Earning Life By Living It
A dialogue with Pierluigi Banna | Maria Silvia - Finding Certainty in the Face of Fear.
Moderator - Our friends in the Movement of Communion and Liberation have given us a wonderful book to keep us company this summer: The Encounter that Ignites Hope. This book, however, is about a life. We cannot present this book as we would present The Brothers Karamazov, because the book in question is the life of a man, Fr. Luigi Giussani, who offered it to all of us so that we, too, could walk this path.
The most exciting thing, as we have seen in recent days, is that Father Giussani invited all of us to make a human verification. “I don’t want to convince you of my ideas,” he often said at the beginning of his lessons, “but to give you a method so that you can know from your own experience the truth of what I, or other teachers, tell you.”
For this reason, the friends with whom I prepared the camp and I wanted to invite our speakers here tonight to ask them three questions each. First, we read the book. We selected six passages that particularly struck us and prepared questions for our friends. We did this because, to compare oneself with a life, one needs a life. So, we are not asking them what they think of the book, but how the proposal that Giussani makes in this book plays out in their lives.
So, we begin with Maria Silvia, who is a dear friend of one of our friends, who insisted we all meet her from the very beginning of our camp preparations. She is a friend who has just had a major brain operation. When she was called for the surgery just ten days ago, I told her, “Wow, if the operation is scheduled, don’t worry about this. Please, go ahead.” And she replied, “But I want to come!” So, I found myself in front of this woman who wanted to be here, even though she could have been resting. She could have had all the rest she needed. And so a question arose: what is it that gives us rest?
Then I invited a dear friend of ours who needs no introduction—partly because he has too many titles for me to learn—who came tonight and gave us the gift of his presence.
So, I'll start right away with the questions. I will read them slowly because they are long, but they are so true that each of us, while listening, can answer them for ourselves: “How would I answer this question?” Because we are not here as spectators at a window; we are here as people on a journey. I will quote the passage from the book and then ask the question. Let's begin.
“Fear is the fear of losing something. Therefore, before fear, there is always an attraction. Before fear, there is a fascination. There is a need, a desire. There is something that dominates you in the most beautiful and good sense of the word, like something beautiful that dominates your eyes and your heart.”
How do you experience fear and the discovery of this desire that comes before fear itself? And what attraction rekindles hope in you?
Maria Silvia - I am a “quadratina.” - the “quadratini” (“small squares”) are sick people, often homebound, who participate in Father Eugenio Nembrini’s daily Mass via videoconference, appearing as small squares on the screen- I just had surgery on my head and, three years ago, on my lung. But what has changed in my life in these three years—and if anyone wants to ask me more, I'll elaborate—is the fact that I was backed into a corner. When they told me I had lung cancer, I left the hospital (I had gone there alone; I wasn't expecting it at all) and said, “I can’t die. I have to live forever.”
This need has not faded; on the contrary, as things progressed, this desire, this need for eternity, this need for life and meaning, was what spurred me on to live everything firsthand, challenging every circumstance. Earlier, it was said that Giussani asked us to verify this. This is what has changed me in these three years. Because every time, I challenge Him and say, “Show me now how You can make me happy in this circumstance. Show me how this is possible.” Because I have this desire, but I am not the one who can fulfill it. The fact that it is mine does not mean that I can find the answer to it. You put it in my heart; only You can respond. I really like St. Thomas, who puts his hand in Jesus’ side, because it is a challenge that gives us all the opportunity to be certain.
Last night, we were talking with a friend of ours, who is also terminally ill, and I said to him, “I am experiencing the Resurrection. And if you experience the Resurrection, you cannot be afraid. What can you be afraid of?”
Now, I will simply tell you the last thing that happened in my life. I had surgery 10 days ago in Milan, at Humanitas. On the very day I was admitted to the hospital, all my friends in Milan were going on vacation to Calambrone, in the province of Livorno. I was very upset because I said to myself, “I'm here alone, and you're all on vacation. I wanted to come on vacation with you, but instead, I have to go to the hospital for surgery.” This alone had already upset me greatly. Even more than the operation, I was upset that they were far away from me. So much so that I called Father Eugenio and said, “I can't die without your hug first.” And he said, “I promise you won't die without my hug.” I believed him.
I went into the operating room crying because I was afraid. This time, I was really afraid that I wouldn't come out of the operating room. I was afraid I wouldn't see my husband again; I was afraid I wouldn't hug my friends again… I was afraid! And then when I came out, it was an explosion of emotion because I was alive. It was an incredible feeling. But the thing that struck me was what I experienced during those days in the hospital. The fact that my friends were all on vacation together in Calambrone and I was alone in the hospital was not bad luck; it was an opportunity to understand what it means to be together. Because I was with Jesus, and they were with Jesus. And so, we were together. I experienced their vacation from my hospital bed, connecting with them at night because it was quieter then and I couldn't sleep. This kept me company in an incredible way.
Then, as I talked to my husband, or to people I met, or to friends who called me on the phone, I realized what was happening around me, independently of me. I also saw how my husband was truly taken by the hand and accompanied during those days. Just the other day, I woke up and said to myself, “I'm not afraid anymore. I'm really not afraid anymore. Because I've seen Him, I've seen how He works, and I've seen how He responds. I've really seen Him! So what can I be afraid of? If my present is a continuous receiving of Him every time I ask, I can't fear anything.”
