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The Repercussion of Being...
Notes from the closing synthesis of the International Assembly of Responsibles, La Thuile, Italy, August 23, 2003

by Julián Carrón

“When we get together, why do we do so? So as to tear out from our friends, and if it were possible from the whole world, the nothingness in which all men find themselves. Ours is a ‘vocational’ relationship. A vocational relationship is just this: that on meeting us–and it can be even your mother, or rather, first of all your mother–a woman or a man, someone your own age or younger, a person, feels sort of grasped in his innermost self, redeemed from his apparent nothingness, weakness, evil or confusion, and, all at once, feels as if invited to a royal wedding. Our Lady is like an invitation to the royal wedding.”1
We are called to live our life and our faith in an epochal context, in which what is at stake is the “I,” the person–not an aspect of life, not an aspect of the “I,” but my, your person, the “I.” And this is why it is no exaggeration to say that the struggle is against “nothingness” in the real sense of the term, that is to say against the destruction of our “I,” the loss of the “I,” an “I” so little, as Leopardi describes it: “When he [man], considering the plurality of worlds, feels that he is an infinitesimal part of a globe that is the tiniest part of one of the infinite systems that make up the world, when he considers this he is amazed at how small he is, and feeling this profoundly and looking at it intensely, he is almost swallowed up by nothingness.”2 This is what we are: something that “is almost swallowed up by nothingness.” And the more profoundly one feels and looks at this, the more he–faced with this littleness, this “almost nothingness,” if he has even the tiniest awareness of this–when he recites the Psalms (“What is man that You are mindful of him?”), cannot help being moved.
But if we are this “almost nothingness,” if we are needy, sinners, then it is easy to see the drama of our “I.” It is not a matter of putting right a small part of us, of changing something around in the little room of our life; it is not a question of interior decoration. What is at stake is our “I” itself, for we are “people not quite right” who are reached by Being. “People not quite right”–we are human beings like everybody, poor fellows like everybody, sinners like everybody! Therefore, as Responsibles, we are not here to learn some discourse a little better, but because we are needy, “people not quite right,” and we need this above all for ourselves.
Fr Giussani said, “Christians often… think they are good because they understood once, and trust in this as if they could save themselves by discourse and consistency. I prefer many who are not Christian, because they are aware of evil and of their incapacity to follow good, in spite of their presentiment of it. This is why I like some temperaments who fumble about in the world and wait for a peace that does not come, rather than those Catholics who build for themselves a system for resting in their supposed faith and supposed charity. In them Christ is mummified, and what is more, they think they know Him.”3 Better to be sinners! … As Jesus said, “After this He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth, and He said to him, ‘Follow Me.’ And he got up, left everything, and followed Him. Then Levi gave a great banquet for Him in his house, and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to His disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’ Jesus answered, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.’”4
Only those who know they are “not quite right,” sinners, needy, like Matthew, understand what it means when Someone trains His gaze on him and says, “Follow me!” You can understand Matthew’s emotion, which Caravaggio captured and placed before our eyes forever (“Me?! You want me?!,” Matthew seems to be saying by the gesture of his hand in response to Jesus’ call). Never had Matthew had such a strong awareness of his own “I,” his own nothingness, his own sinfulness, as in front of this Man. This is the emotion of the “I” in front of Being (something totally different from sentimental emotion!); it is the vibration of the “I,” so little, so “almost nothing,” so needy, in the encounter with Being. All the other emotions are the image, the shadow, of the only real commotion, the one man has in front of Being, in the encounter with the tender, merciful presence of Jesus. This is the only true emotion, the only one that corresponds to human need, that remains forever, no matter what happens.
“ It was a simplicity of heart that made me feel and recognize Christ as exceptional,”5 Fr Giussani testified in front of the whole Church. We need this simplicity in the face of the exceptionality of Christ, of the encounter with this tender, merciful presence. Matthew, too, could say, to use Fr Giussani’s expression, that he was invited to a royal wedding, because he was not the one who did the inviting. Matthew’s banquet was the celebration of his emotion in front of Being–while the others were murmuring, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
What happened to Matthew happens today. One of you said to me that when he was invited to La Thuile, to this meeting, after a difficult year, he perceived this invitation as an invitation from royalty. How many of us have had the perception of receiving a “royal invitation” here? Perhaps, today, after this gesture together, all of us will say that. We, like Matthew, have received a royal invitation; we have begun to glimpse what the vibration of Being means.
For what have we seen and experienced during these days? That Being, through a form, the form of this reality in which we are engaged, has reached us one by one. In our participation in this gesture, in this “whirlpool of charity,” that has a precise, concrete, historical form, made up of faces, songs, and testimonials, all of us have seen happening, in front of our very eyes, the glorification of our Being. Through this form, through this gesture, it is Being that has reached us.
