From My Life to Your Life
All relationships between people, and between people and things, are mediated by a capacity for fascination and by a need to be satisfied; from here a sympathy toward the initiative that Another has taken over your life can be developed. As for Fr. Giussani’s friends on their fifty-year long relationship based on “pure freedom,” recognizing Another as a part of yourself is an inheritance that is constantly the source of a history. The alternative would be cynicism, that is to say not recognizing the inevitability of our own humanity. Instead, what can save us from this shipwreck in the middle of nowhere is our faithfulness to the faithfulness of God, as “in Being there can never be unfaithfulness to being.” The entreaty is the outpost of such self-awareness.
The Goal and the Path
Being is affirmed in the form of memory: anything remembered is a part of being that—insofar as it is—is positive. Things, even in terms of appearance, exist; therefore, the vertiginous perception of their contingency cannot result in a nihilism similar to the one Montale showed and which would reduce them to nothing. Instead, what prevails is the fact of Being, the mysterious root in which “everything consists,” as Saint Paul says. Being reveals itself in Christ as Mercy, that is the infinite power that can draw being from nothingness and make being as nothingness, as is the case with error and pain that are “made void” by forgiveness. The culmination of self-awareness is the perception, in the instant, of oneself as made by this “You.” The consistency of the “I” comes from here; by affirming this “You,” “not a hair on your head will be destroyed.”
Through Human Reality
The Mystery penetrates the world as a historical fact, in space and time. Two thousand years ago, God made Himself experienceable through the flesh, in Christ. This moment gives a new value to time, which turns into the increasing comprehension of the infinite, perceived by the heart as its own achievement. The greatness of being a human person, then, does not consist in being already capable, but in a “yes” similar to the one Peter said, through which, over time, the soul becomes capable of great things. The Church itself, as a whole, grows over time as self-awareness and sensitivity to the richness conveyed by the Spirit. The Christian people is, in fact, moved through history by the promise of God, through Christ, to be able to see and have all that we by nature desire—that “heavenly kingdom,” in the words of Jacopone da Todi, fulfilling the happiness yearned for by the heart.
We Belong to the Same Plan
Work is the most eminent part of our relationship with things. It is the dynamic whereby people come into contact with all the things they are interested in and encouraged to an attempt at clarification. This collision calls forth a curiosity to know the purpose, as human beings are that level of nature “where all things become the need to know why.” The final aspect of the horizon of questions about why can be summarized in the word “destiny”; here the purpose is specified as the ultimate, not abstract end of any human effort involving heart, intellect and affectivity. For the consciousness of destiny to be renewed on a daily basis, we need a “dissonant voice” to tell us that what our heart is made for is there. This “dissonant voice” became a man, Christ, and is so present that it still moves us today.
The Face of a New Person
The person who consents to a relationship with Christ becomes a new thing, takes on a different personality. This can be specifically seen in a conception of life that is complete according to the law of reason; that is to say it feels no need to deny anything, in a plan of action where everything is meant for the good, and in a capacity for affection that reaches gratuitousness, namely, an unconditional love.
Christianity reaches us through people who witness these traits of diversity, and it becomes a hypothesis of life we are called to take seriously and experiment with if we care for a method that can make us “live better.” This way, the more we experience our own self, the more correspondence we find with the “very strange” fact of Jesus of Nazareth. The objection to the verification of this hypothesis originates in preconception, which makes an authentic search impossible.
What Does This Have to Do with the Stars?
Human dignity consists in the connection between the banality of each moment and the totality of factors that make the universe. Any human action carries within itself the responsibility of the universe—either it is in accordance with the good of everything or it is against the good of everything; this is where the moral law lies. The consciousness of this responsibility, comprising the “density of the instant,” is realized in the offering. But man is incapable of sustaining this consciousness on his own, and he inherently has a tendency to give in to despair (“God created man for happiness, but man seeks death,” see Wisdom 1:13-16). Therefore, we need to encounter a “You” who is able to explain life and give reason to all that we do, that “You” of the Mystery from which the “I” springs forth. In the relationship with the Infinite, hope is thus generated; and hope is the highest moral law, in which all things are seen as “part of a great laughter of the universe.”
Positivity Prevails
Everything we experience relates to something else—there is always, in every experience, a reference. For this reason, man is forced to admit the existence of Another that cannot be grasped, that is, a factor that will never be grasped in its content. This logic of the religious sense is the reason why nothing can ever satisfy us—in fact, the nature of our heart is such that we cannot be happy by forgetting or denying something belonging to experience. However, there is one man who historically said, “I am the Way,” meaning, “I am the Mystery that is missing from everything you enjoy, from every promise you experience.” Living the consciousness of His Presence makes us look at things as He looks at them: this is virginity. In this gaze, we discover that everything complies with a plan that is made of the greatest love and that, already in this life, fills the soul of those who follow it with joy.
The Abolition of Estrangement
The word “heart” indicates the essence of man as an aspiration for fulfillment, happiness. Anyone who looks at us without wishing for our happiness is our enemy, even if it is our own mother. And if someone is not totally anguished at the thought of the other’s destiny, that is not true companionship. Yet, the first thing that happened by being with Christ was that estrangement was suddenly abolished. For the Christian conception of existence generates a companionship in which, as Nikolaus Lobkowicz observed, friendship is a virtue, that is, a communion in which the other is perceived as destined for his or her own destiny. This is also called “ecumenism,” which means “growing in life aware of one’s own destiny and, while going toward one’s own destiny, pulling everything together, even the other’s need, into an embrace.” The “School of Community” is a school for learning how to live together this way.
Appendix. Questions to Fr. Giussani
Original sin is denying that God is all and in all. As a consequence of this, while science, man’s unlimited possibility of discovery, becomes the pretence to eliminate God, human coexistence is based on the hunger for power, that is, on being able to use others unconditionally. But no science or human power will ever be able to say, “We have reached the point of knowing everything, of having everything.” Being open to the relationship with God is possible by being faithful to the Event, that is by being struck by a Presence. Our certainty about this Event, about Christ, comes from realizing that from such an encounter a “surplus of integral correspondence” with the call of the heart sprang forth. This is how Christian hope is born—the certainty of a future based on One who is Present.