I summarized it very quickly. There would be many other things I would have liked to say, as usual, but then I get tangled up. The question Mariangela asked me surprised me because before going into surgery, I said to a friend, “Let's prepare a little memento, just in case. If the Lord should take me this time.” And the phrase I had chosen was from this exact piece of text. It's impressive. I wrote: “Don't be afraid. I'm not afraid.”
And then I said, “Since Christ is a present event that is happening to me now, I am not afraid.” This is not because I am unconscious, but because at the moment when He happens and reveals Himself as the victor over death and evil—and as the lyrics of the song “Favola” that I suggested we listen to say, “I will never leave you”—you are not alone. When you experience being taken by the hand, the circumstance becomes an opportunity to relate to Him. I am no longer worried about what circumstances I will have to face. There are no longer good or bad circumstances. There is a circumstance, and there is the possibility for me to say, “Come, stay here with me, take my hand.”
As one of our friends from Rimini, a 14-year-old girl who was having surgery in Monza at the same time as me, said recently. Her mother—since she was also undergoing major surgery on her head—asked her, “What can I do for you to ease your pain?” She replied, “Mom, stay with me and hold my hand.” That's the point. And this, if you start to experience it, to ask and to see that it is so… because it is so, it is enough for you. And it's enough not because you're satisfied; it's enough because it's all you want. And I want everything.
Coming up against a reality that seems contrary to you, that is not what you want, that seems impossible to make you happy, can become an opportunity to experience that it is precisely something else that defines and fulfills you. It reminds me of a spring. The more you pull back on a slingshot, the more resistance it offers, and the more power it builds. I don't know why I have this somewhat silly example in my head, but that's how it is. Nothing holds me back; everything increases my desire.
“If even in one man these needs take root and assert themselves, it means that humanity as such is capable of these needs. And that man would become for us an irreplaceable provocation for the recovery of our humanity. Those needs would be activated in us thanks to the encounter with that Man.”
Does the fact that humanity is alive in other people give you hope? And what steps do you take to make what others experience your own?
Pierluigi Banna - Good evening, everyone. Listening to Maria Silvia, I am struck by how someone can say, “I am with You,” before a surgery—not because they are convinced of something or trying to be strong, but because they have gone through the shock of our human needs. As she spoke, I wrote them down: “I don't want to die,” “I don't want to be alone, even if my friends go on vacation,” “I don't want to be afraid,” which is to say, “I want certainty.” It strikes me to see how, in the impact of life's events—it could be an operation, not going on vacation, or a disappointment—these fundamental human needs emerge. Over time, they have become increasingly dear to me, because I find them to be the point of greatest understanding with others. These needs, in different ways, explode in all of us. The more life challenges us, the more they emerge and are the only way we can find a real answer to our problems.
I simply respond to what Maria Silvia says and add my own thoughts from this year. Recently, I spoke with a couple of friends who had to give birth to a stillborn baby. This story affected me deeply because it reminds me of my own story with my older brother, who was stillborn before me. They told me about their pain and said, “But why are you moved by this? When we tell others, it seems like we're putting something foul on the table. They're embarrassed. And so they seem to be in a hurry to get away.”
I don't know if you've ever said something personal and seen that the other person isn't there with you. In fact, perhaps you feel you have said something that made the other person uncomfortable. For me, however, everything I found fascinating about them was precisely their question that had burst forth—the question of fatherhood, of motherhood, of wondering where this child was, of what all this sacrifice had been for. And I felt these questions were very true for me and for them, because they are my questions.
Another thing that moved me deeply this year was a fifteen-year-old boy who said that at a certain point he didn't understand what was wrong with him. He wasn't going to church; he had been confirmed, but one day (he said he had “tried a bit of everything”), he got off the bus and saw the door of the church open. He entered the church and saw people praying. So he said, “So, something can be done here.”
And he started praying, too. At that moment, it was as if he had been touched in his need. Of all the people he could talk to, he went to a friend of his who he knows goes to Mass on Sundays and is in GS. I saw these two together because they wanted to go to confession at the Catholic office. But the most impressive thing for me was recognizing where this young man had found God. Just as God came to Silvia and said to her, “I am with you,” God reached this young man in that fear, in that uncertainty, in that restlessness that we all experience when life challenges us. The more the wall of limitation hits us, the more these needs are released.
To give a more recent example, last night I was having dinner with another priest, not from the movement, who, having ended up in a parish full of members of Communion and Liberation, asked me, “What are the things that have struck you most about Giussani?” Taken by surprise, I gave him a little speech: “That Christ is alive, as he speaks of him, he puts you before a Presence; that humanity is a beautiful thing, not a curse; and that these things go together: the more you encounter Christ, the more you are alive.” It seemed to me the simplest way possible, without using too much Communion and Liberation language, which people don’t understand. You think you’ve said the right thing, but then he says to me, “You know, when I was ordained, I used to say, ‘Jesus, You are my everything.’ But I wouldn’t write that now. Because then I started being a priest, with all the hardships of life. I had my difficulties. But I would never give up those difficulties, which made me discover the importance of my humanity.”
