The Restless Heart
Parish of San Dionigi, Milan - November 16, 2025
“You sought us while we were not seeking you, and you sought us so that we might seek you.”
Julián Carrón
Every year, Advent meets us exactly where we are, so it is never a mere repetition of the past. Advent knocks on the door of our very being, at the precise point where we find ourselves today. Therefore, this time becomes an opportunity to look at ourselves with tenderness: “How am I, right now?” It is a chance to stop and look. Amidst the chaos that often clutters our lives, we can allow ourselves a moment of tenderness toward our own humanity.
What is the most obvious indicator of how we are? Our desire. Just as longing for a loved one is the thermometer of love, so is our desire. What prevails in us? What do we discover when we stop, when we have a moment of clarity and attention to ourselves? It is easy to find out; just look at the heart.
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” Jesus says in the Gospel (1). Our heart reveals our treasure. What we value most exposes where our heart is truly oriented. Our attention, our thoughts, and our desires are focused on what we consider most precious. In short, what we devote our time, energy, and concerns to reveals our true essence—our “heart.”
Advent is a time to pause, to look within, to surprise ourselves in the middle of daily life, and to ask: “Where is my heart?”
1. The Great Danger of Our Time: Settling for Banality
We live in a time when people risk losing not only faith or reason, but above all desire itself: the taste for the Infinite, the thrill of the Mystery, the longing for something greater than oneself. Today, banality is a form of defense, a way of not feeling too much, of shielding ourselves from being wounded by Reality. But in doing so, each of us becomes impoverished: we become dull, content with the superficial.
We see this when we encounter a witness like the writer and monk Van der Meer: “No one shares my anxiety, no one seeks a word of salvation: they live on the surface, they do not know the torment of nostalgia, they do not know the desire for great things.” (2) What nostalgia must have gripped him to make him say this!
The “great danger” is not so much evil—which can actually be an opportunity to start afresh—as it is the habit of the usual, the mediocre, the renunciation of what the heart truly desires: being content with banality. I am surprised at how many people are satisfied with the little things that fill up their lives. I think of a recent conversation with someone who was amazed at those who wake up feeling the full drama of life, while admitting about himself: “The thought of my own incompleteness rarely crosses my mind.”
We can be like so many who live comfortably, dulled, settling for little. Life becomes flat, insipid, colorless. “Life is as if it were a current that has ceased,” says Don Giussani. “Few of us take real initiative with the demands of our own hearts. Thus, in a humanity that has returned to darkness and dissatisfaction, we too allow ourselves to be invaded by the reduction of the demands of our ego.” (3)
But this complacency is not without consequences. We see it in the discomfort, in the underlying malaise we compromise with, accustomed to looking the other way, as if convinced that “this is just how life is now.” We think we must resign ourselves, within the limits of nature—finibus naturae contentus, as Cicero said—to be satisfied with what we can obtain. We reduce the concept of nature to its limits, neglecting the boundless desire that constitutes us, that invites us to seek beyond those limits.
Henri de Lubac described this “ancient wisdom” as follows: “We know how to resign ourselves to the irremediable. To avoid cruel disappointment, [...] let us be content to adhere with our whole being to things ‘as they are’. Let us cultivate our little garden.” (4)
But then he adds that, even among the ancients, “the divine temptation, however, always reappears.” (5)
2. But Why Am I Not Satisfied?
“Why am I not satisfied with what is before me—tangible, true, real?” Van der Meer asks again. “Why does my spirit invoke the Infinite, Eternity? I cannot imagine the End; the Infinite appears to me as an abyss whose bottom my stone will never touch. Reason understands neither one thing nor the other. It is foolish to seek an answer; it is a waste of time. But why, then, do these problems storm me like a raging tempest?” (6)
We see many signs of our inability to be satisfied, signs of what Claudel called the “organic spark of restlessness [...] embedded in the depths of humanity.” (7) As Ungaretti’s striking verses say: “Enclosed among mortal things / (Even the starry sky will end) / Why do I long for God?” (8)
We see it among the most ordinary people, but also in those who have achieved global success. Singer Taylor Swift, when she won the Grammy Award for the second time in a row, said: “It was the best. My life had never been better. (...) And I remember thinking afterwards, ‘That was everything you wanted! That was everything you wanted. That was what you worked for.’ You reach the top and look around and say, ‘Oh my God! Now what?’” (9)
It can happen to anyone. As someone told me recently, you can wake up at night surprised by this thought, even after reaching the pinnacle of your career: “So what?”
