Sparks of Christian Experience
Carlo Wolfsgruber (1) - Anyone who has not traveled the roads of southern Milan in November—flanked on both sides by ditches, facing a wall so impenetrable that even headlights cannot pierce it—does not know what fog is.
I recall just such a foggy day as I begin these memories of Don Luigi Giussani. He is ill, but since his legs are cooperating today, he decides to leave his apartment in the farmhouse in Gudo Gambaredo where he lives.
I accompany him. I open the door, and we step into the courtyard. I look around: the gray walls a few meters away are barely visible; the countryside is obscured by an almost pungent fog.
“How beautiful!” I hear him murmur to himself.
Surprised, I follow his gaze and notice that down there, in the distance where I hadn't yet looked, a pale, beautiful sun is shining, piercing through everything meant to deny it. Don Giussani was a man who saw—and made others see—something that those around him missed completely!
“What are you doing at the window?” they once asked Don Giussani when he was ill. “I am looking for Christ.”
Christ not as a concept, but as a Presence that continually acts: “He works.” He works in himself, in the world, in others, making the original splendor of everything and everyone shine forth.
In the hallway of the house in Gudo, after dinner, the painter William Congdon—that tireless chronicler of the Milanese lowlands, now elderly himself—was leaving to return to his home in the courtyard of the nearby monastery of Cascinazza. Unexpectedly, he ran into Don Giussani in the hallway. They stopped. They looked at each other. And Don Gius said, “Bill, what beautiful eyes you have!”
His legacy is precisely the introduction to this “path of the gaze,” through which people and things reveal sparks of the Beauty that constitutes them. It signals the positivity of their existence, of being—"the enchanted garden of being,” as he called it.
Naturally, someone who shows you something you hadn't seen catches you off guard; they surprise you.
It was like that from my first encounter with Don Giussani. It was 1957. I was sixteen years old, sitting in the classroom of my first classical high school, the Berchet on Via della Commenda in Milan. My immediate, decisive reaction while listening to this new religion teacher was that he did not speak empty words.
At the time, it seemed to me that all the adults I knew did not say what they believed, but rather what they needed to say to exercise their power—small or large, depending on the circumstances. Giussani was not like that. Explaining how he intended to conduct the religion class—reason, desire, God—he spoke of things about which he was absolutely certain. It was a strange certainty; as he spoke, it seemed that he himself depended on something imposing itself upon him.
There was no pressure to convince us, no flattery to win us over. There was only the clear communication of what was unequivocally true for him—that is, what corresponded to reality.
One day, many years later, he said to me: “I have doubts about many things, but never about the recognition of the truth.” And he publicly stated: “The things I have told you are all true.” True because they were the result of a recognition, not the product of his intelligence or sensitivity (though these were fully engaged in the act of recognition).
“Why did so many applaud you?” a reporter asked Don Giussani as he left a packed hall at the Rimini Meeting. “Because I believe in what I say,” was the disarming reply. The journalist did not seem convinced: “Is that enough?” “Yes,” replied Gius, before breaking into a broad smile.
It was enough for me, too, even though I had already quietly closed the door on religion, as had most of my classmates at Berchet. The second lesson confirmed and deepened the initial shock. After the fourth or fifth, I was convinced. I waited another couple of weeks, then waited outside the classroom and approached him.
“If you're right, I have to become a priest.” “Why?” “If you're right, God exists. And if God exists, God is everything, and therefore I have to give Him everything.” He immediately threw me off balance: “If I'm right, you have to do God's will. Verify this idea that has come to you.”
In my mind, the vocational choice was the result of a syllogism in which God was the premise. For him, however, God was a living Presence and reason was an energetic attentiveness to knowing that Presence. I was taken aback, yet his reply brought to my consciousness something I already possessed within me but had forgotten.
This would happen many other times over the years. Always, the “surprise” proved to be a move that revealed my true self (my "I") and was conducive to its flourishing. Giussani's response exalted my freedom, even before God.
I don't know how many other priests—then or now—would have let the opportunity slip to quickly send a young man, who had been an atheist until the day before, straight to a seminary or convent! Now elderly, Don Giussani would say: “For 50 years I have looked at and welcomed people, relying solely on pure freedom.”
