“In the
Simplicity of my Heart I have gladly given You everything”
Fr Luigi Giussani’s testimony during the meeting of the
Holy Father John Paul II with the ecclesial movements and the new
communities.
St Peter’s Square, Rome, 30 May 1998
I shall try to say how an attitude
was born in me —an attitude
that God was to bless, as He wished — and that I could not
have foreseen nor even wished for.
1) “What is man that you should keep him in mind, mortal man that you
care for him?” (Ps 8:5). No question in life has ever struck me like
this one. There has been only one Man in the world who could answer me, by
asking another question, “What would it profit a man if he gain the
whole world, and then lose himself? Or what could a man give in exchange for
himself?” (Mt 16:26). I was never asked a question that took my breath
away so much as this question of Christ’s! No woman ever heard another
voice speak of her son with such an original tenderness and unquestionable
valuing of the fruit of her womb, with such a wholly positive affirmation of
its destiny; only the voice of the Jew Jesus of Nazareth. And more than that,
no man can feel his own dignity and absolute value affirmed far beyond all
his achievements. No one in the world has ever been able to speak like this!
Only Christ takes my humanity so completely to heart. This is the wonder expressed
by Dionysius the Areopagite (5 th Century): “Who could everspeak to
us of the love that Christ has for man, overflowing with peace?” I’ve
been repeating these words to myself for more than fifty years!
This is why Redemptor Hominis appeared on our horizon like a beam of
light in the thick darkness covering the earth of present-day man, with all
his confused questions.
Thank you, Your Holiness.
It was a simplicity of heart that made me feel and recognize Christ as exceptional,
with that certain promptness that marks the unassailable and indestructible
evidence of factors and moments of reality, which, on entering the horizon
of our person, pierce us to the heart.
So the acknowledgment of who Christ is in our lives invades the whole of our
awareness of living: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn
14:6).
“Domine Deus, in simplicitate cordis mei laetus obtuli
universa” (“Lord God, in the simplicity of my heart
I have gladly given You everything”), says a prayer of the
Ambrosian Liturgy; what shows that this acknowledgement is true
is the fact that life has an ultimate, tenacious capacity for
gladness.
2) How can this gladness, which is the human glory of Christ,
and which fills my heart and my voice in some moments, be found
to be true and reasonable to
today’s man?
Because that Man, the Jew Jesus of Nazareth, died for us and rose again. That
Risen Man is the Reality on which all the positivity of every man’s existence
depends.
Every earthly experience lived in the Spirit of Jesus, Risen from the dead,
blossoms in Eternity. This blossoming will not bloom only at the end of time;
it has already begun on the dawn of Easter. Easter is the beginning of this
journey to the eternal Truth of everything, a journey that is therefore already
within man’s history.
For Christ, as the Word of God made flesh, makes Himself present as the Risen
one in every period of time, throughout the whole of history, in order to reach
from Easter morning to the end of this time, the end of this world. The Spirit
of Jesus, that is to say of the Word made flesh, becomes an experience possible
for ordinary man, in His power to redeem the whole existence of each person
and human history, in the radical change that He produces in the one who encounters
Him, and, like John and Andrew, follows Him.
Thus for me the grace of Jesus, in so far as I have been able to adhere to
the encounter with Him and communicate Him to the brothers in God’s Church,
has become the experience of a faith that in the Holy Church, that is to say
the Christian People, revealed itself as a call and a desire to feed a new
Israel of God: “Populum Tuum vidi, cum ingenti gaudio, Tibi offerre
donare” (“With great joy, I saw your People, acknowledging existence
as an offering to You”), continues the liturgical prayer.
So it was that I saw a people taking shape, in the name of Christ. Everything
in me became truly more religious, with my awareness striving to discover that “God
is all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). In this people gladness was becoming “ingenti
gaudio”, that is to say the decisive factor of one’s own history
as ultimate positivity and therefore as joy.
What could have seemed at most to be an individual experience was becoming
a protagonist in history, and so an instrument of the mission of the one People
of God.
This now is the foundation of the search for an expressed unity among us.
3) That precious text of the Ambrosian Liturgy concludes with these words: “Domine
Deus, custodi hanc voluntatem cordis eorum” (“Lord God, keep
safe this attitude of their heart”).
Infidelity always arises in our hearts even before the most beautiful and true
things; the infidelity in which, before God’s humanity and man’s
original simplicity, man can fall short, out of weakness and worldly preconception,
like Judas and Peter. Even this personal experience of infidelity that always
happens, revealing the imperfection of every human action, makes the memory
of Christ more urgent.
The desperate cry of Pastor Brand in Ibsen’s play of the same name, (“Answer
me, O God, in the hour in which death is swallowing me up: is the whole of
man’s will not enough to achieve even a part of salvation?”) is answered
by the humble positivity of St Theresa of the Child Jesus who
writes, “When I am charitable it is only Jesus who is acting in me.”
All this means that man’s freedom, which the Mystery always involves,
has prayer as its supreme, unassailable expressive form. This is why freedom,
according to the whole of its true nature, posits itself as an entreaty to
adhere to Being, therefore to Christ. Even in man’s incapacity, in man’s
great weakness, affection for Christ is destined to last.
In this sense Christ, Light and Strength for every one of his followers, is
the adequate reflection of that word with which the Mystery appears in its
ultimate relationship with the creature, as mercy: Dives in Misericordia.
The mystery of mercy shatters any image of complacency or despair; even
the feeling of forgiveness lies within this mystery of Christ.
This is the ultimate embrace of the Mystery, against which man — even
the most distant, the most perverse or the most obscured, the most in the dark— cannot
oppose anything, can make no objection. He can abandon it, but in so doing
he abandons himself and his own good. The Mystery as mercy remains the last
word even on all the awful possibilities of history.
For this reason existence expresses itself, as ultimate ideal, in begging.
The real protagonist of history is the beggar: Christ who begs for man’s
heart, and man’s heart that begs for Christ. |
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