We too–like the man born blind–have to travel the path of faith. If we do not travel the entire path of reason, freedom, and affection to the point of recognizing Him who is the origin of everything that has happened–Being–we remain on the level of appearances, in a sentimental emotion; that is to say, we do not live what has happened to the fullest. “As John’s Gospel makes clear,” Fr Giussani says, “Jesus did not conceive of His attraction to others as an ultimate reference to Himself, but to the Father: to Himself, so that He could lead to the Father, as knowledge and as obedience.”6
Therefore, before the calling of Matthew, after the healing of the cripple, the Gospel says, “Immediately he stood up before them, took what he had been lying on, and went to his home, glorifying God. Amazement seized all of them, and they glorified God and were filled with awe, saying, ‘We have seen strange things today.’”7 But the origin of these strange things is God, it is the Father. Why do they think of God, if all they have seen is someone healed, and healed by a Man? Because they could not face fully what happened without thinking of God!
If we stop at appearances, we miss the best part. The best part is that through this form, this, our being together, here, it is Being that reaches us. Tomorrow we won’t be here, the day after tomorrow we have to go to work, and the morrow after that maybe we’ll be out of work or ill. But it is there, what is at the origin of what we have lived is there; tomorrow it is there, the day after tomorrow it is there, without work it is there, in sickness it is there, when death comes it is there! Participating in this gesture, we have begun to understand, to glimpse the content of the letter Fr Giussani wrote us, because once again we have experienced Being-Charity, the original experience of Being that, through a form, “attacks” us and awakens an attraction so that all of us remain attached.
We do not generate the unity with Being; it is He who generates it. It is His presence, through a form, that generates this unity in us. “A person cannot save himself,” said Fr Giussani in his interview in Libero, “through his resolutions, because it is an Other who saves him and the world through a new thing that He has caused to be born in history. Being! Everything comes out of Being’s flow…. Without Christ one feels lost in himself, incapable of focusing on reality, incapable even of spotting clearly any lasting beauty.”8
We can glimpse what happened to Our Lady because we, too, like her, are moved. This is the method by which God saves us, as happened first to Our Lady, “moved by the Infinite.” We need persons, friends, who have been moved, to tear us out of nothingness. This is why our relationship is vocational–this is why we are friends.
“ How can we communicate to others?” Fr Giussani says. “With speeches? It’s impossible. We can only infect others because of the ‘serious illness’ of the experience we have [it is the ‘contagion’ of this illness, of this emotion]!… You are a function of everything [we can contribute to the good of all, to the good of the world] through the contagion of what you are living, the emotion that you are living, the experience that you are living, the feeling about yourself that you are living [much more than a correct, clear speech!]. One is useful to the others to the extent of the feeling he has about himself,”9 otherwise he does not communicate what he is.
More recently, at the Memores Domini Retreat, Fr Giussani intervened to answer a question, “You have said to us that there is no vibration in front of Being. How can we help each other?” He said, “By communicating with each other, only by communicating with each other. And communication is not just language, as the instrument of the word, but it is, above all, the instrument of a presence that communicates itself to you,” of this emotion that you live, of this feeling that you live. There is no other way of communicating with each other, of communicating the truth, except testimony, because the Christian event is an event made up of words and facts together.
Therefore, my true friend, the only one who tears me out of nothingness, is the witness; the witness is someone who makes Being become familiar to me, who makes me participate in this Presence, in the emotion of this Presence, in the event of this Presence in history.
The greatest testimonial of Being, of Christ, is the unity among us. The greatest reverberation of Christ’s presence is this unity; nothing is more impossible to man than this unity. We have to be children of it; we have to obey it. We have to follow this unity, as Fr Giussani teaches us from the beginning: “I belonged, not to them, but to the unity with them,” with those three of the beginning. “I am your son,” he said yesterday to one of us. “I am the son of this unity, which the Father generates before our eyes.” Following Fr Giussani, the sequela of him, is something that an Other does: he is a generator, he is a father, because he is permanently generated by an Other, because he follows what an Other, the Father, generates.
We can all be very good and clever, but by ourselves we are lost. Outside a communion, we are “done away with” in a minute. Therefore, it is a question of attachment to the flesh of a unity, obeying the flesh of a unity; otherwise, what we have is the triumph of our own interpretation.
The consistence of our life does not lie in our strength. Let’s stop saying we don’t have the strength, because strength lies in simplicity! It is like the man born blind: he had more strength, he had more intelligence than the Pharisees who tried to put him in a difficult position, because he had the simplicity to adhere to what had happened to him, in the presence of the One who restored his sight. This is our strength: accepting the hand of another, adhering to the hand another holds out to us in order to save our life.
