And You, Who Do You Say That I Am?
And Who Do You Say That I Am? The Sparkle in the Eyes, on Luigi Giussani’s podcast “And Who Do You Say That I Am?” A Dialogue with Julian Carrón. (ITALIAN)
“Christianity, being a present reality, has no instrument of knowledge other than the evidence of an experience.”
“And You, Who Do You Say That I Am?”
A dialogue with Julián Carrón and Eugenio Nembrini
In a closing conversation, Julián Carrón traces how the good face of the Mystery becomes clear—not through repeated formulas, but through an experience that holds up under the press of real life.
DON EUGENIO NEMBRINI: We received many questions; I passed them on to Julián and gathered them into a single question—the one I need today. So let me ask it as simply as I can. This year we’ve been working on Luigi Giussani’s podcasts: “Who do you say that I am?” We’d like to ask you how, in your own life, the good face of the Mystery became clear, and what helped you answer that question. It seemed to us that the through-line is made of two words that keep intertwining: “method” and “freedom.” That is: how the Mystery knocks at the heart of man, and how man intercepts it and answers. Help us enter into that relationship by telling us about yourself.
DON JULIÁN CARRÓN: Good morning, everyone, and thank you for this chance to look together at a question that none of us, if we are Christian, can avoid hearing put to our own lives. The first thing I trace back, from the time I was small, is a kind of urgency you feel inside, one that pushes you to seek. More and more consciously, I find myself asking: who awakens in me the desire to seek? Who are you who, from the moment I wake, stirs this impulse in me, this attraction to seek you? Today I’d put it in the words of St. Augustine: “You sought us while we were not seeking you; you sought us so that we might seek you.” It is always he who takes the initiative: he sought us so that we would seek him.
And again, Augustine: “You went before me, before I called on you.” So you can’t say where this urgency to seek him comes from; but in time you discover it isn’t something you generate on your own. It is generated by Another, who draws you and seeks you so that you will seek him. This desire, which I kept finding inside myself, has marked—I can say it—my whole life. And only by going along with it did a familiarity gradually grow with the One who was calling me to seek him. It was precisely this seeking that later let me intercept presences in my life that I recognized little by little, and that I, too, tried to go along with—learning from them the way He made himself present. There is the freedom: I went along with those presences in order to learn from them how I could answer the search each of them was calling me to.
Beneath the two words Nembrini lifts up—method and freedom—runs a third that Carrón never sets down: the irreducibility of the I (irriducibilità dell’io). The self that finds itself seeking cannot be argued away, dissolved into what produced it, or reduced to the forces that shaped it. That irreducibility is why the search stays open, and why freedom turns out to be something more than reaction.
I am in debt, because I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t intercepted those presences, which over time became decisive for my life. Later I came across what Fr. Giussani said: if I desire certain things, God lets me learn them from those who already live them. So I began to follow what I saw others living—this has always been the method. Because life, he says, is learned by following those who live it; not because they’re better than you (they may be a thousand times better), but as a method, an attitude, a way of behaving.
You follow an example, not a speech, Giussani says. The rule, then, is always this: follow those presences God places on your path, the ones that keep reawakening in you the desire to seek them, drawing you to follow. Until, at a certain point, among all these presences, the one most decisive for my life appeared: Fr. Giussani. At first, I have to say, more by a presentiment than by an actual encounter, because I hadn’t had the chance—many of you had—to know him beforehand, or to have heard him on other occasions: living in Madrid, I didn’t.
Then I came across this presence. I always remember the first times when, taking part in the common life, I found myself in front of him in certain gestures—during the international assembly, for instance. What stayed with me and struck me from the start, like a shock, was the way he launched into the Angelus: he’d make a comment or two, and that alone moved me, because I was in front of a difference that changed me. Then, listening to him speak, it amazed me that he could look at everything—as we’ve heard so many times—censoring nothing, never looking away. He dared to say, in front of everyone, things I couldn’t even bring myself to look at inside me.
