Event Is Vocation

The lecture give by Julián Carrón at the International Assembly of the CL Responsibles
La Thuile, August 27, 2001

On the Easter Poster of 2001, Fr Giussani says that “Unless you recognize the presence of Mystery, night advances, confusion abounds and–when it touches your freedom–rebellion erupts, or disappointment is so overwhelming that you’ll wait for nothing more and live desiring nothing more.”1 But when one reaches this point, where he has no room left for desire or hope, can he still call himself an “I,” since the “I” is defined precisely by desire for and expectation of fulfillment?

So, without this recognition of Mystery, the “I” is not there, it does not happen as a desire for fulfillment, with the expectation that constitutes it. Confusion, rebellion, and disappointment take the upper hand, and man desires nothing more. What is the “I” of those who live this way? What is left in common between what they live and the “I” of which Fr Pino spoke yesterday, an “I” that asks for eternity? How far are they from that “first impulse which,” as Fr Giussani puts it, “I feel describes my experience: a passion for humanity”2! Where is this passion in people who live as though they expected nothing more?

A man who does not ask for eternity, who does not desire fulfillment, who neglects his aspiration “to a meaning that can explain and fulfill everything” is “as though he were running away, as though he were always outside,”3 does not bear with himself, escapes and seeks refuge in forgetfulness, and then tries to justify it. Thus, the triumph of ideology is the loss of the “I.” No sooner do we look at ourselves than we realize how, to a greater or lesser degree, this happens in us.

What enables each of us to recognize the Mystery present? What arouses our own “I”?

For two years we have been doing School of Community on The Religious Sense and we have learned that the awakening of the “I” takes place in the impact with reality. This is something everybody can live, including us: we are all permanently in relationship with the real. But if, in spite of this immediate relationship with the real, it happens that one ends up desiring nothing more, this means that things, the people we encounter, even those we like most, do not succeed in arousing our “I” in a permanent way. “The dissatisfaction that lies at the end even of every success–because every success, after the first moment of giddiness, always presents a new problem–confirms that man is in search of his path.”4 Even when we manage to reach what we desire, dissatisfaction pops up sooner or later and, in time, one stops believing the promise of things and desires nothing more.

If man were to live the real adequately, according to its nature as a sign, all that comes his way would connect him to Mystery, would become for him a path to the Mystery, for all that exists is the sign of an Other and sends you back to an Other, i.e., to Mystery. We know well that although one can reach the Mystery at times, sooner or later this position falls, so much so that, as we have heard quoted from St Thomas many times, only a few, after much striving and not without errors, attain the truth. But not even these few manage to sustain this intuition; as we have learned in School of Community during recent months, the original position of man does not hold. “Recognizing the real as proceeding from Mystery should be familiar to reason, because precisely in recognizing the real as it is, that is, as God wanted it, rather than reduced, flattened out, without depth, do the needs of man’s heart find a correspondence, and the possibility of reason and affection that we are is accomplished entirely. For reason, because of its very original dynamism, cannot accomplish itself except by recognizing the real in as much as it is rooted in Mystery. Man’s reason reaches its apex, it is therefore truly reason, when it recognizes things for what they are, and things are because they proceed from an Other. … This is why every instant has an everlasting relationship with the Mystery.”5 This should be familiar! Why is it not? “Yet there is a wound in his heart, through which something gets distorted in man, and by his own strength he cannot remain in the truth, but fixes his attention and desire on particular and limited things. The original plan, what man was created for, was altered by the arbitrary use of freedom; thus men tend toward a particular which, detached from the whole, is identified with the aim of life.”6

Only by understanding this, and by walking this existential path, can we understand Fr Giussani’s insistence on Abraham.

1 - The “I” as belonging
It is only the Mystery’s intervention in history that awakened the “I,” an “I” that endures, that is not conquered by bewilderment, and–in spite of all his falls, the circumstances of life–will continue to hope. The origin of this “I” is an initiative of Mystery, which began with the choice of Abraham and of the progeny born from him: “Yahweh said to Abraham…”7

The origin of this “I”–Fr Giussani told us–is a history that began with Abraham. The Psalms we recite every day in our prayers are the expression of persons who, as they wade through history like everybody else, go on hoping in an Other, go on crying out, and are not conquered by an ultimate bewilderment.
For Abraham, as for the people of Israel, the “I” as experience lies in the relationship with the present Mystery, the Mystery that makes Himself present in history. “Yahweh said to Abraham…”8: this is how the presence of an “I” that endures begins in history. This is why for Abraham, like for all those who belong to this history which began with Abraham, the “I” is belonging to this Mystery. The origin of the “I” coincides with this real intervention–mysterious as you like, yet real–this historic intervention that posits such an “I” in the world.

