is easier, for example, to think we understand what freedom is, but we do not know what stance to take with regard to Being, because He is not resonating in us and it seems to us that we cannot experience Him. Helping us to understand the Letter is, then, the crucial matter, because we cannot understand the Letter merely by reflecting on it, but by participating in some way in the same experience as the person who wrote it.
A university student once asked Fr Giussani–who had urged everyone to identify with the content of School of Community as the only way to overcome an abstract way of perceiving the words–how this identification in his life and his relationships took place. He answered, “I cannot tell you how it happens in my life, my friend, except as far as something similar already appears, is experienced, in your life. We understand only what corresponds in some way to something we already experience.”11
It is thus a matter of experiencing what is said to us, because otherwise we think we understand, but we reduce to our own measure. To help us experience things is what Fr Giussani has been pursuing since the Movement’s beginning. He knows very well that something can be understood only if it “happens”: the beginning of knowledge, he has said on various occasions, quoting Finkielkraut, is an “event.”12
The content of the Letter presents us with a problem of knowledge, as he himself told us six years ago (we can see it in the text of the 1998 Exercises, which we still need to learn completely!). Already then, he had this problem in mind: he wanted to communicate that “God is all in all” (i.e., Being) and that “‘God is all in all’ is the impressive consequence to which reason leads us, when it is understood in accordance with the realistically natural experience that we have of it.”13
If someone looked at his own experience, he would understand that “God is all in all.” But “God all in all,” Fr Giussani observes, “seems abstract to us.”14 We understand this when, for example, we ask someone, “Have you thought of this? Do you realize this?” and they say, “Yes, I already know it!” but without being struck by it in the least, so that what you really perceive is the opposite. It is as though he said, “I know it, but nothing happens”–and so it is an abstraction.
One of you wrote, “Here at the beach, I am struck by meeting some people of the Movement and the Memores Domini because, chatting with them about what they do or where they plan to go on vacation, an impressive division emerges between work, relationships, vacation, problems, the matters that truly interest them, and the Movement, their vocation, Jesus. These things [the Movement, vocation, etc.] are not in question at all–quite the contrary! It’s just that they don’t have anything to do with life.”
In the Exercises I just mentioned, Fr Giussani states that the abstract way in which we perceive God is “in the order of knowledge”15 and that this has its “origin in a break that is produced between reason and experience.”16 “The substance of the matter is clarified in the struggle that is set up about the way of understanding the relationship between reason and experience. In order to understand this, it is enough to look at the formula ‘God is all in all,’ which shakes up the more common formulation of the existence of God (‘God exists’). The affirmation of a Supreme Being is always self-evident, of the existence of God closed up in Himself, without any relation to man’s action except, in the end, as the judge who destroys or approves what man has accomplished.”17
The whole problem lies in the way of conceiving the relationship between reason and experience. “The negation of the fact that ‘God is all in all’ depended on a form of irreligiosity.”18 It is an irreligiosity “that starts, without anyone realizing it, with a separation between God as origin and meaning of life… and God as a fact of thought.”19 What we think of God, about God, is detached from the experience we have of Him, and so He becomes abstract. This is the consequence of irreligiosity, an almost imperceptible fracture, which starts without anyone realizing it.
If you are struck by reality and an instant later you break away from it, you separate yourself; there is where irreligiosity begins. The problem is not one of praying or not. The problem is the relationship with reality. God begins to become abstract if, when you speak of God, you are detached, if you speak of God as a fact of your thinking instead of starting from the experience you have of Him. A detachment of God from experience is introduced. We understand this very well if we go see what original experience is like–where this fracture does not exist–and why this detachment is irreligiosity.
The point of departure is experience, and this implies that you and I can have an experience of Being. Why can we have an experience of Him? Because Being communicates Himself, gives Himself in a form: “The Being ‘coextends Itself’ to Its total self-communication. The Being comes to touch all that surrounds It and for which It was made, and it is precisely in Its total self-communication that this [coextension] happens, is realized and reaches you.”20
The human “I” partakes of Being, Fr Giussani told us, through a form, as form. Being cannot reveal Himself unless as form. Being gives Himself, donates Himself, through a form. Being can be experienced, touched, because He reaches us through the enjoyable. Being that becomes enjoyable for existence: this is coextension. Being reaches us through a form. In the face of what happens, so many times we say, “It happens because it happens; there is nothing behind it.” No! It happens because an Other wants it to happen; it happens because Mystery communicates Himself–it is the impressive freedom of Mystery.
