How is a movement born? To tell the truth, I am a bit embarrassed
in answering this question, because an account of what went into
the creation of and what continues to underlie an experience like
ours has already been related and published. But it is also true
that one can always speak about what one loves: even when you
repeat yourself, new things emerge from what you say - because
a true heart is always new.
How is a movement born? How is a Christian experience born? From
a testimony, through a gift of the Spirit -but I'll speak in greater
depth about these points later on. Ever since the weekly Il Sabato
[founded by Communion and Liberation] began to introduce an extraordinarily
interesting and original cultural debate in Italy, the most influential
organs of the Italian press have tried to keep pace, publishing
from time to time the thoughts of some great or so-considered
Italian writer. This occurred again recently when a daily newspaper
with a large national circulation published a profile of Andrea
Emo, describing him as a great but neglected thinker. The paper
published a number of excerpts from his writings, among which
was the following: "The Church was for many centuries the
protagonist of history; then it took on the no less glorious role
of the antagonist of history. Today it is merely the courtesan
of history." Here is the point: we do not want to live the
Church as the "courtesan of history." Why not? Because
if God has come into the world, it is not to be a courtesan, but
rather our redeemer and savior, the focus of our total affection,
the truth of man. And this is the passion that torments us and
determines our every move, even in political matters. We can make
mistakes in the event of a decision, obviously, but the only aim
we strive for is this: that the Church should not be the courtesan,
but the protagonist of history. This immanence of the Church in
history starts from me, from you, wherever I am, wherever you
are. In one of the Pope's talks to young people in Scandinavia
[in June 1988], the Pope uses a phrase which sums up the entire
content of our message to ourselves and thus to others.We want
to shout it to the world: "Like all the young people of the
world, you are in search of what is important and central in life,"
the Pope said. "Even though some of you live far from metropolitan
canters and a few may also be far from having faith and trust
in God, you have come here because you are seeking something important
upon which to base your lives. You want to put down strong roots
and you perceive that religious faith is an important part of
the full life that you desire. Permit me to tell you that I understand
your problems and your hopes. For this reason, young friends,
I want to speak to you today about the peace and joy that may
be found, not in possessing, but in being. And being is affirmed
through knowing a Person and through living according to his teaching.
This person is named Jesus Christ, our Lord and Friend. He is
the canter, the focal point, He who unites everything in love."
I would like to repeat: "We know nothing other than this."How
did this truth appear to me on the horizon in such a way that
it suddenly and unexpectedly embraced my life? I was a young seminarian,
in Milan, a good, obedient, exemplary boy. But, if I remember
correctly what Concetto Marchesi says in his study of Latin literature,
"art needs men who are moved, not men who are devout."
Art, that is, life it is to be creative, or indeed if it is to
be "alive"-needs men who are moved, not pious. And I
had been a very devout seminarian, with the exception of a parenthesis
during which the poet Leopardi, for a month, gripped my attention
more than Our Lord. Camus says in his Notebooks: "It is not
by means of scruples that man will become great; greatness comes
through the grace of God, like a beautiful day." For me,
everything happened like the surprise of a "beautiful day,"
when one of my secondary school teachers was then 15 years old
- read and explained to us the prologue of the Gospel of St. John.
At that time in the seminary, it was obligatory to read that prologue
at the end of every Mass. I had therefore heard it thousands of
times, but the "beautiful day" came. For this reason,
truly, "everything is grace," as Adrienne Von Speyr
said. And I would like to recall another of her thoughts: "Grace
overwhelms us," she said. "That is its essence."
Grace is the Mystery which communicates itself. The essence of
the Mystery's communication, just as the nature of this table
is to be of wood, is that it overwhelms us, fills us. Adrienne
Von Speyr goes on: "Grace does not illuminate point by point,
but irradiates like the sun. The man upon whom God lavishes himself
ought to be seized by vertigo in such a way that he sees only
the light of God and no longer his own limits, his own weakness."
For this reason, the attitude of being scandalized by the enthusiasm
of young people is ignoble in the extreme. Von Speyr continues:
"The person who sees only the light of God should renounce
every equilibrium" (sought by himself), "he should give
up the idea of a dialogue between himself and God as between two
partners and become a simple receiver with arms spread wide yet
unable to grasp, because the light runs through everything and
remains untouchable, representing much more that our own effort
could receive."