After all, it wasn't just me who was taken aback; he was, too. (I will say in parentheses that this is precisely where the difference between authentic certainty and fanatical certainty lies: authentic certainty is critically recovered every time it is affirmed in front of different people and circumstances. In this way, it is permanently verified and, therefore, deepened and always new.)
Giussani's “surprise” consisted of this: finding himself in front of young people who had a Catholic background, his proposal was based on the perfectly reasonable invitation to first verify the religious hypothesis received from their own tradition.
In class at a certain point that year, after about ten lessons, I realized that he was no longer addressing us as Christians, but simply as human beings. Remembering this many years later, I asked him, “Do I remember correctly? Why did you make such a change?” “You remember correctly. I changed because you came to wait for me outside the classroom door, and you were not a Christian.”
Because of this double displacement, our lives remained “stuck” to each other.
He once said to me, “You have a strong aesthetic sense, so you immediately intuit the truth of what I propose to you. You get excited about it, but you don't have the chronological and psychological space to apply it to yourself.” I asked him, “What should I ask?” He replied, “I don't know, because I don't know what Christ says to you.” Then he added, “Ask Christ to become everything in you.”
I did not become a priest as I had assumed. Instead, due to circumstances that would take too long to recount here, I participated and continue to participate in the experience of the Adult Group, which would later be recognized by the Church as Memores Domini.
In the beginning—we are in the second half of the 1960s—it was a small group of people who wanted to devote themselves totally to Christ, in continuity with the characteristics of the movement evolving from Gioventù Studentesca(Student Youth) into Comunione e Liberazione. It was all very simple: everyone worked normally; we met with Fr. Giussani for a weekly meeting and a few days of retreat; we pooled our money and participated in the life of the movement.
Then, four or five of us decided to go and live together, renovating an old farmhouse in the lower Milanese countryside, in Gudo Gambaredo. The idea had not come from Giussani, who, moreover, did not “feel capable” of guiding a new form of cohabitation for consecrated persons—especially laypeople. He resigned himself—so to speak—only a few years later.
However, at that time, he allowed those four or five to live together. After a few years (in the meantime, some women had also begun to live together), he considered that the “house” was the normal way to live the experience of the “Adult Group”.
It was a matter of identifying a “rule” for the life of the house itself. Giussani agreed that those in Gudo (I had also gone to live there by then) should draw up a draft. When we read it to him—moments of prayer, weekly gatherings, house authority, sharing of goods—he approved almost everything (though he categorically refused the recitation of part of the breviary immediately after lunch).
Then, he wanted to add something we hadn't even remotely thought of: the daily hour of silence to be devoted to meditation and prayer; silence from Compline to Lauds the following day; and, in general, the fact that the house should constantly live in an “atmosphere of silence.”
Impressed by his addition, I tried over time to be serious about the rule of silence. I devoted the daily hour with determination to understanding Giussani's words—how many sentences I learned by heart! But this is not the silence he asked of us. This is not the silence that filled Marius Victorinus, the rhetorician he often quoted: “I was told that everything must be accepted without words and held in silence. Then I realized that perhaps my whole existence would be spent realizing what had happened to me. And your memory fills me with silence.”
I am well aware that even the words of this last sentence can be heard and accepted with reverence, yet without letting them escape from sentimentality or, worse, from the cage of the "already known," which prevents all true knowledge. So many times, while continuing to talk about “Presence,” we limit ourselves to flaunting a mere simulacrum of it.
I believe that it is precisely here that we find one of Don Giussani's pedagogical geniuses and one of the decisive ridges for the continuity of what was born from him. I will try to explain by recounting another episode from his very last years.
That day he was feeling particularly ill, and he said to me, “Tell me a word that will give me life.” I was stunned. I doubted; was he losing his faith? I remained silent. Fr. Giussani returned to his room, and I heard him say aloud in the hallway, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” I was consoled: he had not lost his faith. But then, why had he made that request?
I understood it after a long time. Because he did not want to remain stuck in his “already known”; he needed to hear the content of his faith said and given by someone else.
He—strong in his experience—taught us that self-awareness always begins and increases through contact with something outside the self. It is the path of the tenth chapter of The Religious Sense: starting from an awareness of “things,” man comes to know his own “self.”
