Christ Is Something that Is Happening to Me Now
Julián Carrón (*) - I would like to thank the representatives of the publisher Rizzoli, Paolo Zaninoni and Ottavio Di Brizzi. We have chosen this format in order to continue together on the path of the “School of Community.” After Il senso religioso (The Religious Sense), this year we will tackle All’origine della pretesa cristiana (At the Origin of the Christian Claim), which is the second of the three volumes of the Per-Corso (Course) outlined by Fr. Giussani.
“A man came, a young man, born in a certain country, in a certain place in the world that can be geographically pinpointed: Nazareth. When one goes to the Holy Land, to that little village, and enters that dimly lit hut where there is an inscription with the phrase: ‘Verbum hic caro factum est’ (‘The Word became flesh here’), one gets goose bumps."
The chant Et incarnatus est from Mozart's Great Mass is “the most powerful and convincing, simplest and greatest expression of a man who recognizes Christ. Salvation is a Presence: this is the source of joy and the source of the affectivity of Mozart's Catholic heart, of his heart that loves Christ.”
Et incarnatus est, says Don Giussani, "is song in its purest form, when all of man's striving melts away in the original clarity, in the absolute purity of the gaze that sees and recognizes. ‘Et incarnatus est’: it is contemplation and question at the same time, a surge of peace and joy that arises from the wonder of the heart when it is faced with the fulfillment of its expectation, with the miracle of the fulfillment of its request. [...] May we too, like Mozart, contemplate with the same simplicity and intensity the beginning of the history of mercy and forgiveness in the world, and drink from the source that is Mary's ‘yes’!”
This beautiful song helps us to gather ourselves in grateful silence, so that the flower of “yes” may be born in our hearts, may sprout in our hearts. [...] Just as it was for Our Lady, that girl from Nazareth, before the Child who had come forth from her: a boundless relationship filled her heart and her time.
If the religious intensity of Mozart's music—a genius that is a gift of the Spirit—penetrated our hearts, our lives, with all their restlessness, contradictions, and struggles, would be as beautiful as his music“ (L. Giussani, ”Il divino incarnato" [The Divine Incarnate], in Spirto Gentil: An invitation to listen to great music guided by Luigi Giussani, Bur, Milan 2011, pp. 54-55).
What better way to begin this gesture than to listen to it, as contemplation and as a question?
Et incarnatus est
(“Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et homo factus est”—“By the work of the Holy Spirit he was incarnate in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and became man,” soprano Joo Cho, piano Luigi Zanardi), W.A. Mozart, Great Mass in C minor K.427. See also “Spirto Gentil,” CD no. 24 (2002).
It is difficult to find another artistic expression that captures better than the Et incarnatus est—to quote Eliot—that "moment in time and of time, / A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: dissecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not as a moment of time, / A moment in time but time was created through that moment: for without meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave meaning“ (T.S. Eliot, Choruses from "The Rock", Bur, Milan 2010, p. 99).
Faced with this Event, God made flesh, which expresses all of God's tender passion for man, we cannot help but say with the psalmist: “What is man, Lord, that you remember him? What is the son of man that you care for him?” (cf. Ps 8:5). Nothing: a twig that a gust of wind blows away. Yet You became man for each one of us. Anyone who has a moment of simplicity and lets the Christian message enter cannot avoid the same jolt that Elizabeth felt within herself when she was visited by Mary carrying Jesus in her womb. “As soon as Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb” (cf. Luke 1:39). This is what happens to us today as well. To us, poor as we are, God made flesh is announced today. We are no longer alone with our nothingness. In this moment of confusion, when so many are groping in the dark, we are given the grace of this news. Who would not want to live every moment of their life under the pressure of this unparalleled emotion, generated by His Presence?
But is it really possible?
1. A challenge for the man of today
“Can an educated man, a European of our day, believe, truly believe, in the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ?” (cf. F.M. Dostoevsky, The Demons; Taccuini per “I demoni”, Sansoni, Florence 1958, p. 1011). This sentence by Dostoevsky sums up the challenge facing faith in Jesus Christ today. This challenge is not generic; it does not ask whether faith in Christ is possible at all. The decisive aspect of the Russian writer's question lies in its reference to a very specific context: the contemporary era. And it is addressed to a specific type of person: a culturally educated individual, one who does not renounce the exercise of his reason in all its power, in all his need for freedom, in all his emotional capacity. That is, a person who does not renounce anything of his humanity. A man who has a cultural history behind him, a demanding heritage, who is influenced by a pervasive rationalism, by a spontaneous trust in the scientific method, and by a suspicion of anything that does not submit to reason as a measure. For a human being with these characteristics, is it possible today to believe in what Christ said about himself?