Forty years later, reading this passage from Von Speyr I understood
what had happened to me then, when my teacher spoke of the Word
which was made flesh. "The Word of God, or rather that of
which everything was made, was made flesh," she said. "And
therefore Beauty was made flesh, Goodness was made flesh, Justice
was made flesh, Love, Life, Truth were made flesh." Being
does not exist in a Platonic nowhere; it became flesh, it is one
among us. And then I recalled a poem by the poet Leopardi, a poem
I had studied during that month of "escape" in my third
year of high school, entitled: "To His Lady." It was
a hymn not to one of Leopardi's many "loves," but to
the discovery that he had unexpectedly made, in that vertex of
his life from which he would later decline, that what he had been
seeking in the lady he loved was something beyond her. Thus Leopardi
wrote his beautiful poem to Woman, not to a woman, but to Woman,
and it ends with this passionate invocation: "If you, my
love, are one / Of those undying forms the eternal mind / Will
not transform to mortal flesh, to try funereal sorrows of ephemeral
beings; / Or if you dwell in one / of those innumerable worlds
far off / In the celestial swirl, / Lit by a sun more stunning
than our own, / And if you breathe a kinder air than ours, / Then
from this meager earth, / Where years are brief and dark, / This
hymn your unknown lover sings, accept."And in that instant
I thought how it seemed to be a prophecy, 1,800 years on, a prophecy
that had already been realized by the proclamation of John the
Baptist: "The Word was made flesh." Not only had Being
(Beauty, Truth) not disdained to clothe its perfection in flesh,
and not only had it not disdained to bear the toils of this human
life but it had come to die for man. "He came to his own
and his own received him not"; he knocked on the door of
his own home and he was not recognized.That is the whole story.
My life has been shaped by that memory, both because it has continually
influenced my thought and because it has served as a stimulus
to make me reevaluate the banality of everyday life, because the
present moment, from then on, was no longer banal for me. Everything
that existed - and therefore everything that was beautiful, true,
attractive, fascinating, even if only as a possibility - found
in that message its reason for being, as a certainty of presence
and living hope which caused one to love everything. On my desk
at that time I had a picture of Christ by a second-rank Italian
painter named Carracci. Beneath the picture I had written a phrase
from Mohler, the famous precursor of ecumenism whose Symbolica
and other writings I had read at school: "I think that I
could no longer live if I no longer heard Him speak." Now,
when I make my examination of conscience, I am compelled to beg
Christ's mercy, through the compassion of Mary, to enable me to
return to the simplicity and courage of that time, because when
such a "beautiful day" comes to pass and one unexpectedly
sees something of extraordinary beauty, one cannot help but speak
about it to one's friends. One cannot help but begin to cry out:
"Look there." And thus it was.Some of the students a
the seminary who sat' near me in our large classes (we were very
numerous) this experience with me. So a small group began to take
form - because the same law is always at work: a few grow closer,
feel an affinity with your vision, with your heart, with your
life. And so the first true core of the Movement, which we called
Studium Christi at the time, was born. Each month - later every
two weeks- we put together a kind of mimeographed sheet entitled
Christus. Each member of our group wrote about their own personal
experiences of how Christ related to something that interested
him: studies, current events, other things. But another group
of fellow students made fun of our efforts. This group began to
hold meetings and took the name Studium Diaboli. Man is capable
of anything in his freedom. Then, a year and a half later, the
rector of the seminary, who later became the cardinal of Milan,
asked to see me. "What you are doing a wonderful thing,"
he said. "But it is dividing the class and you must discontinue
it." When the rector later became bishop of Milan, he still
used to talk about a certain incident that happened at the seminary,
exaggerating a bit, as he was inclined to do. It took place one
evening in winter. The way he recounted it, the seminarians were
entering the refectory en masse and he was walking behind me.
I wasn't aware that he was there and he heard me say to another
seminarian: "The rector has killed Christ for us." To
tell the truth, I do not recall having said it. In any case, these
are things one cannot stop, and the seed which I have described
animated our friendship throughout our years in the seminary.
It determined our choice of authors to read and, in the final
analysis determined which authors became our favorites. Thus is
those years we read, for example, Moeller, Soloviev, Newman, understanding
what we could. In this way we made our study of theology come
alive. It certainly did not remain fossilized doctrine for us.
After about a decade of various experiences, while I was teaching
at the same theological seminary, I met a group of students on
the train to Rimini. I began to talk about Christianity with them.