Those who have this experience understand that for Abraham and for the people of Israel, the origin of the “I” and belonging coincide. But we have difficulty understanding what we say about Abraham, understanding why origin and belonging coincide, a difficulty which was formulated perfectly by some of you.
One question about what Fr Pino said to us read, “You reminded us that origin and belonging coincide, yet this is all but obvious. Normally, first comes the ‘I’ and his self-awareness, and then the choice of belonging.” Do you understand? First the “I” conceives of itself autonomously, and then he decides to belong! This is the outcome of the mentality in which we live, of the Enlightenment, which see belonging as something added on.

For many, belonging is a moral issue, which I decide afterwards; it does not belong to the nature of the “I,” it does not belong to the “I” as we see it happening in history. That one may think like this is the height of slavery to the common mentality: thinking that we first say “I” and then we decide to belong and, what is more, thinking that this way of saying “I” coincides with our nature is the sign of the triumph in us of the prevailing mentality. It is not so! We do not first say “I” and then decide to belong–as if first there were “I” and then I should decide to belong–because we, you and I, all of us, are made, that is, we belong. When people think as those in power wish them to think, but as if this were their own thinking, we have really reached the maximum of enslavement!

For Abraham to say “I” coincided with belonging to the Mystery who happened in an encounter, who had come his way. Abraham’s “I” had never been awakened as much as in that moment. He had never had an experience of initial fulfillment of his own “I,” he had never been snatched away from bewilderment as in that moment. So, that the origin of the “I” and belonging coincide means that precisely belonging to the Mystery who had come his way was the origin of Abraham’s own “I.”

Let’s take another step forward. This beginning of salvation, both in Abraham and in the people of Israel, led them to realize that He who had entered history to awaken their “I” was the very Mystery who had created them, made them, who was at the origin of them and of everything. The people of Israel first had the experience of salvation and then realized–by fathoming that experience–that the One who saved them was the One who had created them. Thus, going to the depth of their “I,” they were able to understand that saying “I” with full awareness was tantamount to saying, “I am You-who-make me.”9

Salvation unveils and helps us recognize what we all are: we are made by an Other. One who does not appreciate that he is not making himself, that it is an Other who makes him, does not take in all the factors of the real, and takes for granted, as he says “I,” the most elementary fact: that he does not make himself, and thus that he belongs.
In this even more radical sense, origin and belonging coincide: I am because I am made, because I belong to an Other. So no one can say, without obliterating the most elementary evidence, that he is alone, that origin is loneliness: origin is belonging. If I am, there is an Other who makes me. Why, if one looks at reality and at himself, is he sure to belong, is he sure that there is an Other? Because he is there. If he is there, there is an Other who makes him.

Belonging is an essential characteristic of the ontology of the “I”–it is not a decision you make; it is a loving recognition rather than a decision. A loving recognition, not a decision, in the sense in which Fr Giussani speaks of St Peter’s yes: I am not introducing this as an end in itself, but to oppose it to the concept of willful decision . As Fr Giussani said in the introduction to L’attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction that is Jesus], that yes of Peter’s, “that yes, that adherence, was not the outcome of willpower, was not the result of a ‘decision’ made by young Simon. It was the emergence, the coming to the surface of a whole thread of tenderness and attachment which found its explanation in the esteem he felt for Him–it was therefore an act of reason–so that he couldn’t not say, ‘Yes.’”10 That recognition was like being won over by something evident that attached him. “That yes was the outcome, the definition of a relationship full of esteem born as appreciation, as judgment, as a gesture of his intelligence that dragged his heart along, a gesture made existentially, as clear as the sun, of a tenderness: so much so that he and the others would rather have their heads crushed than betray Him.”11

The relationship with the Infinite is not therefore man’s capacity, it does not belong with ethics or morals; it is the given where it appears with clarity that man belongs to the Mystery. So the first activity is a passivity: to welcome, to accept, to recognize, rather than an activity that is something willful. It is merely recognizing, recognizing one’s belonging. This recognizing is called faith. Abraham did make this act of faith, of recognition, which is nothing other than loyalty to the experience one has lived in his encounter with the present Mystery. He recognized that he had never had awareness about himself, a clarity about himself and his destiny; he had never appreciated himself so much as when the Mystery had come his way. This loyalty made of Abraham a truly great man. This is his greatness, after all, that he subjected his reason to experience. This is the sacrifice we must make: accepting experience. It seems simple, but we keep sidestepping this compliance with experience.

