EVENT, MISSION, EDUCATION

The CL Adults’ Beginning Day in the Diocese of Milan. 15,000 people in the Filaforum in Assago. Notes from the talks

Fr Pino
“Man makes headway when he knows well where he is going.” This is the strongest need that fills our hearts now, at the beginning of the path of a new year marked by the horrendous surprise of what happened on September 11th.
Talking with a group of university students, a girl suddenly burst out with this observation (seeing those images on television, the image of so much violence, destruction, the impressive and unthinkable expression–as last month’s Traces Editorial put it–of the human ability to destroy, to annihilate civilization’s efforts to construct): “In the face of all this I felt a void, a tremendous emptiness.”

I was reminded of a passage from Montale, in which he describes the instant, on a cold morning, “walking about in a vitreous, clear air,” when the man intuits (Montale calls it a miracle, but it is not) “the nothingness around my shoulders and the void behind, and know the terror of a drunken paranoid.”

Certainly, since that September 11th, it is more evident that the things that are there, everything that is there, could also not be there, but the response that lets nothingness win, the response that says, “Everything is an illusion,” would be a yielding of my freedom to instinctiveness, to irrationality.

“The dismay and grief at what happened cannot be contained, much less resolved, either by the indifference that tends to reduce them to the emotion of watching a film, or by revenge that can only transform them into the bitter aftertaste of a devastating and merely temporary victory.”

If what happens is left to instinct, to individual opinion, all this can only be further instrumentalized by those in power.
What happened is so terrible that the temptation is to give in to what Luca Doninelli, in a letter to Savorana, calls “the worst enemy: abstraction,” or as Fr Gius would say, ideology: “The first impression that came to me,” he wrote, “was that I was inside a novel, an American novel, one of those best sellers made up of theorems, all abstraction, full of cruelty, and where everything squares up in the end because it is not squared up with reality.”
The first thing that stands out in front of the temptation of emptiness, of instinctivity, is that we need reality in order to live.

It is dramatically more evident since this September 11th that everything that exists could suddenly not be there any more, yet this does not lead us to say that everything is an illusion, but that reality exists and this evidence–as dramatic as you might wish–is for me, it corresponds to me, as a need to grasp it, to recognize its origin and purpose.
This disaster interrogates anyone who has humanity, who has the heart he was born with from his mother’s womb, this need for happiness which nothing and no one can take away from us. But how should we respond?

The salvation, the solution, is not political. We cannot be satisfied with unloading onto a summit meeting of nations or politicians the solution to the problem. It would be like entrusting to someone else something that presses on me as an urgent need, that is pressing within me, for me.
A realistic gaze–and this is the second passage on which I would like to insist–asks us to grasp two factors that this tragedy has brought out unmistakably. If we do not acknowledge the presence of these two factors, we condemn ourselves to abstraction, and thus to instinctivity, as the only ephemeral possibility of response.
As a way of introducing the first, I quote the Traces Editorial again where it says, “Thus the people of the western world, taken up with other matters and forgetful of their fragility, of the evil and sin they bear within them, stare aghast at the television images of the seemingly science-fiction realization of the evil intent of ‘others.’”
In effect, everything that is human is in grave jeopardy. In his closing words to the Meeting, Giussani spoke of “the mortal situation in which humanity lies. And all our hopes broken and all our expectations, legitimate and just, but dashed.”

“Who can stand before You, o Lord, who can resist in front of Your face, under the burden of our sins, under the weight of this inability or impossibility of man to make himself worthy to put forth an effort of dignity in the face of God? If You look at man, says a Psalm, there is no moment that can be saved, no man is serene, can be serene, grow serene again.”

The great censure that has prevailed in the West for centuries, and prevails over the prevailing mentality, is applied to the evidence of evil and our connivance with it. It is what the Church calls original sin, this wound that makes it impossible (not just improbable, but impossible) for man to be, by his own efforts, himself, to be what he was made to be.

