Cl in the world

Against the Virus of Taking Things for Granted

Six hundred high school students and some teachers gathered in Saint Moritz in early September for the “National Equipe,” a meeting of leaders, of GS. The topics included encounter, companionship, studies, and free time. Nothing can be left to chance, because young people “are very sensitive to recognizing something true. When they encounter it, they follow it in a way that we cannot even imagine.”

By DAVIDE PERILLO

“Okay, the year is starting. But to tell you the truth, the only thing I hope for is to get knocked down as little as possible and to come out of the last exam with a decent grade.” The car climbed, one curve after the other, up toward the peaks of the Engandin. But a GS student from Bologna, Giulio, in it with three friends and a teacher, was flying low. Very low. Practically grazing the ground. And yet an adventure can start out even like this, with your motor idling and the idea that things, after all, “are pretty awful.” All that is needed is that, once the curves have ended and you have reached the hotel, the questions, answers, and objections raised along the way not be allowed to drop. All you have to do is keep them alive, and maybe even face them head-on–precisely as happened in Saint Moritz, in early September, at the GS Equipe. The protagonists were Giulio, his friends, and six-hundred kids, the avant-garde of the 7,000 or 8,000 who revolve around GS, but also of the almost 4,000 middle school students who take part in the younger “Holy Grail” proposals. The meeting spanned three full days, packed with work and familiar gestures (lessons, testimonies, and songs). There was a new wind blowing through them, one that rose far away and came all the way here. “We wanted to start out with a fundamental idea: the encounter with truth, which, if it is true, is true for everybody,” explained Fr Giorgio Pontiggia, GS Responsible. “However, right beforehand, Fr Giussani’s provocation in Rimini came, with his words on hope. So we decided to try to go into that more deeply. And it was impressive, because it seemed like they, the kids, were waiting only for this. They want to understand what hope is.”

The encounter
The first lesson was on encounter, and on the unexpected discovery that what you have encountered truly corresponds to your heart. “It is like a game that you always win, but in which you never reach your goal.” “I am never content enough,” wrote a girl in one of the many letters quoted by Fr Giorgio. Another was the testimony from Andrea, who told of running into “a tall, stocky man with a deep voice who asked me to follow him. A simple suburban priest who has had the gift of having encountered in his life someone who looked at him in a different way. But above all he was a friend, because no one had ever looked at me the way he did.” In short, simple and true, and thus fascinating. “You see, we are in a moment when the kids’ deepest needs are like raw nerves; all you have to do is touch them, and they jump,” Fr Giorgio observed. “They are very sensitive to recognizing something true. When they encounter it, they follow it in a way that we cannot even imagine.” And when they realize that Christ is not a road, but the road, as the development of the lessons reiterated, they discover the newness capable of changing their lives: in a word, hope.

We are talking about “the true hope, that is born of a present certainty, and that is impressively documented in Our Lady, as Fr Giussani reminded us.” But we are also talking about the hope that, for example, has traversed the life of Donatella, a high-school girl from Turin, in an unexpected manner. Her testimony brings chills. Suffering from anorexia, she struggled for a year between hospitalization and recovery. When she went into the hospital in August, she was not expecting anything any more, not even the end. “I didn’t even realize that I was about to die, and yet death was so close.” Then that unexpected page arrived from Rimini. “I read Fr Giussani’s address. It was a revelation. I realized that I have been preferred because I have encountered this companionship. The fear of dying returned to me, and the desire to go back to living. And even inside this hospital, my life still has some mysterious usefulness. Now I understand what a friend of mine said: We need you, fight.” Imagine Giulio and the other six hundred kids, all of them there leaning forward, eyes and hearts opened wide in the face of such a great discovery, and later in the face of the words of Franca Scanziani, who during the evening session explained in depth Dante’s canto and the line “you are the living fountain of hope.” And, again, in the face of the richness of Andrea’s story, telling about his life in Taiwan. It seems as though you can hear their lungs filling with air and breathing deeply, as happens only rarely. “After all, the lethal virus that strikes us all, including the kids, is taking things for granted,” observed Elena Ugolini, a high-school principal in Bologna and national Responsible of GS: “All too often we start from a negative, from what is not there. Well, hope is the opposite: it is starting from what is there.”

