Revealed in Experience
Julián Carrón - The text reports a conversation between Julián Carrón and a group of friends that took place in Sanxenxo in the summer of 2025.
Intervention: The last two years have been difficult. I broke up with my boyfriend, which meant suffering, but also rediscovering the love of Christ. After a very difficult journey, and after months, the last period has been one of great joy, especially at school and with my students. I felt a great love for them and a passion for their future. In short, it has been a period of great happiness. Talking to my friends who are in the same situation—they do not have a boyfriend or husband—they told me that it is nice for them to have time to love their students. They told me that they are happy with this situation because it allows them to devote themselves to their work. It seems like a peaceful solution, and on the one hand, I would like to be content and think that I am fine with what I have. But coming here reopens wounds and the measure of desire. I see that the more I am attracted to Christ, the more my desire for someone to love me grows. The two go together. I would like you to help me understand this.
Julián: This is a question I am often asked. Just last week, I was asked a similar one. It is as if, not yet having a definite vocation in life, we ask ourselves: what do I do in the meantime? In reality, what you are doing is the answer to the situation you are experiencing. Why? Because you are not simply waiting for a boyfriend to come along, but you are exploring the possibility of Christ filling your life. If you do not have this experience during these years, you will not even know how to love your boyfriend when he arrives, or you will not know how to live the way the Mystery calls you. That is why you have the two possibilities you described to start seeing if they respond to you, to see what allows you to live now: the work and relationships that are most familiar to you, or the verification of Christ, with His claim to respond to the needs of the human heart. And this is regardless of how the future will unfold before your eyes.
We never waste time when we take our lives seriously. Taking your life seriously means taking seriously the question, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself?” (Mt 16:26). This question is concise because it is the need to live. Giussani connects this phrase of Jesus to the irreducibility of the person. This is our person: we are made for something, and if we do not find that something, even if our work is going well and our relationships are functioning, we will not be able to truly answer this question. So, who has made us an offer that meets the need for fulfillment that we all have? Jesus' offer is very simple: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). He is the only one who has had the courage to tell us that we have this irreducibility, that He came precisely to respond to it. In order to love freely, to work with enthusiasm, not to depend on the responses of others, we must follow this path, or it will be difficult not to remain stuck, both now, because we are waiting for the bridegroom, and in the future, because, not having faced the great problem of our fullness in all its density, we will not find satisfaction in work that goes well or in emotional responses. For this reason, it seems to me that the path you are following is the most appropriate: take advantage of everything and wait for the Mystery to reveal itself more and more in your life.
A problem of knowledge
Intervention: I am Venezuelan and have been living in Madrid for four years. First of all, I want to thank you for being here. A few months ago, my mother came from Venezuela. She lives there, in a context we are familiar with, with many difficulties. She also lives in an inland area of the country, where the difficulties are more evident. She is responsible for the Communion and Liberation movement in that community. She came to visit us to be with her granddaughter and with us. One evening I came home from a normal day, after doing a thousand things at work, and while we were having dinner I was telling her about my day, and at one point she said to me: “I'm going to bed because if I keep listening to you complain, I'll wake up depressed.” She went to bed and I was stunned. I exhausted my mother! This is too much! My mother lives in a difficult place and faces very hard things, and she never complains. Just the day before, we had gone out with friends after school, and I had said to them, “I challenge you to make my mother complain about something.” That evening, I stayed up talking to Koana (my wife) while we tidied up the kitchen, and when I went to bed and passed my mother's room, she was not asleep but was reading. I had exhausted her with my complaints!
From that moment on, I realized that at some point I had drifted away: how could it be that complaining prevailed in me when, compared to the situation four years ago when I arrived, I had everything and even more? Not only materially, but we were welcomed, we received blessings and gifts, such as our little girl and Koana's new pregnancy. Yet at the end of the day, I find myself spewing out a lot of complaints, and that is the summary of the day... I felt sad and talked about it with some friends. One of them, for example, said to me, “How nice that complaining bothers you.” Something similar happened to me when we had the introductory meeting with you two days ago. My wife stayed outside with the baby, and when I came out, she asked me how it went. I replied, “It was hot.”
