Letters

EDITED BY PAOLA BERGAMINI
pberga@tracce.it

Moscow
Fulfilling Desires
Dear Fr Giussani,
My name is Natasha and I am from Moscow. This year I worked very hard (I am a speech teacher in a kindergarten, and then in the evening I give private lessons). I like my work, I like children, but over the year I often wondered, “Lord, what else is there in my life, besides my work? Sure, I do it for Your glory, but so often I don’t have time to spend with my friends, to go with them to the movies, the theater, or just wandering around. And what should I do with all my desires? Why does someone always want a fuller life than the one he is leading right now?” At a certain point I realized that I couldn’t stand it any more. But at the same time I knew that the only thing I should do to fulfill my desires was to remain faithful to Him, to love Him. I want to tell you about the gift the Lord gave me as an answer to my entreaty. This summer, I was invited by my friends to the Meeting in Rimini and to the international CL vacation at La Thuile. I was shocked, during the Opening Mass of the Meeting, to see 3,000 people all breathing the same breath. Then, working at the Meeting, I met so many joyous people, in love with each other. In the beginning, I was envious because there are so many of them here, and it is easier for them when they are together. In Moscow, there are 40 or 45 of us, and most of my time I am alone. But then I understood that it is not important how many we are—3,000 or only 2—if we are aware of why we are together. During my stay in Italy, thanks to the Host Families association, I lived with the Biondi family and then with a friend of mine in Milan. This too was like a revelation for me. In Russia, young people often marry very young, and then after a while they get divorced; they often live in civil marriages, ready from one minute to the next to run away. My sister is now living with her third husband. But I was never struck there by the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, as I was by the ones I saw in the families of my friends. It is clear that an Other is present in these relationships, who teaches you to look at the person next to you, to respect a child’s personality, and therefore to love with a love that asks for eternity. I saw this in the relationships of my friends who were quite young. During my vacation, the Lord gave me a greater awareness of what my heart wants and answered all the desires that I had experienced during this year. You may not believe me, but in Italy I met everyone I love and whom I had not seen for a long time: friends from Portugal, Italy, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, and other cities in Russia, those who live far away from Moscow. We stayed together and did some wonderful things. It is surprising how all this was able to happen in one place and at one time. Looking at all the friends with whom I spent time, I thought, “How happy I am that we all belong to this history. And how great God is, who created this history and this friendship that sweeps away all boundaries.” Now, when I have trouble feeling His presence, I can doubt no longer. I have to ask the Lord to teach me to live this friendship, this enormous desire for love, always and everywhere. I can ask Him for everything that I want. I know that He will answer me a hundredfold and in the most unimaginable ways. Thank you so much.
Natasha

Uganda
Shoes and Dried Fish
Dearest friends of Maurizio: Thank you for the offering for my children at the orphanage. Providence always arrives at the right moment. Last week, some fifteen of my oldest girls at the orphanage, the ones in the sixth and seventh grades, 12-13 years old, were sent home from school because they had no shoes. I told them for the moment to continue to go to school wearing slippers and then, if they were sent home again, we would see what could be done. I usually buy their shoes at the second-hand market, all nice things from Europe, and they cost $10 a pair. A few days later, Maurizio brought me your money, a sign that I was supposed to buy the shoes. With what is left over, I will buy a 450 lb bale of dried fish, which will last for at least twenty meals, and meat on Sunday for ten times. They usually eat beans and millet or corn mush, but at least once a week they will eat dried fish, and meat on Sundays. At the moment, we have 91 children. They always pray for their benefactors, but I will tell them to pray especially for all of you and your families. Thank you for your generosity. I urge you to pray that the Lord, through the intercession of the Queen of Peace, may give us the grace of conversion and grant our Acholi people the peace that is so greatly desired.
Brother Elio, Gulu

“The” Road
We started spending time together as first-year students at the university. Struggling, we managed to stick together all the way to graduation. Together, we signed up for the pilgrimage to Toronto. And yet, what stormy university life was not able to divide, was separated by the organization of the trip: three friends, three different flights, three different departure and arrival dates. We met again, after many misadventures, only on the morning of the 24th. A poet has written that the unexpected is the only hope, but for us the situation was the opposite: every morning we woke up hoping that something expected would happen. Sleeping little and badly, with stomachs half-empty, nothing made us think that something that could be remembered positively might occur, as was instead our greatest expectation. And yet it happened. The Pope, in his welcome address, re-established for us an order of priority in that tangle of things that had happened to us in a dizzying whirl. He said that the world responds to our demand for happiness by proposing many roads, but he assured us that there is only one road. He had really got us there: all our thoughts about our choices of work, all our thoughts about School of Community and about the other questions that come up in phases like the one we are living now, what are they if not the reflection of the desire to be happy?! Then we wondered: What difference is there between doing one thing instead of another if there is not a total answer? What good does it do to commit your energy and your freedom, to make sacrifices, if you cannot see the possibility of getting what you asked for? This concrete possibility has a name, which is Christ, the only road, the road that for us in those days took the form of the luminous testimony of the Pope and the concrete support of this companionship of ours, made up of so many initially unknown faces and that has become, day after day, a familiar place. Thus, for us three, being separated was no longer a problem like it was before. The encounter with John Paul II, the things he said to us, the tenderness and esteem with which he looked at us, the responsible willingness he asked of each of us have confirmed even more the history that took us all the way to Canada and sustained the toil of our stay there. If a question in search of an answer can do so much, how much more will a question sustained by the certainty of an answer make us build?!
Lorenzo, Giovanni, Paolo, Milano