So I stopped him and said, “Excuse me, you're correcting me. I didn't explain things well before. Because now you've told me your life story. Now I'll tell you mine. What struck me about Giussani is exactly what you are saying: it is precisely that humanity, that wounded point I find in myself every morning, that allows me to say that Christ is alive.” It’s not that I said “Christ is alive” and then later questioned it. I can only say it because Giussani made me discover that this is the path. Like Tom Thumb in the fairy tale, who leaves little pebbles behind him, Christ has placed the pebble of these needs in my life to make me understand that He is there. When I said this, he was moved and said to me, “Now we understand each other. Now I think we are saying the same thing.”
Why am I telling you this? Because, to answer your question, I have to walk the whole path with my human nature and feel this sympathy, even in front of other people. I have a friend who always provokes me when he tells me that he only met two men before becoming a priest, Giussani and Carrón, but then he adds, “But you, too, can be on this path.” And I think that this is truly the journey of life: putting your humanity before everything else, just as it is. Because this humanity is the point through which God calls you to discover who He is in your life. I would even dare to say if He is there.
You know, there was a great monk in Cascinazza named Quique. A man went to confess to him two days before he died—he died suddenly—and said something beautiful to him, something I have repeated to myself often lately: “You know, when I entered the monastery so many years ago, I tried with all my strength to become a monk. In recent years, I have come to understand that I want to become Quique, to be ready to meet Him.” That, for me, is the point. It takes great courage to be yourself—to have this total loyalty and love for yourself, just as you are. Because this is the starting point that God gives you to discover the truth of life.
“Conscience is given by a voice, a voice we have inside us, which constitutes us. Even if some among us could repeat, ‘There is no one who hears the voice calling in the darkness,’ even he would have to say, ‘But why does the voice exist?’ The defense of this voice: this is our intention. The defense of this voice that coincides with every person in the world, in society. The defense of this voice in our own lives, in your life.”
Moderator - What is this voice for you? And what does it mean to defend it in life?
Maria Silvia - I'm not very theoretical, so I beg your pardon in advance!.
Modeator - Thank goodness!
Maria SIlvia - The experience I am going through is all-encompassing. It cannot be satisfied and tolerates no half-measures. It makes me sink into reality as it is, and as I said before, everything is an opportunity to ask Him to make me happy. I don't want to be calm and serene; I want to be happy. I want to live. I really want the Lord to find me alive when He comes to take me. This need that I feel within me, which makes my life life… lately I often repeat: “I want to earn my life by living.” And it's a fixed point for me. I realize when I am earning it by living, because it's when I give myself completely and when I listen to this voice.
This voice, which I hear inside me and which makes me who I am, doesn't allow me to stop crying out. It's just like the song “Povera Voce”: it has to cry out because it has to ask for meaning. Lately, I've noticed—and I can become a bit unbearable at times—that when I'm in moments of prayer with friends or simply in conversation, even the most trivial things become an opportunity to go deeper into the encounter.
For example, every morning, with some friends from the Community School and some others we meet along the way, we have a moment of SdC (two minutes at most) before reciting the Angelus at 7:45 a.m. Immediately after, we recite the Angelus with some friends from Urbino, but that's another story. On these occasions, we talk to each other, and I cannot help but reaffirm what I am experiencing. So if someone says, “Let's hope that exam goes well!” I cannot help but ask, “Excuse me, what do you mean, ‘let's hope that exam goes well’? Does that mean, ‘go the way you want it to,’ or simply ‘go well’? I find it hard to say, ‘Let's hope the report is okay.’ The report is okay if it goes well. But my life can't depend on a report.”
Let me share another story. I don't know if it's relevant—excuse me, I'm not very clever—or if it even has anything to do with the answer…
Intelligence is what makes us human! Giussani told us this his whole life. Intelligence is what makes us human in relation to others, my friends. So, the more someone is in a relationship with the good Lord, the more intelligent they are. Sorry, I reacted.
No, you're doing just fine. For example, we were talking to a grandmother who was worried because her daughter was expecting a baby who might have caught a virus in the womb. And she says, “She has to have this test”—I don't know what test it is—“it's a test that's also a little invasive, even a little dangerous.” So I looked at my priest friend from Pesaro and said, “But why are you taking this test? You're not going to have an abortion. Why are you doing it?” And in fact, my priest friend looked at me and asked, “Why are you taking this test?”
These seem like trivial things, but I realize that I am beginning to make St. Paul's words my own: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” I am beginning to see a change. I am no longer satisfied with trivialities or clichés. If He was born, lived, and rose again, I believe in the Resurrection, and I believe that He loves us.
For example, when they told me about the fourth tumor in my head, which they then removed, I said to Father Eugenio during Mass—I'm part of the little squares: “I had been asking for a miracle all day. I had gone to Giussani's tomb asking for the metastases in my head to disappear… and instead, there is a fourth one.” And he said, “But you have received the miracle. You have already had it because you are here. You should have died two years ago, and you are here.” But then I said, “And then it's true, because all day long I think, ‘But if I, who am bad, give good things to my son, how much more should God, who is good, give me good things?’ And since I pray that Father Giussani will take away all evil, obviously this is not evil if He does not take it away.”