So, as Fr Giussani says in Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling], it is the fathoming of this You to whom you belong that makes you understand your “I.” “Since your ‘I’ is made of belonging to a You (the One who came your way), it is not by fathoming your own ‘I’ but by fathoming this You that you will understand your ‘I,’ that you will fathom your ‘I.’ … Here lies the equivocation of the ancient ‘Know yourself’: the ‘Know yourself’ of the Greeks, which was the summit of Greek wisdom, the ‘Know yourself,’ this discovery of self-awareness, lacks altogether the perception of its origin, and therefore of its destiny, which is a You.”12

Now, this belonging to a You is the origin of positivity. “Normally,” said a university student, “for the mentality and the everyday experience of us young people, this recognition of the inexorable positivity of reality coincides with a mood; you may have an optimist, as well as a pessimist. What Fr Giussani says seems much different to me.” And it is very different! So much so that he speaks to us of the positivity of the real, just as he speaks of the violence that weighs heavy on our days. “What can give a man of today the assurance of being able to move about in safety when violence seems to corrode relationships and actions? Awareness of the inexorable positivity of reality.”13 But how can Fr Giussani talk of this inexorable positivity? Let’s see how he goes on: “It is right here that the Church identifies God as the author and the affirmation of human life, who does not abandon life after calling it into being.”14 The present Mystery is what enables us to live everything with the consciousness of the inexorable positivity of reality. “And in fact, the Lord answers Moses, ‘I shall go with you.’ ‘God is not separated from the world,’ the Pope wrote to the Meeting in Rimini, ‘but intervenes. He takes an interest in what man is living, He enters into dialogue with man, He takes care of him. All this is witnessed by the history of Israel,’ a history that we feel also to be ours: every day on a journey, in and through the forest of errors and contradictions.”15

How can there be, then, the consciousness of the inexorable positivity of being, of reality? It is there because one lives the experience that God, the Mystery, does not forsake life after calling it into being. If we do not experience the fact that God is not separated from the world, that He lives within the world, sooner or later we are going to be defeated. Life, on the contrary, with all its vicissitudes, if it is lived in the company of the present Mystery, fathoms the recognition of that You which is the ultimate origin of the positivity of the real.

This year, before the summer, I was supposed to meet one of our fraternities in Spain, where I often go. Thinking about what could be the theme of the meeting, it came to my mind to ask a question. Since in this fraternity we went through a dramatic experience (the death of a very dear friend of ours, that opened up many problems, like that of her children, etc.), I said, “Let the theme of this last meeting this year be this question: What enabled us not to be defeated by what has happened?” The only thing we could answer was that it is not a reasoning that enables us, but His presence in history, a presence so strong that not even such a bewildering reality as the death of a dear friend (which is a threat, because one seems to lose the way, and be lost), not even all the evil, all the disasters that take place manage to erase the attachment to It, to this kind Mystery who is present and familiar, to this Presence we love.

It is only the certainty of His action today, now, here, amid the vicissitudes of life, that enables us not to be defeated. So it is not as a consequence of a reasoning that one affirms the positivity of the real, but it is thanks to this You who is present here and now, it is thanks to this present Mystery. Fr Giussani in Autocoscienza del Cosmo [The Self-Awareness of the Cosmos] says, “Reality is positive when in it you recognize the You that lies behind it. Otherwise, reality is at least enigmatic, and then becomes horrible (horreo: I am afraid, like a child in the woods), horrendous.”16 It is in the recognition of this You, to whom one is attached precisely thanks to a history, that there is the wellspring of the consciousness of the inexorable positivity of the real.

2 - The “I” as belonging can be understood in a historic fact, not through a reflection
How can we understand today what happened to Abraham? By reflecting about Abraham? Not so. By having the same experience as he did. We can understand it only in a present fact that enters history, because we can only start from the present. And what is the present called? Event. It is an event.