Faced with the person's inability to achieve the fullness to which they aspire, Romano Guardini astutely observes: “Often they are devalued by arguing from their fragility, since their being and concrete power continually contradict their claim... They are expected to renounce their claim and become as simple as a plant or an animal. The person even tires of themselves, feels the oppression of responsibility for the inadequacy and wickedness of their being, and tries to renounce it by dispersing themselves in relationships of relief. Their own determination bores them, they are annoyed at having to be nothing other than themselves, they want to escape from themselves by disguising themselves in reflected figures, in masks. They are afraid of their loneliness and immerse themselves in the dissolving communion of the species or nature. They try to forget themselves, throwing themselves into passing things, into the river of eternal birth and death. They sell and betray themselves: in pleasure, in work for its own sake, in deterioration, in evil... And yet the truth that ‘I am I’ stands out, enormous. Hard, beautiful, terrible, creator of destiny, root of all responsibility [this is our greatness]. It gives everything its splendor and its gravity.” (10)
And he ends by saying, “Only the self can renounce the self,” to be truly itself.
Our irreducibility is the most powerful resource we have for living Advent. No decision to settle for less can subjugate our nature to resignation. We cannot reduce who we are to the measure we want. It is not in our hands. The disproportion is structural. Everything would be easier if we could reduce it, but the fact of how we are made is stubborn; it proves more powerful than our own stubbornness in trying to suppress it.
This is the victory of experience over any attempt to subdue it. What wisdom to recognize, as Giussani said, that Reality becomes transparent in experience! It is there, in the experience of each of us, that the nature of who we are, of our “I,” emerges with all its power. What an impressive testimony is given to us by those who remind us of this!
“Nostalgia and hope seem to be the last resources of the human heart,” writes María Zambrano, and “in both we perceive the same fact: the fact that human life is felt by its protagonist as incomplete and fragmentary [...]; that is, it refers to something that is missing, it never presents itself as a complete whole.” (11)
“Being here is a lot,” admits Rilke, and we can say the same, yet it seems all this is not enough: “This earthly existence seems irrevocable.” (12)
People experience beauty and, precisely because of this, feel deep down that “something is missing.” Pope Leo says: “It is a paradoxical situation [...]. We come to terms with our limitations and, at the same time, with the irrepressible urge to try to overcome them. We feel deep down that we are always missing something.” (13)
But the ultimate reason for this lack is not that we are badly made; it is not a manufacturing defect. No one has summarized it more masterfully than St. Augustine: “You [God] show quite clearly the greatness you wanted to attribute to rational creatures; [because] nothing less than You is enough for their blissful peace.” (14) The experience that nothing less than Him is enough for us is precisely the most striking sign of our greatness.
This restlessness, which drives us to seek meaning beyond appearances, beyond the usual limits, prompts a great observer of our time, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, to say:
“Many people find themselves in a situation of great loneliness, and a profound question arises in their hearts: what do I really believe in? What is the center of my life? What do I want to spend my life on? Many people find it very difficult to answer these questions [...]. So today, in a context completely different from that of past eras, religious experience also takes the form of a common search: the emergence of ‘people who seek,’ of ‘seekers of meaning’ (seekers).” (15)
When all our strategies for reducing desire are exhausted, what remains is the heart that urges, irreducible... waiting.
3. Waiting
Waiting is ineradicable—indeed “inevitable,” writes Giussani: “The situation in which we live—of denial of presence and absolute weakness and renunciation of reason—leaves intact in man […] the melancholic ambiguity of experience, as Adorno says; people wait for the truth of things […] to emerge, despite everything, within appearance, beyond it, the image of salvation. [...] The expectation of salvation is inevitable.” (16)
We may or may not recognize it, but we cannot help but encounter it. It manifests in many ways, with many symptoms, and remains within us without our being able to suppress or erase it. To deny it is pathetic.
Faced with this endless tension, however, people are tempted to defend themselves. The suffering of desire can be unbearable, and then the temptation of ataraxia arises: the ideal of peace achieved at the price of eliminating desire itself. In the Buddhist or Stoic view, disturbance arises from wanting, from attaching oneself to things, and liberation consists in no longer desiring anything. The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism says, in fact: “The origin of suffering is desire (tṛṣṇā).”
But the very fact that we want to eliminate desire because it is unbearable proves that waiting resists any attempt to suppress it.
Why is it inevitable, sooner or later, to grapple with this expectation?
