Cl in the world

The Embrace of the Beginning

15,000 adults came together on September 21st at the Filaforum of Assago, Italy, for Opening Day in Lombardy, with talks by Vittadini, Cesana, and Fr Pino. At the end, Fr Giussani’s greeting: “A great soul is needed, a great heart, the heart of a child”

by LUCA DONINELLI

As the minutes passed, more and more cars crowded into the parking lots around the Filaforum, almost all of them full. Their doors opened, and the late summer country air was filled with the last scraps of the week, with our usual problems, with everything the week had left unresolved, with the human drive with which we go through things. But there was not only this. How many years now is it, on an invariably hot Saturday in September, that we come together, ten, twelve thousand-this time, says Fr Pino, it is fifteen thousand-in Assago for Opening Day? Our daily lives adhere to something else. It is not only a need for spiritual edification, it is something to touch with our own hands, something to experience. It is the passion that yearns in everything we do, if we do it with awareness. Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor.

In America and in Lombardy
That “something” is the concrete working of God. The first to speak was Giorgio Vittadini. He began by recounting the news of what is happening in America through our charism. He recalled the day when he spoke with Fr Giussani about the project of the “conquest” of America by the tiny CL group-the Movement as a plan, a preconception. And Fr Gius said, “It is not a project, it is Jesus making His way into history” (almost the same words, I thought to myself, that he used a little more than a year ago, talking about the death of young Stefano Aletti).

Fr Giussani had gone on that day to say, “We must obey the way the Lord chooses to manifest Himself.” And again, “The first need is to feel oneself embraced completely and unconditionally.”

What answers this need? The encounter with Jesus Christ. The need to manifest our faith arises from this. It was a position like this that enabled, that did not impede, the miracle of our presence in America, culminating in the Way of the Cross at Easter in New York.

In my notebook, I underlined this sentence twice: “Our public gestures characterize our companionship like the Way of the Cross in New York.” Which means also that all the gestures in which our companionship is expressed, even the most humble, are like that Way of the Cross, which was so mysteriously expressive of our entire history. Then Vittadini changed direction and said, “But just what we have seen in America has taught us to see what is here, because what is happening in America happens also in Lombardy, and the origin is the same–it is the apparently casual encounter that is in reality gratuitous, providential, and personal.”

And then came a flood of examples, which are real people and stories. Vittadini seemed to be asking those who were listening to him, “What’s wrong, don’t you see it? And yet it is right before everybody’s eyes.”

In the heart of the embrace
While Vittadini gave us the chronicle of a “complete and unconditioned” embrace, Giancarlo Cesana went to the heart of that embrace. His way of communicating, which is direct, personal, and not at all indulgent but used to showing mercy, cannot help striking anyone who hears him.

What has wiped out doubt, violence, and obscurity in us is “the certainty of being loved”–not the idea of being loved, but the certainty. “To be certain, a place is needed. There has to be someone who wants me.”

Cesana described the fragility of the experience of being loved as “the expression of a momentary beauty” besieged by the “fear that everything flees, every time.” But “being loved is a correspondence, not something abstract.”

There is an abstract idea of correspondence, I thought to myself, that I find in lots of people, especially young people (but not only them), who show how easy it is (for everybody, not just for them) to build up an image of what the other-woman, friend, child-has to be.

“Not abstract, but of another. In order to live, a ‘you’ is needed. And you,” Cesana went on, “are never enough.” “But what does the opening to “you” communicate to us? The meaning of life, its purpose, which is not only a task, but Destiny.” The task is the road, it is what I do in order to reach the goal, but the other wants me, not what I do. “The ‘I’ has no banks to contain it, because what we are destined for cannot be contained.”

What counts is not what we do, but the dimension of what we do, that is to say, “the aspect of opening to all of reality that a human gesture brings about” (L Giussani, Tracce d’esperienza cristiana [Traces of Christian Experience]). “Anima est quodammodo omnia.” “To a certain degree, the soul coincides with everything” (St Thomas Aquinas).

Energy of attachment
To understand this, it is necessary to risk a response, and responding means getting attached. “Knowledge is an affective energy,” an energy of attachment.

