cesana

Destiny and Education

What has erased the darkness, the doubt, the violence from the faces of the young people in the suburbs of New York is the certainty of being loved, because in order to be certain, an idea is not enough; an idea is enough to be a fanatic. To be certain, a place is needed, someone who wants me. In order to live, I am not enough by myself; I need you, and you are never enough.

But what does the other person who loves us transmit to us? The meaning, the purpose of life, the vocation; not simply a task as something to do, but destiny. Destiny does not want one task or another task, it wants the “I.” The Other who loves me, wants me; the meaning of life wants me (not what I do, but me). Imagine someone who has a passion for a certain amount of industriousness and is forced to stay in bed for twenty years. What can sustain him? The task? The word “destiny” decides: he either accepts or does not accept. We are destined to love. This surpasses all points of view, goes beyond all the confines of a task. We have to respond to this You who intervenes in our life, wanting us, and to respond, responding, is the risk of getting attached, because knowledge is an affective energy (as in “affection”); it is not the electronic mechanism of a computer. Getting attached is the risk of a life. Responding means that life is no longer like you imagine it, but is determined by the presence to which you respond, and not a Presence with a capital “P,” because there is a certain spiritualism that capitalizes all the words (the Presence, the Other, etc.), but presence with a small “p”–the presence of you, which bears that Presence with a capital “P.” I understood in this way what Fr Giussani said about Our Lady. Our Lady became attached, she bore the Mystery. This is why she is the living fountain of hope, because she surrendered. But there could still be a final objection, the one that Eco offered recently, summarizing the thought of Popper: “Of everything, it can be said that it is a lie; of nothing can it be said that it is the truth.” This is what life is like, and it is like this if the truth is not stronger than death, because death falsifies everything. The only truth that overcomes death, the only factor of hope, is Christ, who vanquished death, who is present and manifests Himself in a changed humanity, as the promise of fulfillment. I am a follower of Christ, not because I have understood everything, but because I have not understood anything except the promise contained in the response that came from Him. There is no presumptuousness in being Christian. And Christ is mystery precisely in the way He presents Himself: through a human companionship. So, if this is destiny, what is the task? Mission and education. Even more: education as mission. Education is helping to see, so that freedom can be gambled. “Man begging for Christ and Christ begging for man,” in order to knock down the wall of objection. Education is above all a proposal–not of an idea, but of me, and thus of what you choose, of what you belong to.