Perceiving reality as it is, this is called experience. The event is truly present when it is the content of an experience. It is not a matter, then, of making a reflection, but of looking at experience. We have to look at experience. When was our “I” awakened, when did we recognize that our “I” was beginning to see clearly as never before through its constituent factors? When was the meaning of saying “I” fully unveiled before our eyes? Here no one can do the work for another: each one has to look at his own experience, if he wants to understand that the origin of his “I” and belonging coincide. We can understand what happened to Abraham only if we have the same experience in the present, if it becomes for us the content of an experience.

“It is an event” says Fr Giussani in Generating Traces “the irruption of a new thing, what starts off the process by which the ‘I’ begins to become aware of itself, to take stock of the destiny it is aiming for, of the path it is treading, of the rights it has, the duties it must respect, its entire physiognomy.”17 The beginning of this awareness of the “I” is an event. But when did this happen to you? It is necessary to become aware of the real, historical factors which made you have this experience, or else you will always depend on, be the slave of, the common mentality. When did we, all of us, have this experience? In the encounter with the charism.

Most of us had already received Baptism, already belonged to the Church, but when did this begin really to unfold? In the encounter with the charism. “Thus for me, the grace of Jesus, in the measure in which I was able to adhere to the encounter with Him and communicate Him to the brothers in God’s Church, has become the experience of a faith that in the Holy Church, that is to say, in the Christian People, revealed itself as a call and a desire to feed a new Israel of God.”18 We can prove true these words Fr Giussani pronounced in Rome; his experience of faith was truly revealed for us as a call; we have encountered no other thing that has called our life as this his experience, to the point that we are here and we cannot understand our lives without this call. This is far from something added! For us it is the origin of our way of saying “I”!

And how did this encounter come about? When we encountered the charism, what did we encounter? We met some persons: it was the encounter with a human reality, an integrally human one, a small group of people, faces, facts, that no one can question. How come this encounter was able to awaken our “I”? We have had may encounters in life, we have met many people on our path, but this encounter awakened our “I” like no other; as life went on, it did not fail as everything else, but it has continued and continues to reveal its depth before our eyes. What did we encounter, then? Through the charism, it is Christ who has reached us; the charism is the way in which Christ reaches us today.

“In order to deepen the reflection on where the Mystery of Christ makes Itself present, ” Fr Giussani writes as he comments on John Paul II’s words, “let us continue reading the Pope’s speech to the priests of CL: ‘Sacramental grace finds its expressive form, its concrete historical influence through the diverse charisms that characterize a personal temperament and history.’”19 These charisms, these temperaments, are the way in which Christ makes Himself concrete. “Without His physical concreteness–Fr Giussani continues–Christ would remain abstract, left to our imagination and our mood, identified with the obscurity of our nihilisms, or confused with the euphorias easily aroused by making the ideal coincide with whatever we think or whatever pleases us. Whereas Christ reaches us as He reached Zaccheus, who was in the sycamore tree, curious to see Him as He passed.”20 He has reached us like this, today, in the present. He who reached us, through the charism, is Christ.

“Now, that Fact, the event of that exceptional human presence, posits itself as the method chosen by God to reveal man to himself [this is the first effect of the encounter], to awaken him to a definitive clarity about his own constituent factors, to open him to the recognition of his destiny and to sustain him on the path to it, to make him, in history, an adequate subject of an action that will bear the meaning of the world. This event is therefore what sets into motion the process by which man attains his self-awareness in an accomplished way, acquires his entire physiognomy, and begins to say ‘I’ with dignity.”21 We have started saying “I” with dignity when we encountered the presence of Christ through that mode aroused by the Spirit of Christ in His Church, which is called charism.