This was to tell you about the change that is taking place, a change that leads me to speak and to be—more than to speak—a somewhat provocative presence at times, but in any case, what I must be. If I am here, it is because He makes me be here. This is my certainty. I wasn't supposed to be here. According to the doctors, I should already be dead, but I'm here. And I said, “If I'm here, it's because You make me be here. And if You make me be here, there must be a purpose, a reason.” So, in my life, I can do nothing but say “yes” and listen to this voice.
Pierluigi Banna - But are you better now?
Maria Silvia - No, at the moment they've only removed the fourth metastasis that had just appeared, to see what it is. I still have the three metastases in my brain…
Moderator - She says this with a laugh. Either we are visionaries, or we are listening. “Dormant needs are reactivated thanks to an encounter. Instead of the word ‘encounter,’ in the background of the word ‘encounter,’ we can use another word: event, something that happens,” says Giussani. “Needs that have been extinguished, dulled, degraded, obliterated, suffocated, and trivialized are reactivated only thanks to an event, something that happens and whose total face is an encounter, whose entire definition is an encounter.”
Can you tell us how this happened to you and what your experience has been like?
Pierluigi Banna - As Maria Silvia just described, it's something that changes your outlook. You enter a situation thinking you have to manage it, looking at all the bad things that have happened, and instead, someone looks at you and brings out the good, starting from the good that these needs represent and giving them a new form. Put like that, it may not be clear, but for me, the paradigm of it all was when, at a dinner, a religion teacher took something I had said jokingly seriously: “I have no friends.” It's as if she had taken that and turned it into a need—the need to find a true friend. I hadn't found one and had already resigned myself to the idea of not having one. She gave this need a new form because she spent the whole evening talking about this question, taking it seriously, provoking me, challenging me… until, the following week, she gave me a note with a song, “Favola,” which we heard earlier.
This is the paradigm, because every time it happens to me in life, you are there thinking you have to manage these needs, almost ashamed of them, not brandishing them as the tool that allows you to discover the truth, as I said before. But then someone comes along and sees them as the most precious thing you have, something that leads you to your destiny, to God. We could say that these people bring you the gaze that God has on that circumstance.
I'll tell you another story, because otherwise you won't understand. A girl from Catania, my hometown, was working in Milan and met a handsome colleague who was a bit of a heartthrob. She said there was an aura of mystery around him, making him seem unapproachable. One day, she plucked up her courage and asked him, “Are you married?”
“No.” “So would you mind if I asked for your phone number so we could go out?” That takes guts! And he said, “No, but I'm busy. If you want, I'll explain why.” She replied, “Okay, let's go out, and you can explain why.”
Over dinner, he explained that he's part of the Memores Domini. What impressed me was that this girl said, “It's not that I don't like this guy, but the more he talked, the more interesting his story became. It was something that interested me more, that touched me.” But with these very words, she said, “God is such a rascal! I haven't been to confession since my first communion, but now I feel the need to meet Him again.”
That encounter drew on her needs, starting from her desire to meet that young man, but it gave her something much more noble, greater, and broader than she could have imagined. This episode impressed me because, if I think about the most decisive encounters in my life, I could go into detail about the times I asked questions, questions that I still ask Carrón today. I have to admit that every time, he turns the tables on me, helping me discover a much deeper dimension within myself than I had seen before, and thus reshaping my needs.
Another thing I would say is that this encounter, by giving shape to things, makes you realize what you didn't see before. Very often we talk about our moments of encounter as moments of relief, but in the sense of an escape from circumstances. Instead, what surprises me most is that these real encounters, as you said just now, put you back in front of evidence that your eyes couldn't see before, because they were so caught up in images of how things should be, in your dreams.
So you end up saying what you said before: “I could not have been here, but I am.” If we think about it, this is not only true for you, but also for me: “We could not have been here, but we are.” Yet, this fact only becomes clear to me thanks to an encounter; otherwise, I would forget it. At times, the deadline for submitting my article seems more important. I fall behind schedule and think—I confess, it's bullshit—that my life will be judged by that. After all that the Lord has done for you, you let yourself be influenced by this?
Yes! Yet something happens that makes you look up. It doesn't free you from anxiety or the circumstances, but it makes you look back at that evidence. But what is the greatest thing? That you are here right now. You could not be here, and yet you are. Is that worth more or less than the deadline? It is worth more because it embraces the deadline, because it doesn't make you run away from the three metastases that remain.
The other day, I got in my car very early to go visit the body of a dear priest friend, who was 92 years old. I don't actually live in Milan; I live in Venegono, and he wasn't exactly in Milan, so I had to cross the diocese from northwest to southeast, which was a long drive. To avoid the morning traffic, I got in the car and said the Litanies, the Office, the Community School—all in the car. But at a certain point, after doing everything I had to do, I asked myself: what binds me to Father Gianni, who is in heaven and whose body is still here? What binds Father Gianni to me now that makes me move? It became clear that Father Gianni and I were greater than everything that would have determined me at that moment: the traffic, the appointment, the delay. There was something indestructible about Father Gianni and me, and this was more evident than all my thoughts. It is a moment like that, when you experience it, that you would not change anything in your life to live it. On the contrary, you understand that you have lived your whole life to experience that moment of self-awareness. At that moment it was not only Father Gianni who had died, but there was Father Giussani, all the people I had met, all my friends. I was like the king of my life, because everything was in my hands, connected to the One who made me.