I realized it right away, and then I also said to her, “No, it was incredible because of this and that.” I feel miserable in that sense.
Julián: Life can be wasted in complaints, despite all the gifts we receive. This is an interesting point to reflect on in your life. In moments like these, when you realize it with the clarity with which you said it, the question arises: “Do you want to waste your life living?” as Eliot says. The question is to use what appears to be evident in our experience: no one has complained about you, you yourself have seen the awareness of what is missing grow. There is no gift that could be more interesting to a person who wants to embark on a journey than when the symptoms of illness appear. An illness without symptoms would be terrible: when you realize you have it, you are already in the grave. Here, symptoms appear that we can use to ask ourselves what kind of journey we are on and what it arouses in me, what urgency I perceive so that lamentation does not prevail, that is, so that the secondary does not prevail over the essential. This is the question that everyone must ask themselves.
Intervention: A quick example, which I think has something to do with this. Some time ago, I went on vacation with some friends and, during dinner, my boyfriend commented that he sometimes gets bored or tired of me. This stuck with me, and the next day, as we were returning from our trip, I was still thinking about it. When we were almost there, he took out his cell phone and started watching soccer. I got angrier and angrier: I was furious, and he started watching soccer while I was driving. So I started making an endless list of everything that makes me angry. After thinking about it for a while, I said to myself, “But... who does not get tired of me? Is there anyone in the world who does not get bored with me, who always finds me interesting or attractive?” I was surprised, and these questions brought this thought to mind: “I miss myself, this is who I am.” As if there were a point of joy in this experience. I am telling you this because I do not want to miss it: what is going on here? Why, when I find myself with these questions, when my irreducibility emerges, is there a point of joy in realizing that this is who I am?
Julián: What do you think?
Intervention: I have lots of examples like this. I will tell you about a more recent one. After spending several days with my boyfriend, we found ourselves in front of a beautiful sunset and I was reminded of the scene with Giussani and his mother when he says: “How beautiful the world is and how great God is!” Suddenly, the horizon widened, and I perceived something interesting for me in the discovery of the question of who I am and who my boyfriend is, in the desire to be loved. I would not change these questions.
Julián: It strikes me that when these things happen, the problem of living clearly emerges. Because one can wait for a boyfriend to come along, but you have one and you have not solved the problem; or another waits for their dream job, finds it, and gets stuck again. We can use whatever words we want, but all this speaks to the irreducibility we talked about at the beginning, which is always the starting point for Giussani: “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself?” (Mt 16:26). It is not that you have to give up your boyfriend, your job, everything you have to do, but all these things, without addressing the fundamental question of living, do not provide an answer. It is essential to use these things that happen to everyone—when it is not my boyfriend who is bored with me, it is me who is bored with myself, or things that do not work—so that the essential question emerges: who am I? Who am I?
Growing in self-awareness, says Giussani, is fundamental. You were not thinking about your self-awareness: as you lived, the provocation “but who am I?” emerged with complete clarity. This is valuable in understanding that even if we may perceive the word “self-awareness” as something difficult to grasp in its meaning, it becomes clear in experience. The experience you are recounting, like that recounted by the previous speaker, documents this nature of our self. For this reason, without addressing this question, we are always groping in the dark. Not because we are fragile, but because we do not address the decisive question in order to be able to walk, take steps, and chart a course to respond, with ever greater clarity, to this question that emerges in all our daily gestures. How many of these moments could each of us recount? One person is bored with his girlfriend and another bores his mother... It is not a matter of philosophical reflection, but something we encounter. We end up boring others, others get bored with me... That is why I say that in Giussani's text on self-awareness[1], we understand why he has the courage to take the bull by the horns. Friends, this is the fundamental problem. If everything we do is not aimed at seeing what path we can take to respond to this, to the irreducible need of our self, then we are constantly rethinking things. But not because we are sinners; that is not the problem. Boring your boyfriend is not a sin. Let's be clear: if he does not understand who he is, he will not be able to understand why you bore him. Even if he loves you very much and is enchanted by your beauty and your humanity, you will always be a drop that cannot satisfy his desire for infinity. It is not a question of wickedness, of being grumpy or heavy. This has nothing to do with the underlying issue.