In other words, does faith have any chance of taking root—that is, of fascinating, attracting, and convincing the people of our time?
But this question does not only concern those who have not yet encountered Christ; it also concerns us, for whom, after so many years of encountering Him, Christ remains distant from our hearts, as Fr. Giussani reminded us in 1982: “You have grown up: you have secured a human capacity in your profession,” but "there is, as it were, a possible distance from Christ (compared to the emotion of many years ago, of certain circumstances of many years ago, above all).
There is a kind of distance from Christ, except for indeterminate moments. I mean: there is a distance from Christ, except when you pray; there is a distance from Christ, except when you set out, let's say, to do works in His name, in the name of the Church or in the name of the movement. It is as if Christ were far from the heart. To quote the old poet of the Italian Risorgimento, “Busy with other matters,” our hearts are as if isolated, or rather, Christ remains as if isolated from the heart, except in moments of certain works (a moment of prayer or a moment of commitment, when there is a general gathering, when there is a community school to hold, etc.).
This distance of Christ from the heart, except when His Presence seems to operate at certain moments, also generates another distance, which reveals itself in a final impediment between us—I am also talking about husbands and wives—in a final mutual impediment. […] Christ's distance from the heart makes the last aspect of one's heart distant from the last aspect of the other's heart, except in common actions (there is the house to run, the children to care for, etc.). There is also a relationship, undoubtedly there is a mutual relationship, but it is only in operations, in works, in common gestures in which you find yourselves or found yourselves. But when you find yourselves in common action, it slightly—just a little—makes you see only the horizon of your gaze, of your feeling“ (L. Giussani, ”Familiarity with Christ," May 8, 1982, in Traces, no. 2/2007, p. 2).
That this does not only concern the past was recently pointed out by a friend: "Having had both community and personal meetings, I have recently realized this: ‘Reality is positive’ has been, in fact, since the Day at the beginning of the year, the ‘common thread’ that was then also documented in the flyer on the crisis, as everyone's assessment of the situation we are experiencing. But it risks being empty, not so much of understanding as of existential certainty. Sometimes I feel a kind of unease: there is a kind of triumphalism in what we do that counterbalances the tragedy of a hopeless existence. We [so often] are not certain of the path we are taking in the face of reality as it is. We agree with that assessment, we understand, but we are not convinced, we are not truly emotionally attached to the truth of our lives. Just look at the reactions of so many of us to the affirmation of the positivity of reality to see the relevance of this assessment."
We all know how far we have to go to overcome the distance we keep between ourselves and the Event of Christ's presence. For this reason, the question we have just asked takes on all its drama for us: does faith have a real chance of overcoming this distance and taking root in us?
In a lecture given in 1996, the then Cardinal Ratzinger replied that faith can still “succeed” “because it finds Correspondence in the nature of man. [...] In man there is an unquenchable nostalgic aspiration towards the infinite” (J. Ratzinger, Faith, Truth, Tolerance, Cantagalli, Siena 2003, p. 143). With these words, he indicated, at the same time, the necessary condition: Christianity needs to encounter the human that vibrates in each of us in order to show its full potential, its full truth.
The book we are presenting is an attempt to unfold this approach, to respond to an unavoidable demand for reasonableness.
Don Giussani addresses the issue right from the preface: “At the origin of the Christian claim is the attempt to define the origin of the apostles’ faith. In it, I wanted to express the reason why a man can believe in Christ: the profound human and reasonable Correspondence of his needs with the Event of the man Jesus of Nazareth. I have therefore sought to show the evidence of the reasonableness with which one attaches oneself to Christ, and thus is led by the experience of encountering his humanity to the great question of his divinity. It is not abstract reasoning that makes one grow, that broadens the mind, but finding in humanity a moment of truth attained and spoken. It is the great reversal of method that marks the passage from The Religious Sense to faith: it is no longer a search full of unknowns, but the surprise of a Fact that has happened in human history" (L. Giussani, All’origine della pretesa cristiana, Rizzoli, Milan 2011, p. VI).