A Different Kind of Weekend
I am a Combonian Sister, a missionary in Africa for a number of years and now in Italy for a while. I had just recently returned from Sudan when I heard that in a certain Italian school, Christmas had not been celebrated because there was a Muslim child in the class. And yet in Sudan, even though there is a fundamentalist Islamic government, at Christmas the celebrant, at the end of the three-hour Solemn Mass, extends greetings to the Christians and also to the Muslims present at the celebration. Some of them, whom I know personally, arrive very early to get a place. When, for example, I once greeted a married couple and pointed out to them that they had come into the church even before me, the wife answered that she did not want to miss the Christmas celebration. Besides the fact I mentioned earlier about that Italian school, I heard many other things, all of them very negative; it seemed to me that in Italy nothing was holding together any more, and I was perplexed. A couple of weeks after these incidents, my niece asked me if I wanted to go to the CL Fraternity Retreat with her. I said that, if there was room, I would gladly go–and room was found. I already knew about the existence of the Movement for some time, but very vaguely, and only in this period when I have been staying with my niece have I come to know how it actually operates. I arrived in the auditorium and sat down in my place; looking around me this time, I understood fully the great gift that God has given the Church in Fr Giussani, working always to raise up apostles who are able to give a new face to His Church. The great hall was full of people of every social level who have been “called,” united on an ever more profound journey toward knowledge of Christ, toward an ever more intense life in His Presence, experienced in our everyday life until we can communicate it to all we meet on the road where He has placed us. Out of this awareness arises my thanks to the God of all good for this new force that your Movement is in today’s Church. Walk in the footsteps of Christ and Fr Giussani in order to be a light and a spur to all you meet.
A reader

A hundred Percent
This summer, in July, I spent 20 days in England on a study vacation. The decision was made by my parents, even though I was somewhat against it. What frightened me most was the fact that out of 35 kids, I only knew 3, and not even very well. The morning of my departure, I met a friend for coffee. At a certain point he said, “The Movement is the people you have next to you; if then they are your friends, it is a miracle.” I did not really understand this, but I was struck by it and kept it in mind. The first week in England was the most tedious; my greatest longing was for the day I would return to Milan, and everything was lived as though in view of that. I couldn’t wait for evening to come so I could say, “One day less to go!” One day at the beginning of the second week, Fr Giorgino, before reciting the Angelus, said, “Let us ask to be able to make memory of our friends so as to make memory of Christ’s face.” I was amazed, and I understood also what Fede had said: in the face of such a difficult situation, so contrary to what I wanted, if there is not a 100% “Yes,” even the most concrete and true things, like a friendship or being in love, become false. A 100% “Yes” that makes you embrace that friendship and that being in love a thousand times more. However, someone can say “Yes” only if he has precise faces in mind and wants the same thing be true also with those 35 people who are practically unknown, but at that moment the Movement is “the people you have next to you,” not necessarily the usual three or four friends.
Marta, Milan

Ready, Set… GO!
At Malpensa, the plane was late. We finally took off at 12:30 and after eight exhausting hours of flight landed in New York. We climbed onto the bus that took us through the “beautiful” borough of Brooklyn to a college accommodation, and then at 6:30 a.m. we left for Toronto! Ten hours on the bus is a long time, but between a Piedmontese song, a Sicilian ballad, and some “very funny” jokes, we reached the Denison Armoury. We camped out in the gym, had a nice shower (there was one shower for every 90 persons), and then to bed… And this is where my story begins! That evening, sitting on my air mattress, I found myself thinking and wondering what I was doing in the midst of so many people that I didn’t know except by sight, and thus between a “curse the day I signed up for this pilgrimage” and a string of imprecations aimed at the “beautiful” place we were in, I managed to fall asleep. The next morning, my morale was certainly not among the stars, but at a certain point I looked around me and saw a group of faces that were different from the ones I had seen the day before. They were the faces of people who did not care whether there was hot water or not, or that they had slept on the floor; they were the faces of people who were free. I decided to follow those people, and the next days were, minute by minute, a renewal of the encounter that Fr Giuseppe has called “a grace.” Ever since my return, I think of nothing but all those people who, even without knowing me, were close to me in the joy of that encounter that made us pilgrims together.
Pero, Buccinasco