Here we are talking about a problem of knowledge rather than ethics: who is able to fill my heart in whatever situation I find myself in? Who is able to respond to all the needs we have within us? The more we become aware of this, living—not with definitions of self-awareness—the more we are aware of this irreducibility, the more we realize that nothing can respond. In this moment of apparent disorientation and general confusion in society, what does not disappear is this irreducibility. It is something that emerges with all its clarity in very different people, in different human conditions. It reappears over and over again, as if the question ultimately lies in Jesus' question: what good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself? Having this before us prevents us from being distracted by other things. It cannot be resolved by attending premarital courses. It is addressed by embarking on a path that allows the person to enter into a relationship with their own nature.
Thank goodness you exist!
Intervention: I am surprised by how familiar you are with Christ. You are good at giving examples, challenging people, and understanding the problem behind the questions we ask because you start from a real knowledge that strikes me, hurts me, and makes me want more. At lunch, I asked you how you came to be so familiar with Christ. You replied, “You have to examine everything that happens to you.”
Julián: I have nothing else to tell you except what you see happening in your life. If, as we said before, someone finds themselves in this situation in an important relationship, such as the one they have with their boyfriend, and they do not use it to look them in the face and see how they respond, what path they must take to see if Christ is able to respond to this... familiarity with Christ will be an abstraction. Everything that happens to us can be an opportunity to answer the question: who am I? Who can respond to my irreducible nature? I have told you many times that what saved me was loyalty to my humanity. All the things you talk about happened to me, which is why I understand them. But I had an initial hypothesis, a perception of the Mystery that made me sense that the answer was there. The only thing I did was try to return again and again to the One in whom I could find the answer. That is why I did not waste time blaming others, because the problem is that the drop is not to blame if it cannot fill the glass! It is useless to insist on blaming the other because he is not able to fill me. He cannot be infinite to fill me! And this is the tenderness with which you can look at your boyfriend and say, “Poor thing, I cannot fill him, I cannot attract him enough.” That is why I say that if we do not lay a solid enough foundation for the relationship, everything falls apart.
Intervention: Here's the second part of my question. I find that many things in life are getting worse or falling apart or remaining suspended. The decline of certain things and relationships gradually fills me with skepticism, and I suspect that the initial enthusiasm with which I approached many things—work, friendships, movement—is a phase of youth that is ending because they are no longer “the first times.” I face this question that arises and this wound, but there are things that die without an answer, and I cannot prevent skepticism from creeping in, so I close myself off, I shut myself off, and I believe less and less in things.
Julián: I understand you perfectly. This does not necessarily mean that skepticism is growing; what is growing is your realism. Things are limited, and this is becoming increasingly clear. But, at the same time, the fact that things decay or do not satisfy you is confirmation of something that leads to the opposite of skepticism: that you are more than anything else! When St. Augustine says, “You clearly show the greatness of human nature [you show how great we are] because, in its desire for fullness, nothing less than You, Christ, are enough.” If one does not understand this... I like to listen to you, because it is normal that things do not have the ability to hold you for long. They cannot correspond to your human nature, to the greatness for which God created you! What is the mystery in this?
St. Augustine understands this clearly because he has traveled a human path to arrive at this evidence. He is amazed that many of the things that interested him no longer interest him, and he realizes that this is the most obvious sign that only Christ responds to this greatness. It is not that the drama disappears, but it comes into play with all its power: but do I believe that there is a Presence that is able to respond to the drama of my greatness? This challenges skepticism infinitely more because it introduces the decisive question: Is there anything in reality that is capable of responding to the greatness of my human nature, that is, to my irreducibility, to the question, “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world if he loses himself?” (Mt 16:26)? What baffles you is what excites me.