This is the greatest evidence that the encounter gives you: not that you are able to manage your life better—like, “thanks to the encounter with the Movement, I can earn more, have more children,” because sometimes we think of the hundredfold in this way. Too little! If only that were all. Instead, the hundredfold is making you aware that at this moment you are in a relationship with Another, and life breathes when you are suspended by the sign of this Other.
For me, this is what makes me breathe like never before, because after a while, all beautiful things bore me, even a song. It's beautiful, but after a while, you can't just repeat it. It could be the most beautiful friendship, but then you see the limits. But the thing that makes me embrace all these things, including their limits, without giving them up, is being suspended in the moment-to-moment relationship with the One who does all these things. For me, an encounter is an encounter when it puts you in a relationship with Someone who makes you who you are now—that is, when it leaves you speechless before a presence. Then, yes, it's an encounter. Before that, it's just an emotionally compelling, exciting impact, but it's an encounter when it leaves you speechless before the presence it creates.
Moderator - “Our goal, first and foremost, has never been to create a strong company. Our aim is not to create a strong company, a community that imposes itself on others. That's what other people believe, because we project onto others what we are ourselves. Our goal, our passion, is to create a new man within you, just as I am committed to creating a new man within myself.”
What is your experience of this way of conceiving and living community?
Maria Silvia - In this sense, the experience I've had for the last three years with the “squares” is truly exemplary. Why is it exemplary? I became part of this group of friends who connect daily for Mass with one question, the one I mentioned at the beginning: true life, eternal life. (I want eternal life; I want to live for eternity.)
With this question, I committed myself to a relationship, to a community, to a place, but following my own personal path—so personal that I remember phone calls I made to a friend of ours who is now in heaven, where I told her, “You either live your preference, or you don't live it. We can't just tell it to each other; we can't just impose it on things. If you're happy, you're happy. I can't say I'm happy when I'm not.” And I asked to experience it firsthand.
It was such a personal journey that I remember the summer of 2022, when we little squares met with Carrón and I spoke to him about the desert (in fact, many people remembered me as “the one from the desert”). A Memores friend of mine who lives abroad had suggested I go visit her and wanted to take me to the desert, and I said, “No, thank you, I've had enough.” Because if there's one thing I hate, it's the desert. I'm a water person, a sea person, and sand almost hurts me.
But then, on the very day I exchanged messages with my friend, there was a reading from Hosea that says, “I will take you by the hand, I will lead you into the desert and I will speak to your heart.” And I opened myself up. Because I said, “If Jesus speaks to my heart in the desert, takes me by the hand, and leads me with Him, I want to go.” In fact, I wrote to my friend: “Okay, I'll come to the desert with you.” Carrón, to whom I told this, said to me, “Why is the desert exemplary? Because it is the most arid place on earth, where nothing grows, and yet Jesus manages to make the desert bloom. And if you see someone who makes the desert bloom…” That is really what I said at the beginning: what are we afraid of? What can we be afraid of?
And above all, this personal relationship with Jesus, which I compare—excuse me, I'm a bit romantic—to the moment when Princess Sissi is chosen by the King as his bride. She didn't expect it because her sister was supposed to marry the King, and she—who is in love, rightly so—is preparing for the wedding. There is this moment in the film, this journey on the river in a boat in which she is taken to meet her future husband. What I am experiencing is the encounter with the One who has chosen me, from whom I have been chosen. I was chosen by the One I love most. I don't know if I'm explaining myself. I wasn't chosen from a list of reserves, but by the One I love. And I affirm this here with my husband present: chosen by Him (with a capital H), who passes through him (with a slightly less capital H). It is this relationship that is truly love, truly preference.
I am 65 years old, and for most of my life, I have felt like Calimero, the character from the cartoon series: “Nobody loves me,” “I'm small and black.” But lately, the first thing I exclaimed when they found metastases in my brain was, “How much I am loved!” I mean, I can't help but say, “I am tremendously loved.” And this changes everything, because it changes the fact that you are truly precious in His eyes, just as each of us is precious in His eyes, and every person who is given to you is an immense gift.
So, the companionship becomes the place of this love. Just yesterday, Father Eugenio, talking to some friends, quoted something I had said: “I am impressed to see how every day I fall more in love with these little square friends.” We are all down and out, we are in a bad way, but discovering that you are in love is a beautiful thing. It is something extra, because it is not essential—I am sure of that—but when you experience it, your heart truly explodes. And that is why the company is no longer something that has to replace us or to which I have to entrust my relationship with Christ, but it is, as I said before, the place of this love. It is precisely the way in which He wants to make Himself present, because I am a human being, so every morning I ask to recognize the signs of His love and His presence. It comes naturally to me to ask. Because if you don't recognize it, you can still be loved, but if you don't recognize that you are loved, you are not happy.
