Window on Reality

A chronicle of the days spent in La Thuile at the annual gathering of CL Responsibles on the theme, “Event is vocation.” Lessons, testimonies, and unexpected encounters. A kaleidoscope of faces and stories, of people who have begun to change the world

BY PAOLA RONCONI

Anyone coming into La Thuile, in the mountains of northern Italy, at the end of August might have wondered if he had taken a wrong turn and ended up at the Tower of Babel. The place was a melting pot of languages, nationalities, and colors. This was the annual International Assembly of CL Responsibles and I was in the midst of it, not because I am responsible for anything, except to report on these three days, entitled, “Event is vocation.”

Many of us had just come from the week of the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, perhaps one of the best-attended in years, and certainly the one that received the greatest media attention. As Cesana would say, many were amazed, or at least had their curiosity whetted, not so much by the presence of government figures as by the fact that it is an event that engages you on the human level.

Saturday evening Carras introduced the program in La Thuile, emphasizing the fact that the map of Movement communities in the world is expanding (and it seems like the beginning of a game of Risk!). All that’s missing is Kamchatka!

The more than 750 participants came from every part of the world, from 70 different countries (new entries were Greece and the Philippines), but they understood each other perfectly, thanks to simultaneous translations in ten languages.

Sunday
The clear sky of that region, known as Valle d’Aosta, marked the beginning of our day, and I think it is true, as Camus says, that “greatness comes like a sunny day,” as we all really felt a bit touched by grace.

Everybody moved into the big hall at the end of the residence where we were staying, with our Book of Hours, songbooks, and notebooks in hand.

The first lesson was given by Fr Pino. In seven points he outlined an itinerary for going back over the year just passed.

Fr Pino spoke of positiveness, of eternity, as the Meeting has just taught us, of event, of the “I,” and of a new mentality that, it is clear, is already taking shape in these people scattered throughout the world.

This was a lesson of a little more than half an hour, then announcements: we were to have lunch, personal meditation, and an assembly by language groups. “Hi, my name is Paola.” With one eye on the name tags bearing everyone’s name and nationality, hundreds of handshakes were exchanged, but with no signs of awkwardness. Classical music accompanied the orderly exit from the assembly hall. We stopped around the book and magazine tables: Tracce, Passos, Huellas, Traces, Traces (the French edition), Sled, Slady. We would have ample opportunity in these few days to understand how God makes abundant use of these tools.

Dinner was the best time for meeting each other, especially in the line for the buffet where, every day, we were forced into single file. My eye could not help falling on a name tag. “It’s green,” I thought to myself, “so he’s foreign.” I jumped in: “Where do you come from?” “Cinisello Balsamo” was the answer, a place very near Milan. Better luck next time, I thought.

The first evening brought us three witnesses from the United States.

Vittadini gave a brief introduction, taking a step backwards to 1997, when, after the presentation of The Religious Sense at the UN in New York, “all charged up and excited” about its success, “we prepared a plan for going into the United States with events, encounters, etc.” Then there was a sudden halt: “When Fr Giussani heard about it, he told us to cancel everything. If God had done everything up to then, we were not to force events, but to trust in Him. God does everything. Through us.” And that’s the way it happened, because by a slow, almost imperceptible progress, in these last few years many “strange” things have happened, such as people coming across Traces by chance or seeing The Religious Sense and buying it because the cover is a picture by their favorite artist. All this is happening in places we Italians have heard about, as Vitta says, “mainly by reading or watching Tex Wheeler or the adventures of the American Indians.” And so for some time, the CL office in New York has been receiving e-mail from the farthest corners of the United States, from people who are curious and want to see and understand what this is.

The Eternal Father in the third millennium uses even Bill Gates! But a nagging question remains: who could have taken a copy of Traces to New Zealand, where it was found by someone passing through, who then decided to send an e-mail to the Australian office?

Monday
The next day we took the field trip. The goal: Sans fond (bottomless) Lake. We began with the usual recommendations: dress in layers, as in the mountains it can turn cold from one minute to the next; take suntan lotion, a hat, and backpacks for food. As was to be expected, along the climb we met all sorts: from Nigerians on their first trip into the mountains (and thus dressed in more layers than an onion, even under a blazing sun), to the Brazilian who thought he was at the Carnival in Rio.

Once again we were moved to thank this company of ours that educates us to beauty: we ate around the lake and at the shout of “song, song,” together we burst into song!

