La Thuile

Like a Lightning Bolt in the Fog
Return to Reality
Eight hundred youth and adults from seventy countries participated in the International Assembly of Responsibles of the Movement. Each arrived with his own experience, and each was a witness to the other of Christ’s love for man, against the dualism and nihilism that would separate us from the real

by Luigi Amicone

Let us say, to begin with, that, like every year in La Thuile, in the Aosta Valley, the mountains tower so high above the plain that the sky, poor fellow, withdraws meek and mild to just a little patch beyond. Thank God, we had four days of good weather, with the day of the hike the most beautiful–a lost blue, a blazing sun, and a light breeze, like when you are at sea and all the power of nature works to the sailor’s benefit. This year went like this, at the court of the Paduan hoteliers Graziano De Bellini and his friend Igino, who have built a small empire of intelligent tourism, the vacation/International Assembly of Responsibles. With Fr. Gius listening to us from the Mystery on high, and us, here, still on our way under the imposing peaks of Mont Blanc, with a roommate who is not so foreign that he isn’t recognized immediately as one of us. “Give the reasons for the hope that is in you.” “Hope does not disappoint.” This was the leitmotif of our half a week of work, the reason that gathered us and provoked us in a time of listening and dialogue with eight hundred youth and adults, from the CL communities present in seventy countries of the world. First of all, there was the orderly day, the riverbed specially built to channel experience as a walk toward the true: wake up call (at 8:00), breakfast, Lauds, assembly (on odd days), lesson (on even ones), songs and classical music (always), Eucharist, testimonies from around the world (evenings), silence (“at 12:30 a.m.,” Mr. Carras). The fact that the proposed climate was one of silence full of conversation with your roommate re-focused our attention on the meaning of our being together.

Like children
Work: life is all a work, even in its apparently more irrelevant aspects, to cleave to the Mystery who creates us, to that “something within something,” as was said, that bursts through the opacity of the daily routine of the things superficially dolled up by our activist prejudice, and finally makes us see (and enjoy) that original “farther beyond,” always eluding our imaginations, of which the real is constituted. “Unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of God.” Return, enter and see: this is good work. Reconstitute that original relationship with which a child goes from one thing to another, following things without idolatry, using the world at his pleasure, feeling perfectly at ease, without setting up before experience any abstract thought; yes, this produces experience of the world just the way God made it. “Notwithstanding everything (the war and the Holocaust of 6 million Jews), it seems to me that the world as God made it is good” (Arendt). So good that every child stays within it comfortably, not only like a monkey, tree, or stone, but precisely like a being made in the image and likeness of God, constituted in original and loving dependence. And, one understands, all things are good, but your mother, the face of your father, your beloved, make your heart leap and your face light up as nothing else does, as Mary’s embrace made John jump in his mother’s womb, and Elizabeth’s face light up.

The crisis point
Instead, Julián Carrón opened his lesson, quoting Arendt, “Ideology is not the ingenuous acceptance of the visible, but the intelligent erasure of reality.” This is the crisis point of our times, one that penetrates each of us as an objection and a temptation. “Difficulty recognizing that something within something. Reduction of reality to appearances. And thus relationship with reality that eliminates Mystery. This is what we can call dualism. On one side, the real, and on the other, the Mystery” (so, if it exists, it doesn’t matter). “An already-constituted ‘I’ to which something is added.” An “I” that pre-constitutes itself independently from the real. Out of this comes a juxtaposition, the impossibility of a “loving knowledge.” “This is the beginning of the victory of nihilism.” So much the worse for the Christian event, which is often unknown even as an elementary datum of information (even in the heart of the global village, in the capital of the whole world’s communication and information, New York: “Why are the newspapers so critical of Gibson’s Passion? Who is this Jesus, anyway?” asked a colleague of Giovanni Cesana, a physician and researcher in an important New York university). But also for those who know Him, who is Christ? “Christ is no longer an authority, but an object of sentimentality; God is a scarecrow, not a friend.” From this ignorance and, above all, from the absence of a method, from the lack of a commitment of reason, the charism has freed us, said Carrón. “Identifying with Fr. Giussani is identifying with a method.” Either that, or it’s just a sentimental nothing. “Fr. Giussani did not leave us with a spirituality group; he left us an historic turning point for responding to the drama of our era, the enmity against the Mystery.” Because what is in crisis is “our mysterious nexus with the real,” said Carrón, quoting Maria Zambrano. Thus, “that which nurtures life is no more.” But if that which feeds life is no more, how will we look at our children? What will save them from the petrifying gaze of our measure? And from Power?