This stirred such an attraction in me that I wanted to be able to look at life that way. It’s not that I hadn’t made a journey in my earlier years, in the seminary, in theology; but books are one thing, talks another, and seeing a person in whom what I’m describing actually happened is something else entirely: watching him, something happened in you too, and the desire to go along with it kept growing, because of the newness you sensed in the person. At first, as you can imagine, I felt the whole distance between where I stood on my journey and Giussani’s stature. But that very thing kept the question alive in me: where does he draw what he says and lives? I didn’t want to just keep repeating certain things I heard him say—even if I did repeat them—I wanted to know where he was drawing them from. So the question of method was decisive: I wasn’t satisfied just to repeat.
So I put myself on watch, with an attention strained to catch the origin of that difference he was showing me. And I caught it in the few times I was in front of one of his gestures, or in a moment with everyone, where I felt that what he said spoke to the bottom of my I. Along with that, I didn’t have the chance to live alongside him; and yet it always amazed me that I could somehow identify with the way he took things on. Reading those now-legendary collections of Giussani’s texts and dialogues, like the ones from Memores Domini—which, being an open dialogue, gathered everyone’s questions—I learned the method this way: when I heard a question, I’d stop in front of it and try to answer it myself, only to find my answer had nothing to do with his. And so, little by little, letting myself be moved, I began to see where he was drawing this difference from, and I was thrown off every time.
Eugenio is right about the reach of the method: it wasn’t a repetition of phrases I could have repeated endlessly, but a method I wanted to learn in order to make my own what I saw in him. Bit by bit I grasped its reach more and more, because—as he repeats, almost as the keystone of his whole approach—reality, what you want to learn, becomes transparent in experience. That’s exactly what amazed me: only by making experience of what I was living could I better understand what the ultimate origin was, and what newness life was bringing. We all know the newness of life doesn’t come just by repeating things. It comes when something happens. And it has to happen in experience.
And in experience, one of the things that struck me most is that trying wasn’t enough. As he says in the first chapter of The Religious Sense, to be able to say you’ve made an experience—that you’ve grown in what you tried—you have to arrive at a judgment, because without that nothing remains. I saw this recently in one of my students. I was telling her how amazed I was at what she’d told me—“You get it, don’t you? With all the hours you already put in, you’d more than earn the tip they gave you; and if the tip actually shows up, that’s the icing on the cake”—and she looks at me, dead serious: “Prof, in me it all resets to zero.” I was floored: on one hand amazed that she already had this awareness, that we try something but nothing stays. So much so that when I came back a few weeks later, she didn’t remember a thing she’d told me.
That’s why, when I recently came across a text where, back in the 1960s, he names what is, intellectually, the biggest thing he said in all his teaching… I’ve often stopped to ask myself, and I ask each of you: let everyone form his own hypothesis. Careful, though—he says no one understood it back then: it was this invitation of mine to compare everything with your own elementary experience, with life, with that complex of original structures and inclinations. Only when you make that comparison do you gain something that makes you more and more yourself; and you can find out whether what you’re living is adequate to, and corresponds to, the expectant awaiting of the heart. That, in the end, is what Jesus poses in the Gospel as the great question of living: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he then loses himself?
Jesus poses the great question of life and sets us in front of it: what has to happen in our lives so that, even if we gained the whole world, we wouldn’t lose ourselves? How do we keep from losing ourselves? What has to happen? Because everything else is “too little and too small for the capacity of the soul,” as Leopardi would say, for a person to truly gain himself. And to this, Giussani gave the tool—as he always said—for a human journey: to intercept in experience what answers Jesus’ question, so that life doesn’t go to ruin.
This awareness of your own humanity, then, isn’t a premise but the necessary condition for understanding the answer. Even Jesus, by putting it in front of everyone, submits to this test. If, after asking the question, he didn’t answer, he’d leave us in our powerlessness, because we can gain the whole world that lies in our hands and that still isn’t enough to keep us from losing ourselves.