Guardini comes to our aid again in this portrait of melancholy: “Melancholy is too painful and too deeply rooted in our human nature to be left in the hands of psychiatrists. We consider it intimately connected with the depths of our human essence.” (17) Even “boredom” is for him a sign of our greatness, that boredom which “can accompany, and often accompanies, a rather busy life” and which has only one meaning:
“In things, we search passionately and everywhere for something that things do not possess [...]. We search and strive [...] to find in them that weight, that seriousness, that ardor, and that accomplished strength that we thirst for: and it is not possible. Things are finite. Everything that is finite is defective. And the defect is a disappointment to the heart, which yearns for the absolute. The disappointment spreads, becoming a feeling of great emptiness... There is nothing worth existing for.” (18)
But “for my part,” he continues, “I believe that, beyond any medical or pedagogical consideration, its meaning [of melancholy] lies in this, that it is an indication of the existence of the absolute. The infinite bears witness to itself, in the depths of the heart. [...] Melancholy is the price of the birth of the eternal in people.” It is “the restlessness of man who senses the proximity of the infinite.” (19)
Desire does not speak to us of an absence. Lévinas says: “Desire is not the lack of something, but of someone: of the infinite.” (20) Human desire never closes: it is infinite openness to the Other. In fact, people “cannot desire God,” writes Simone Weil, “without God himself already being present in the waiting.” (21) Lack is the form in which God makes Himself perceptible.
But even if that restlessness belongs to our nature, we always decide in the face of it. It is never automatic. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor, says: “Everything can be taken from a man except one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (22) No one can take this away from us, but neither can anyone spare us from it.
Our freedom is at stake in this choice. It is a game played within us. “Only the self can renounce the self,” Guardini reminded us.
And waiting does not mean being helpless, doing nothing; on the contrary, it is a profound “activity” that engages our whole being, as Pavese says: “Waiting is still an occupation. It is not waiting for anything that is terrible.” It is a matter of realizing that desire is not a mistake to be corrected, but the trace of the Infinite in people. Indeed, as Weil clarifies, “waiting is already participation in what is awaited.” (23)
Human life reveals itself—for those who live it with awareness—as a journey marked by lack. Even, and especially, when people achieve what they desire, something in them remains open, unfinished. This lack is not a defect, but the trace of greatness: the sign that the human heart is made for more than what the world can offer. For this reason, the desire that arises from lack is the truest force of life, the most precious resource for celebrating Advent. It becomes waiting: patient and trusting availability toward what is not yet seen, but which is intuited as necessary for one’s fulfillment.
4. Waiting and the Event of Christmas
We often contrast them: encounter and search, finding and seeking, coming and waiting.
What is the relationship between the coming of Christ and waiting? With His coming, isn't religious meaning “surpassed”? If Christmas represents the fulfillment of waiting, why does the Church continue to celebrate Advent? Without exploring this paradox, the season of Advent risks losing its meaning. Only an empty ritual remains. We are by no means immune to the risk that Advent will be reduced to a ritual—from which, after all, we expect nothing significant—and to the risk that Christmas will be only a memory that has no impact on the present.
Christmas is indeed the fulfillment of the messianic expectation of the Old Testament: the Incarnation marks the moment when God enters human history to respond to that expectation. In this sense, the expectation is fulfilled: the Messiah has come.
However, the Church continues to celebrate Christmas not only because it still awaits the definitive fulfillment in the Second Coming in Glory, but also because in Christian liturgy, remembering is not simply recalling a past event: it is making it present and participating in it. Celebrating Christmas means allowing Christ to be “born” again, more deeply, in our hearts. This “birth” does not happen once and for all; it is never finished. It always requires a new acceptance, a conversion, a response in the circumstances in which I find myself today. The celebration, every year, is an invitation to renew this response in the present and to verify how real its impact is in the present.
Christmas celebrates a fulfillment that continues to happen. And in order to continue happening today, in each of us, we need to wait. Without waiting, Christmas becomes something “already known.” No wonder. Only formalism.
I was amazed by the story of two friends who were about to get married. Before the declaration, everything in him was alive, on fire for the recognition of the good that she is; his life was invested with the presence he desired to marry. Then he declared his love, with great joy. But shortly afterwards, he confessed, almost surprised, that it was as if everything were “already known.” Even the presence of the person who made us tremble with joy—without waiting, without the question—becomes a habit. It becomes “old hat,” even if we have them right in front of us.
The risk is also ours. This year. Now.
Therefore, Advent is not a formality in preparation for Christmas. Waiting is crucial so that Christmas does not become a devout memory. For Christmas to happen as an Event in the present, my waiting and your waiting are necessary today.
“This is the beginning,” Giussani said: “A sensitivity to one's own nature as a human being, your and my nature as human beings, and, therefore, the more one feels the needs, the interests, the ideal aspirations that make up the physiognomy of every human being, the more one is in search of a path that can respond.” (24)
Without the drama of our ever-present “I,” which urges a response, the celebration of Christmas becomes a ritual that leaves no trace in life other than the desert behind us. Nothing happens without us, without us caring about our humanity.