In order to perceive the novelty of this approach, it is necessary to realize precisely this: it is not abstract reasoning that broadens reason to allow it to recognize Christ, but the Correspondence between man and Christ, which is realized in a real, historical encounter in the present; a Correspondence in which the reasonableness of faith itself consists. This is what makes the journey of faith simple. All it takes is an encounter in which we can discover this Correspondence. And it is precisely when this encounter does not take place—due to the reduction of Christianity to discourse, doctrine, or morality on the one hand, and the corresponding reduction of man's humanity on the other—that a perfect juxtaposition is established between man and Christ, and a deep estrangement is created (it is a parable that comes down to us from modernity): of a distance, in fact.
With this observation, Don Giussani warns us against the greatest risk we may encounter in beginning the work of the School of Community this year. What is the risk? For the vast majority of us, At the Origin of the Christian Claim is a familiar book. Therefore, the temptation of "the already known" is more present than ever. And so we can easily succumb to reducing Christianity to “doctrine.”
We usually expect novelty from difference, from doing or reading things that are different from the usual. Instead, novelty does not lie in difference (of work or of husband and wife), but in the happening of what we desire. And there is no greater event than that in which we find the Correspondence to the needs of our heart. It is only the recurrence of this Event that can overcome Christ's distance from the heart.
If Christ does not recur as an Event, the more time passes, the more we are overcome by that “ambiguity of ‘becoming great’” that Giussani speaks of: "In fact, he says, what we have received settles in such a way that it also bears fruit, but the heart, the heart itself, in the literal sense of the word, [...] is as if it were embarrassed with Christ, as if it did not continue a familiarity that was felt, albeit with the sentimentality characteristic of age, at a certain moment of our existence.
There is an awkwardness that is His distance, which is like His absence, a being that does not determine the heart. Not in actions, in those it can be decisive (we go to church, we “do” the movement, we even say Compline perhaps, we do the School of Community, we engage in charity, we go to groups here and there and we launch ourselves, we even catapult ourselves into politics). It is not lacking in actions: in actions, in many actions, it can be decisive, but in the heart? Not in the heart!" (L. Giussani, “Familiarity with Christ,” op. cit., pp. 2-3).
So the real question is: what is needed for the recognition of Christ's Correspondence to the heart to be as transparent as possible, that is, for the Christian experience to be realized?
2. A tender and passionate awareness of myself
Don Giussani is well aware of the necessary requirements for this Correspondence to take place, as is already clear from the first paragraph of the book, which for us contains all the methodological genius of his approach. "It would not be possible to fully realize what Jesus Christ means if we did not first become aware of the nature of that dynamism that makes man human. Christ, in fact, presents himself as the answer to what ‘I’ am, and only an attentive, tender, and passionate awareness of myself can open me up and dispose me to recognize, admire, thank, and live Christ. Without this awareness [of what I am], even that of Jesus Christ becomes a mere name” (L. Giussani, All’origine della pretesa cristiana, op. cit., p. 3).
In order for man to fully realize what Jesus Christ means, therefore, each person must place himself before Him with his whole being. Without this humanity, without this attentive, tender, and passionate awareness of myself, it will not be possible for me to recognize Christ. The reason is very simple: Christ presents himself as the answer to what I am; therefore, without awareness of myself, even that of Jesus Christ ends up becoming a mere name.
It is difficult to find a greater appreciation of the person than that offered by Christianity. Christ does not intend to enter secretly, as if taking advantage of a distraction, into a person's life: He wants to enter into human life through the front door, that is, through humanity, a fully conscious human being, made up of reason and freedom. Christ submits himself to the test of man's native criterion: the heart. Without this comparison, there is no Christian experience, nor would Christianity have any chance of success. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr clearly identified the reason: “Nothing is as incredible as the answer to a question that is not asked” (R. Niebuhr, Il destino e la storia, Bur, Milan 1999, p. 66).