A Jesus who comes to give us a hand but doesn’t answer this wouldn’t be credible as a possible answer. That’s why Fr. Giussani—as we’ve seen this year—puts exactly this at the start of the verification: you couldn’t fully realize what Jesus Christ means unless you first realized the nature of that dynamism that makes man human. Christ, in fact, presents himself as the answer to what I am; and only a careful—and tender and impassioned—awareness of myself can open me wide and dispose me to recognize, admire, thank, and live Christ. Without that awareness, even the awareness of Jesus Christ becomes a mere name—“a fairy tale,” he says elsewhere. We can repeat the word “Jesus,” but it stays a mere name. That’s why, from the very first paragraph of At the Origin of the Christian Claim, he sets the challenge before us: to make a road, a journey that can grow us into an experience of Christ so real that he doesn’t stay a mere name. The real question, the great problem of the world—he told us—is no longer a theoretical, who’s-right question, but an existential one: how do you live.
Today’s world is brought back to the level of evangelical poverty, and we see it more and more. In Jesus’ time the problem was how to live—not, excuse me, who was right: that was the problem of the scribes and Pharisees. This shift changes the very nature of our concern: we have to move from an intellectually critical stance to a passion for what marks the person of today—the doubt of existence, the fear of existing, the fragility of living, the inconsistency of the I, the terror of impossibility, the horror of the disproportion between oneself and the ideal. That is the bottom of the matter; and it’s from here that you start again, toward a new culture, a new way of being critical. He said this at the start of the 1990s—imagine what he’d say now. So each of us, like it or not, stands before this question: how do you live?
And to recognize it takes honesty with yourself, that is, an observation of your own experience. What can answer an existential urgency like that? Only something real. That’s why he says that, in a society like this, you can’t create anything new except with life, with something real: no structure, organization, or initiative will hold; only a different, new life can revolutionize structures, initiatives, relationships—everything.
That’s why, from the very start of the verification of the Christian claim, he sets before us that Christ stands as the answer to what I am, to this existential urgency we all carry. Each person has to verify, attentive to his own experience, what answers it. And in a compact but crucial line, Giussani says: Christianity, being a present reality, has no instrument of knowledge other than the evidence of an experience. That is, we can answer the question—how do you live?—only if we live the Christian claim, the Christian announcement, as the evidence of an experience. Then each person will be able to see whether any reduction of Christianity to doctrine, or ethics, or gestures and rites can answer the demand of living. And there we’ll start to understand whether Christ, for us, is a Presence or a mere name.
That’s the great question of Christianity. How often do we repeat “Christ”? How often do we catch ourselves talking about him? How often do we even do things for him? But for whom? Is Christ a Presence? It isn’t enough to know what Christianity is, just as it isn’t enough to know what falling in love is. Knowing it, describing it, being able to explain it to someone else isn’t enough to make it happen: it is an Event, not the result of a theoretical definition. It isn’t a correct doctrine about love; it’s something you know only through the evidence of an experience. So it seems crucial to me, in order to answer the question—“Who do people say that I am? And you, who do you say that I am?”—that each person come to answer in the evidence of an experience. People can hand you plenty of answers, but if you don’t get there, each one still has to verify.
The disproportion Giussani names is not a flaw to be fixed but a structure to be reckoned with—a structural disproportion (sproporzione strutturale) between what the heart awaits and anything the world can hand it. Read this way, the “horror” is not pathology but accuracy: the measure of a desire that nothing finite fills, and so the exact place where only something real can answer.
It always strikes me how Giussani, speaking of himself, says that what amazed him was that, for him, Christ was a Presence; and he told us this in every way. I think of what he says about John and Andrew. Think of them: for their whole lives, the most present present remained the present of the day they met him. Nothing was comparable to it, except the renewal of that day in every day of their lives. They spent three years living like kings—not because they flew around the world or went to the moon, but because of the bond that everything they did—looking at their wife, their father, their children, going fishing, being with friends—had with him.
So when they followed that man down the road, there was no room left in their hearts for anything else. And when Andrew’s mother died? Here Giussani, for the sake of verification, says nothing that doesn’t hand us something to verify, so we won’t misread him: if Christ was present for John and for Andrew, was he present when Andrew’s mother was dying, or if a son of his had died? The Gospel doesn’t mention these details, because they have nothing to do with the central point; but a mother does die, and a son can die.