During the summer exercises of 1987, Don Gius told us: "Imagine Francesca [replacing the real name] returning home: she climbs the stairs and enters the attic. The walls disappear, the floor disappears, all the furnishings disappear, all relationships disappear. All the people disappear, then all the stars in the sky disappear. If everything disappeared, she would no longer have any substance. Her awareness of herself depends on the presence of others."
When I asked him how he was always so willing to empathize with people, he replied that in relationships his self-awareness was filled by the other and, therefore, always enriched. It is exactly the opposite of the “already known”—it is an Event.
Don Giussani insisted on this theme with determination in the early 1990s, both with the Memores Domini and with the movement: Christianity is neither a doctrine nor a moral code, but an Event; it is known only through an event; the event is always unexpected, unpredictable, and not a consequence of preceding factors; the only novelty is the event.
I found this appeal fascinating and perfectly in tune with my initial encounter. I wondered if all the “knowledge” accumulated over decades of life in the movement and in the Adult Group—and in thousands of hours of silence—was not a burden for me, an objection to experiencing Christianity as an event.
So, during an assembly at a Memores retreat, I asked: “How does what one knows become a present experience in the moment?”
I quote Don Giussani's answer as it was recorded in the transcript distributed to all the Memores after that retreat in October 1992:
"How can what one knows become experience? How can what we know and have become an event that we encounter and penetrate? How? Don't you think that there can be only one answer to this question? What we know or what we have is something that is given to us now. The awareness of what we know and what we have is the awareness of something that is given to us now [...]. Outside of this ‘now’ there is nothing!"
The Christian event ‘works’ only in this way. And the danger of its static organizational reduction—that is, its annulment—is always looming.
I think this is one of the main methodological teachings that Don Julián Carrón passed on to us. It is no coincidence that in 2011 he asked all the houses of the Memores Domini to hang a sign with the words: “Outside of this ‘now’ there is nothing!”
The phrase on that year’s Easter flyer, with the image of John and Andrew seeing Jesus walking away and deciding to follow him, is taken from the answer Giussani gave me at that retreat:
"The event does not only identify something that happened and with which everything began, but what awakens the present, defines the present, gives content to the present, makes the present possible. [...] 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, that is, changed, except by a contemporaneity: an event. Christ is something that is happening to me."
The Christian community is the place where Christ freely educates the person in the ever-unpredictable flow of circumstances.
“I never intended to ‘found’ anything,” wrote Fr. Giussani to John Paul II in 2004, on the fiftieth anniversary of the CL movement. This is not just a figure of speech; it is the absolute and constant awareness with which he looked upon and guided the people he had “seen form” around him, in the great river of the Church.
Every human community needs forms in which to shape the spaces and times of its coexistence. (Don Giussani was extremely meticulous in his attention to every spatial-temporal detail, whether for a course of exercises for thousands of people or a dinner among friends). However, forms and structures are totally dependent on the mysterious and imaginative relationship of the Spirit with each person.
After the pontifical recognition of the Memores Domini Association on December 8, 1988, Fr. Giussani gave an interview in which he said:
"This experience... aims to be totally immanent in the ordinary life of the Church. If it needs an organization, it is only to safeguard a solidarity of help in the difficult task of Christian witness... So it is as if I wished that the members of Memores Domini were not even identified as an ‘association’ within the Church. That they be remarkable and notable, in short, for the example they give, not as members of a new entity."
A Christian experience grows and develops through the growth of the individuals who constitute it in their very personal relationship with their own destiny. No organizational fine-tuning or associative insistence can ever replace the unfathomable depth and uniqueness of this dramatic relationship.
How did Fr. Giussani exercise authority? He was absolutely convinced that Christ had taken each of us personally (objectively in baptism and existentially in the encounter) and had constituted us as one body. It is a fact that is more profound and definitive than any other characteristic of the person and even—surprisingly—than all his faults. I never saw Giussani scandalized by our mistakes: any mistake could become a resource for starting over.
Once, at a gathering where the topic of obedience was being discussed, one of the first members asked him, “We must obey you, but whom do you obey?” And he replied, “I must obey all of you.”
The Memores retreats often followed this pattern: in a first meditation, Fr. Giussani would propose the announcement—the theme of the liturgical season or an aspect of the faith. In a subsequent lesson, he would draw “practical notes” from that announcement, drawing on conversations or the countless letters he was inundated with.