Steiner writes, “The creative act,” through which Being communicates Himself, coextends Himself, and reaches us, “is the enacting of a freedom. It is completely free. Its existence entails, implicitly and explicitly, the alternative of non-existence… ‘Creation,’ correctly understood and perceived, is a synonym of ‘freedom,’ of that fiat or ‘Let it be,’ that finds its meaning only in its relationship… with ‘Do not let it be.’ It is only in this gratuitousness toward being–being is always a gift–that the artist, the poet, the composer, can be considered ‘like God.’”21 Being reaches you, touches you, calls you through a form, therefore you can have an experience of Him.
This is what is implied by saying that the point of departure is experience. It is precisely the opposite of abstraction. “Experience,” Fr Giussani brilliantly said in the lesson we have cited, “is the emergence of reality to man’s consciousness; it is reality becoming transparent to man’s gaze.”22 Knowing what love, freedom, mother, or mountains are only comes about through experience. It is not by reading novels about love, but through the experience of love that someone understands what love is.
So let’s look at the original experience, the experience of the encounter of the “I” with reality (Chapter 10 of The Religious Sense).23 If I opened my eyes for the first time at this moment and saw Mont Blanc, the first thing, the absolutely first thing would be wonder, attachment. First of all, then, reality strikes me (“Oh, how beautiful!”) and I attach myself to it; then I become aware [of myself]. The first experience I have is of an attachment, not a detachment. If this detachment is produced, it is because of a move made by my freedom.
In the face of reality, in the impact with the presence of reality, in the attachment to the attraction of reality, of the enjoyable–religiosity starts here. On the contrary, detachment is the beginning of irreligiosity, because it goes against the nature of the experience we are having.
Therefore, as Finkielkraut says, “The triumphant utopia is the violent claim to free us of reality as given, and above all, of the given as presence.”24 If this utopia wins out, we are “screwed”–all the rest is only a consequence.
The beginning of irreligiosity, the first victory of nothingness, is produced in this detachment, if we accept this detachment, if we give in to it, because the origin, the original experience, is an attachment, not a detachment. This beginning happens almost without one’s realizing it.
As is shown by the development of the entire Chapter 10 of The Religious Sense, if we are loyal, in the impact with the real, in the collision with reality, this original counterblow awakens in us a desire, a tension, a need to know that is not fulfilled until we reach the point of saying, “You who make me.” If we stop before getting there, as we usually do, we do not reach Being, we do not have an experience of Being, and when we speak of Being we talk about Him outside our experience.
We have been educated to take reality as our starting point. If I start with the reality I see and touch, with the form in which Being gives Himself, I am forced to affirm Being, a “real” Being as its origin: not a fact of thought (a fact of thought is not capable of explaining the presence of the real), but a You–Father Giussani says in Avvenimento di libertà [Event of Freedom])–a “real and mysterious You.”25 It does not matter if you perceive Him or not: He is there! This real and mysterious You exists. Why does He exist? Because we exist. It is not a question of feeling, it is not a question of what we think; He exists! If we cannot make such a simple statement–“He exists!”–when we speak of God, we are talking about a fact of thought, to the point that when we hear Fr Giussani talk about Being, about God, we are struck. Once–Giancarlo Cesana tells the story–during a lunch, Fr Giussani exclaimed, “For me, God is as real as these potatoes are.” It is because He exists that I experience Him, I perceive Him. It is not, “Because I perceive Him, He exists,” but, “Because He exists, I can experience Him.” It is a problem of knowledge, first of all. If we do not use reason in this way, we do not respect its true nature, for the true nature of reason is defined by this need that the real awakens in me. “Dante’s Hymn to the Virgin coincides with the exaltation of being, with the ultimate tension on the part of the awareness of man in the presence of ‘reality,’ which is not born of itself, but is made by an ineffable focus.”26 What is this “ultimate tension of awareness”? Reason! The presence of the real awakens this need, this tension, that defines the nature of reason.