How can we avoid it being a mere repetition of a ritual, even if it is heartfelt? Some reflections by St. Augustine in the Confessions can help us. I was struck by his insight: he notes that people “who carry their mortality around with them, who carry the proof of their sin around with them; this person, however, a small part of your creation, wants to praise you.” (25)
St. Augustine, whose human story we all know, when he writes the Confessions years after his conversion, is surprised to find himself with the desire to praise God. For him, this desire is not at all obvious; rather, it is the starting point.
But how can people desire to praise God if they are so ill-fated, so distracted, being mortal sinners?
St. Augustine’s answer could not be more liberating for each of us: “It is You who reawaken them to take pleasure in praising You [not to fulfill an obligation, a commandment, but “to take pleasure in praising You”], because You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” (26) His familiarity with his humanity leads him to be surprised that God cares so much about pulling him out of forgetfulness, out of formalism, awakening him from his torpor, from his habit, so that he can take pleasure in praising Him, in loving Him.
We poor creatures can only perform a formal gesture if He reawakens in us the desire to praise Him, because, being made for Him, our hearts can only rest in Him.
The more one is reawakened by the beloved, the more one takes pleasure in being with them, in “resting” in their presence. Otherwise, even the relationship becomes suffocating.
Our hearts have been made restless, desirous, so that they may find their full satisfaction in their relationship with Him. Without this relationship for which the heart is made, restlessness finds no answer. Because the heart is made for You to satisfy it, inflame it, and make it radiant. This is the “rest” that St. Augustine means. Rest should not be understood, as is often the case, as the cessation of desire! “The more we taste the Mystery of God, the more we are attracted to it, without ever being completely satisfied,” (27) said Pope Leo recently, quoting from the tenth book of the Confessions: “You poured out your fragrance, and I breathed and yearned for you, I tasted and I am hungry and thirsty; you touched me, and I burned with desire for your peace.” (28)
A satisfaction so fitting and desirable that we never stop seeking it, precisely because of the enjoyment we experience. How different Christian life is when it is perceived in this way! As Dante says of Beatrice’s “shining eyes”: “Full of wonder and joy, my soul tasted that food which, satisfying itself, thirsts for itself.” (29) The more satiated we are, the more our thirst is reawakened.
Christ entered history and our lives to reawaken this search for Him, without which we cannot be ourselves.
St. Augustine, as we know, went through all the trials and tribulations of his human journey, which is why he expresses it in such a moving way: “You sought us while we did not seek you, and you sought us so that we might seek you.” (30) Or again: “We seek with the desire to find, and we find with the desire to seek again.” (31) And, at the end of the Confessions, he says: “I call upon you, my God, my mercy, who made me and did not forget those who forgot you. I call upon you in my soul, that you may prepare it to receive you with the desire that you inspire.”
It is He who prepares us to receive Him at Christmas, arousing our desire. It is not enough, therefore, to be “made”; those who forget must be constantly prepared to receive God again. He prepares us to recognize Him, to receive Him, by reawakening our desire for Him. How different Advent is, lived in this way, from a usual, empty ritual.
Augustine invokes God because He has “preceded” him: “You preceded me before I invoked You, insisting more and more, and with the most diverse appeals, so that I might hear You from afar, and turn around, and invoke You who were calling me [...], for before I was, You were, and I was nothing because You granted me existence.” (32)
Jesus never ceases to seek us out—“insisting more and more, and with the most diverse appeals”—so that we may seek Him, listen to Him, turn to Him, and invoke Him. The desire to invoke Him is already a sign that Jesus has succeeded in reawakening, in those who listen to Him, the desire for Him.