The problem of our life is that the malice of this guilt, of this lie, of this seizing things not according to their nature, is in the common attitudes, thrown into the plethora of commonplaces. No one affirms this any more, no one has this love of reality any more, has this gaze full of awareness, has this consciousness. Evil is reduced to a deficiency of social structures, a psychological disturbance, a mechanism that does away with freedom, so that, when it emerges so tragically, we reach a monstrous conclusion, a monstrous image of the Mystery: man innocent and unsuspecting, and God who destroys him. This is the result of abstraction, this is the result of detachment–we said it three years ago at the Retreat of the Fraternity and now it is clearer than ever–between the consciousness and God perceived as distant, detached from experience, from the heart of man, from reality, from the needs of every day (of which the greatest is the need for meaning).

Well and good, this consciousness is given to us precisely as the most radical judgment that can be made about ourselves: what the Church calls original sin lies at the origin of violence between brothers, between husband and wife, between parents and children, between children and friends, between friends and the company, between the company and institutions, between institutions and peoples.

“If You look at man, what is man that You keep him in mind?” (cf. Psalm 8). Or, to borrow a passage from the article which appeared in Corriere della Sera in August (and this is the second factor which forcefully emerges, with evident impact on the reality of now): “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.”

It seems like an abstract formula, but it is not, because it is right here that we identify God, the Lord, as the author and affirmation of human life, who does not abandon life after calling it into being. There is no void, there is no distance. Or better, the void, the distance in which we would confine the Mystery has been ripped apart, broken through, by the Lord. The Mystery breaks through this distance, entering into time and space, entering into the flesh of existence, entering with a face; and the face of the Mystery in time and space is mercy. As is written on the cover of Traces: “If we put God in front of all the sins of the world, it seems obvious to say: ‘Who can stand? No one can be saved.’ Instead, God died for a world like this, He became man and died for men. Mercy is the ultimate meaning of the Mystery: a positivity that conquers presumption and desperation.”

It is He who breaks through the void in which the monstrous images are born (and now this is tragically real). It is a return backwards, centuries backwards. It is the return not only to paganism, but to the most brutal reduction of God to an idol: the god who destroys man, who devours life, who strikes terror in the heart; the monstrous image of those who identify him with violence (the god of war) to the point of annihilating themselves and causing death and destruction in accordance with the devastating lie of an idolatrous and ideological vision, but also the grotesque image of those who want to reduce him to an abstract factor, a factor of private devotion, for those who–as a famous Italian journalist wrote in the most authoritative Italian newspaper–consider “a human devastation inevitable every time the attempt is made to make the Infinite enter into the finite,” perpetuating in this way the abstraction that is then the fount of lies and violence.
If this void is there, the return to fate is inevitable, the annihilation of the “I” as the need for happiness is inevitable, the reduction of the heart to instinct, of freedom to free will; inevitable is the pulverization of the human.

The Christian event is the answer to the search for the infinite which is the heart of man, so that man can walk forward, so that man can be conscious of that move which coincides with life, of that move of the heart that is a crying out to life, that is a need for truth, for beauty, that is a need to build, a need to leave a trace–large or slight–in the great book of life, in the great book of history.
Religiosity, i.e., the acknowledged and loved dependence on and belonging to the Mystery, is the dimension of life. The God who makes Himself flesh, the tenderness of mercy and pardon are the only path for man to have a realistic and cordial gaze on his humanity.

Religiosity as a dimension of life–there is no justice without this. “We have to seek justice with all the means available to man,” says our Editorial, “yet not according to the presumptuousness of man,” but by acknowledging the only One who is infinite justice, the only One who is mercy. Outside of this, lies and violence are perpetuated.
There is not an abstract place where this happens. The place is a concrete one: Christ’s mercy for the individual. The Lord died and rose again for the concrete man, for me and for you, born of your father and your mother. There is no humanity except in the “I.” Otherwise, it would be once again an abstraction in the name of which even more horrendous injustice can be perpetrated.

This is why we ask all the forces in play, all nations, Islamic and Western, to be responsible. If there is a prudence, a possibility, or a decision that the leaders of the states with an Islamic majority must feel as their sacrosanct duty toward the whole world, it is this: they cannot escape the fact that the truth of life, and thus the criterion for judgment of a life and about a life, is the person, the honor paid to the person, and for this reason no one, for any reason whatever, can rise up against another man. This is the first thing the Pope–speaking of the attack on America–recalled: “This was a dark day in the history of humanity, a terrible affront to human dignity.”