They were so unaware of the most elementary things, and so indifferent
to them, that I felt an uncontrollable desire to share my experience
with them. I wanted them to have. as I had had, the experience
of the "beautiful day." After that meeting I left my
position at the seminary, in agreement with the rector. I was
in fact. spending more time with young people than preparing my
lectures. I began to teach religion in Italy's secondary schools.I
still remember perfectly the day, so important for my life, when
I walked up the four steps to the school's entrance for the first
time. I was saying to myself: "I am coming here to give to
these young people what was given to me." I say this because
that was the only reason I have done what I have done and why
I will continue to do it as long as God allows me to: that they
should know Him. There is nothing more unjust in the world than
that He not be known - that God became man, that he came unto
his own and his own people should have not known him. It is the
worst sin."Christ - center of the world and of history."
When I heard John Paul 11 in his first address use this phrase
which - and my friends of the time can bear witness to the fact
- had been from the beginning precisely the one we used regularly
for meditation, literally the same phrase - I felt an emotion
that brought back all the memories of the discussions and debates
I had held with the school's young people and which they had held
between themselves and I remembered the profound tension with
which we gathered together in the name of the Father, of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit. I always used to say the young people:
"Come and see," or " You will see greater things
than this," as Jesus says in the Gospels. Or, as the prayer
during Mass says, "May your Church be made manifest to the
world," that she be made visible"; or "God, Glory
of His people." And I then I would ask: "But what is
the meaning of 'God, Glory of His people,' for example, if not
the transformation that Christ produces in the individual and
in society through the mystery of His permanence in the Church?"
This transformation is the miracle which gives glory. This is
what we have been asking of God for so many years, only this:
that Christ help us to live the Church in such a way that, even
through our lives, our action, our fellowship, our projects, He
may appear ever more in the world to the men and women chosen
by the mystery of the Father, that the glory of God can thus appear
ever more clearly through a following of Christ that changes our
lives, and the life of the world, by transfiguring them. This
is the sole reason we came together and will continue to come
together, for as long as God wills. When I first began to teach
religion, I would ask the students I passed on the steps - students
I didn't know: "Do you think Christianity is present here
at the school?" And they all used to look at me surprised
and laugh, and some would say, "No way!" So I'd answer:
"In that case, either faith in Christ isn't true, or a new
way of believing is needed." This was the way our discussions
began, starting with the premise that Christ was the canter of
the cosmos and of history, the skeleton key to unlock knowledge
of man and the world, the source of a possible peace for the individual
heart and for society, the source of unknown and unique impulses
of the emotions, like the emotion Socrates describes when he suddenly
interrupts his talk and says (to Plato and his other listeners):
"is it perhaps not true, my friends, that when we speak of
truth we even forget about women?" Young people slowly became
attracted to the debates we were holding, showing their curiosity,
anger and affection. These became the most talked about subject
in the school during the 12 years I served there as a religion
teacher. The daily subject of the students' ferocious discussions
was Christ and the Church. I used to ask the young people (and
still ask the question now): "What alternative do we have,
in fact? The political alternative? On this point, Camus again
has something to say in his Notebooks, written in 1953. Speaking
about the political left, which at that time was the symbol of
reform and honesty in politics, Camus said: "What the left
approves of is done without a word being said, or else it is judged
inevitable. This includes: 1. the deportation of thousands of
Greek children. 2. The physical destruction of the Russian peasant
class. 3. The millions in concentration camps. 4. Imprisonment
for political reasons. 5. Daily political executions. 6. Anti-Semitism.
7. Stupidity. 8. Cruelty. The list could go on." But this
list is sufficient for me. I don't mean to be pessimistic, but
it is difficult not to view contemporary politics within this
framework.Then I would ask the students: "Is there another
area of hope, more serious than politics, more able to succeed?
Is it science?" Thirty years ago, "science" was
a word one hundred times more divine than it is today. If only
we could have heard the words of John Paul II back then, when
he said years later: "The science of totality (because it
is not science if it does not claim to confront and deal with
the total horizon) leads spontaneously (by its very nature) to
the question of totality itself; a question that does not find
its answer within such a totality (passion for the whole horizon
leads to the question about the meaning of the horizon, but within
the total/ horizon no answer may be found)." The development
of our interest in life in all of its aspects had, and continues
to have, His presence as its reference point: "We believe
in Christ who had died and is risen. Christ present here and now."