Only someone who accepts this counterblow and does not detach himself from the tension that reality produces in him reaches the ineffable focus of Being (on the condition that he not be irreligious, that he not stop, not break away, not separate, not block the need awakened by the presence of the real).
Anyone who recognizes reality as created cannot avoid ending up in the exaltation of Being, for all of creation is Being communicating Himself; all of creation resonates with this Being. “It is an eternal counsel. It is something that resonates. It is something that is called eternity.”27 Therefore, it is impossible that Being not be resonating in anyone; if we are not resonant, something is wrong; it is the victory of that detachment. Otherwise, it is impossible, just as it is impossible to look at the mountains without saying, “How beautiful!,” without feeling the blow of beauty. It can’t be done! It means that we do not accept seeing the real. If someone finds himself in front of the real, he cannot help resonating.
But meditating on texts or reading a novel about love is not enough. An event is necessary; we have to feel moved. The test to see if we have reached Being is this feeling moved. We can be experts on the topic, but how many of us are moved? Being communicates Himself through the feeling of being moved that He produces in us. There is no other way.
Therefore everything–the mountains, a woman, circumstances, disaster–everything is the method, the form by which Being calls me, communicates Himself to me and calls me from the depth of this ineffable focus. “The You is the depth of truth, that is to say, of reality.”
The work to be done–the education we are missing after four centuries of rationalism, of being blocked at the level of appearance–is to arrive at this focus, because the appearance, the form, “is the first manifestation of what is forever,”28 as we read in Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling]. It is truly something out of this world: appearance is not the prelude to nothingness, deception, vanity. “Appearance is the first manifestation of what is forever.” “What we see is the appearance, but we have to let ourselves be swept away, attracted by the appearance all the way to the heart of the appearance, which is something else, which is an Other. It is not an appearance, it is an Other. But this does not make you forget the appearance; it makes you grasp it more tightly,”29 precisely because it sends you back to the Other. This is maturity, “letting yourself be so attracted by appearance as to reach the intimacy of the appearance,”30 the heart.
We do not experience Being, or speak of Being outside our experience, if we do not get this far, if we remain on the level of appearances. It is a problem of education, and this applies to everything that occurs, all of reality.
Let’s take the story of the man born blind and look at the course he takes in the face of the miracle (the miracle: something that happens). “Before, I could not see, and now I see.”31 And that man begins a journey from the appearance to the heart of the appearance. What is the heart? Let’s look synthetically at the steps along the way. “But they kept asking him, ‘Then how were your eyes opened?’ He answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’ They said to him, ‘Where is He?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’ They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, ‘He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.’ Some of the Pharisees said, ‘This man is not from God, for He does not observe the Sabbath.’ But others said, ‘How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?’ And they were divided. So they said again to the blind man, ‘What do you say about Him? It was your eyes He opened.’ He said, ‘He is a prophet.’ [Earlier, he had said, “The man called Jesus,” and now he says, “He is a prophet.”] But the Jews did not believe that he had been blind [To remain prejudiced, it is necessary to cancel out reality, because the real starts the journey made by the blind man; to stop this journey, one has to detach himself from experience, and this detachment is the negation of the real.] and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight and asked them, ‘Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?’ His parents answered, ‘We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.’” “So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, ‘Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.’ [This is prejudice.] He answered, ‘I do not know whether He is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.’”32 This attachment to reality makes him a victor despite all the cunning of the Pharisees. There are no two ways about it–this is the point (“One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see”).
“ They said to him, ‘What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?’ He answered them, ‘I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?’ Then they reviled him, saying, ‘You are His disciple, but we are disciples of Moses.” “The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where He comes from [He is real and mysterious], and yet He opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but He does listen to one who worships Him and obeys His will… If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.’ They answered him, ‘You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?’ And they drove him out. Jesus [here we are at the end of the journey] heard that they had driven him out, and when He found him, He said, ‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’ He answered, ‘And who is He, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in Him.’ Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen Him, and the one speaking with you is He.’ He said, ‘Lord, I believe.’ And he worshiped Him.”33
Even in the face of such an impressive miracle, we cannot avoid following this course. The opposite is not realizing it at all. We can read the Gospel of Luke about this in the episode of the ten lepers; all of them were healed, but only one realized it.34
We are all given life, Being communicates Himself to us, but only some of us realize it. This is the problem of the education we need. An example is the child, in front of a gift he has just received, who is so happy about what he has received that he forgets everything else, and whose mother reminds him, “What do you say?” and the child says, “Thank you!” The mother makes the child understand that it does not happen because it happens: there is someone else. This is the introduction to the real, to the You, through everything. What a great thing life is when, in everything that happens, we do not stop at appearances!