I often find myself saying: “Thank goodness you exist, thank goodness you exist. If you did not exist, I could not have an answer to my desire, to my need, to the greatness of my person.” And why does it exist? Because this need, this greatness of my person, being limited, I cannot give it to myself, I cannot produce it! I know that the answer exists because He makes me so great every day, with this greatness. Our skepticism grows because idols fall one after another, but this means that we are not deluding ourselves! Instead of becoming skeptical, we should arrive at the opposite: not to be confused, to know, ever more clearly, that not just anything is enough to respond to all the greatness for which God created me. After all, it is as if we do not believe in this marvel that we are. And we think, “But why did you make me so great and not a little smaller, so that I could be content with something less, like dogs?” It is a final complaint to God for creating us with this greatness. We want to be appreciated, to be loved, but when there is Someone who creates us with this desire and is present in our lives to respond to it, we complain! We must understand this. It does not depend on anything else: on society, on chaos, on the tsunami that may happen, on the circumstances we live in... all these things are not decisive! Everything can collapse, but I can grow more and more in the awareness of who I am and of Who responds. When someone, like St. Paul, grows in this awareness, “neither death nor life, neither angels nor the present, nor the future, nor any creature can separate me from the love of Christ.”
Intervention: A couple of months ago, I moved to Tenerife to do my specialty, after many years of studying medicine, with a great desire to start working, to get my first salary, to live in the same city as my boyfriend after two years of a long-distance relationship. Moreover, it is a city where there is a fantastic community of the movement that welcomed me with great affection. However, I started thinking, “And then what?”
Julián: Thank goodness! Thank goodness you managed to come to this conclusion in just two months. Do you know what Matt Damon said when he won the Oscar at the age of 27? “Thank goodness this happened to me at 27, because I could have lived to be 90 and wasted my life waiting for something that would not have fulfilled me.” Is it bad luck or does it free your mind to focus, after two months, on what could really be the answer to your question?
Intervention: Being away from home, I find that I cannot escape what happens to me.
Julián: Thank goodness.
Intervention: Many times when I am in Madrid, there are things that bother me and I can avoid them. In Tenerife, I do not know where to hide. I find something in myself in the morning, in the afternoon, when I am on night shift, when I am with friends. And I ask myself: how can you live like this? The other day you said, “You have found a Presence without which you cannot live.” And how do I live? I see myself in a state of waiting... how can I live my days? While I was preparing for school with some of them, one of them told me that he had met a priest who had asked him how he was. The boy, somewhat evading the question, replied, “Fine, and you?” And he replied, “Wonderfully, because I exist and therefore I am loved.” Hearing this hurt me deeply because I would not have answered that way. I desire this awareness, and it is not that I am opposed to my need for something more... I desire to grow in the knowledge of Him so that I can respond, in any circumstance, wherever I am, in Madrid or Tenerife, near or far from my friends: “I am wonderfully because I exist.”
Julián: How do you think you can learn to respond like that?
Intervention: I do not know.
Julián: This description you gave of work, friends, when you are not at home and you cannot escape, this new situation can be an opportunity to grow in your relationship with Him. This is usually the last thought that crosses your mind. When someone says something like what that priest said, you are stunned. The point is this: on the one hand, you would like to be like that, but on the other hand, how can you do it? Until you find out, there is no point in them giving you the answer in advance. The priest gave you the answer in advance and attracted you, and now what do I do? He is telling you, but you have not yet discovered it with sufficient weight. You are not yet sufficiently involved in the event of Christ to be able to say what He says. You are confused: “And now, living here, far from home and in these conditions, what do I do?” Do you understand that you cannot replace the experience of the event of Christ with an explanation? And the fact is that if we do not use every circumstance, every challenge, every disappointment, every loneliness, every anxiety, to seek Him, we will not be able to discover who He is. For us, He remains a stranger, a dream.
Like a child
Intervention: What does “using every circumstance to seek Him” mean?
Julián: Look at children. If a child is alone, what does he look for? A dog, a toy? No, his mother. During these holidays with so many families, we see it all the time: as soon as children are separated from their parents, they make a big fuss. They do not get confused. How did each of us grow up in our relationships, in the certainty of the most important affections of our lives? Every time something happened—as happens to you now that you are an adult—we looked for them. This does not change when we grow up. You did not let loneliness or fear stop you, you did not stop! Children do not stop, they seek. That is why Jesus says, “Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Mt. 18:3). It is not complicated, it is very simple, as it is for children. For us, being like children in adulthood is a difficult task. But, in reality, it is not complicated at all, it does not require any particular willpower: you just have to seek Him, as a child seeks his mother. How did you know who your mother was? By a definition of mother? No! Because she was always there: when you were hungry, sleepy, afraid, in need. If Christ is not the presence that is there and that I see happening in me when I relate to Him—just as being with your mother took away your fear—He will be a stranger. You can take all the theology courses, read all the community schools possible and imaginable, but He will remain a complete stranger.
