Make Your Life Your Own
Avvenire - In a book containing lessons given to university students of Communion and Liberation (CL) in 1985, Don Luigi Giussani stated: “We must repeat the words so that they become our own: life must become our own.”
Twenty years after his death, Libreria Editrice Vaticana published the volume L’incontro che accende la speranza (The Encounter that Ignites Hope), edited by Davide Prosperi, with a preface by Cardinal Pietro Parolin (144 pages, €14.00). The book includes previously unpublished lessons, a dialogue from an assembly, and a summary of Giussani’s interactions with young university students of Communion and Liberation during a course of spiritual exercises in 1985. It explores a reversal of perspective through an encounter with a “You,” the Mystery made flesh. We offer an excerpt in these pages.
When we hear Beethoven or Schubert—and this is now common when we gather together—the sense of greatness and beauty emanating from the music penetrates our entire soul, creating an encounter. […] Our prayer must be awakened by that profound accent of humanity, because prayer encompasses all that music, all that sadness, all that sense of incoherence and disproportion, and all that unquenchable desire. Prayer is our whole humanity: no state of mind, however arid, can prevent it. As Ungaretti writes, there is no one among us so voiceless as to be prevented from praying (La pietà, 1928, 1).
We must not hate repeating things, though we are inclined to resist repetition. Here, we need to be masters of ourselves. We must repeat words so that they become our own: life belongs to Another, but it must become ours. This is possession and freedom.
Would there be humanity without the passion for truth—tell me—without ideals, desire, passion, or the fascination with truth? Would there be man—man! No! And without fascination, desire, the striving for fullness, perfection, fulfillment, or—in its psychological reverberation—happiness, would there be man? No! Fill these words with meaning, if you can! You cannot! Yet they are the fabric of our lives.
We must seek—this is friendship—to help each other maintain this level of awareness; otherwise, we degrade, and our lives become meaningless and useless. This is the effort of our companionship. […] We must restore the original breadth of our needs. Why is it that, at certain moments when we hear music, we are overwhelmed by a wave of humanity that brings us back to ourselves and makes us feel alive? It is as if it expands us. It is as if we had been bent over until then, our stomachs pressed against our knees, our heads unable to rise because of a wall. We cannot move to the right or to the left; we are crushed, as if in the hole of a basement. But when we hear certain things, it is as if we can stand up straight, spread our arms wide, breathe, and raise our heads. It is man rising to his full stature.
We must restore the full scope of our needs. “Man, monotonous universe,” says Ungaretti, “Believes he is expanding his possessions” with his busy work, “And from his feverish hands / Nothing but limits come forth” (La pietà, 1928, 4). Rarely has man’s inability to satisfy, to satis facere, to fulfill what he is, been expressed more vividly: […] “God, look at our weakness. // We want certainty. // […] I can no longer bear to be walled up / In desire without love.” There is a mechanism within man that cannot be stopped; but if its meaning is not recognized, it becomes desire without love—a desire without meaning, a desire that does not recognize what it is filled with. A desire without love is a desire that does not acknowledge the other, because love is recognizing the other. […] “Strike down,” O God, “my poor emotions,” useless, “Free me from restlessness. // I am tired of screaming without a voice” (La pietà, 1928, 1). “Screaming without a voice” is desire without love, a mechanism without content, without meaning, without recognizing what arouses it and propels it. Most people around us, most of our contemporaries, live without meaning, because a desire without love or a scream without a voice is nonsense. […]
This is the nature of man: “One loves what does not last only in the name of what can last” (C.-F. Ramuz, Adam and Eve, Dadò, 2014, p. 119). Bergson highlighted the value of the word “duration” exceptionally well. “We love what does not last” means we love what is fleeting, what has no consistency, “only in the name of what can last,” only in the name of being, of the permanent.
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