But there is also an historical responsibility of which the West should feel the necessity, because of a grave lack of ideal, and thus moral, education. Before every other concern, this is the one that must be perceived as the factor that determines a present, and as such must be pursued.
But–and with this I conclude–there is a responsibility that is ours, that belongs to each one of us. Everything that has happened in these months has happened “so that I might make the word ‘my Jesus,’ ‘my Lord’ become ever more true. Because if the Lord were not mine, then He would no longer be anyone’s.”

In the face of terrorism, in the face of the possibility of lies and violence, if others go so far as terrorism, we have to go so far as a conscience that bears the ultimate consequences of the life that the Lord has created, all the consequences, all of life, all of reality.
The Lord has touched each one of us, has taken us, has made us part of a people that bears through time, that continues through time, the great history begun with the Hebrew people.

Chapter 6 of Deuteronomy reminds us of the formula of faith of Israel, which is our own, i.e., the formula of the conscience as it faces all of reality, all of life, every instant of life: “Hear, O Israel! Yahweh our God is the one, the only Yahweh. You must love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. Let the words I enjoin on you today stay in your heart. You shall tell them to your children, and keep on telling them, when you are sitting at home, when you are out and about, when you are lying down and when you are standing up; you must fasten them on your hand as a sign and on your forehead as a headband; you must write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. You shall observe all this so that you may be happy.”

The great cry of man’s heart is answered by this Presence as the content of the consciousness of the instant, as the root of a realistic gaze, in the shadows in which we walk, of an inexorable positivity. There is no expression of life that cannot be impacted by this awareness, by awareness of the relationship with Christ, with the present Lord.
As a great Orthodox historian, Lev Regelson, has observed, “It is man’s self-awareness that determines the face of epochs.” It is the self-awareness of each of us, as consciousness of dependence on and belonging to the present Mystery, that determines the face of the world.
If we are together and if we have been touched, it is for the world. Because of this, we now understand more clearly and urgently the invitation that was extended to us this year: we must surprise the “I” in what makes the “I” something absolutely original, the protagonist of history.

It is the conclusion of the Editorial, “We must find ourselves once again, that is, find Him who has made us know goodness, the taste for life, for our own ‘I’ as an indispensable factor in the world, to be communicated not only by the flickering of lights, but also by the testimony of devotion to the truth.”
I would like to ask you–Giancarlo–to help us tackle the fundamental factors of this work we are doing on ourselves and, through each one of us, in our companionship.

Giancarlo Cesana
When I met with Fr Giussani to decide the points to make in the Traces Editorial, at a certain point he said, “What are the thousands of dead crying out from under the rubble of the Twin Towers?” This question buzzed around in my head in these days because it was true: in the face of the stunned silence of the living, it is the dead who cry out.
Our American friends, immediately after what happened, proposed a Mass, and a priest told them, “I don’t know what to say; you say it” (precisely, it is the dead who are crying out).
In an article that appears today in the Corriere della Sera, which carries an interview with Elie Wiesel (the Nobel Peace Prize winner, a Jew who has committed himself to affirming the liberty and dignity of man), the interviewer asked him if the fact that he survived the Nazi concentration camps was a miracle, and he said that he cannot say it was a miracle, because if he said it was a miracle, then he would be bringing God into it and would wrong those who died. He says, “It was by chance.”

What are the dead crying out? They cry out if there is a reason to remember them. Who is man? Who is the one capable of building the Twin Towers and of destroying them? Who is the one who, while he loves and builds, hates and destroys? Who are we? We too are made like this.
Wiesel too corrects himself, because when they ask him, “Is it by chance that you were born into the Jewish people?” he said, “No, that is not by chance; it is election.” He then quotes a saying by the Rabbi of Bratislava: “Nothing is as whole as a broken heart.” What Fr Pino says is an answer: God is not the God of death, He is the God of life, He is a God who in the face of the world’s evil did not destroy it, but died for the world, conquering even His own death.

So, what is the problem of the living? What is our problem today? This is a Beginning Day and we must not leave here with an idea–that would be too little. We have to leave here with a task, and a task that is not even an operative idea, but is life that has been hit by a greater Presence; it is a life that follows What it has encountered as true.

