Inside America

Looking into the Void
“Amy and I are wondering, now, what would St. Benedict do? Where would he begin in the midst of so much suffering and so much need?” “Put nothing ahead of Christ’s love”

It took time to recognize the magnitude of the tragedy. One of my friends wrote a moving e-mail: “My first reaction was to pretend this was not happening. To turn off CNN and pretend that I could still drive from my parents house down I-10 and into the CBD of New Orleans.” In spite of instant television coverage–perhaps because of it; it seemed to be taking place in another world–it took time to be struck by the impact of what happened when Hurricane Katrina struck the United States Gulf Coast. But then came the first impact of reality. It was like looking into a void.
“I realized very quickly that this denial did not make me happy. My sadness turned to anger. The city that I love so much is mostly gone. I met a woman who cried in my arms. She worked long hours of overtime in order to buy her own house, and now it is gone.
I had no words for her because I was speechless in front of her sadness.” Questions arose, frightening questions that we were tempted to avoid: “What I would like to understand is how this is possible. I want a judgment on my culture, a society that allows people to drown on the streets that I know. How is it possible that we let people starve because of bureaucracy or red tape or who knows what? How can the response to this be snipers shooting at the rescue helicopters and medical personnel, looting and rape, or babies stuck at Turo? Are these people so different from me? I grew up 30 minutes from them. So if I were standing in front of the convention center next to the river, how would I react? Would I separate a mom and her child to push my way on to a bus?”
Then came the danger, the danger of seeking refuge in ideologies ready to provide answers to these questions: political answers, sociological answers, psychological answers, religious answers. Ideology is not an ingenious acceptance of the visible, Hannah Arendt said. It is its intelligent cancellation.
We cannot allow ideology to dissolve the impact of the real. We must not give in to the temptation to somehow overcome what appears before us as given. Instead, we must look at the totality of the real. Is it all emptiness? Can this emptiness totally overcome reality in all its dimensions? Looking at the sea, Fr. Giussani writes to a friend: “Calm or agitated, silent or furious, every day and at every moment the sea has a minimum common denominator, a unique and inexorable basic meaning which is its greatness: the overwhelming sense of an immanent aspiration for the infinite, for the infinite mystery” (cf. Lettere di fede e di amicizia ad Angelo Majo, Edizione San Paolo, 1997). And then he tells his friend that the human heart is like that sea: “Your life is like that sea. In the midst of those serene or anguishing circumstances that come up seemingly unexpectedly, there is a voice, a passion, a desire for Him, Happiness, Beauty, Supreme Goodness.” That is the ultimate truth about reality which the emptiness cannot overcome and ideologies cannot dissolve. “The experiences of life cannot but serve to make this need deeper, overwhelming, and exclusive, especially the painful experiences, especially the most painful, the most terribly painful.” This is the basis for our hope. In the midst of the emptiness there is the Presence of the Mystery, the Mystery that Christ embraced human suffering and human death to embrace us with an infinite Mercy.
“Amy and I are wondering, now, what would St. Benedict do? Where would he begin in the midst of so much suffering and so much need?”
“Put nothing ahead of Christ’s love.” This is St. Benedict’s rule. Put nothing ahead of that infinite desire awakened by reality. Give witness to the Mercy that saves us. Rebuild what is destroyed, moved by the certainty of that Presence, the basis of a hope that does not disappoint.