The companionship
Perhaps the last session was the one that knocked people off-balance the most. The topic was companionship. Fr Giorgio described it as the instrument of that Presence which makes us certain–not a closed horizon, but a road. “To make things clear, certainty is not companionship, but what is in the companionship.” Perfect; but why did he go to the trouble to point it out? “Because the risk is to seek sticking together as an aim in itself. We meet, we remind each other, and, after all, it is nice to be together. But the mentality, inside, remains the world’s mentality.

The final assembly
The reaction of the kids to this reminder? “Wonder, but without being scandalized. It was like a perspective they had not yet glimpsed, but in some way were expecting,” recounts Fr Giorgio. It is no coincidence that the questions in the final assembly often fell right there, on how to help each other live the friendship that, left to itself without being nourished, becomes stifled and ends up in staying together out of inertia, as Margherita, from Perugia, said. “Our friendship has this as its purpose, that is to say, the reason why we can hope,” Elena reiterated. Realizing this is sufficient for “the demand to rise in the heart that the encounter with Christ be possible for everyone, and the desire to live this newness publicly” (Alberto, from Perugia). Also arising was the awareness that “Our Lady is the fountain of living water because she said ‘Yes,’ but we are like her–if we say ‘Yes,’ we can be a fountain of living water for our friends” (Elisa, from Bologna). Others’ lives, Fr Giorgio pointed out, have testified to the strength to become “a presence in front of everybody,” such as the three GS kids from Brianza who went to York to study English and became involved in a friendship with a 70-year-old parish priest, Fr Michael, encountering him “with a simplicity that makes it clear how Christ is present in their lives. And look, nobody said to them to ‘go do mission.’” This is how it was for the kids. But what about the teachers? What step did Saint Moritz help them to take? “It came out clearly what the living water Fr Giussani talks about is: it is Christ,” Elena answered. Education is a personal risk, in short, and is the taste of a discovery in which, Fr Giorgio added, “responding to your task as an educator, i.e., making this experience more encounterable, you commit your whole self.” The conclusion? “We can no longer live by trying merely to aggregate the kids to the community, but we have to see to it that they personally deepen their certainty. We have to look at them one by one. To share. And to start out from their needs, giving breath to them, without imposing schemes on them. Otherwise they are devoted to us, but they continue to think like the world thinks.” A pause. A draw on his cigar. Then, sharply, “After all, how was the Movement born? From a man who had two things clear in his mind: the certainty that Christ is the center of everything, and an enormous passion for what is human. All the rest, he invented himself, Fr Giussani: the raggio, School of Community, the books, Spirto Gentil… Before, they weren’t there. And then, look, education is possible only if you acknowledge that there is something to stretch out towards. Otherwise, all you can do is train. There are two fundamental things: that truth exists and that man was made for this. If you take these things away, you can no longer educate.”

Living big
Let these certainties grow in the hearts of students and teachers and it happens that, conversely, you can live the school year “in a big way,” as Maria, from Friuli, announced. After the return from Saint Moritz, here and there the impact with the start of classes vibrated with powerful tones, made up of initiatives organized by the kids themselves, without the input of adults. There were parties lived with the joy of starting up again, but also with the certainty that “for the first time it seemed to me that our life together did not break off during the summer,” as a girl from Pavia said. And there were flyers written all in one go, like the one written by the Bolognese GS, starting from the events of September 11th but consisting above all of a “talk” filled with desires and charged with a question: What does it mean to “start over again”? And how can you do it in a way that is not taken for granted; how can you live school in accordance with its purpose? The root of the word gives us a hint: scholè, in Greek, means “free time.” “It depends on the way you look at life, not on a plan of your own; the savor lies right here.” You have Giulio’s word for it. Now he has opened the throttle, and he’s no longer flying close to the ground.