As Deuteronomy suggests, the first problem of the living, the primary problem that concerns us, is education, which is certainly a duty of fathers, but it is a duty of fathers because of the questions that children ask their fathers: “Tell us who we are, hand on to us the experience of your identity, of what you are.” As Fr Giussani said in our meeting to prepare this day, this is the formula of civilization, of civilization understood as a good, a good that is not lacking in contradictions and difficulties, but a good that brings peace, stronger than contradiction and difficulty. This is the formula of civilization: “Without a past there is no present.”

The task of education is to make the past live in the present, to make the awareness man has of himself (the awareness that Fr Pino was describing earlier) live in the present, otherwise nobody gives a hoot about the past, nobody gives a hoot about the present, except for the emotion that the present produces (only for this!).
Making the past live in the present, making the awareness that has been handed to us live, making the tradition live in the present.
The principle of education is an event that impacts the person.
Education is not programming, it is not even Catholic programming. To insist on a program of education is to destroy education. Not that one should not make laws and schools, but laws and schools are the container of education, they are the foundations of the house, yet no one builds a house to live in the cellar. Education as an event demands freedom, and schools and laws must defend freedom (which is what makes man, like God, free) as the possibility to adhere to a truth that we did not invent, but was handed down to us. If the principle of education is an event, this has to have happened; we can neither wait for it nor produce it by an act of will–it has to have happened, it has to be here, now! Education begins when one can indicate, describe, tell about an event. This is as true for the little ones as for the grown-ups; even more for the grown-ups than the little ones, in that the little ones marvel more at what grown-ups consider usual.
But what is an event? An event is not the emotion that we look for around the facts, the gratification we look for in the face of facts, but it is the fact.
The event is a fact, exceptional in its dimension, i.e., as to measure and as to time: beyond our measuring and unexpected as an occurrence. It is an exceptional fact, because it corresponds to the heart, to what we are seeking, even if we don’t even know we are seeking it, even if we don’t even know what we really want.

An event is the exceptionality of a presence, of an unexpected human fulfillment, beyond our measuring, with the movement that it (the event) produces, not that we produce. Emotion means movement, moving out of oneself, but in accordance with the original logic of reality, that is, of what happens, not of what we have in our heads.

We have encountered the Mystery; within the humanity that goes with us, we have encountered God. And the capacity for affection (because there is no knowledge without affection; we do not know, we do not become attached to reality, we do not know, if we are not struck. We know someone we love much better than someone we care nothing about); the capacity for affection is the capacity to let oneself be struck by the originality of the reality as it comes to meet us, by the originality of God as He comes to meet us.

This is why we must ask and pray, because our heart is broken, broken–more than by what happens–by our incapacity. But “nothing is as whole as a broken heart,” because a broken heart entreats, beseeches, and prays to God, whose Presence is manifest in the Church, in the Church of Rome, in our fraternity. It is a localistic principle: God is in a place. This is so true that when the event of September 11th occurred, our friends in New York spontaneously gathered at the CL office, because it was the evident sign of the companionship of this Presence, of this possibility for hope, of this possibility–not a presumptuous one–of self-awareness, of assumption of self-awareness. Not only for them, for our American friends, and not only for us, but for everybody, for the world, and this is the second aspect of our task: mission.
We are for the world, and we are for the world because without the reality that surrounds us, we do not exist. Our happiness, our well-being is profoundly connected with the destiny of all, it is a responsibility for us and for all. With Baptism, our name collaborates, is a pointing to, is a sign of the name of God.

“None of us lives for himself,” said Fr Giussani last year, citing St Paul in his Letter to the Romans, “and no one dies for himself, because if we live, we live for the Lord, if we die, we die for the Lord. Whether we live or whether we die, we are in the Lord… Christ everything in everyone.”

The desire that is given to us, the tension, the temperament, the humanity, the character, everything that is given to us is not only for us, but for everyone, in Christ. We are aware that the fulfillment of what we are tending toward is not in our hands, even if we, with all our strength and all our sincerity, are seeking its accomplishment.
Fulfillment is in Christ; our desires are for Christ. If lived like this, our fulfillment is not only for us, but is for everyone. And the mission is to look at others like this, live with others like this.
E-mails are starting to come in from the United States, thanking us for the Traces Editorial; they thank us because they perceive it as a point of reference.

We are nothing. The disproportion between us and the Mystery is immense, and the disproportion is also immense between us and the task to which we have been called. But what has been lighted in us is a little lamp that will not go out and, shedding its beams afar, strikes where we least expect it.