When there were only a few of us Memores, it was fairly easy to recognize who Don Gius was talking about. That year—in the late 1970s in Pianazze—there were a few dozen of us, and the “practical notes” were very realistic. At the end, one of the locals said to me, “This time he really gave us a good thrashing!”
I suddenly understood that, in reality, Giussani was saying to us: “But do you realize who you really are, the new creatures that Christ has made you?”
In short, even the uncomfortable reminder of a mistake made was a renewal of the promise and breadth of my initial desire. Giussani did not call us to morally correct our behavior—as is typical of all moralism, especially ecclesiastical moralism—but rather to lay the proper foundations for an uninterrupted journey: a promise fulfilled, not a lie!
“If I died now,” he once said to me, “your whole sky would become cloudy, but a little piece of it would remain intact and you would continue undafraid.”
This judgment seemed so unfair to me that I got angry and left the table where we were having lunch together. It took me some time to understand. It was necessary for me to see others take that last leap of faith that Giussani had warned me he had not taken. “Faith is ‘realizing that Christ is present here and now,’” not simply “knowing” that Christ is present!
When, in 2003, Don Giussani did not call me (along with others) to the new board of Memores Domini, I felt the urge to say to a friend who was crying as we left the meeting: “Don't cry: today Don Gius made us a promise.” This time I could not have reacted differently without denying myself and my whole history.
And the promise is fulfilled and, at the same time, remains open.
The purpose of the Christian community is mission. In this regard, I would like to mention the collaboration that some Memores have given to the work of Don Luigi Verzé, namely the San Raffaele Hospital. I recount this because, according to Don Giussani himself, it was “the clearest and purest example that God has given me.”
The starting point is, as always, an unexpected event. I quote from the transcript of the 1992 summer exercises:
“The encounter I had with the Sigilli of Don Luigi Verzé... struck me because I saw people who dedicated their lives to a work of good, renouncing marriage and with mature responsibility... I had them come here to talk to you, so that you could have a testimony of how one can serve God with one's whole life... Why? Because I don't feel that you are so mature and responsible."
This meeting led to the proposal that some Memores should also work in the hospital and even decide to belong to the Association. Don Gius encouraged them: “The charism we have experienced makes us want to launch ourselves... into a dedication to the work of Don Luigi Verzé.”
It is a dynamism that has appeared many other times: the collaboration with Nomadelfia, the requests from bishops and nuncios. It is the particular expression of a principle very dear to Don Giussani: “The greatest sacrifice is to give one's life for the work of Another” (with a capital A and always necessarily with a lowercase 'a' as well).
I do not intend here to reconstruct that story, but only to emphasize the extraordinary indication of method that Don Giussani drew at that time:
"We have met, and thus a new seed is born in you, a new man... At a certain point, according to God’s will, the Lord brings you into contact with a work to serve, with a creation made by another charism. And then you say: ‘I want to serve this stranger’. What does this imply? It implies a break. Those who do not achieve this break are not mature. This does not mean going into that charism and imposing your own. It means the opposite. It means mortifying the applications that our charism would make in order to serve the charism of another."
He said to one of us on that occasion: “I have not educated you in a form, I have given you a criterion.” It is the complete and radical overcoming of every form of self-referentiality.
In everything and in everyone, Fr. Giussani knew how to perceive beauty, a tiny and unique fragment, “sicut favillae in arundineto” (like sparks in the stubble), of the Beauty of that “young Jew from Nazareth” who had called him to the seminary when he was just 10 years old.
He had “conquered” him to the point that Fr. Julián Carrón could say in the Milan Cathedral at the end of his funeral: “We thank you, Don Giussani, because you not only spoke to us about Christ, but you made us experience him.”
(1). Carlo Wolfsgruber (Milan, 1941) attended the Berchet Classical High School in Milan. He holds a degree in chemistry from the University of Pavia and worked on research projects for the National Research Council (CNR) at the Politecnico di Milano. He chose to forego an academic career to remain in Milan alongside Don Giussani during the years of the tumultuous growth of Memores Domini, the association of consecrated laypeople born from the charism of the priest from Desio. He taught chemistry in state technical institutes and served as Rector of the schools linked to the V. Grossman Foundation in Milan. He served as President of the Memores Domini Association from 2013 to 2018.
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Excerpted from Massimo Borghesi, In comunione e in libertà: Don Giussani nella memoria dei suoi amici, Studium, 2023, pp. 258–267.