All the concreteness of human pain remains, and all the tears a certain character, a certain temperament, calls for. And yet there was one invincible thing: joy, made possible by the fact that he was free. Free, that is, bound. Bound to that man, that young man who spoke, who told the widow of Nain, “Woman, do not weep,” who turned to the chief tax collector of Jericho and called him “Zacchaeus.” Precisely because he had that relationship, he was glad even in the face of his dead mother: he wept, but he was glad. John, I’m sure, would have wept, by temperament; Andrew maybe had a tougher streak, but a couple of tears would have welled up if his mother had died.
For them, though, it was as Giussani describes it. And why could he be so sure? Because of the experience he himself had of Christ present. That’s why the verification falls to us: Christ is a Presence when things happen. So the verification of what you meet is crucial for seeing whether Jesus is a mere name, still a fairy tale, or a present reality. Each of us makes it when life bears down, as it did with me. Everything life doesn’t spare us, every circumstance we have to face, every unexpected thing that comes up in living is the occasion to ask: what happened to me—does that Presence hold up in the face of life’s urgency? That’s why I’ve said so many times that I’m truly grateful I was not spared the hardships of living: if I had been spared them, I couldn’t have come to know him as much as I do. Every time, for me, it was the occasion to see what Christ was, present for me. And that’s what created an ever-greater familiarity with him, and bound me more and more.
He made me ever more full of that Presence, and for that very reason free in any circumstance, whatever it was—right up to retirement. You really do verify whether Christ is able to fill a life. And it’s the surprise of an ever-greater fullness I find inside me, of an even keener desire to seek him, of an urgency for silence, because nothing compares to this being with him—to the “staying with him” that, for the disciples, coincided with the fullness of living. The question, then, is how each of us, along the way, makes experience of this: we can be sure that he becomes less and less a mere name—through the intensity of living, through the overflowing fullness we find in ourselves, through the longing. Each person can see the plainest sign that something has happened in front of him, a real Presence: the longing for him.
If I can go right by with no urgency, no longing—just try to convince yourself, or anyone else, that you’re in love. That’s why it amazed me so much—and with this I’ll close—that even Giussani had to make the verification of all this: of what his own I was, and of what Christ was. And I find nothing more beautiful than the moment when Giussani, with some of the Memores, is saying goodbye to someone leaving for abroad, and they sing a song with these words: “Feast and longing, in this lovely company… [verse not included] a ship. Yes, it’s all true and great, and you are here.” And he comments: it’s really very beautiful—as music, as singing, as a human feeling of friendship, of fraternity, of company in an adventure.
And yet: if the things could be listed just as I’ve listed them, and that were all; if something else were taken for granted—accepted and acknowledged, mind you, but taken for granted—and it were not his Name, with a capital letter—not the product of some emphasis, some need to make yourself heard, some need to hear him; if he didn’t have a personality that is, at a certain point, autonomous, a face that is ultimately singular, unmistakable features—even in the ones he himself created as a sign of himself—then we wouldn’t be as content as before.
If he weren’t an object thought of, remembered, spoken, invoked, contemplated with wonder and relish, so much that it turns into gladness over a Presence—“my heart is glad because you are alive”—; if whole days went by without saying “you,” except in the rush of repeated formulas: that wouldn’t be enough for the person leaving to be as full of life as he was. Even when, despite everything, an exceptional and finally satisfying job goes well for him—born of his own hands, his own mind, truly his—it still isn’t enough. That’s why, if this singular face, these unmistakable features, don’t appear—even in the situation of company and friendship he’s describing—what prevails, what gets the upper hand, is what should be only provisional, an analogical foretaste.
What’s the sign that the provisional doesn’t prevail? Look at how he documents it. First, he says, let’s be careful: Jesus, among us, can be the origin of a whole world of humanity full of gladness and friendships, of formally flawless reasons, of a help that is formally unique and also concretely real, ready to be given. And yet that Jesus could be reduced to the portrait of a beautiful woman carved on her own tombstone. The presence of Christ in the world is the miracle of our company; but that is the emerging tip of a sign that plunges down to where it is truest. So it isn’t a matter of softening the weight of our friendship, of making hazy that effectiveness loaded with eyes, with lips, with face, with word, with song, with heart.