Therefore, a memory of the past is not enough to move people in the present. “Christianity,” Giussani insists, “being a present Reality, has as its instrument of knowledge the evidence of an experience.” (33) It is evidence, not a memory, because it is present and reawakens us. Giussani describes it this way:
“Just as He entered into the womb, just as He began his journey on earth by entering into a woman’s womb, it is in the womb of our recognition, it is in the womb of our love that He continues to be present ‘here and now.’ […] The Mystery made flesh […] enters into experience as a factor of ordinary human experience, […] in my relationship with my mother, in my relationship with this girl, in my relationship with my friend, in my relationship with my enemy, in my relationship with all the people who pass me by on the street when I go to take the subway, inside, inside the experience I am having [...], inside this I recognize You as the substance of everything. Your face is the substance of everything! [...] None of us can completely escape the fact that Christ loves us exactly as we are, more than any other being we fall in love with. [...] Affirming a Presence is love. Observing laws is a routine, a habit, a convenience [...]. It is the difference between moralism and the Christian moral revolution, which arises from the encounter with a Presence from which springs a love that, leaving you as you are, with all your faults, with all your mistakes, changes you.” (34)
And how can we see that someone is participating in this event, the Christ Event that we celebrate at Christmas? From the desire they have within themselves. I have found nothing that describes it more brilliantly than this sentence by Nicolas Kabasilas: “Men who have within themselves a desire so powerful that it surpasses their nature, and they yearn and desire more than is fitting for people to aspire to, these men have been struck by the Bridegroom himself. He himself has sent a burning ray of his beauty into their eyes. The extent of the wound already reveals what the arrow is, and the intensity of the desire gives a hint as to who it is that has shot the arrow.” (35)
Those who realize the dynamism that Christ sets in motion cannot help but rejoice, as when Fr. Giussani, aware of this, says:
“Guys, don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid of not succeeding, of not making it. Just as you did not make yourself, so you do not fulfill yourself: it is Another who fulfills you. How do you live? It is Another who made you, it is Another who awakens you to being. Instant by instant, you belong to Another! Therefore, do not be afraid of not succeeding, because it is Another who acts in you.”
It is so true that “you must force yourself away, you must deny […], you must hate the truth, and then even He stops at the threshold of your freedom. Do not be afraid of not succeeding, because it is Another […]. The more time passes in your life, the more you will feel the depth of the emotion of understanding that it is Another who makes you, that is, the emotion of becoming a child again at thirty, at forty, at fifty [...]. And do not be afraid [...] of being overwhelmed, of being absorbed by Another, of being conquered by Another. Do not be afraid, because what the Other wants and works in you, the change He wants to bring about, is to make you become yourself.” (36)
“You sought us while we were not seeking you, and you sought us so that we might seek you.” This is how we become companions on the journey with so many of our contemporaries who are searching, the “seekers of meaning” of whom Taylor speaks.
“The greatness of the Christian faith, unmatched by any other position, is this: Christ has answered the human question. Therefore, those who accept the faith and live it and those who, not having faith, drown in the question, despair in the question, suffer in the question, have a common destiny.” (37) What sensitivity is needed to feel like companions to those who are searching and to feel them as our companions.
What happens when His Presence, His unique gaze, bursts into our lives?
“The first consequence of affection for Christ is the discovery of love, of tenderness toward oneself; amazement, admiration, veneration, respect, love for oneself, for oneself!” says Giussani. “The first consequence of affection for Christ is a return to ourselves [we must not always run away, trying to endure life], love and esteem, veneration and tenderness toward ourselves, toward this something that is not mine, but from which everything starts, because it is myself: something that I do not do, but that You do.” (38)
We don't need to distract ourselves because being with ourselves is unbearable. I think of a friend who, for many years, has lived every day alongside her seriously ill husband, taking care of him. She said she “always fantasizes” about the things she likes to do and cannot do, such as traveling abroad. Her grandchildren gave her a trip to Dubai, a place she would have loved very much because of her passion for architecture. Before she left, everyone encouraged her: “You deserve it, it's good for you to get away, take your mind off things!”
She says: “The more they said it, the more it annoyed me, so I left with a great desire not to take my mind off things, but to be there with all the urgency I feel every morning. This made me attentive, allowed me not to miss anything of the impact with reality. And to enjoy all the grandeur I saw. It was important to realize—for once not in the daily grind, but in a moment of absolute beauty—that the real pleasure for me is the relationship between reality and my humanity, not distracted, but wide open to the urgency of meaning.”
You have been able to verify that the problem of living emerges even more powerfully when the “dream” comes true, because that is when we see whether the ‘dream’ is able to respond to all our needs. It is significant that by “distracting ourselves,” we cannot even enjoy beauty! We can only enjoy it if we are there with our whole selves, with all our urgency for fulfillment.
I remember one day, we were in Tuscany, in a spectacular place, in front of a breathtaking view. Someone said, “After a while, even this bores me... Why?” Because even the breathtaking view, without You, is not enough. If each of us does not verify this, You remain a “religious” ornament, for moments of “devotion.” And I only remember You, Lord, when there are problems. No! It is precisely when we seem to have everything that we feel most that everything is too little. Because nothing less than You is enough. You are not an ornament. You are the Only One who can fill this need.
Everything—the breathtaking view, the dream trip—refers us to the Only One who can satisfy us. It is not voluntarism; it is not gritting our teeth, nor convincing ourselves; it is nothing that goes beyond our strength. It is, simply, a recognition. The recognition of You who are doing this to me now and who—precisely because You are present—are constantly reawakening my urgency, as if to ask me: “Don't you miss Me in everything you enjoy?”