This interest has always led us to become involved in politics
in the light of our total acceptance of Christ. We were perfectly
aware, however, that salvation cannot come from politics. This
in turn led us to a passionate involvement in studies and in scientific
fields, not out of a kind of idolatry or in order to advance professionally,
but out of a growing seriousness which ultimately has its center
in Christ. Our experience of His presence generated a passion
for social and political life and a passion for knowledge. Our
movement's "Meeting" in Rimini (Italy), even if only
tentatively, but with determination and passion, was born from
this double interest, that is, from the root that created this
double interest.
St. Augustine in his Contra arianos wrote: "This is the horrible
root of your error: you claim that the gift of Christ consists
in his example" (everyone, even those who write in Italy's
left-leaning newspapers, speak reverently about Christ, of moral
values, indeed, they teach and preach to Christians that they
must follow moral values for the good of the State) awhile the
gift is His very person." It is His presence. This is the
new thing in the world and there will not be anything new that
is more new than this, ever. In one of his poems, Milosz writes:
"I am only a man, therefore I need sensible signs; constructing
ladders of abstractions tires me quickly. Grant oh God, therefore,
a man in any place whatsoever on earth and permit me to admire
you by looking upon him." Christ is the answer to this prayer.
Christ's incarnation meets the needs of man's nature. It corresponds
in an unimaginable way to a sensible need, to the need of a living
and passionate man.In his inaugural sermon, the new archbishop
of Cologne, Cardinal Meisner, poses a question which I would like
to turn to now: "The eternal word of the Father was made
flesh. And now, in the Church, he can be heard and touched by
all men." But what is the Church made of? Of you, of me.
This was the sudden discovery I made that month of October when
I began to teach religion. If God has become man and he is here
and communicates himself to us, you and I consist of one and the
same thing. Between you and me, strangers, the strangeness has
been lifted. St. Paul called it the enmity; we are now friends.
I would say to the students: "You have been together in the
same classes for five years, sitting in desks next to one another.
You share the same experiences, but you do not share friendship.
You go on vacations together, you study together, you have fun
together but you are not friends. You are temporary companions;
there is nothing between you that is enduring. None of you is
interested in the destiny of the other." I said this to make
the point that Christ is present in us precisely in our unity.
This is the unity which he brings us into through the act by which
he seizes us: the sacrament of baptism. (When the Synod on the
Laity was recently held, there was almost no one mention of baptism).
When Christ seizes us in baptism he places us together as members
of the same body. On this is point one should re-read chapters
1 to 4 of the Letter to the Ephesians. Christ is thus present
here and now -in me, through me. The first expression of the change
brought about by His presence brings is I recognize that I am
united to you, and that we are one and the same thing.Chapter
3 of the Letter to the Galatians contains another passage we always
quote in our community: "For as many of you as were baptized
into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female;
for you all are one in Christ Jesus." Whatever utopia man
may have created, he has never even dreamed of what Christ has
created between you and me. If you accept this, act, and our life
becomes more human. The other Gospel phrase which I used to challenge
the students with when I entered the school - a phrase I used
every hour I taught - was: "He who follows me will have eternal
life and a hundred-fold here below." This is a phrase I still
use today. "The phrase 'He who follows me will have eternal
life,' may perhaps not interest you," I used to say, but
the second phrase cannot help but interest you: you will have
a hundred-fold here below.' According to this, you will live a
hundred times better your love for your girlfriend, your love
for your father and mother, you will have a hundred times more
passion for study, you will love work, enjoy nature." This
is precisely what Milosz needed: to encounter someone who could
be seen and touched, someone who enables us to experience life
one hundred-fold: "Create therefore a man in some place on
this earth and grant that by looking upon him I may admire You."
This is Christ for man. Christ is in you and in me, and that is
a tremendous thing (tremendum mysterium); it is the source of
our responsibility and of our humility, something we must inevitably
confront because we are the physical sign of His presence. There
were 15 of us when I used to say that our community is the real
sign- even if temporary, provisional, laughable but great - by
which He becomes the object of a present experience. From that
originally group of 15, we eventually became a group of about
300. But the number doesn't matter. After 12 years there might
only have been just three of us, or two. This is the meaning of
marriage: marriage is, and ought to be, a sign for the community
because one discovers in it a union not born of flesh and blood,
but of Christ. The community infinitely widened, is the Mystery
through which I can truly say with fear and trembling and love:
"You." My discovery of this came at a certain meeting
held on the [Ligurian] sea coast, at the top of a tower, in Varigotti.Memory
is the consciousness of a presence that has begun and lasts. Memory
is the consciousness of His presence. Our great writer in the
period after the Second World War, Pavese, used to say: "Memory
is a passion repeated." We have this passion for Christ repeated
because there is, unfortunately, no uninterrupted continuity in
us. Pavese also says: "Poetry, that is, the cosmic dignity
of the particular, is born from the moments in which we lift up
our heads and discover -with stupor - life." This is the
sign of the divine: the possibility of exalting the particular
moment. Pavese continues: "Even normality becomes poetry
when one reflects, that is, when normality ceases to be normality
and becomes prodigy"-mystery that is present and acting.