If man has the original structure to recognize Christ, what then is the problem? What difficulty makes this recognition problematic? The issue is that our original structure is often buried under the sediment of the influence of society and history, which reduces our original needs. Unless he is awakened from his torpor, freed from his measure, from an adulterated or reduced version of his own needs induced by the context, man will be hindered or held back to varying degrees in perceiving the Correspondence that allows him to recognize Christ.
We can also recognize this reduction in ourselves from the embarrassment we feel when we encounter the “tenth leper” (cf. Lk 17:12-19) or in Christ's reaction to the disciples' exultation over their missionary success (cf. Lk 10:17-20): we too are content with healing like the other nine lepers or with success like the disciples. We do not feel the need for anything else. And so our hearts remain distant from Christ.
Christianity reduced to discourse, much less to ethics, cannot respond to this existential situation of man, which is also the result of historical reasons. But this is also the great opportunity that the current situation offers to Christianity: to become aware that none of its reduced variants can respond to the urgency of man's present. Because in order to grasp the value of a moral and religious personality, we need to have human genius within us, that is, the “original openness of the soul; [...] an original attitude of availability and dependence, not of self-sufficiency” (L. Giussani, All’origine della pretesa cristiana, op. cit., p. 100). And only a Christianity that presents itself in its original nature as an Event in history can be capable of arousing that humanity that allows man to recognize it, piercing the encrustation that constantly covers it.
3. Christianity: a fact
In a passage from his Life of Jesus, François Mauriac describes the first appearance on the world stage of that presence which—from the outset—imposed itself as a “problem” and which has since then marked history to this day: "After forty days of fasting and contemplation, he returned to the place of his baptism. He knew in advance why he was meeting him: ‘The Lamb of God!’ said the prophet when he saw him approaching (and certainly in a low voice...). This time two of his disciples were with him.
They looked at Jesus, and that glance was enough: they followed him to the place where he was staying. One of them was Andrew, Simon's brother; the other was John, son of Zebedee: “Jesus, having looked at him, loved him...” What is written about the rich young man, who had to walk away sad, is implied here. What did Jesus do to keep them? "Seeing that they were following him, he said to them, 'What are you looking for?' They replied, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They went and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about the tenth hour." (F. Mauriac, Life of Jesus, Oscar Mondadori, Milan 1974, p. 29).
Let us ask ourselves: how could John and Andrew have been so suddenly won over, to the point of recognizing that they had met the Messiah? There is an apparent disproportion between the very simple nature of the event and the certainty of the two. If this event took place, says Giussani, recognizing that man, who that man was, not in depth and in detail, but in his unique and incomparable (“divine”) value, must therefore have been easy. Why was it easy to recognize him? Because of his unparalleled “exceptionality” (L. Giussani - S. Alberto - J. Prades, Generare tracce nella storia del mondo, Rizzoli, Milan 1998, p. 10).
What does ‘exceptional’ mean? When can we define something as “exceptional”? When it adequately corresponds to the original expectations of the heart, however confused and nebulous the awareness of it may be" (Ibid), as when we see the exceptional beauty of a mountain landscape, of a woman, or of a gesture full of tenderness and charity: it is easy to recognize it because of its winning appeal. It is precisely this exceptionality that, when it occurs, reawakens man's Original Experience, however confused and nebulous his awareness of it may be, so that he, thus awakened, can make a judgment about that same exceptionality.
How can we define a phenomenon such as the one described?
“Christianity is an Event. There is no other word to indicate its nature: not the word law, nor the words ideology, conception, or project. Christianity is not a religious doctrine, a set of moral laws, or a complex of rituals. Christianity is a Fact, an Event: everything else is a consequence.”
This is why the word “Event” is decisive: "It indicates the method chosen and used by God to save man: God became man in the womb of a fifteen- to seventeen-year-old girl named Mary, in the ‘womb that was the dwelling place of our desire,’ as Dante says. The way in which God entered into relationship with us to save us is an Event, not a thought or a religious feeling" (Ibidem, pp. 12-13).
But, be careful, before proceeding, I want to immediately address the temptation to which we are exposed. At least because of how often we have heard Fr. Giussani say it, none of us would deny that Christianity is an Event. But we often reduce the Event to something in the past—whether it be the beginning of Christian history two thousand years ago or the moment of our personal encounter—when we do not simply reduce it to an abstract category. But if it is reduced to a fact of the past or to a category, what remains of Christianity in the present is only ethics. It is like when the Event of love between two people ends, and all that remains are the things to be done, the tasks to be accomplished. The fascination is already behind us, and the distance between the two grows.