I'll open another small parenthesis, just a tiny one: the other day I went to visit my sister-in-law in the hospital (the person I hoped would take care of my husband when I'm gone. But no, my sister-in-law is worse off than I am). [laughs] Oh well, let's leave it at that. [laughs, laughter] Sorry, I'm not laughing because she's ill; I'm laughing because the situation is truly bizarre. Anyway, my husband and I went to visit my sister-in-law, and I was struck by the fact that while I couldn't help smiling at her and covering her with kisses, she was all closed in on herself, angry at the world, and almost unable to recognize all the good she had around her.
She was surrounded by love because she had her two wonderful children, her husband, and two grandchildren with her, who served and revered her. My husband and I, on the other hand, had nothing in Milan but sad salads from the bar on the first floor! So I understood that you can be loved as much as you want, but you have to recognize it. It's precisely the attitude towards the light or towards the darkness that Father Giussani talks about. I would have given everything to be able to convey my affection and all my certainty to her.
I'll end with this sentence because it's something I said yesterday to another friend who is also very ill. I said to him, “Do you realize that we are called to give our lives? Right now, we are called to give our lives. But not only that; we are called to give life. We give life to others.” And so, whether you are there or not, whether your work and your personal relationship are there or not, it makes a difference. Because that one you mentioned before, the one who takes a different approach within a story, truly allows the Lord to work. That is all.
Moderator - “This meeting, which could remain empty words, can become our work. Work, not speeches that are like puddles in which one drowns in a thin slime. This work is not voluntarism, which always leads to exasperation. This work has a more precise name: experience. The meeting must become the development of an experience. It is called work because an experience is the impact of a subject, of an ego, of a person with reality. It is not enough for someone to live and feel this impact. In fact, experience is not multiplying impacts with reality.”
Can you tell us about the work you do so that this meeting does not go to waste, so that life is not a series of impacts with reality, of blow after blow, but rather an experience?
Pierluigi Banna - As Maria Silvia said, we can have a “ward” full of the best things, full of affection, and not even notice it. For me, the work of my life is first and foremost to notice what has happened to me. I was struck by your mention of Princess Sissi, because I wanted to talk about something similar. In the Song of Songs, there is a scene similar to the story of Princess Sissi.
The bride is one of the courtesans chosen by the king, and she and the king meet several times. She waits for the encounter with this unique privilege she has received. One of the first Christians to comment on the Song of Songs was one of the Church Fathers I study, Origen. He focused on a passage that struck me. After a meeting between the beloved and the lover, the lover says, “Beautiful soul, know yourself.” And Origen comments, “But why does the lover, when he meets you, say, ‘Know yourself’?” Because the beloved not only needs to be loved, but wants you to discover his love in you; otherwise, you might mistake it for many other forms of love.
This struck me deeply, because it is what Giussani says. If I have to state the difference between the many beautiful things I've experienced—even the many people whom I have heard speak sincerely about Jesus in the seminary and in theology—it is this method that Father Giussani says is a gift that he has. Carrón has repeated it with such force.
Even in his recent texts, we can see how this method of experience is what he emphasizes most. The fact is that the impact is not enough; you need to discover what this impact says about you, what discovery it leads you to make about yourself. Because only the Lord of your life can help you discover who you are in a new way.
This aspect of “knowing yourself” is what has challenged me most personally this year in my work on The Sense of Religion. After we have seen in chapter ten that man is made moment by moment by a force greater than himself, Giussani continually makes us do a work of reason and affection—to look at the signs, to interpret the signs—because it is not enough to recognize that reality is made. You need to make your own journey in the face of this fact.
And in recent months, I have been challenged as never before by Giussani’s provocation: after something has happened, what has it made you discover about yourself? Otherwise, the next day we find ourselves confusing lobster with fish sticks, because we tend to think that it's all fish anyway. If you haven't realized the quality of what a certain reality has brought to you, you say, “Oh well, if the diet calls for fish, lobster or fish sticks are the same thing.”
Metaphors aside, there was an episode that impressed me. We had a wonderful dinner with some priest friends one evening, one of those dinners you remember because they bring you back to a Presence. What I was saying before: not just talking about Jesus, but putting yourself in front of Someone who is happening. And there I was, stunned, as if to say, “But I'm here because this is what won me over from the beginning!” I repeated my yes, so to speak.
The next day, I got up at 4 a.m., without an alarm clock, because I was anxious about having to correct 100 pages for my beloved students who had left it to the last minute. I basically had from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. to correct these papers because my whole day was full of other things I couldn't reschedule. And I was angry because I said, “Damn it, after such a beautiful evening, I wake up anxious!” As if that evening had left no trace. No, I was angry because that evening hadn't taken away my anxiety. I thought, “What? I was in front of Jesus, and there's still a problem?” That's how we think, right? And it was a struggle, doing those little tasks, one by one. I couldn't go to the chapel to pray; no, I was there correcting. And as I corrected, I kept asking, “But does what I saw last night set me free? Is what I saw last night stronger? Is what I saw last night worth more than this anxiety?” It was a struggle, but I went on correcting, and in the end, I even finished everything.