The importance of a form, of the recognition of a form–a unity that constantly opens us up to Being–is still foremost. Being’s charity reaches us through a form, through the form of this unity. Whoever has obeyed this form during these days, whoever has had the simplicity to follow, has experienced–just as it is!–the exaltation of his “I.” And he goes home transformed; he participates more in Being, he is more himself. As Montale wrote, “The sign was right; whoever saw it cannot fail to find you.”
It is the beginning of a memory. We need Him, we need to recognize Him every day. We cannot do without this, we cannot live without this, we cannot get up in the morning for anything less than this–not only when things are bad, but also when things are splendid. If He is not in our life, there is no way out, whether we are on the Emerald Coast or in the Bahamas or the Caribbean, because He is the difference, His presence makes the difference.
When we insist so much on bad situations, it is because in normal situations we live as though we had no need of Him.
That Being is charity, that He exists, means that I am not alone with my nothingness, with my need, with my weakness, with my inability, with my sin. This makes us glimpse what Fr Giussani means by the term “ecstasy of hope.” We can all go home with hope, because we have seen that we are important to Being: our life is important to Being!
Memory is not a remembrance, but the present recognition of Being who reaches me now. This is positivity, as we read on the Easter 2003 Poster: “Any event that happens would never find an adequate answer if Christ were not there. He marks God’s ultimate victory over human reality. Whatever happens, it is ‘mercy’ that gives the reading of everything that is human. Mercy: God accomplishes the victory over evil within history as positivity: it is this that gives a reason to what happens.”
Without the recognition of Christ in every instant, we do not have the reason for what happens. We are friends because of this, in order to recognize this: we are united in order to help each other recognize the reason for everything that happens to us, which is not something abstract, but a person, Christ. This is why, each time, a greater affection for Him is aroused; this is what we get up for in the morning.
All this has its splendor in Our Lady. “You are the living fountain of hope”–the ultimate positivity that wins out. She, one of us, was able to say, “He looks on His servant in her lowliness,” the “almost nothingness” of His servant. This is the ultimate positivity that wins out. She is before us and defies all of our skepticism. In pain, in bad situations, in sickness, we have Our Lady before us.
Fr Giussani said to the novices, “I ask you to start always from the presence of Our Lady, this supreme presence in the history of the universe. Imagine Our Lady’s days, Mary’s days with that Mystery, which she feels, perceives, acknowledges, embraces with all her being, inside her. In the passing time, the endless multiplication of the horizon implied in it, what this must have represented for Our Lady! Not only when she thought about it, but always, because, for a mother, holding her child, carrying her child, is like loving the presence of everything–it is loving the Presence! So that truly–we have to discover this, help each other discover this–truly it is a love otherwise totally unknown to others, a love because of which everyone else is made just as we are made, a boundless love, like the notes say about the Father’s attitude toward His Son Jesus. Let us have the patience of time, not an irritated or scandalized impatience because words do not immediately give, do not immediately express, their meaning, or, as has been said and quoted, they do not leave us in love with the Infinite. The passing time will make us fall in love with the Infinite in every finite thing that comes our way! We have to ask Our Lady for the grace to be a part of her motherhood, because this is what we were made for... “A child in his mother’s heart. What domination!” (see page one in this issue). May Jesus dominate as the dominant thought of our hearts! Every morning, we can begin the day by praying the Angelus, letting this domination enter into our nothingness. Every morning, this happens to me, to you: in our nothingness, in our zero-ness, in our distraction, in our evil, we are given the grace of Our Lady, we are given the grace, the announcement, the announcement is communicated to us that the Word was made Flesh, just as to Our Lady. And if we are attentive, we cannot help being moved by this. We get up for this: so that Christ may dominate each time even more in our life for the life of the world.
1 L. Giussani’s message for the pilgrimage to Loreto, June 14, 2003. See Traces, July/August 2003, Vol 5 No 7, p. 41.
2 See Zibaldone 12, VIII, 1823.
3 Interview in Libero, August 22, 2002; see Traces, September 2002, Vol 4 No 8, p. 47.
4 Lk 5:27-32.
5 L. Giussani, meeting with the Pope in St Peter’s Square, May 30, 1998, see Communion and Liberation. A Movement in the Church, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2000, p. 171.
6 L. Giussani, L’uomo e il suo destino in cammino [Man and his Destiny], Marietti, 1999, p. 129.
7 Lk 5:25-26.
8 Interview in Libero.
9 L. Giussani, Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling], BUR, 2001, p. 267.