So what does it mean that the nature of Christianity, like falling in love, is an Event? Don Giussani himself answered this question with the words of last Easter's Volantone: "The Event does not only identify something that happened and with which everything began, but it is what defines the present, gives content to the present, makes the present possible. What we know or what we have becomes experience if what we know or have is something that is given to us now: there is a hand that offers it to us now, there is a face that comes forward now, there is blood that flows now, there is a resurrection that takes place now. Outside of this ‘now’ there is nothing! Our self cannot be moved, touched [to the point of being fascinated], that is, changed, without a contemporaneity: an Event. Christ is something that is happening to me." If we compare the way we often talk about Christianity with this description given by Don Giussani, we can measure the distance that giving it for granted, as something already known, causes in us, and we can see how unaware we are of the reduction we operate in doing so.
"So, for what we know—Christ, the whole discourse on Christ—to be experience, it must be a present that provokes and affects us: it is a present as it was for Andrew and John. Christianity, Christ, is exactly what it was for Andrew and John when they followed him; imagine when he turned around, and how struck they were! And when they went to his house... It is still like that today, even now! (Communion and Liberation, Easter Flyer 2011). Without this contemporaneity, there is no development, and the Event recedes into the past, falling further and further back in time. Thus, as the years pass, instead of bridging the gap that separates the heart from Christ, they widen it.
The experience that Fr. Giussani testified to us is very different, especially as the years of his life passed: "Encountering a different kind of humanity comes first not only at the beginning, but at every moment that follows the beginning: a year or twenty years later. The initial phenomenon—the impact of human diversity, the amazement that arises from it—is destined to be the initial and original phenomenon of every moment of development. Because there is no development if that initial impact is not repeated, if the Event does not remain contemporary. Either it is renewed, or nothing proceeds, and immediately the Event that has occurred is theorized [it becomes a category], and one gropes in search of substitutes for what is truly at the origin of diversity. The originating factor is, permanently, the impact with a different human reality. Therefore, if what happened in the beginning does not happen again and is not renewed, true continuity is not achieved: if one does not now experience the impact with a new human reality, one does not understand what happened then. Only if the Event happens again now does the initial event become illuminated and deepened, thus establishing continuity and development” (L. Giussani, “Qualcosa che viene prima” [Something that comes first], Traces, no. 10/2008, p. 2).
Don Giussani concludes: "Continuity with what happened at the beginning is therefore only achieved through the grace of an ever-new and amazed impact, as if it were the first time. Otherwise, instead of this amazement, thoughts dominate that one's own cultural evolution makes one capable of organizing, criticisms that one's own sensibility formulates about what one has experienced and what one sees others experiencing, the alternative that one would like to impose, etc." (Ibid.).
Therefore, the way chosen by The Mystery to reach us—a fact, an Event, not our thoughts or feelings—is the most suitable for the historical situation of man and the only one capable of overcoming our distance from Him: "In order to make himself known, God entered human life as a man, in human form, so that human thought, imagination, and affectivity [our humanity] were as if ‘blocked,’ magnetized by Him. The Christian Event takes the form of an ‘encounter’: a human encounter in the banal reality of everyday life," capable of magnetizing all our affection and all our freedom. The Christian Event does not wait for man to change, it does not require preparation or preconditions: it bursts in and happens, like falling in love. His Presence, in fact, precisely because of its exceptional nature, that is, because of its unique capacity to correspond to the original needs of the heart, is able to reawaken those needs in all their significance, so often buried under a thousand sediments, and to open up all of man's reason, magnetizing all his affectivity. In the presence of the answer, the question is freed in all its original, infinite depth. "What characterizes the phenomenon of encounter is a qualitative difference, a perceptible difference in life. The encounter is, in other words, coming across a diversity that attracts because it corresponds to the heart, therefore passing through comparison and the judgment of reason, and arousing freedom in its affectivity" (L. Giussani - S. Alberto - J. Prades, Generare tracce nella storia del mondo, op. cit., pp. 24-25).