“ This perceiving the presence is perceiving that nothingness is vanquished,” says Cornelio Fabro.35 We have to perceive the presence of Being so that our “I” can be reborn. This rebirth occurs in the recognition of Being, which becomes prayer, entreaty to Being in the face of the sign: “Show Yourself! So that I may recognize You!” This is man’s ultimate expression: that I may recognize You in everything! This is the play of our religiosity or else our irreligiosity: that I may recognize You through everything! That I may make it to the end, all the way to You, that I may not stop along the way.

2
God’s method: Our Lady
God’s method: this is what Our Lady respected. What Being is, is made evident in Our Lady. Herein lies her unique importance. “Our Lady is moved by the infinite.”36
The Annunciation is Being communicating Himself; the Magnificat is the emotion of this, and it proclaims the greatness of the Lord, “For He looks on His servant in her lowliness.”37 But this happens every morning when we say the Angelus. It does not happen because it happens (it could also not happen; I could forget), but it is God, it is the Mystery who communicates Himself to me, who makes me say, “The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary.” It is not a remembrance, it is now. And one realizes the difference between a pious prayer and an event, if he is moved or not!
This is what brings about rebirth of the “I,” the exaltation of the individual. Herein lies Being’s greatest challenge to each of us, that places us in front of our real drama: “Without the recognition of the vivifying Mystery, the individual fades away and dies.”38
“ The supreme drama is that the Being should ask to be acknowledged by man. This is the drama of the freedom that the ‘I’ must live: adherence to the fact that the ‘I’ must be continually exalted by a rebirth of reality, by a re-creation which in the figure of Our Lady is moved by the Infinite.”39 Here is the supreme drama of the “I”: in order to live, to be reborn from the nothingness to which we surrender, we need to accept the blow of Being, to adhere to Being. Our Lady is the method, because she is the paradigm of true religiosity: “The figure of Our Lady establishes the Christian personality.”40 Without this, there is nothingness, i.e., the power of those in power. The only limit on power is true religiosity.
“ Our Lady totally respected God’s freedom. She saved God’s freedom. She obeyed God because she respected His freedom. She did not oppose it with her own method.”41 God’s freedom communicated to man makes man’s freedom possible. “Salvation, therefore, is the Mystery of God communicating Himself to man.”42
Thus, we understand why “man’s freedom is man’s salvation;”43 man’s freedom is the sign that man has been saved. And in Our Lady this becomes as clear as day. It is, Fr Giussani told us, as though God said explicitly, “Look what life can be for a creature who respects God’s freedom.” “I’ll teach you, God says through Our Lady, I’ll show you what you must do.”
Our Lady is the method by which we learn familiarity with Christ. This, the Mystery’s gift of Himself, which so greatly fills being, the creature, the “I,” this gratuitousness of Being, this virginity of Being, that communicates its fullness to Our Lady, is what enables her to relate gratuitously to all of reality. “The first characteristic in which the Being communicates itself is virginity”44–absolute purity, absolute gratuitousness.
Only if we are filled by Being can we let everything be what it is, can we not demand to possess, can we respect the other, leave him free, just as God created him, free. Why? Because within his relationship with us, there is this virginity, this fullness. And this fullness, which is virginity, is generating, is motherhood: all we need is someone to generate us; we do not need advice, we do not need empty chatter, we do not need anything; all we need is someone who communicates Being to us, in whom Being is transparent.

3
Charity and hope
“ Being,” the giving Himself of Being, the communicating Himself of Being, “is charity.”45 “One would be unable to know the Being-Mystery,” Fr Giussani goes on to say in the Libero interview, “to capture it and adhere to it, if it did not reveal itself as charity.”46 Charity is the word that supremely expresses God’s attitude toward man.