Without this You, whatever we experience is too little. Everything depends on being loyal to the need that we see emerging from the depths of our being in our experience.
Only those who indulge it can be overwhelmed with gratitude: what a blessing, Christ, that You are here! Only through this joy can we be a contribution to everyone, to the world, because it is what so many are groping for.
It is because of this gaze, which has reached us, that we can look at ourselves with such tenderness that we coincide with ourselves. Without running away. Outside of the recognition of His present Presence, there is no possibility of unity of the self; therefore, there is no salvation, no experience of fullness and peace is possible.
It is the fulfillment of what the prophet Isaiah says, to whom the Church refers us during Advent: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; do you not perceive it?” (39).
There are those who notice this newness and write to me in amazement:
“The experience of fullness is not the next step after something else. It is not that first I experience sadness and then consolation; it is not that first I experience discomfort and then fullness. My experience is that I would never want to live a life without feeling human, because it is there that I surprise the One who fills me, not the One who will fill me. It is a present experience! For several mornings now, the very first thought when I open my eyes is: ‘You are making me now.’ It seems like nothing, but everything changes. Giving space to this fills my self-awareness with the relationship that constitutes me. And I can only bear witness to what I am experiencing by living it.”
“It is there, in my experience, that I encounter the One who fills me.” Christ reveals “who He is” not with a speech, not with words, but within each of us, through the fullness with which He fills us, like a beloved person. And the most obvious sign that He is present, here and now, is the desire for You, Christ! The desire not to leave You!
“Christianity, being a present Reality, has as its instrument of knowledge the evidence of an experience.” It is this evidence of experience that can take away our fear of not succeeding: “Do not be afraid of not succeeding, of not making it. Just as you did not make yourself, so you do not fulfill yourself: it is Another who fulfills you.” But even more: “The more time passes in your life, the more you will experience the depth of the emotion of understanding that it is Another who makes you, that is, the emotion of returning to childhood at thirty, at forty, at fifty.” How can we not be amazed at the fulfillment of what the Apocalypse says: “I make all things new” (40).
This is how He reaches us today, to respond to our desire for fulfillment and to reawaken our desire for Christmas. “You sought us when we did not seek you, and you sought us so that we might seek you.”
A person meets a friend she has not seen for a long time and is so fascinated by her that she is overcome with the desire to be with her, to follow what she is looking at:
“I felt this nostalgia [for the life I saw vibrating in my friend], this longing to always live like that: I am envious, in a beautiful way, because I too would like to always have that free and pure heart, to follow my desire without telling myself lies. Sometimes it happens and it really makes me feel free, loved for who I am. Other times, come on, we're just kidding ourselves! So, you always need to have true friends around you, like you were when you suggested this show to me. Even though we hadn't seen each other for a year, I didn't care! You were more genuine and more of a friend than many people I have around me. You went straight to challenging me in my freedom. So, I thank you, because what I saw made me reshuffle the cards, I left there with a new job inside me to do and to look at.”
This is what makes those who have been touched by the Presence of Christ cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus,” during Advent. He puts people who have been touched by Him before us to reawaken in us the desire for His Presence. Let's not miss this opportunity.
Too much time is wasted by those who do not love you, sweet love Jesus above all love. Love, those who love you are not idle, so sweet it is to taste of You; but live wholly desirous of how to love You more closely; for the heart is so joyful through You: he who does not feel it could not speak of how sweet it is to taste Your savor. (41)
Assembly
Question: I have a question that has been nagging at me for some time. It happens more and more often that I feel a deep joy, not because my life is going the way I would like it to—because nothing is going the way I would like—but because, as you said before, in my restlessness (I call it restlessness rather than expectation) it is as if I recognize my desire for Christ. And this makes me happy, because it is as if I am living in the certainty that He is there. Carrón: Perfect.Question: But I have a doubt, probably due to the mentality that surrounds us, and I say to myself: “This joy is too strong! Maybe it's sentimentality.” And I don't want to be sentimental. In fact, I find it very dangerous. Usually, those who are sentimental are also cynical, and that is something I cannot tolerate. Perceiving the depth and the greatness of my feeling of joy, this doubt hit me. But this morning's lesson is as if it were saying to me: “No, it's not sentimentality; it's that you are grateful to God because He is there, even though things don't always go the way you would like, but He is there.” I wanted to say this, because today's retreat has removed this doubt from me. We feel a little ashamed of being so happy, of feeling too much happiness. It's as if we have to be a little sulky, a little resentful toward life; so sometimes you feel out of place... I don't know if I've made myself clear.
