Document

Man and His Destiny

Julián Carrón’s lesson at the International Assembly of CL Responsibles. La Thuile, Italy, August 27, 2002

In the situation of confusion and devastation of the human in which we live, in which the “I” is reduced to a reaction, a feeling, a “doing,” the questions, “Who am I? What is man, truly?” become even more urgent. Usually we skip over these questions and start out by asking ourselves, “What do I have to do?” But the answer to “What do I have to do?” already presupposes an answer to “Who am I?” So we start out, like everyone, from the conception of the common mentality. It is thus a charity that one may be part of a locus where these questions are asked: “Who are you?” “Who am I?” The point of departure cannot be anything other than experience. The most important thing to understand is that “the departure for every definition, and thus for establishing the factors of every reasoning, is experience. The explanations or processes of reasoning that have to suppress some aspect of experience in order to be affirmed are not true.”1

I. The “I,” a desire for happiness
If I become aware of myself in my acting, I cannot help acknowledging that I am a desire for happiness. As soon as I open my eyes in the morning, even if confusedly, I expect something. Sadness, as awareness of something missing, is the expectation of something other than this, of happiness. But we do not decide the nature of this desire; we can only recognize it. And even when we manage to get what we want, something is still missing. The characteristic of this desire is that it never runs out.

When we take this for granted, we are already starting down the wrong path. Look at who you are! Look at what your heart desires! If still today we are not amazed at this, we have never recognized it as true. Look at the vibration of your heart, in an instant, at least, of tenderness toward yourself. Just hearing these words, we should already feel this gaze of tenderness on us; for it is always because there is Someone among us that we are able to look our desire for happiness and embrace it, to recognize what it is to which we have been called, destined, to recognize the greatness and truth of ourselves.

This desire is always the cue to start. “How many of us get up in the morning looking at the day as a piece of the adventure of the desire for happiness?”2 Nothing is more trampled upon and ridiculed by the world, than this desire. What blocks this self-awareness of myself? “It is a lack of simplicity in recognizing the vibrating, the immeasurability, and the infiniteness of the desire for love that you have.”3

Even when the Lord grants us this clarity, there is still in us a “boundless weakness,” which makes man sail on the edge of nothingness–as Fr Giussani said to us when we met in preparation for this gathering–which keeps us from remaining in this awareness, this thrust, this vibration of the “I”–a weakness that is already the beginning of death, of unhappiness, and that, with our own cooperation, becomes conformism. Thus, it is as though the desire for happiness with which we were born went away.

“God made man for happiness, but man seeks death.”4 He seeks death because he is far from believing in the possibility of achieving this happiness. The fact that we prefer death denotes a lack of love for ourselves.5 Without realizing it, we slide into what Fr Giussani denounced in the interview that appeared a few days ago: “There is no expectation. It is as if people expected nothing more.”6 Therefore, we always need a new beginning. But we can only ask for this new beginning; we cannot give it to ourselves.

II. Being is mercy
In this situation of boundless weakness in which we live, the moment has arrived for us to see how much God is mercy. Our only chance is an Other, the intervention of an Other. God, the Mystery, revealed Himself as mercy by entering history. And we began to discover Him. One day, walking along the road, Jesus saw a man who was seated collecting money–his name was Matthew. Matthew had already ended up in a “doing,” but Someone walked past him and looked at him like no one had ever done before, to the point of making him say, “Is He talking to me? Does He really know who I am?” A gaze like that cannot be forgotten. He left everything and followed Him. The same thing happened to Zacchaeus, he was determined by that presence. It was the same for Simon.

We know the Mystery by submerging ourselves in the gaze that Matthew, Zacchaeus, and Simon felt trained on them. Only someone who has this experience can understand gladness.