All we have to do is read the Gospel of John, “God so loved the world that He sent His only-begotten Son,”47 or the Letter to the Romans, “While we were God’s enemies, He gave His Son for us,”48 or the one to the Galatians, “I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”49
“ The essence of Being is love, this is the great revelation.”50 “The issue 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.”51
If we recognize everything that happens as Being’s gift of self, the giving of this You to our nothingness, everything that happens in life is an increment of our certainty about Being, about Being’s charity toward us. “Without being caught up in the whirlpool of the Mystery-charity, in the end one is sterile.”52 This whirlpool is happening now, it is taking place now.
Being’s gift of self is “desire’s invasiveness. It is a desire without end,”53 it awakens all our “I,” it makes us “one;” it is the victory over dualism. God’s charity awakens in us charity towards everything, as a reverberation of the event of Being.
Fr Giussani also said, “The existent, the ‘I’ attracted by Being in the encounter with a form, with this love, opens up to it, in this way creating charity.” It is this charity toward us that opens us up. “Love is, therefore, the formula for participating in what would remain purely ephemeral.”54 Everything would remain ephemeral, and instead it becomes the road to the Mystery.
It is the charity of which St Paul speaks in his Letter to the Romans: “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold His own Son, but gave Him up for all of us, will He not with Him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? [This is the victory over detachment.] Will hardship [hardship separates you, it introduces a suspicion into your relationship with Christ], or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”55
Nothingness thus no longer has any grasp on us. This is the victory of Being, the most sensational example of which is Peter’s “Yes.” “Peter’s ‘Yes’ is the greatest expression of the redeeming work of Christ on man; it is the explosion of the positivity of Being over the negativity of the falsehood of man’s action.”56
Peter’s emotion! When a CLU student asked him, “How can my ‘yes’ be a ‘yes’ full of emotion… like Simon Peter’s?” Fr Giussani answered, “How can it not be full of emotion? How can you not be moved by the thought that the Mystery of being penetrates into my poor humanness, which is otherwise mortal in the full sense of the term, destined to complete pulverization? How can the Mystery of being love me to the point of penetrating me, making me like Him, and lifting me up under my arms like a mother does with her child, grasping me under my shoulders?... How can it happen that God does this with me, with you?... God is mercy.”57
This mercy of Being is the essence of Being. Therefore, “We must make Christ’s presence a human preference.”58 Look at everything and compare it with this love! How can you prefer others to Jesus?
Christ’s charity is the ecstasy of hope. The relationship of Being with man’s life is the beginning of the end, of fulfillment. Life begins continually as a wellspring of Being. Therefore, if there is this hope, there is a force of renewal in every circumstance whatever, which otherwise would not be there. “Hope passes as a light into the eyes and a fire into the heart of that Being who defines the reward of human expectation. It is not a prize given because the ‘I’ is good, but because the ‘I’ lives the ecstasy of hope.”59
This is where a people rises up. The Mystery becomes the human people, the emphasis of a Christian personality. This is why you get up in the morning, “you get up in the morning for an explosion inside you of the fact of Christ!”60
For anything less than this, we do not live.

NOTES
1 L. Giussani, “Why Do We Gather Together? To Free Ourselves from Evil. The One Who Frees Us is Christ,” message for the foot pilgrimage from Macerata to Loreto, in Traces, Vol. 5, No. 7 (July/August), 2003, p. 41.
2 L. Giussani, “Dalla mia vita alla vostra,” [“From My Life to Yours] in Avvenimento di libertà. Conversazioni con giovani universitari [Event of Freedom. Conversations with university students], Genoa, Marietti 1820, p. 10.
3 “Even heads of communities do not understand these things: they are not ready to break their conformism and open breaches towards the future: they are not waiting for fullness. There is no expectation. This applies to CL and outside, to the Church and outside.” (R. Farina, “Ebrei e cristiani alla fine si riuniranno,” [“Jews and Christians will Eventually Reunite”], interview with Fr Giussani, Libero, August 22, 2002, p. 1; reprinted with the title “Being Is Charity,” in Traces, Vol. 4, No. 8 (September), 2002, pp. 45-48.