Carrón: Absolutely. I think it's a beautiful question because, as you can see, even in the face of such an amazing experience of fullness, doubt can arise. We must therefore look it square in the eye so as not to succumb to the temptation to interpret it simply as sentimentality. The real question is whether, looking this fullness in the face, I can reduce it to a “feeling.” Whether this fullness can be interpreted as something I produce and not as the most evident sign—being so far beyond my ability to understand it—of an Other greater than myself, of the fact that Christ surpasses us in every way. Let us think of the Gospels: how many times were the disciples amazed. The episode of the miraculous catch of fish often comes to mind. Peter and his companions, expert fishermen, toiled the whole night without catching anything, but someone came and said, “Cast your nets.” And they said, “We have toiled all night and caught nothing, but at your word we will cast the nets.” They leave the possibility open, because He had already surprised them many other times. And the unexpected happens, beyond all imagination. Then Peter kneels before Jesus: “Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinner.” He feels the distance. But he feels it precisely because he cannot reduce that experience to a feeling! It is someone else who has done what he feels, even sentimentally, but that does not mean that the catch did not happen: it happened, and it was brought about by someone who was before him, so much so that he knelt down. Therefore, if we do not address the questions that come to us, such as yours, we are always left with a doubt, like a “virus” that makes us doubt everything beautiful we see in life, because it overwhelms us on all sides. It is not possible to explain it simply with human “activity.” This, in my opinion, is what makes it possible to know who Christ is. Because Christ manifests Himself, as Giussani says, in the “evidence of an experience” that we cannot generate ourselves! Any other image of Christ or thought about Christ that is not “the evidence of an experience” is not Christ. It is a reduction of Christ. Because when Christ appears, when He reveals Himself in all His beauty, His attractiveness, and all His power, He takes everything from us! This is Christ. Everything else is not Him, but our thoughts or our reductions; only through “the evidence of an experience” does He communicate to us who He is. This is why He entered history. Anything else is a reduction of Christ. Instead, we recognize Him because in our experience, within our experience, we find something unique that we cannot deny. We would have to renounce our experience! We would not even have to believe our own experience! It is impressive. Yet, even if we try to tear it away from us, we cannot erase it. Christ is this objectivity, which imposes itself almost in spite of ourselves. This is Christmas.
Question: A month ago, at the place where I work, I was evicted. It is not a very serious thing, but it is serious because I had built everything there, I had renovated the furniture, everything... Since this happened, I have had many questions that I did not have before. The fundamental one is: what really builds the world? I felt so bad! As you said before, one builds their own ‘little garden’ in life. I had built my own garden, I was very happy there, then a man came along, leaned against the wall and said to me: ‘No, you have to leave here.’ Now I find myself with questions I didn't have before: what really builds a workplace? Why did I do all this?
Carrón: And where do you see what it builds? Where do you see it now, in this experience you have had? If you see that, despite what they have done to you, your "I" resists, your "I" is “built” and is not annihilated by evil. If He wins in you, if you do not let yourself be drawn into the spiral of violence against others, then you are truly building the world! We don't build it when things happen according to our thoughts, but also when a trial like this happens, and you can be undefeated because there is someone who makes you more and more yourself. Did Christ build the world with his death or not? It seems to me that we see some fruit... So, He can build the world even in an absolutely paradoxical way, such as by allowing those who meet you to see that you are not determined by this situation. And so, through you, He continues to build the world from scratch, you don't know where or how. Do you know what the greatest defeat would be? If you were defeated. That would truly be the greatest defeat. If, on the other hand, you are not defeated even by evil, it means that Christ is rebuilding you to continue building the world.
Question: Defeated in what?
Carrón: Defeated in the sense of being so disappointed that you can no longer recover from the wound. Or if, on the other hand, because of the Presence you have encountered, because of Him, you can start over, you can breathe, because you no longer depend on the evil that has been done to you, because there is a greater power that frees you from evil and fills you with His Presence. This is what rebuilds the world now, in the midst of evil. We think we can only build it in an idyllic situation. No, we build it right where and how we are. Let us look at Jesus: He did not build His Kingdom in an ideal world. He was spared nothing, not even death. So, there is a way of building that is not according to our image, so that as soon as we are tested by what happens to us, we question our ability to build. Instead, it is as if Christ wanted to say to you: “My dearest, even here I can show you my victory, not letting you be destroyed, making my victory shine in you—not elsewhere, not in others, but in you—to build the world.” Thank you.
Question: In life there is the experience of an exceptional correspondence. Then, however, it is as if I wanted that desire to always find that exceptional response, perhaps even in the same form. It is as if I were attacking myself. Instead, you continue to “tear us away,” to make us move forward, as if everything were still new and to be discovered.