This is exactly what Giussani calls a change of religious method: "In the hypothesis that The Mystery has penetrated human existence by speaking to him inter-humanly, the relationship between man and destiny will no longer be based on human effort, as construction and imagination, on a study aimed at something distant, enigmatic, a tension of expectation towards an absent one. Instead, it will be an encounter with the Present. If God had manifested his particular will in human history, had traced his own path to reach it, the central problem of the religious phenomenon would no longer be the attempt, which also expresses the greatest dignity of man, to ‘pretend’ to be God: the problem would lie entirely in the pure gesture of freedom that accepts or rejects." Here, then, is what the reversal of method consists of: “No longer is the effort of a constructive intelligence and will, of a laborious imagination, of a complicated moralism central, but rather the simplicity of recognition; an attitude similar to that of someone who, seeing a friend arrive, identifies him among others and greets him.” (L. Giussani, All’origine della pretesa cristiana, op. cit., p. 35).
This marks the beginning of an adventure of knowledge:
"When we meet a person who is important for our life, there is always a first moment in which we introduce them; something inside us is overwhelmed by the evidence of an unavoidable recognition: ‘here he is’, ‘here she is’. But only the space given to the repetition of this documentation charges the impression with existential weight. Only coexistence allows it to enter more and more radically and deeply into us, until, at a certain point, it becomes certainty. […] From coexistence [of the first disciples with Jesus] will come a confirmation of that exceptionality, of that diversity that had struck them from the very first moment. With coexistence, this confirmation grows.” For Don Giussani, “it is so true that knowledge of an object requires space and time that, a fortiori, this law cannot be denied by an object that claims to be unique. Even those who were the first to encounter that uniqueness had to follow this path” (Ibidem, pp. 58-59).
With his usual genius, Don Giussani presents us with two methodological considerations that are invaluable for reaching an existential certainty about The Mystery that has become part of history: the first refers to the fact that "I am all the more qualified to have certainty about another person the more attentive I am to his life, that is, the more I share his life. The necessary harmony with the object one wishes to come to know is a living disposition that is built up over time, in living together. For example, in the Gospel, those who followed him and shared his life were able to understand that this Man was to be trusted, not the crowd that went to be healed." The second element that Fr. Giussani invites us to consider concerns the fact that, "the more powerfully one is human, the more one is capable of reaching certainties about others from few clues.
This is precisely the genius of the human being. Rousselot emphasizes this in this beautiful text: "The more agile and penetrating the intelligence, the more a slight clue is enough to induce a certain conclusion. [...] This is why an unquestionable tradition dating back to the Gospel itself praises those who do not need miracles to believe. It does not praise them for believing without reason: that would be deplorable; but it sees in them truly enlightened souls capable, through the slightest clue, of grasping a great truth." Even this intelligence of the slightest clue, although man naturally possesses it at a fundamental level in order to survive, needs time and space to evolve. It is this gift that the “claim of Jesus” requires in order to be understood. The multiplication of signs concerning his person leads to the reasonable conclusion that I can trust him“ (Ibidem, pp. 49-50). It was precisely the signs that appeared in their coexistence with him that triggered the question: ”Who is this man?" They could not find a more adequate answer to this question than the one offered by Jesus himself.
This last observation introduces us to the great theme of faith. In fact, "the attitude of those who are struck by the Christian Event, recognize it, and adhere to it is called ‘faith.’ The position in which we find ourselves when faced with the Event of Christ is identical to that of Zacchaeus when faced with that Man who stopped under the tree he had climbed and said to him: “Come down quickly, I am coming to your house” [imagine how he must have felt being looked at].
It is the same position as that of the widow whose only son had died, who heard Jesus say to her [with all the tenderness with which he looked at her], in a way that seems so irrational to us: “Woman, do not weep!”—it is absurd, in fact, to say to a mother whose only son has died: “Woman, do not weep!”. For them, and for us too, it was the experience of the presence of something radically different from our images and at the same time totally and originally corresponding to the deep expectations of our person. [...] Having the sincerity to recognize, the simplicity to accept, and the affection to attach oneself to such a Presence, this is faith. [...] Faith is essentially recognizing the diversity of a Presence, recognizing an exceptional, divine Presence.