He reveals Himself only in experience. You did not have to take any courses on motherhood to understand who your mother is. You understood it by taking your fear and loneliness seriously, instead of keeping them inside. We can stay in the Church for centuries without this dynamism being set in motion. That is why, after years, it may seem that everything remains the same: instead of increasing familiarity, we feel more and more like strangers. No one can do it for us. When you were afraid, you did not need anyone to accompany you to look for your mother. Your urgency to escape your fear drove you to look for her. This is what made you find in your mother a companion who helps you live. At first, we need our mother, and this says something about the structure of our relationship with being. This is the very simple way that God has devised to make us understand, from an early age, the kind of relationship that can respond to our greatness. At a certain point, we no longer need our mother, and the greatness of our desire and the mystery that we are appears, and either we discover God, or we will not find an adequate answer.
And so, one may have studied for years to become a doctor and find oneself disoriented. But what if this were the opportunity to take the leap? What if, in your relationship with your patients, with your colleagues, in the situation you find yourself in, you feel the need to enter into a relationship with the Presence that can be decisive for your life? This will not convince anyone unless each person makes it their own, that is, unless it is evident in their experience. If one does not think that Christ can respond to the drama of one's loneliness and does not seek Him, one does not risk verifying whether His promise comes true – “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” – if you do not verify it, if it does not give you rest, why will you seek it the next day? It will continue to be the phrase you repeat with great sincerity, but it does not move you, and experiencing it does not convince you. Christ's only means of communication is the evidence of experience. I want you to understand the logic of how things work. Otherwise, we are wasting our time.
Intervention: Listening to you, I realized that the most precious thing I have is my question. I had a very special and also very difficult year in many ways. Since last summer, when we had a meeting with you and I asked you a question about a circumstance I was experiencing, I have always tried to look at that green sprout on the dry trunk you were talking about. It is true that I have come a long way this year. Many things have happened to me. The best thing is that, after a horrible relationship and a horrible marriage, I fell inL love again. It was amazing, and I could not help but bow down to what was in front of me. At the same time, there has been a breakup with my parents at home, and I am going through a bad time with my family. On the other hand, I am a public high school teacher, and after five attempts, I passed the competitive exam this year. I came here without believing it yet, I still do not believe it, and I am immersed in what I have to do. I came here with a great need to verbalize all this because I do not want to waste my life living. Listening to you, I realize that the most important thing is this question: where will this question take me? It is true that I am happy because I have a secure job and I do something I am passionate about, namely teaching, even though I have some uncertainties because I do not know where I will be next year. In recent years, I have realized that my vocation is public school. But I have something in my heart: it is not that it is not enough for me, because I am happy; but at the same time, I need to be present in what has happened to me, as well as in the relationship I am experiencing. I want to continue being myself. I never want to despise the sign; I want to value these signs, these things that are happening to me.
Julián: You will have to see, while supporting all these beautiful things that are happening to you, if they are sufficient—even though they are precious—for your greatness. That is the point. If at this moment you remain enthusiastic about these things that work and you do not realize, using reason, that you have an absolutely greater need...
Intervention: That is clear to me.
Julián: Exactly, so the point is that while you enjoy these things, you take your question seriously. Otherwise, tomorrow you will find yourself back where you started.
Intervention: These days I have been struck by all this beauty and I said, “I am in love with what has happened to me in life and I need this to live.” I take notes on everything so I do not miss anything and so I can pick it up again once I am back in Oxford, when I am alone in my room. And then I think, “But you know yourself, your freedom is very fragile, you are lazy and unmotivated... after several days of coming home exhausted from work, you will not have the energy to stick with it.”