Another of Pavese's phrases: "The richness of a work is always
revealed by the quantity of the past it contains." This word
"work" can be taken in the sense of the accomplishment
of a generation, or our life as generation. The "past"
here refers to something that can exist in the present, going
beyond it, transcending it. The "past" in this sense
is more powerful in the present than as a recollection, because
recollection flattens experience, making it like a worn-out garment.
Memory is a past that becomes so present that it determines the
present more than any other present. Memory has become the capital
word of our community. Live the memory. The community is the place
where one lives the memory.
I would like to detail some aspects of this community life. I
have not yet used this word because it indicates a fellowship
that is not born of the flesh or blood but from Christ, whose
life is the memory. As St. Catherine of Siena said: "Memory
has been filled with blood." Our memory is filled with the
blood of the cross and of the glory of the resurrection, for Christ
cannot now be conceived of as dead without the resurrection. This
is why Claudel said, correctly: "Peace is made of equal parts
of sorrow and joy." And peace is the heredity that Christ
has left us as the sign of his active and working presence.Above
all the life of our community has never suppressed the sense of
the drama of individual lives; it has not forced anyone to conform
to a certain kind of behavior. It has always been a passionate
proposal but we are well aware of the effort which must be made
by those who have received the call. Certainly the truth bears
witness to itself: Christ's message is so much in keeping with
what man longs for that the individual who hears it cannot help
but be struck by it. But immediately afterward a resistance arises.
This is why I used to say to the young people in class "As
I speak to you, you seem interested and you faces say unequivocally,
That's true, that's the way it is.' But afterward something diabolical,
original sin, fills you with 'but,' with 'if,' with 'perhaps,'
with 'however,' with who knows,' that is with skepticism. This
skepticism makes you try to escape from the truth that has flashed
over you." When this resistance arises, a the drama of a
struggle begins. The struggle the individual undergoes does not
consist at all in an hysterical exasperation; rather, it involves
saying "You" with an awareness of the difference and
of the journey that must be made. Every human relationship is
filled with drama - no really human relationship exists that is
not. This fact touches its deepest roots with Christ."First
my will and then my intelligence resisted for a long time, but
in the end I surrendered and I won," a Lithuanian dissident
has written. The will is where resistance is especially found;
the victor is the one who affirms himself. This surrender is "not
a capitulation in the face of the adversary" but "a
reconciliation with the Father (with the origin of oneself). "His
possession of me is my liberation." In The Religious Sense,
a book containing my notes from my first years at the school,
I developed this idea of the identification between being possessed
and being free. After only a year, with the students in my secondary
school classes, we printed an anthology of Dionysius the Areopagite,
with the Greek text facing the Italian, that contained one of
the most beautiful phrases I have ever read: "Who could ever
speak of love to the man possessed by Christ, overflowing with
peace?" This is what I meant by my phrase, "His possession
of me is my liberation "When I saw the human drama being
lived by these young people - there were several hundred of us
who would get together to discuss things from morning to night,
even outside school hour - I understood for the first time, after
all my years in seminary, what it meant to ask. I understood that
the supreme expression of man is the most elementary and that
man can carry it out no matter what condition he is in - even
the atheist. Indeed, the more one senses the difficulty the more
the process of asking suits him. In the famous Italian novel I
Promessi Sposi the atheist - the Unnamed - says: "God, if
you exist, reveal yourself to me." I used to comment on this
in school: Tell me if there is anything more rational than this:
'If you exist' involves the category of possibility; 'reveal yourself
to me' involves the question." We will all be judged according
to whether we questioned, because even in the lion's den or buried
in a coffin, surrounded by mud, we can cry out, we can ask. During
Holy Week, the Ambrosian liturgy suggests a moving form of this
questioning (and thus reveals the Church's astonishing tenderness):
"Even if I am late, do not close your door. I have come to
knock. To one who seeks you in weeping, open the door, merciful
Lord; receive me in your dwelling give me the bread of the Kingdom."