During the International Council, Fr Giussani spoke to us via Internet. Just a few words, which as a reflection will stay with us in all the moments and meetings not only of those few days.

Returning from the lake, we had the second lesson, this time given by Julián Carrón. Belonging, event, vocation. But it is necessary “to give each other a hand,” he concluded, “to help each other along as we travel this path.”

It sometimes happened that between a bite of pasta or grilled swordfish we tried to talk to each other, but problems of language intervened. Luckily, there was a friend to translate when I met some people from Russia. My interlocutors seemed a bit brooding at first, just as I had always imagined Russians to be. But watch out: we Westerners have the bad habit, maybe an unfortunate leftover from the time of the Soviet Union, of thinking of the ex-Soviet countries as one big nation. Now, a Bielorussian is not a Russian. The conversation started off with a rebuke, but all I had to do was mention a common friend to make Sasa’s serious face break suddenly into a smile. He lives in Novosibirsk, in Siberia. He told me his story briefly: “Years ago I was in the Communist Youth. I was going to get ahead and I would have been sent to Moscow.” But, at a certain point, the Communist system collapsed, and for Sasa it was the beginning of a period of personal crisis. “It seemed like the ground had crumbled under our feet,” he said. It was 1992, “around now,” he added, when he met some priests and with them, two people from Memores Domini. “We read The Religious Sense together. What they offered me and their openness was what I needed. I intuited that my life could have a meaning despite the situation.” Now Sasa has opened an advertising agency. Every week, he asks his co-workers to read Sled (Traces) together with him. “You see, in my country now, the young people are taken up by great enthusiasm for the economic recovery, but this enthusiasm will soon run out. I continue to tell them that they have to look for what gives them enthusiasm to all of life.”

Alësa is younger. He is Orthodox, and studies at the Orthodox faculty of theology in Minsk, Bielorussia. “Three years ago Beppe Meroni came to us for a meeting on problems of education, and said something that I still repeat to myself today: we must not think of Christianity as something for cultivated persons, but for everybody, for the people you run into in the subway or on the bus, for everybody. Thus also for me, I thought. Not a day passes that I don’t go back to that moment.”

While I was walking out of the dining room, I was still thinking about my new, chance dinner companions when I heard someone say a name that was not new to me: “Kinder, John Kinder!” Of course, the Australian of “Latte with Leopardi” (Traces, Vol. 2, No. 10, 2000). I checked his identity by a furtive glance at his name tag. It was he. Within a few minutes, I was seated around a little table with the entire Australian continent, i.e., John Kinder from Perth (far west) and Renzo from Sydney (far east).

“After that article in Traces,” John told me, “I sent the magazine to the students in my course [Italian literature at the University of Perth]. In February of this year, the editorial talked about, of all things, the Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia. I invited the kids to come together again to read it. Only two of them came, but for the last six months we have been meeting regularly and reading Fr Giussani’s essays on Leopardi. There is nothing of CL in the form of these meetings, but the substance is all there in the way of looking at life that I have learned. Recently, a 50-year-old woman has joined our group (down our way people enroll in the university even a little later in life!) and in fact, when she heard I was coming here she said to me, ‘If you see Giussani, tell him he’s my hero.’ She used just that word: hero!”

John showed me the letter of thanks from the new Archbishop of Sydney, John Pell, for the copy of Traces that he sends him regularly: “Thank you for your devotion to this small task.”

It was getting late and we had to stop because there were two other witnesses waiting for us in the assembly room. Two stories from completely opposite poles: on one side, Fr Bepi Berton, who has already appeared several times in our magazine (Traces, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2000, in addition to letters in different issues) and Chris Morgan. One a missionary and “thief of child soldiers” in Sierra Leone, the other a partner of KPMG in London, one of the largest consulting firms in the world; one accustomed to negotiating with rebels to obtain these children and restore them to their families, the other accustomed to negotiating with the business world. Two very different lives. And yet the challenge is the same: to recognize the Mystery in daily life, in the forest as in the subway.