Here, Giancarlo had an outburst that seemed polemical to me, against a certain kind of creeping spiritualism. “Life,” he said, “is no longer like you imagine it; it is the response to a presence, but a presence with a little ‘p.’ Let’s not overdo it with the capital letters: the presence is not the presence of God, if it is not first mine, yours, his or hers.” The reminder is an opportune one for everybody, but it is not at all generic–as it never is among us. It is evident that the risk of getting rid of experience by means of a sentimental reduction (or one determined by one’s role) is very strong. It is a cultural judgment, that does not limit personal freedom with ethical snares, but touches our life like the point of a sword.

I shall not summarize Cesana’s talk any more than this. I only quote the phrases I underlined:

“Mary carried in her womb the mystery that involved her.”

“If there is nothing that is stronger than death, then death falsifies everything.”

“A humanity is changed when it is not afraid of contradiction.”

“I am a follower of Christ not because I have understood everything, but because I have not understood anything, except the response of a different humanity with which I, we, gamble our lives.”

“Education as mission is a necessity of life.”

“Education is a proposal–not of an idea, but of me, of you.”

Even lined up like this, these statements say what they have to say. And here too, there is nothing of the generic. Behind these words are people, faces, actions, and stories.

“The” road
The third talk was Fr Pino’s. “This is not a road like the others, but ‘the’ road, where Destiny touches me and changes me.”

If certainty, Pino went on, asks for a place, that is to say, an embrace (because only if it embraces you is it for you, and thus is it a real place), this embrace acquires, among us, a form, a name, a dailiness: it is the Fraternity, which is Christ’s friendship lived in persuasive terms, i.e., in accordance with the circumstances that help us to walk along better.”

I was struck greatly by Pino’s insistence on the tools of this friendship: from School of Community (we are picking up again with the sixth chapter of At the Origin of the Christian Claim) to the other books; from the Spirto Gentil CDs to Traces magazine; from the common fund to charitable work, which is “education to look at reality with compassion.”

These are tools because they are for me. Not for “the Movement” in an abstract sense, but for the education of my person, for the growth of the “I.” That’s all.

The tools we adopt are not a pretext, a tribute to pay in order to be more spiritual, “better,” or to have more power or anything like that. They are the most concrete and sure help for walking along “the” road.

Eternity in us and among us
As Pino said his final words, the big screen lit up and Fr Giussani appeared.

I have never managed, not even once, to imagine what he was going to say. And I didn’t succeed this time either. Fr Giussani said that in order to put into effect what has been said, i.e., “eternity in us and among us,” which, day by day, “vanquishes the ruin into which man would let himself fall, a great soul is needed, a great heart, the heart of a child. How does the child demonstrate his presence? By crying, or laughing, or smiling. The expression of the child is ultimately the one that says, ‘Mother!’ Inside this word is everything that came forth out of nothingness; there is everything that comes forth day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, out of our nothingness.

I urge myself, I have always urged myself every morning of my life, to pray to God to be a child,” because “being a child means feeling this possession which an Other, the Mystery, has of us.” Fr Giussani urges us to the gesture that most expresses this possession by the Mystery: begging, prayer.

There is no need for me to repeat Fr Giussani’s words here. But the simplicity of the embrace is impressive. The consciousness of the evil that is in us and among us (reinforced by Fr Gerolamo’s homily) never ends, however, with a condemnation of the evil, but with the force of forgiveness (which is the true force of destiny), with a judgment that is, at the same time, a picking up again and a support.

A new factor
The new beginning is an Other who happens to me and begs for my heart, and asks that our days take this into account as a new, different, unforeseeable factor–for me who am a writer, for you who build houses, for you who are a mother, a teacher, a merchant.

I listened with renewed wonder at the beauty of our songs; I was moved with admiration at the work of the secretariat. Theirs is not perfectionism, but only the humble attempt to answer a call through a gesture.

Two hours later, under a downpour, there I was again, caught up in my own business. I was on the bus. Next to me sat a punk with light green hair, ten rings on each finger and ten face piercings. It is highly unlikely that the novels I write would interest him. But Fr Giussani’s words, the embrace between us, that, yes indeed, is for him too.