The exceptional does not happen normally; so when it does happen, one says, “This is something else! I am in the presence of a superhuman power!” Who knows how many times the Samaritan woman must have thirsted for the attitude with which Christ treated her in that moment [and how she must have unconsciously sought it in all the husbands she had], without ever realizing it before; when it happened, she immediately recognized it. (L. Giussani - S. Alberto - J. Prades, Generating Traces in the History of the World, op. cit., pp. 28-31).
A faith conceived in this way is as far removed as possible from a “belief” that is alien to the human: it implies, in fact, a path of knowledge that involves reason, affection, and freedom in the face of an incomparable fact! For this reason, "faith belongs to the Event because, as a loving recognition of the presence of something exceptional, it is a gift, it is a grace. Just as Christ gives himself to me in a present event, so he enlivens in me the capacity to grasp it and to recognize it in its exceptionality. Thus my freedom accepts that event, accepts to recognize it" (Ibidem, p. 31).
But how can I know that what faith adheres to is true, that it is real?
4. A new humanity: verification of the Christian faith
What happens when I encounter the Christian Event? The flowering of the human: “Christianity is an Event in which the self encounters and discovers that it is ‘consanguineous’ with it; it is a fact that reveals the self to itself” (Ibidem, p. 13). “When I met Christ, I discovered myself as a man.” This phrase by the Roman rhetorician Mario Vittorino expresses well what happens when faith is a real experience. In this exaltation of humanity lies the reasonableness of the Christian faith.
The Event of Christ recognized (faith) makes everything come alive in a different way. And it is precisely this new, “subversive and surprising” (L. Giussani, Dall’utopia alla presenza (1975-1978), Bur, Milan 2006, p. 330)—as Don Giussani said—way of living everyday life that becomes the Verification of the truth of the encounter made: Christ exalts reason, Christ exalts affection, Christ exalts freedom! “What is the reason that faith has? The reason that faith has is that it realizes my humanity with its demands, changes it for the better, makes my humanity walk” (Ibidem, p. 359); it exalts all that is human in me. And who would not desire such an exaltation for themselves?
Let us be together in this adventure, to support one another. So that the experience in which we are involved does not become fossilized in doctrine, our support can have no other logic throughout this year than that of witness. But this does not change the totally and definitively personal level of the matter: only I can respond to the Christian claim before the Lord. Christianity, Don Giussani insists, “takes place in communion, but everything is played out in the freedom of the person” (Ibidem, p. 327). "The whole question lies in the real faith of the person. [...] Consequently, the only and dramatic problem is personal faith, faith as a response to one's own human experience; this is the only and dramatic problem of every day and every person because faith is a challenge to freedom; there is nothing more given, more gifted than faith, and there is nothing less automatic than it." (L. Giussani, Il rischio educativo, SEI, Turin 1995, pp. 162-163).
The initiative of Christ in our lives, His Event, arouses and demands our freedom, challenging it like nothing else, at the beginning and at every moment of the journey. Don Giussani tells us clearly: "Jesus Christ did not come into the world to replace human work, human freedom, or to eliminate human trials—the existential condition of freedom. He came into the world to call man back to the foundation of all questions, to his fundamental structure and his real situation. In fact, all the problems that man is called upon by the providence of life to solve become more complicated, instead of being resolved, unless certain fundamental values are saved. Jesus Christ came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution is a lie.
The problem of knowing the meaning of things (truth), the problem of the use of things (work), the problem of complete awareness (love), the problem of human coexistence (society and politics) lack the right approach and therefore generate ever greater confusion in the history of the individual and of humanity to the extent that they are not based on religiosity in the attempt to find their own solution (“Whoever follows me will have eternal life and a hundredfold here below”). (L. Giussani, All’origine della pretesa cristiana, op. cit., p. 124): the hundredfold in terms of affection, reason, and liberation is the reasonable nature of faith in action, and constitutes the overcoming of any juxtaposition between the divinity of Christ and my humanity, between my heart and Christ.