4 See P. De Carolis, “C’è la prova scientifica. I buddisti sono più felici” [“There is Scientific Proof. Buddhists are Happier”], in Corriere della Sera, May 23, 2003, p. 14.
5 V. Schiavazzi, “La noia ci salverà la vita” [“Boredom Will Save Our Lives], in la Repubblica, July 22, 2003, p. 26.
6 L. Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” Letter to the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, June 22, 2003, in Traces, Vol. 5, No. 7 (July/August), 2003, pp. 1ff.
7 Giussani, “Why Do We Gather Together?...”, p. 41.
8 Ibid.
9Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 1.
10 Op. cit., p. 2.
11 Giussani, “Attraverso l’umano” [“Through What is Human”], in Avvenimento di libertà [Event of Freedom], p. 35.
12 Cf. “The event is something that breaks in from outside. Something unforeseen. This is the supreme method of knowledge. We have to restore to the event its ontological dimension of new beginning. It is an irruption of the new that breaks the cogs, that sets a process in motion.” (A. Finkielkraut, “Tirerò Péguy fuori dal ghetto” [“I Shall Pull Péguy Out of the Ghetto”], interview by S.M. Paci, in 30Giorni [30Days], June 1992, pp. 58-61.
13 Giussani, “Dio e l’esistenza” [“God and Existence”] in L’uomo e il suo destino. In cammino, [Man and his Destiny. On the Road], Genoa, Marietti 1820, 1999, p. 103.
14 Ibid.
15 Op. cit., p. 104.
16 Cf. op. cit., p. 105.
17 Op. cit., pp. 106-107.
18 Op. cit., p. 105.
19 Ibid.
20 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 1.
21 G. Steiner, Grammatiche della creazione [Grammars of Creation] Milan, Garzanti, 2003, pp. 122-123.
22 Giussani, “Dio e l’esistenza,” p. 107.
23 Giussani, The Religious Sense, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 100 ff.
24 See L. Amicone, “Events as Encounter. The Battle Against Utopia”, in Traces, vol. 5, no. 5 (May), pp. 16-17” and C. Dignola, “L’ideologia è morta. Anzi, no” [“Ideology is dead. Actually, No, It Isn’t”], in Tracce, March 2003, pp. 62-63.
25 Giussani, “Lo scopo e la strada,” [“The Purpose and the Road], in Avvenimento di libertà [Event of Freedom], p. 20.
26 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 1
27 Op. cit., p. 2.
28 Giussani, Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling], Milan, BUR, 2001, p. 314.
29 Op. cit., p. 364.
30 See op. cit., p. 363.
31 See Jn 9:25.
32 Jn 9:10-21, 24-25.
33 Jn 9:26-28, 30-31, 33-38.
34 See Lk 17:11-19.
35 C. Fabro, Libro dell’esistenza e della libertà vagabonda [The Book of Existence and Vagabond Freedom ], Casale Monferrato, Piemme, 2000, p. 28.
36 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 1.
37 See Lk 1:48.
38 R. Farina, “Ebrei e cristiani alla fine si riuniranno,” [Jews and Christians will eventually re-unite], interview with Fr Giussani, Libero, August 22, 2002, p. 1; reprinted as “Being Is Charity,” in Traces, Vol. 4, No. 8 (September), 2002, pp. 45-48.
39 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 1.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Giussani, “Being is Charity,” pp. 45-48.
46 Op. cit., p. 45.
47 See Jn 3:16-21.
48 See Rom 5:6-11.
49 See Gal 2:20.
50 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 3.
51 Giussani, “Being is Charity,” p. 46.
52 Op. cit., p. 47.
53 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 2.
54 Op. cit., p. 3.
55 Rom 8:31-35, 37-39.
56 Giussani, “Fede in Dio è fede in Cristo,” [“Faith in God is Faith in Christ”], in L’uomo e il suo destino [Man and His Destiny], p. 146.
57 Giussani, “Attraverso l’umano,” [“Through What is Human”], in Avvenimento di libertà [Event of Freedom] , pp. 54-55.
58 Giussani, Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling], p. 96.
59 Giussani, “Moved by the Infinite,” p. 3.
60 Ibid.