What did these men live? An experience of correspondence. No one had ever looked at them in this way, with that boundless positivity, with that esteem for their being, with “that truly human gaze which revealed man to himself and was impossible to evade. Nothing is more convincing to man than a gaze which takes hold of him and recognizes what he is, which reveals man to himself.”7 The desire for happiness is fulfilled in Someone who looks at our life in this way: “Happiness is a you, a reality to which you say, ‘You.’ And it appeared in human form, listed in the census by the municipal administration of Bethlehem; this is Jesus.”8

Christ is “the” road–not “a” road, but “the” road–because He corresponds to our desire for happiness. He is “the” road not because you say so or He says so; He is “the” road because it is the only one that corresponds to the desire for happiness. Without the desire for happiness, I would not recognize the One who fulfills it; the criterion for recognizing “the” road is in us.

We can say that He is “the” road because we have had this experience. The Church, the dogmas, tell what we can recognize in our own experience. If the first ones said, “We have encountered the truth,” it is because they had this experience of correspondence!

Since this desire for happiness, which is the criterion for judging everything, even Jesus, is the same for everybody, when we encounter what corresponds to it, it is not the truth only for us, but is the truth for everybody; if it is for me, it is for everybody. If it corresponds to my desire for happiness, it corresponds to everybody’s desire for happiness, even if they have yet to encounter it.

The new beginning is being loved, because the truth is love. We always need this being loved, we need for someone to look at us with truth, to embrace us unconditionally. “Experience is either experience of love or it is not,”9 says Fr Giussani in the interview.

The new beginning is the standing method of the Christian experience: if there were not an event that keeps on happening, we would not be here, there would be no Christianity, there would be no Church. The new beginning indicates the method, the primacy of this event. “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.”10

Therefore, the nature of Christ–as it is described by the Gospels and as it appears in our experience today–makes us tend forward toward happiness. Encountering Jesus, His gaze, one does not want to miss anything more; he wants more of what he has begun to savor. The desire for happiness begins to be fulfilled, and this makes us tend forward even more toward Him who fulfills it.

In this devastated situation, Christ manifests Himself to our eyes as the victor, hic et nunc: nothing, no situation, stops Him. Christ wins, He is victorious, He is the victor, He is the sun that rises and shines. Christ is the victor over history through the imprudent credulousness, through the accomplished guiltiness, through all the confusioÇ. Christ wins, and we see this victory with our own eyes if they are simple. We can see this victory (in Colombia, in Brazil, in Canada, in Nigeria, everywhere), and we are the sign of His victory.

This is why–said Fr Giussani–the fundamental chapter of the whole world’s relationship with Christ is Peter’s “Yes”–“Yes, Lord, I love you.” From where does this affection for Christ spring, that is greater than everything–everything that is lacking; all our evil, all disasters, all the pedophilia in the universe, all the attacks–spring, if not from the work that He is doing before our very eyes?

“Yes, I love you,” is the same as saying, “Your victory over the world is my whole life, and since I am not capable of living this love, make me live it, You, daily, each day, one by one, in all my relationships, one by one!” All our desire, all our activity, all our life is summed up in this invocation, in this prayer. Therefore, we are sailing with this boundless weakness of ours on the edge of nothingness, but with an inconceivable attachment to Christ.

Christ is the mercy of the Father, Christ reveals to us the mystery of Being, He reveals to us that Being is charity. For us, saying “Being” is normally an abstraction. How terrible it is–says Fr Giussani–that He who makes everything, who makes the beauty of everything, becomes abstract! He becomes abstract because we detach Being from working, from His manifesting Himself; for us, reality is appearance, not the manifestation of Being. The true subject of what happens among us is His presence, it is Being. And we have seen Being at work in these days–hence, it is there! It is Being, not nothingness! Being is there.

“Why can we affirm this? Because we recognize that it is there! It is there! The Mystery is there!”11 We take it for granted, as something already known, but if it is taken for granted it is not known at all. If one recognizes Being and is not struck by this, he is not in the presence of Being, but of nothingness! If he is in the presence of Being, he cannot help changing, he cannot help feeling an unbelievable gratitude, he cannot help seeing his life accompanied, embraced: He who is making you now, Being, is there. It is a judgment. He is there, He is there, He is there! It does not depend on your temperament or your feelings; He is there! When someone recognizes that this Being who is charity is there, then fear is dispelled forever.