Living the real
Here then, is the point of departure, the first step of the method, the first act of reasonability: living the real, living reason as the window thrown wide open onto reality in the totality of its factors, that is, to the affirmation of the Mystery, because it originates from it. This is the life from which our Movement was born–Carrón read from a 1946 letter of the 24-year-old Fr. Giussani to Angelo Maio: it is a “you,” a friend; it is “that ineffable and total vibration before things and persons.” “Re-read Chapter 10 of The Religious Sense until you know it well,” suggested Carrón. The law of being is a “You;” it is an “I-am-you-who-make-me.” And yet we can experience that “none of us succeeds alone in bringing himself back to a true gaze on the real.” For this reason, the second point of method, let us please stay in front of the greatest news of all news: “To make us become familiar with the Mystery, the Mystery entered into history. Christianity is the announcement that God became man, in a certain place, in a certain time.” It is an encounter that is renewed today for us, “like a lightning bolt in the fog.” As it was for John and Andrew that afternoon, two thousand years ago, so for us the encounter is the happening of a human exceptionality that has no comparison, where “the exceptional is something that corresponds to the original demand of the heart, no matter how confused or nebulous the awareness of this need may be.” In effect, learning that “the presence of Christ is the companionship of those whom He has called like you,” doesn’t require running off to history or theology books; you understand it even as soon as you sit down at table with any one of the eight hundred present, witnesses of His body at the end of the world. “The body is what appears, what you let be seen of what you are,” explained Carrón. “It is real, and at the same time it goes beyond; it sinks down its roots into a land unknown to us, the land of Being.”

Dennis, Cleuza, Marcos, and others
The stories are almost invisible, but contain the drama of the universe. Dennis from CL in Rwanda said, “My colleague lost his faith during the genocide in Rwanda. They exterminated his extended family, about two thousand close and distant relatives. He spoke with many ecclesiastical authorities, but no one convinced him, because, for that matter, there were also men of the Church in connivance. I understand that I am his only hope against all hope.” There was also big breaking news, like the story of the Brazilian Cleuza and her husband Marcos, who, through absolutely unimaginable roads, (brought their movement of people without homes, a hundred thousand men and women who have been committed for years in the struggle for social justice, into the CL Movement. Cleuza said, “There was an Italian doctor who talked too much, and dotted his words with references to Fr. Giussani, and some of his friends who were always quoting Fr. Giussani, and were strange, different, but a good kind of strange and different; they were attentive to people, to their material problems, and, to make it short, I encountered what was missing for me: hope.” She quips with happy irony at one of the assemblies, “Yeah, Carrón, it’s easy for you to say, ‘You have to do School of Community,’ but if by chance only 10% of our people accepted your invitation, will you explain to me how my husband and I are going to lead School of Community for ten thousand people?”
Now, since Italian is spoken in La Thuile, even though Carrón is Spanish, you can imagine the exhausting work of the interpreters. But do you think it’s normal that a bishop (of Petropolis, Brazil) should tranquilly serve in the interpreter’s booth, or that Annamaria should spend four days in the mountains hanging onto the skirts of her Croatian countrywoman Ylena, to translate all the lessons, assemblies, and meetings of the vacation for her? Cambia, todo cambia. (Everything changes.)

A gorgeous sight of varied humanity
The Argentine choir livened the after-dinner time with its “aria caliente.” Have you ever seen a choir of Black Alpine Corps singing Sul pajon and, bit by bit as the group enlarged on the veranda, Nigerians and Americans, Austrians and Italians, everyone together singing Guantanamera and Aida? But Pablo just doesn’t know where to start his story. He comes from Colombia, in a neighborhood where the young men wear Benetton t-shirts (with a photo of sheep begging not to be sacrificed at table), while at night in the next neighborhood there are “cleaning sweeps,” that is, death squads that kill for a euro a head, transvestites, prostitutes, and drug addicts. Enrique comes from Chile, where it can be seen that “the South American continent runs the risk of sinking under a new wave of populism and caudillos,” and Michelle from Washington, where she works as a journalist whose challenge is to learn the profession while working hard on a doctoral program. Cindy is an Australian, a “CL reference point” against her will: “I didn’t choose the circumstances; you find yourself in them. I believe this is the best thing I’ve found in my life, you know, and it’s not that I haven’t seen the things of life. I have three children–twenty, eighteen, and sixteen years old–and I’ve been reborn at forty something.” John, too, is Australian, but from Perth, on the West Coast, where everything is apparently against Christ, because, as it says on the t-shirt from the place where you have breakfast on the beach, or a break from work, or an afternoon aperitif on the veranda, or an evening in the arms of your loved one, watching the sun set over the ocean, “O God, Perth, another boring day in Paradise.” What a gorgeous sight of humanity in its variety, of stories, of joy, mixed with known and hidden trials and suffering! And yet, we are compelled–unexpected, on top of the world, among people we would never have imagined meeting, black, white, yellow… Olga from Moscow and young Siberians, polite Chinese and a fantastic South Korean–we are forced to be touched by the attraction of Being, given to us by a Presence. We are touched by the charism through which He has reached us.

The attraction of Being
The Responsibles Assembly, therefore, reveals itself first of all for what the Movement is at all its levels: personal, communitarian, geographic, and spatial-temporal. We left the Meeting amazed by a reality open to everyone and hostile to no one. We entered the Responsibles Assembly, struck by the endurance of a pure and lasting beauty. What is amazing, in fact, is not the variety and richness of the people who’ve come from all over the world. What is amazing, humanly speaking, is that there is Something that makes all this possible. “How beautiful the world is, and how great is God!” repeats the body of our Movement. Salvation from the hell of dualism. We see, and touch, and announce a life, only a life, nothing other than a life, that makes us give in to the attraction–to the attraction of the Being who comes out to us, to meet us on the way.