What I discovered in the end was being able to say, “Yes, Your presence is more powerful”—as you said, Maria Silvia, going through circumstances much heavier than my anxiety. In the afternoon, I was talking about it with a friend and I said to him, “But why do we have to start over with this struggle every morning? Why do I hate my freedom so much that I have to go through this anxiety again?” And he gave me an answer that left me speechless: “Because otherwise you wouldn't have understood the significance of what happened last night at dinner. Now you realize what happened to you because it was able, in your weakness, to stand up to your anxiety for four hours straight. Do you realize what happened last night? You'll remember this episode precisely because of the journey you've been on; otherwise, you would have forgotten about dinner.” In fact, I haven't forgotten, and I'm telling you about it.
Why was it a turning point for me? Because looking at those moments when things seem to be falling apart, instead of seeing it as the moment where you say, “Okay, let's see what I've experienced. Let's see what can withstand the impact of this confrontation.” This struggle, this ‘warrior’ who has taken over my life, is so powerful that He won't let me cross the river, as He did with Jacob. Why is He there, despite my imaginings? Only through this experience will I be able to say, “God is there, and He has won! Because I saw that He held out for those four hours.” For me, this is what it means to have an experience.
I could stop here, but I will recount another episode that impressed me because it is a path, as Mariangela said at the beginning, that Father Giussani gave us not so that we could learn and repeat it, but so that each of us could live it in an original way. I was struck by meeting a young man at Christmas and Easter who had lost his father. At Christmas, a few weeks after his loss, he was overwhelmed with questions, saying, “It's all well and good, all the affection shown at his death and funeral, but why did it happen?” I told him to keep these questions open, that this is life, the way through which you can discover if there is an answer. “I'm not anticipating anything except giving you this path.”
Then Easter arrived, two days before Easter, and he said to me, “You know that I experienced the temptation of Barabbas? When the Jews said, ‘Do you want Barabbas or Christ?’ they chose Barabbas. And I said in my prayer to Jesus, ‘Between Your cross and my father's life, I would prefer my father's life and would send You to the cross.’ And do you know what's most impressive?” he asked me. “That He went to the cross. But when I look at His cross, I can't explain how, but I understand that my dad isn't taken away from me.”
This passage here, where we have to fight through circumstances with all the questions we have inside us—which are the expression of our needs—is where we see what resists, what wins. And over time, you see that looking at what wins—looking at Him who takes up the cross, looking at that point that resists anxiety—makes life blossom.
And this is the last thing I will say: why does He make it blossom? Because deep down, our aspiration is to fix circumstances, to forget them. Whereas the greatest thing about Jesus, who loves us more than we love ourselves, is that He allows us to experience. This means that He makes those scars, those metastases, that anxiety, important. Our aspiration is to overcome and forget them, but instead, He imprints them on our bodies as points through which He makes us learn Who He is. For me, this is ultimately the hundredfold. We must not imagine the hundredfold in a material way, as 100 more images. Sometimes, if our images were to come true, they would be hell! But instead, those scars that you wanted to remove become a channel of grace that you would never have expected. And nothing, nothing, nothing is lost.
Moderator - For those who are able to speak after what we have heard, we have 10 minutes for questions. So, anyone who wishes to do so can come to the microphone.
Question - Hello. I wanted to ask very simply if you could repeat why you didn't feel alone during the dramatic moments you experienced. I'll tell you about something that happened two years ago. I had a moment of crisis where I ended up hurting myself and woke up the next morning in the hospital. So, I'm a little ashamed to say this because, in my case, it's something that was my fault, let's say. But at that moment, when I woke up and couldn't remember anything, I felt a tremendous loneliness that shocked me. Even today, I still feel it. So, I just wanted to ask that.
Question - Unlike you, I also have something wrong under my scalp. I experience fear from time to time, because if they told me the day after tomorrow that I had to go to the Creator, I would sign up immediately. But between now and then, you don't know how much there is in between. In particular, I'm afraid that my wife might leave me. The idea of being alone scares me. For me, fear is somewhat inevitable. If my wife is an hour late, I start asking myself, “Why is she late? What's happened to her?” And so on. Fear is inevitable for me, from a certain point of view. So I ask myself, what helps me overcome it? Because I believe that life is a struggle, not peaceful and smooth. So when fear arises, what allows us to overcome it?
Question - To complete the picture of all these very important questions, I too live like this: I am up because I recognize Him as present; I am down because I do not recognize Him and I withdraw into myself. There is no longer any stability; either I am up or I am down. So, I'm asking: How can you maintain the awareness, when you are anxious or afraid, that this is actually the path for Him to act? That it is He who acts, not me, who can pull you out of fear, pull you out of anxiety, pull you out of anguish? What allows you to maintain an awareness of His presence, to recognize Him, and not always have these ups and downs?
Pierluigi Banna - The first question was for you, about loneliness. Go on!