In this way, Christ submits himself to the Verification of our heart: he does not ask us to believe him “a priori.” For this reason, the “Christian claim” is the most imposing challenge a person can face, because it mobilizes all the resources at one's disposal—reason, affection, and freedom—to carry out a Verification. No one can take our place, not even Christ did: "Faith cannot cheat, it cannot say to you, ‘It is so,’ obtaining your consent bare and raw for free. No! Faith cannot cheat because it is in some way linked to your experience: in the end, it is as if it had to appear in court where you judge it through your experience. But you cannot cheat either, because in order to judge it, you have to use it; in order to see if it transforms your life, you have to live it seriously; and not a faith as you interpret it, but the faith as it has been handed down to you, the authentic faith.
This is why our concept of faith is immediately connected to the time of day, to the ordinary practice of our lives. […] If, in falling in love with a girl, or having experienced falling in love several times, you have never perceived how faith changes that relationship, you have never found yourself saying: “Look at faith, illuminating this tentative relationship of mine, how it changes it, how it changes it for the better!”; if you have never been able to say something like that (and, instead of the girl, you can put anything else: your father, your mother, your studies, your work, your circumstances, etc.), if you have never been able to say: “Look at how faith makes my life more human,” if you have never been able to say this, faith will never become conviction and will never become constructive, it will never generate anything, because it has not touched your deepest self." (L. Giussani, L’io rinasce in un incontro (1986-1987), Bur, Milan 2010, pp. 300-301).
A year ago, at the presentation of Il senso religioso, we were invited to live The Religious Sense as a verification of faith, seeking to respond to Don Giussani's concern: "We Christians in the modern climate have been detached not directly from Christian formulas, not directly from Christian rites, not directly from the laws of the Christian Decalogue. We have been detached from the human foundation, from The Religious Sense. We have a faith that is no longer religiosity. We have a faith that no longer responds as it should to religious sentiment; we have a faith that is not conscious, a faith that is no longer intelligent about itself“ (L. Giussani, ”The Religious Conscience of Modern Man," pro manuscripto, Jacques Maritain Cultural Center, Chieti, November 21, 1985, p. 15).
Similarly, today we propose to maintain the same perspective of Verification by addressing The Origin of the Christian Claim. But what does this mean? What is the Verification that Christ, as a present event, has entered our lives? The fulfillment of the human, the hundredfold of reason, affection, freedom, we have said: this remains the essential and indispensable Verification of the reasonableness of faith, of the truth of the Christian proposal, the evidence of its credibility. But the heart of this Verification is, through change, the increase of faith itself, the loving recognition of His Presence.
“Your Presence is worth more than life.” Returning to be close to Him, as the leper did, is worth more than healing; being chosen, as happened to the disciples, is worth more than success! The culmination of the Verification is the emergence of an expectation, of a loving knowledge that grows with the growth of the experience of Correspondence; it is an affection that embraces all other affections. At the heart of the hundredfold experience, the deepening of the relationship with Christ dominates: a familiarity, a tension to affirm him, an ease in recognizing him (“But it is the Lord!” said St. John). The most profound change is faith itself. In the continuous and daily encounter with His real Presence, our question, our infinite thirst, finds an answer and at the same time is exalted and amplified, and thus it becomes easier, in a certain sense more “inevitable,” to recognize Him as the only one capable of responding to it. Only in this way can the distance of the heart from Christ finally be overcome.
The meaning of this year's journey could be summarized in a phrase from St. Paul: “I press on to seize him, I who have already been seized by Christ” (cf. Phil 3:12). Each of us has been seized by Christ. The more one has been seized, the more one strives in the race to seize Him again. What we pursue is ultimately no longer even change, that is, a hundredfold increase, but His Presence, our relationship with Him, as happens in every loving and purely human relationship: nothing satisfies except the presence of the beloved person. This places in the world an unyielding figure, who is not satisfied with any “intermediate” goal, any healing or success, always on the run, attracted by His Presence, and therefore a free actor in history, an indomitable builder of destroyed houses. And this can be our contribution to society.
For our journey, Fr. Giussani always recommended a gesture that sums up the whole content of the Christian event: the Angelus. Let us ask that it happen in us more and more each time we perform it. It will be a clear sign of our journey.
Angelus
Thank you all for listening and participating.
(*) - Presentation of the book by Luigi Giussani All’origine della pretesa cristiana (Rizzoli) - January 25, 2012.Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan and via satellite throughout Italy.
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