“Christ’s power, present in the world within the Church, reaches the individual through a charism, a particular gift (Grace) with which the Spirit invests the expressive, operative, incisive energy of a temperament, a person, a history. What would be the use of all that is in the Church as an established, institutional reality, unless it reaches you with an energy that enlightens, moves and affects your life and that of others?”22 This is what makes us love the Church, this is what makes us love Christ. This is why I am sticking more and more to Christ and to the Church: because, by belonging to this people, as Fr Giussani said of himself in Rome, “everything in me became truly more religious, with my awareness striving to discover that ‘God is all in all.’”23

The encounter with the charism is what makes us discover what it means to belong historically to the Church and to Christ, makes us understand the unique importance of Baptism, which is the stable and sure foundation of our belonging. For Baptism is not a figure of speech and it is not a mood. It is the fact of Christ binding Himself to me forever. “Since every one of you that has been baptised has been clothed in Christ. There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither slave nor freeman, there can be neither male nor female–for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And simply by being Chirst’s, you are that progeny of Abraham, the heirs named in the promise.”24

We are part of Abraham’s progeny and we understand what it means to be progeny of Abraham because we are in Christ. So what unites us are not good feelings. “The others,” says Fr Giussani in Affezione e dimora, “if they are baptized and were called to the same vocation, belong–precisely ontologically–to your own root, they are a part of your own root [of your ‘I’]. That they [those who are called with us] exist is necessary to your own definition. That they should exist! But whether they treat you well (whether you are well), or they mistreat you (or you feel bad), whether they understand you or not, all this is secondary. It is not all the same, but it is all secondary as to definition.”25
The event that arouses our “I” continually is not something we ourselves can make, something we give ourselves–we can only ask for it, beg for it all the time.

3 - Life as vocation
We were given this awareness, we were called through this charism: God called us, in a way so incisive, so fascinating, through this charism. It is necessary to respond. For him who responds, life becomes vocation, he understands life as a response to this call. All of this is development, the continuation of what has happened. Thus one conceives of life as vocation from God.

If the “I” is vocation, every moment of life is part of this vocation. This is why all that we do is divine. Our vocation enables us to enter into everything, to discover God as “all in all.” By responding to this call, by living this vocation, the “I” becomes the subject of the history of His presence in the world. It is God who makes it, but He makes it through your frail yes, my frail yes. It may be as frail as you like, but without this yes, what the Lord wants to do with history does not happen. At the same time, it is by belonging to this history that the “I” matures, becomes itself: our “I” is born, is reborn through this predilection of God, through His mercy that does not stop before our evil, our incapacities, and calls us again and again. The people, the belonging to this people, becomes the instrument to fulfill the vocation of the “I.” “All in me became truly more religious.”26

Thus, by belonging, one begins to change his mentality. The new mentality is nothing other than total, all-encompassing belonging to That which has happened to us. “The new culture [the new mentality] is a vision of the world–from the ‘I’ to the Eternal–that starts from an encounter you have had, an event in which you participate, a Presence you have bumped into, rather than books you read or ideas you may have. This encounter has a genetic value, in that it represents the birth of a new subject, which arises in a given place at a given time in history, and there it is nurtured and is incremented as a new personality, with a unique conception that is irreducible to any other, receiving a new noûs, a new knowledge. When this presence is at play in all relationships of life [when one enters life with this presence in his eyes], when all relationships ‘hang’ on it, when they are saved, judged, coordinated, evaluated, used in the light of that Presence, we have a new culture.”27 There is no need to go to the university. Look at what our friends from Nigeria tell us: “Our friend Fidelis died. A great grief, a great mystery. When we went for the funeral rites in his village, our friends told us there was going to be a long meeting between his paternal and maternal clans to clarify the cause of this death. In their culture, there are no reasons for a premature death, and so a culprit needs to be found within the clans and the punishment to be established. Yet, besides this narration, Francis said that precisely here lies the difference between the culture from which they come and that encountered in the Movement: whereas their culture perceives the Mystery as an enemy, we perceive the Mystery in its very nature, a friendly one, and this explains reality better.”

The mentality that is born of belonging explains reality better. The new mentality then is born not of going to the university, but “from the position one assumes toward this Presence that is exceptional and decisive for life. This is why St Paul says, ‘This is your spiritual cult’: it is your culture, it is the new point of view from which to look at the world, the whole of reality. When a person has a childlike gaze for that Presence, whether he is small or mature (provided his eye is free from buts and ifs and is filled with the question that nourishes man’s heart), then he will penetrate the relationships, both near and far, with a light that no one has, except those who have the same position before Christ, the God made Man, the Word made flesh.”28 Thus one begins to love others, to understand affection and work, all the way to politics, in the light of that encounter. Here is where the new mentality is learned.
We must lend each other a hand to sustain one another on this path, because in it lies the possibility for each of us to be really an “I”–otherwise, we are defeated by circumstances.