To recognize this, it takes the whole of our being, because faith is the fulfillment of reason; it requires the totality of reason, therefore the whole of your being; it requires you to be there! Being needs us. He can give us everything, He gives us everything, but recognizing Him depends on us (I can give you a wonderful gift, but I cannot also accept it for you–that is something you have to do for yourself!). This gives the Christian personality its tone, for it is not given by what is missing, but by what is there: present salvation.

“One accepts only what he has experienced,” states Fr Giussani in the interview. “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,” the object of God’s preference. “God bears Himself because He is charity.” “But if it [this experience] is not lived as an experience of love, one ends up anchored to a tragic vision, to communicating the cross without this being vivifying. One ends up communicating Christ and what derives from Him as a discourse that is clear-cut, but not sanctifying, because it is loveless, and without being caught up in the whirlpool of the Mystery-Charity, in the end, one is sterile.”12 Either we participate in this whirlpool of Being, we are inside the working of Being, the charity of Being, or we are useless and sterile; we cannot be ourselves and therefore we are sterile. “Without Christ, there is nothing sure, we would be in absolute uncertainty. With Him, instead, the individual is exalted. This is why I want to bring everything back to this: Being is Mystery. The Mystery exists.”13

We read this and we take it for granted, “Okay, the Mystery exists.” But have we started asking ourselves what it means? We cannot even imagine it. “For our part, we can only imitate the Mystery. I am talking of Being as an affirmation of positivity, of the positiveness of life; He is charity. It is an Other who saves [you] and the world through a new thing that He has caused to be born in history. Being! Everything comes out of Being’s flow. Without Christ one feels lost in himself, incapable of focusing on reality, incapable even of spotting clearly any lasting beauty.”14

III. The awakening of hope
In those who recognize and take part in this Presence, hope cannot avoid being awakened. Hope is the word that comes after mercy; one feels loved and starts to hope. The point in history where this began is Our Lady: Our Lady is the point where the Mystery becomes experienceable as charity, because in her womb germinated the heart of Jesus, the flower of Jesus. Therefore, as Fr Giussani said in his address to the Meeting in Rimini, Our Lady is “the living fountain of hope.”15 She is the source of hope because she is the source of Jesus; Jesus is the hope of life.

“Peter had done everything it is possible to do, and yet he lived a supreme affection for Christ.... Christ was the source, the locus of his hope. Through the haze of those objections, Christ remained the light source of his hope.... Our hope is in Christ, in that Presence that, no matter how absent-minded and forgetful we are, we can no longer uproot from the soil of our hearts.”16

We can fall down a thousand times, err a thousand times, but nothing, not even ourselves, can uproot Jesus, attachment to Jesus, from the soil of our hearts.

“Then comes a gush from our depths, like a breath that rises from the chest and inebriates the whole person and makes him act, makes him desire. It bursts forth from the bottom of the heart.”17 We start afresh, it is a new beginning, possibility is reopened, hope is reawakened. This change that happens in us belongs to the event that He is. And Christ, by changing us, begins to change society. This is the beginning of the end: by changing us, Christ begins to change the world. Therefore, what we are living is also hope for all.

IV. Unity
Taking part in this mercy is the root of the unity among us. We are united not because we are good and clever, not because we have no faults. We are united, because we have a common root: taking part in this mercy. Unity is born from this root. My salvation takes place in a locus, in this unity, in this communion; thus, my salvation passes through the belonging to this unity, to this concrete locus. Outside of this unity, we are nothing, even with all our ingeniousness–a breath, and we are blown away! Therefore, the path toward happiness, in this new beginning that is always happening again, is possible only if we have the simplicity to belong.