September 11th

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

“In the world, you will know suffering. But do not be afraid. I have overcome the world” (Jn 16:33). This was my first thought after I heard of the terrorist attacks on September 11th.

On the day of the terrorist attack, the first e-mail message that I received was that Father Giussani had urged us to pray to St Joseph for the Church. I was surprised by those words. Why had he thought of this now? Then we were sent a translation of some pages of the new book, Affezione e dimora [Affection and Dwelling Place].

The translation was about our reaction to evil, but it referred to our own personal sins, not to an evil like this one. Then came the “America” flyer specifically about the tragedy. Somehow, I had to put the three together. There was a logic there that I had to grasp. I believe it is a matter of the logic of the Incarnation; the logic involved in the event itself, the logic of the Angelus, which we say all the time, the logic of our prayer: “Come, Holy Spirit. Come through Mary.”

We are in the world. The follower of Christ is in the world. The Incarnation takes place in the world. And when an evil of this kind takes place, we experience it like anyone else in the world. We experience it with everyone else in the world. We experience its meaninglessness, its horrifying nothingness. As someone said in the meeting to discuss the flyer, “You cannot run away from it or fix it.” That is the first thing, not to run away, to stay before what happened, to share entirely the experience of its horror, to look into the dark hole that opens up before you; not to run away from the world, but to penetrate into it. When you do that you discover within you a powerlessness, a need, an insurmountable weakness, a trace, a share in the nothingness that envelops you. It is, as the flyer states, a “poison–Christians call it ‘original sin’–the envy that man carries within against good and against himself.” In a sense, this tragedy shocks us because we have forgotten about original sin, because the fundamental error of modernity, of “the people of the western world, taken up with other matters and forgetful of their fragility,” is the denial of original sin. On the other hand, though, it is something that will always shock us because it doesn't correspond with our humanity, because we are not defined by it.

If we look deeper into the horror, if we are not distracted, if we do not react immediately according to our preconceptions and feelings of repulsion and anger, we will discover within our hearts a protest: this doesn't define our humanity! In the context of September 11th, the words of Fr Giussani in the article on the August 24th issue of Corriere della Sera are prophetic when he asks, “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?” And he replied, “Awareness of the inexorable positivity of reality.”

“In the world you will know suffering, but do not be afraid. I have overcome the world.” If the first part of the prophecy is an affirmation of a fact, of an event, of an experience, so is the second part. This “victory” over the world of suffering, this redemption of suffering, must also be an experienced fact, an experienced event. It cannot be a matter of inspiration, of emotions, of intellectual convictions, of a stubborn idealism, a longing for a “better world,” a religious consolation, a hope in progress or in a value-base, and even less in weapons and violence. It has to be a fact, an event, or this part of the prophecy is simply not true and we should indeed be afraid.

This is where the Church comes into play, and within the Church, our Movement, which is the concrete and immediate way we experience the Church. No one experiences the “universal Church” directly, as Father Giussani explains in Why the Church. We experience the Church in her concrete manifestations, in a companionship with others. The Church is precisely this companionship, and, as such, as a way of being together and loving together, the Church becomes the manifestation of the event of Christ's victory. The victory of Christ over the world where companionship and solidarity are destroyed, where love is no more, is precisely the creation of this new companionship by the Spirit of God, thus making Christ's presence a concrete experience, an event that has happened and continues happening.

Understanding everything is not what is promised to me by the Christian proposal. “In this world you will know suffering.” Again and again I will confront my lack of understanding and refuse to escape from it by reducing what happens to pre-conceived plans. This will bring about suffering, a share in the world of suffering, as I experience the threat of nothingness.

What I am promised as a response, though, is the event of a Presence, an event that creates a bond between friends that cannot be destroyed. It is by being part of the history of this event, the history of the creation of this communion, of this people, starting with what happened to Abraham–by situating myself within this history, by letting this event define my identity, that I can affirm the positivity of reality in the face of evil, that we can experience the victory over a world passing away into nothingness. When Pope John Paul II visited New York City for the first time, he said something that appeared as the banner headline of the Daily News: “Every City Needs a Soul.” This is our vocation here in New York City now, in the United States, as wherever we find ourselves: to be that soul, to be that city's prayer of intercession. This has always been, since Abraham, the vocation of God's people in the world. This is our past, our present, and our future. It is a long and difficult road, as the flyer states, but probably the only road.

As Father Giussani wrote in Corriere della Sera: “In our experience, [the relationship with Christ] pushes one to recognize a truth that unceasingly renders us, in the face of all the problems that arise, without pretense, without preconceptions, indomitably open to everything and everyone, humble and continuously capable of changing and of picking up again where we left off.”