I never said to the first young people who met together: "Pray."
All those who came, even if they didn't directly participate in
the discussions, participated in the gesture of prayer. After
a little while all began to take daily communion. I used to say
to them that the sacrament is the greatest prayer, the essence
of prayer, because it is the demand of an of one's own ego: one
participates in it without even knowing how to think, how to speak,
without knowing anything, asking by one's presence: "I am
here." How can one, then, make a hierarchy of values and
contents? What must we obtain to be able to develop life? You
ask me what you must ask? Affection for Christ!St. Thomas Aquinas
says: "The life of man consists in the love that sustains
him and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction" (in
the Latin meaning of "satisfaction," which implies fulfillment,
completeness). The most beautiful thing in the history of our
movement is that first hundreds, and then thousands, of young
people have learned, and now live, the love of Christ that alone
permits one to love one's friend, or a woman, or oneself. But
how does this capacity for loving Christ come about? In the first
place, above all, by asking for it. The religious history of humanity,
that is, the Bible, ends with this phrase: "Come Lord."
It is an emotional phrase, overflowing with love. Until a few
years ago, it was the formula that we used regularly in our community.
Now there is another which we focus on: Veni Sancte Spiritus.
Veni per Mariam. It is the same, more developed and conscious.But
here we come to another question: a love that sustains life, in
which man finds his fulfillment, must have as its object something
that is able pertinere ad omnia (to pertain to all things). In
this regard, a well-known phrase of Guardini's comes to mind:
"In the experience of a great love everything that happens
becomes an event related to that love." If a man and a woman
love each other with a profound love, the events of Tienanmen
Square, a song one hears, the newspaper one reads or the sun in
front of one's eyes, everything that happens becomes an event
in relation to that great love. The object of love must be capable
of encompassing" everything. An example: Communion and Liberation,
which was once called Student Youth, has never organized activities
that were not unequivocally educational, not even eating meals
together. This explains why the group chooses to go to the mountains
for its summer holidays. It is not a chance decision. We decided
against the seashore at the outset because the seashore is too
distracting. In the mountains, the healthy human surroundings
and nature's imposing beauty combine every time to help renew
the question of being, of order, of the goodness of reality. This
question provides the first provocation by which the religious
sense is awakened in us. With the necessary discipline, which
has always been rigorously preserved (discipline is like the source
of a brook or stream: the water there runs purer, clearer, faster;
discipline is necessary because everything is recognized to have
a meaning), the vacations in the, mountains are therefore always
proposed to the experience of persons like a prophecy, even if
fleeting, of the Christian promise of fulfillment, like a little
anticipation of paradise. And every particular brought that promise,
was aimed at realizing that anticipation.What our movement is
usually criticized for is in fact the sign of our greatness: that
everything happens within the horizon of the presence of Christ,
that is, of our fellowship. We are criticized for the fact that
the experience of the love of Christ should be all-encompassing.
But everything that is divided by His presence will be destroyed;
division is the beginning of destruction. (There is no "I"
if it is not capable of embracing everything spreading far and
wide.) This is why we have always hated the word censorship. I
used to say to the young people: "You cannot censor anything,
not out of a psychoanalytic passion, but because everything must
be revealed, cleared up, explained and assisted."The sign
of a life that reveals itself in the love of Christ, that is,
that adheres to and participates in his fellowship, is joy. "I
have told you these things so that your joy might be full."
Christ said this a few hours before he died. Joy alone is the
mother of sacrifice, because sacrifice is not reasonable if it
is not attracted by the beauty of the truth. It is beauty-"the
splendor of the truth" -which calls us to sacrifice. As the
Bible says in the Book of Sirach: "A happy man is also at
peace when he sits down to his meal; he savors what he eats."