Maria Silvia - I'm a little hard of hearing, I apologize to the first person who asked the question. I'm also a bit blind and now I can't see him… I'm in a terrible state! The answer, which I think connects to the other two questions, is getting to the bottom of who truly keeps you company. Because you can only overcome loneliness if you live your life, look around you, and see reality for what it is—you can't just think about it. Who really keeps you company? What do you really need?
I'm very much alone, especially this last year, because I can't drive, I don't go out on my own, and I'm at home because my husband works. Every now and then a friend comes to pick me up and takes me around the block. So, I spend hours at home. Sometimes, like everyone else, I can get bored, but most of the time I realize that loneliness depends on how my heart faces reality. Because maybe I watch a movie, and that movie speaks to me a lot, because my heart is still searching. And I've realized through experience that true companionship is not just the physical presence of people around me, but His companionship.
An example: this winter I went to visit my son who needed me because he was buying a house. My husband was working, so I went alone. I wasn't feeling very well; my arm was hurting. On the last day, I wrote to my doctor to ask if he could give me a stronger painkiller. This doctor, who is young and wonderful, called me instead of just texting back. He asked me a few things and then said, “But you sound down.” This was a stab in the heart for me, because me, feeling down? No way. So I said, “Look, this has probably been a busy week.” And he said, “Okay, let's do this: when you get back to Pesaro, if you still feel that way, let me know, and I'll give you some medicine to cheer you up.”
I hung up the phone and stood there alone in my son's house, face-to-face with the reason I felt that way. I was down. And I realized—I remember writing this down—that I missed Him. I missed the Lord. Then, it coincided with my husband's arrival. He came to pick me up on Saturday morning, and from that moment on, life took shape again. The moment I realized that I missed Him, even before He made Himself present, it was as if He had already answered me.
So what I can tell you is this: go to the bottom of who really keeps you company. And ask, because that is our grace. Yesterday, Father Eugenio was talking about children, but we are like that too. In times of suffering, we can call on Him, ask Him, just like a child asks its mother. A great friend of ours wrote a poem that said, “The wound becomes a loophole,” a place where He can enter. I'm not good at giving advice, but what I can say is this: every sacrifice, every effort, everything that makes us struggle—let's turn it into an opportunity. And so let's start asking, even breaking down the doors of those who are older than us or those who are close to us, you understand? If you need me, call me! I'll come with all my heart!
Pierluigi Banna - Sometimes, in reference to the third question, we ask for a kind of mood stabilizer in our relationship with Christ so that we don't have too many ups and downs. But in reality, I see it this way: if you start to experience these ups and downs, it's like searching for a radio frequency. But the frequency of what? Of the relationship with the One. Because the problem is this: the more familiar the relationship with Him is, the less I ask in life for the ups and downs to be removed, and the more I ask that He become more familiar, whether I am flying high or sinking low. Because, as Maria Silvia said, both the high and the low can be an opportunity for a relationship. In the end, what else do we want? Flatness? Mediocrity? Instead, the beauty of life is seeing how both the highs and the lows are His, as Psalm 139 says: whether I am in darkness and the shadow surrounds me, or whether I am in the light of day, You are there with me.
But what is the way, not to stabilize our imbalances, but to be able to make everything a relationship? What is the first step? We are faced with an Other, and we cannot control this Other. Sometimes we are, in my opinion, a little superstitious. As if by saying an extra rosary we can win Him over, or by saying an extra Mass we can win His favor. What idea do we have of God, that we have to buy Him? Since I do not have Him at my disposal—because, as The Religious Sense says, He is something else, a Mystery that surprises us every time—what is the way in which I can stand before this Mystery? He has left us a way, and that is our humanity. That is, to say: I don't know how, but now I find myself with this fear. Who can fill this fear? Whose lack is this fear? Deep down, even if your wife were there, it would be like Adam, who felt alone until God gave him Eve. But even that is not enough, you understand? So you ask: but then who will really keep me company? Your humanity is the a path you can take to place yourself before the Mystery.
And you will say to me, what about the community in all this? For me, a community is truly a community the more it places me before the Mystery and makes me love this heart of mine. Because otherwise, it's not company, it's a distraction. It stabilizes your mood, makes you more useful to society, gives you techniques for being better, but this is also done elsewhere, in other associations. Instead, someone who makes you increasingly aware of this heart as an instrument can only be someone given to you as a gift by the Lord of this heart. At the end of The Religious Sense, Giussani says that it is God Himself who is speaking to you, who places you before the mystery and makes you love your heart. Look, I would examine all the friends we think we have according to this criterion. If they don't have these characteristics, I don't know how many friends they really are.
Moderator - I would like to say just one thing to the friend who spoke first. I wanted to thank you for what you shared. And to tell you one thing: when someone asks a question like that, it is because they are already in the presence of Someone. That loneliness is relational. The same loneliness that you have is the loneliness that I have, and it is the only way for me to fall in love with Christ. I thank you for putting me and all of us before the Mystery, so that the silence that reigns among us now is the position that most corresponds to the heart. What our friends have communicated to us this evening is a life that poses a single question to each of us: Do I want to live like this?
We have just seen that it is possible to live this way; it has happened right before our eyes. Whether I want to live this way is a question that each of us must now ask ourselves.
The notes and its translation have not been revised by the speakers.