Tuesday
There are people who give you a sense of good humor and peace just by looking at them. Annamaria, originally from Rimini and now thirteen years in Nigeria, is one of them. She loves that country so much so that now even when she is in Italy she dresses in the typical African way: skirts to her ankles, bright, loud colors, a turban on her head. “Chiara, Olivetta, and I arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1988, at the invitation of the Apostolic Nuncio. In the beginning, I only knew one word of English”–and she burst into an infectious laugh–“‘snake,’ because I was terrified of them and I wanted to be able to ask if there were any around! But you know, there were no barriers to our missionary drive, not even language! The first School of Community lessons consisted of repeating passages by Fr Giussani that we had memorized in English and then, when our friends said something, since I couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying, if they had a questioning tone I would answer, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll understand little by little’! If they had an affirmative tone I would say, ‘Great! Go on just like this!’ And yet, out of all this, a companionship was born. And we are very active: not long before I left to come here, one Sunday morning, Luisa, Martin, Francis, Jovita, Joy, and I got together to sell Traces in front of St Dominique’s Church. After about four hours under the African sun, I asked, ‘Francis, how many Traces have you sold?’ ‘Just one, but how many people I’ve met! People that I invited to be a part of us, who wanted to know about us.’ And some people asked Luisa to recite the Hail Mary to prove she was Catholic, because they suspected her of being a member of a sect and wanting to spread a ‘pollutant’ magazine.”

Francis met Annamaria, Chiara, and Olivetta about ten years ago. “They had organized a Christmas show,” Francis told me, “with slides and written phrases. I went to it, and went back another time for School of Community. They gave examples from daily life, and this is very rare in Nigeria. What is more, I had learned in school that whites would never help me in life and instead, look, here I am!”

Francis talked to me about his friend Fidelis, who died in January of this year (see Traces, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2001). “At the funeral we understood how different the mentality we learned from the Nigerian culture was; the families on the father’s side and the mother’s side would have met to establish the cause of his death. For them, premature death, an accident as in this case, needs a guilty party within the families in order to establish his punishment. Do you understand? The Nigerians perceive the Mystery as an enemy, while we see it as a friend, and this explains reality better.”

We could have gone on talking for three hours, “but who knows if we might not be able to tell our whole story in Traces soon.” OK, it’s a deal!

The days of the Assembly were a continuous drumbeat of stories, histories, and even those who have been in the Movement for years could not help being affected by the enthusiasm of those who were just starting out. This is the case of Malou (short for Maria Lourdes), who comes from Quezon City, Manila. Years ago she met a priest who for a certain period of time moved to the Philippines from Thailand. This woman, unexpectedly tall for an Oriental, has several copies of Traces sent to her every month. She keeps one for herself and puts the others on a little table outside her office. “In Philippine culture, friendship starts with eating,” she said, “so I put a dish of candy next to the magazines.” Thus, the unsuspecting prey, while he unwraps a piece of candy, leafs through the magazine. “At that point it is possible to propose a friendship,” says Malou.

As we came into the assembly hall for the session with Cesana and Carrón, the notes of Rachmaninov’s concertos for piano and orchestra resounded, and the sensation was exactly as Fr Giussani in his genius wrote for the booklet accompanying the CD: “In Rachmaninov, the music expresses man as part of a people, pacified in his belonging to a unity that exalts every single note by completing it. And man seeks this peace more than any other thing, whether he is aware of it or not, in all the restless movements of his heart, up to the farthest horizon of his eyes.”

The last supper. At the door of the restaurant I met my Irish friends. “Let’s eat together.” We grabbed a round table, taking up only half of it, while we waited to see who turned up. After a few minutes the table was full: a little group of Canadians and a teacher from Perugia joined us. We introduced ourselves and started talking. “You know,” said Mauro, who lives and works in Dublin, “in Canada, too, they need Little Traces in English,” nodding toward John Zucchi across the table. “In Montreal, where he lives, every Saturday some members of the community organize nice things for the children. And they also invite the parents. But if they had Little Traces in English…” Just about a month ago in Dublin, Mauro had told me about the situation in Ireland, where catechism is delegated to some teachers who often do not even know very well what they are teaching. So his wife and other Movement mothers have gotten organized and set up a sort of catechism, “cutting, pasting, and translating some parts also of Little Traces. But if it were in English too…” Certainly, we can at least think about it.

We walked together into the assembly hall for the last two testimonies: Msgr Twal, Bishop of Tunis, told us about the Catholic schools, attended by 6,000 Muslim children, and how the small Christian community is an important presence in the city. In closing, Giancarlo Cesana reported on the Meeting, which had ended a few days before.

Wednesday
Wednesday Lauds seemed to have been written purposely for this variegated group that was preparing to return home, to 70 countries of the world: “I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries, and bring you into your own land” (Ez 36:24).

Carrón summed up the work of these few days.

As Andrea, who teaches Italian in Taiwan, would say, “We have a bomb in our hands.” Christianity is an intriguing adventure, for everybody, bar none.