This joy lies even at the depth of the most bitter sorrow, a sorrow
which one cannot avoid at a certain point: the sorrow over one's
own evil. To belong to our company means to feel that the greatest
sorrow is that of one's own evil, of sin. I cannot say: "I
will never again commit a sin," because keeping God's law-that
is, following Christ - is a miracle of Grace, not something we
accomplish by ourselves. This is why the point at which the freedom
of the Mystery and the freedom of man meet is the moment of the
question. Our movement also emphasizes something else: the greatness
of the moment, the importance of contingent reality, where an
endless series of solicitations come together by which the Mystery
calls us. I always repeat that our greatest "friends! are
the inevitable circumstances in which we find ourselves, since
these are the absolute sign of the Mystery that calls us. Again
in the Ambrosian liturgy there is this lovely prayer: "Grant,
oh God, that the Church of Christ may celebrate ineffable Mysteries
in which our smallness as mortal creatures is rendered sublime
in an eternal relationship and our existence in time begins to
flourish as a life without end. Thus, following Your design of
love, man passes from a mortal condition to a wondrous salvation."
In other words, man passes to a way of life that flowers ever
more luxuriantly.De Lubac, in Paradoxes and New Paradoxes, observes
that "the conformist takes even the things of the Spirit
in their formal, exterior aspect. The obedient person instead
takes even the things of the earth in their interior and sublime
aspects." Because of this- this is another thing our movement
emphasizes -it is necessary to cultivate a human gift that is
natural to a child and becomes something great when it exists
in an adult. As one person wrote to me: "Nothing is communicated
except what is received freely (as by a baby). And one's attention
is drawn only because one is astonished." We therefore ought
increase our capacity for wonder: "if you are not like little
children you will never enter." In the first chapter of John's
Gospel, in the second half, there is an account of how John and
Andrew set out to follow Jesus. Jesus turned around and said:
"What are you looking or?" "Master, where do you
live?" "Come and see." And they went and remained
with Him the entire day. Let us try to imagine who those two men
were who followed Jesus, thoroughly frightened, and the young
man who walked ahead of them. Who knows with what wonder they
looked at him and, once in his house, listened to him!Another
page of the Gospel strikes me in the same way. It describes the
moment when Jesus passed through the crowds of people in Jericho.
The head of the local mafia in Jericho had climbed up a sycamore
tree to see Him, because he was a small man. Jesus passed nearby
and looked up to where the man had climbed. Let's try to imagine
what that man must have felt. It is as if Christ had said to him:
"I respect you, climb down quickly, I am coming to your house."
But that encounter would not be true-would be as if it had not
taken place 2,000 years ago-if it did not happen today. One cannot
follow Christ if one does not perceive that he is true today!
The encounters with persons with whom we share this sense of wonder,
as it occurred in the encounter between Jesus and Zaccheus, are
the most important things in our lives. "Look every day upon
the faces of the saints and listen carefully to their words,"
the liturgy says.One understands, then, that the Community, is
the place where one's individual identity can
individual identity can be centered, where one can attain the
clearest perception of reality - feeling it, grasping it intellectually,
judging it. Here one can imagine, plan, decide, do. Our individual
identities form an integral part of this community, and the community
provides me with the ultimate criterion for confronting all reality.
Therefore our point of view does not go its own way, but rather
commits itself to a certain community model and in that model
obeys the community, the fellowship. As Rilke said of his wife,
in that sharing that marks the relationship between man and woman,
so brief but exemplary: "where something obscure remains
in a relationship, it is the type of thing that does not require
clarification, but rather, submission".We experience great
submission in our community life: submission to the Mystery of
Christ who makes himself present among us and walks with us. Something
Peguy said captures the point well: "When the disciple does
nothing more than repeat, not the same resonance but a miserable
copy of the thought of the master; I when the disciple is nothing
more than a disciple, even if he is the greatest of disciples,
he will never generate anything. A disciple does not begin to
create until he himself introduces a new sound (that is, in the
measure in which he is not a disciple). It is not that one should
not have a master, but one must descend from the other by the
natural ways of filiation, not by the scholastic ways of discipleship."
This is what our community needs in order for it to become the
source of missions throughout the world. It needs not discipleship,
nor repetition, but filiation. It is right that a son who has
the nature of his father nevertheless introduce a new echo and
resonance in his own life. He has the same nature, but he is a
new thing. This is so true that the son can do better than the
father, and the father can watch joyfully as the son becomes greater
than he. But what the son does is greater only in so far as it
realizes more fully what the father has heard. For the living
organic nature of our community, then, there is nothing more contradictory,
on the one hand, than the affirmation of one's own opinion, of
one's own measure, of one's own way of feeling, and on the other
hand, repetition. It is filiation that generates, the process
by which the blood of the father passes into the heart of the
son-and generates a different capacity of realization. Thus the
great Mystery of His presence is multiplied and spread, so that
all may see Him, giving glory to God.
Ireland