Carrón: That's right.
Question: This fascinates me greatly, but how can we face this diversity and novelty, always possible, when we would like to remain attached to the place where we saw Him?
Carrón: Because our hope cannot be placed in some strategy that we invent ourselves. That is why I say that reading St. Augustine is liberating! Because it is He Himself who reawakens our desire, our whole desire for Him. So that even when we fail, we can always start again. Reading these texts was a real challenge for me, because He is the protagonist of the story! And He does not repeat mere rules that we must follow, while constantly recognizing that we fail... No, He wants to reawaken our desire for Him! He wants us to enjoy His Presence in such a way that, even if we continue to make mistakes, to stumble and fall, we feel compelled to desire to return to Him, like Peter. Without this, we always fall back into an ideal world that does not exist, into an ideal “I” that does not exist. St. Augustine traveled a path so human, so similar to ours, that he grasped the crucial point: he realized that if He does not constantly “go before us,” if He does not constantly reawaken our desire, it is not enough for us to remember the commandments; everyone does that: they repeat the rule, the right thing to do. But the question is: who reawakens your desire, who reawakens your taste, your desire for Him? Over time, this experience will also give you the energy to adhere to it. You will surprise yourself by living the rule, the commandment, not as an “ethic,” but as the fruit of a passion, of an affection for Him.
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1 Mt 6:19-21.
2 P. Van der Meer, Diario di un convertito, Paoline, Milan 1967, p. 150.
3 L. Giussani, Greeting at the Spiritual Exercises of the Memores Domini, August 6, 1998.
4 H. de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, Jaca Book, Milan 2017, p. 176.
5 Ibid., p. 177.
6 P. Van der Meer, Diary of a Convert, op. cit., p. 37.
7 P. Claudel, L’esprit de prophétie, in J’aime la Bible, 1955, quoted in H. de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, op. cit., p. 179.
8 Cf. G. Ungaretti, from Dannazione in Vita d’un uomo. Tutte le poesie, Mondadori, Milan 2016.
9 From Lana Wilson's documentary film, Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, 2020.
10 See R. Guardini, World and Person. Essay on Christian Anthropology, Morcelliana, 2022.
11 M. Zambrano, Man and the Divine, Edizioni Lavoro, 2001, p. 280.
12 R. M. Rilke, from the ninth Elegy in Duino Elegies, Einaudi, Turin 1978.
13 Leo XIV, General Audience, St. Peter's Square, October 15, 2025.
14 Augustine, Confessions, XIII, Sei 1992, p. 453.
15 C. Taylor, Questions of Meaning in the Secular Age, Mimesis, 2023, p. 34.
16 L. Giussani, In cammino (1992-1998), BUR Rizzoli, Milan 2014, p. 44
17 R. Guardini, Ritratto della malinconia, Morcelliana, Brescia 1993, p. 13.
18 Ibid., p. 38.
19 Ibid., pp. 67-69.
20 Cf. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, Jaca Book, Milan 2010.
21 Cf. S. Weil, Waiting for God, Adelphi, 2024.
22 See V. Frankl, Alla ricerca di un significato della vita, Mursia, 2012.
23 See S. Weil, Attesa di Dio, op. cit.
24 L. Giussani, Incontro con Gioventù Studentesca, Varigotti, 1963.
25 Augustine, Confessions, 1,1.5.
26 Ibid.
27 Leo XIV, General Audience, St. Peter's Square, October 15, 2025.
28 Augustine, Confessions, X, 27,38.
29 Dante, Purgatorio, XXXI, vv. 127-129.
30 Augustine, Confessions, XI, 2, 4.
31 Augustine, The Trinity, IX, 1.
32 Augustine, Confessions, XIII, 1, 1.
33 L. Giussani, Avvenimento di libertà, Marietti 1820, Genoa 2002, p. 190.
34 L. Giussani, The Virtue of Friendship or: The Friendship of Christ, “Parola tra noi,” in Tracce no. 4/1996, p. II.
35 N. Kabasilas in J. Ratzinger, Beauty, the Church, Itaca, Castel Bolognese 2005, pp. 15-16.
36 L. Giussani, The Encounter That Ignites Hope, LEV, Vatican City 2025, pp. 126–127.
37 L. Giussani, The Self-Consciousness of the Cosmos, BUR, Milan 2000, p. 164.
38 L. Giussani, Una strana compagnia, BUR, Milan 2017, pp. 248 and 252.
39 Is 43:19.
40 Rev 21:5.
41 Laudario di Cortona, 13th century.
Notes not reviewed by the author