A company as beautiful as this—and yet he can’t take it anymore: there’s a kind of exasperated tension to cry out your name, Christ! How many, on that evening so full of beauty, felt the exasperated tension to say his name? It’s not, as people say, that something bad has to happen for me to remember: here it’s the opposite. It’s full of beauty, and yet he can’t bear it, because everything else is too little for the urgency of his humanity not to cry out his name to everyone. That’s why each one makes the verification in living: whether Christ becomes this exasperated tension that arises not only when I pray, but when I live, and everything, without him, is too little. Without trying to soften it—soften nothing! Because if it isn’t like that, it still isn’t that Presence which is Jesus.
Think of St. Paul: what experience did he have? Through all the trials life didn’t spare him—his letters are the documentation of it, because he had to go through them constantly in announcing the Gospel—he came to say: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Precisely these things, which he was not spared—distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword—were the occasion for seeing him win. And that is what brought him to the conviction that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of Christ.” Each of us stands before this same possibility.
Like that woman whose letter I’d read at the Lenten retreat. Back when she was leaving her husband, as I said goodbye I told her: “Seek him day and night, the love of your soul.” She left disappointed, but in the end that was the one thing she had left. Ten years later, without my having heard anything about how it turned out, she writes to thank me: “Nine years have passed. Today my life has changed, into an unbroken and dramatic dialogue with the One I’ve discovered to be truly my first and only love. I’ve been reborn, and little by little my home has been reborn with me. Today I’m glad, at peace. Nothing has been lost. Friends look at me, amazed, and don’t recognize me. I can say only this: day and night I sought, day and night I seek the love of my soul. Thank you for showing me the way. You allowed what seemed an unacceptable circumstance to become the proving ground of my faith, and the place where Christ could reach me.
There is no other love holding up my life and the world.” That’s why it isn’t enough to know Christ. It isn’t enough to know all the truths about him, however right. You need an experience like this to be able to say such things. It has to be unveiled in experience for it to become yours. She left disappointed; I’d only given her a hint for the road. What else can we do? We can’t stand in for the experience each of us has to make in order to discover the value of life. If we settle for repeating certain things, then we have to verify them in the living, because only that way—as we were saying—will the true nature of Christ be unveiled. Christianity, being a present reality, has the evidence of an experience as its instrument of knowledge. Not only John and Andrew, not only Giussani: even an ordinary person who takes a sentence like this so seriously that she is amazed to see it come true. That is the only way to understand, existentially, the question put to each of us: “And you, who do you say that I am?”
DON EUGENIO NEMBRINI: I don’t really have anything to add; but when you spoke about your first encounter with Giussani, one thing struck me: what you describe is exactly the experience, the impact that many of us have had—and go on having—with you. Even this morning, it’s extraordinary to me that someone comes to tell us small facts of life, to remind us of the method, to tell us what holds life up, what holds the I up, what holds up this question: why is life worth living? What lets me live? For that, I thank you.
And looking out at this room, with the bar in the background, I say: what a grace that so many of us, thank God, no longer try to answer with phrases, but bear witness to this journey with the drama of their own lives, in the most beautiful sense of the word. Let me say just one thing: the relationship between method and freedom you’ve described is the great challenge. Freedom—this morning, again, I’m taking this home with me—is the real desire to judge, to go to the root of any fact, experience, event, sorrow, or joy. It’s the same intensity you started with, saying that from the very beginning you sensed and intercepted that desire: that’s where freedom is at stake.
Right up to the point where the judgment on life can become my own experience. Method and freedom, then, can’t be separated: there isn’t first the method and then my freedom; freedom coincides with this embrace of myself and of reality. I don’t know if I’ve put it well.
So, dear friends: summer is coming, vacations, the messes, the illnesses, the sufferings—and so is the challenge for each of us to go and verify what makes it possible to live every instant, every circumstance, every part of life, so that our faces can tell the world—with our faces—that life can have a taste and a meaning, and others can catch it. So, truly, thank you all for this year’s work, and for the company we’ve kept. Thank you, Giulia, for the company you go on giving us. And onward, all of us, certain that God abandons none of his children: the one certainty, the great certainty of our lives.
DON JULIÁN CARRÓN: Thank you.
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