These days, I have been thinking about what we said in the first meeting: what does it mean to give my boyfriend space? When he video calls me or I miss him, I make sure I have some time in the evening to talk to him. My question is: what does it mean to educate him to be free? It seems to me that there is no way forward for me, because my mother always tells me that I am lazy and that I do not pursue things. In the example with my boyfriend, I do not see any problems. I do not know if my problem is educating him to be free or how much I believe that all the boredom of the day can lead to something and thus give him space.
Julián: You talk about what you have found in life. What have you found?
Intervention: A religion professor who fascinated me.
Julián: And why did he fascinate you? If you do not get to the bottom of this—verifying it in all these new circumstances you find yourself in when you are at Oxford—you will not realize that you have found a Presence, not notes. The notes are an opportunity to connect with this Presence; it is not that the notes at Oxford will solve your problem. A Presence that you can let into your life will solve it! Let yourself be surprised by what happens when you let Him in. You know what happens, you have seen it many times. Stop worrying about the times you make mistakes, do not even spend a minute on it. No difficulty you have, no mistake, no laziness—as your mother says—can prevent you from rising again before the attraction that was awakened in you when He entered your life. Without measuring yourself. Do not waste time with this. Go along with it when the Lord draws you back. Because it is by following the positive of what happens that you will want to continue to go along with His Presence. It will not be by reproaching you for how lazy you are. Do you see how we change our approach at a given moment? Were you not lazy at the beginning, just like now? But no one prevented a religion teacher from fascinating you, despite your laziness. You were just as lazy. That is not the problem! We fixate on these things and convince ourselves that the problem is my laziness. My mother tells me that too... But nothing you are saying has prevented you from recognizing the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to you in your life. You do not need other conditions, a different nature from the one you had on the day it happened to you. Your whole nature was already there, everything you needed to recognize it was already there, otherwise you would not have recognized it! Who is preventing you now, at any moment? If we do not realize how it happened to us, even if we experienced it, we change our approach. We do not realize that it has already happened with all our laziness, all the reproaches we make to ourselves now we already had, and nothing prevented it from happening. Why are you blocking yourself?
Intervention: Because when I was in Madrid, I was surrounded by the things that were happening around me. Now I do not know... something will come along to provoke me again, something will wake me up, but I think I will be alone in Oxford. I know that is not the case, but it is as if I have to move on to a new state of maturity in which...
Julián: You move on to the state of maturity by facing the challenge, the loneliness, the laziness, the situation you are experiencing in order to seek it. What does a child's growth consist of? In the fact that each time they know more clearly what they have to look for, where they have to look. They do not waste a minute thinking about their laziness, they do not waste a minute reproaching themselves for something, they do not put anything between their need and the search for the person who responds. There is nothing that can prevent you, whatever your situation or condition, from letting Him in. We could really spare ourselves all these things. What I cannot spare you is whether you are in Oxford or Madrid, because these are circumstances of life and are partof your journey. If we reflect for a moment on how things work, we could spare ourselves some paranoia, because these are things without substance and have nothing to do with the subject we are talking about. In the beginning, you were as lazy as you are now, and that did not limit you. It was simply the simplicity of recognizing it.
The text has not been reviewed by the author.
[1] Refers to a speech by Luigi Giussani during the Spiritual Exercises of the university students of Communion and Liberation (Riva del Garda, December 5, 1976) http://archivo.revistahuellas.org/?id=266&id2=323&id_n=12007 : “The feeling of the irreducibility of oneself! Because there is no... Is there perhaps something more evident when we say the word ‘I’ with a little tenderness? Is there anything more evident than that, when we say this ‘I’, we affirm, we feel we affirm, we perceive we affirm a reality that cannot be reduced? There is nothing more that can be called by that word in the whole history of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, in eternity... Note that the novelty of life grows in proportion to the maturation of this self-awareness, this feeling of self, this gaze and this taste for oneself. Please understand that the subject, that is, that from which all things arise, spring forth, take shape, and derive their face, that is, all relationships, all actions, all movements, is this I? I! There is a law, a law that you must note, a law of this self-awareness, of the life of this self-awareness, of this I, of this person that I am!”
