Thank Goodness You Are Here
Thank Goodness You’re Here — Recognition, Longing and Presence.
“How do we know that Jesus means something to us? If we miss him.”
Julián Carrón - Conversion begins not with adequacy, but by recognizing the Presence that endlessly begins again.
A dialogue among friends in Grosseto. Unrevised notes by the author.
Question. Julián came to visit us again this year, and we thank him. I’ll start with something that happened to me on Friday morning, the day we left to come here to the beach. I got up at 6:30; Michela was already up. I went downstairs, walked into the kitchen, and found her having breakfast while listening to an audio recording. I listened in and heard these words: “In this very moment, conversion is recognizing Him.” I asked her what text it was, and she said, “The Lenten Meditations of Oropa.” So I listened, and what I heard hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Conversion, Giussani says, is recognizing Him; and this recognition is a dense, total instant. An hour later, the next day, one finds oneself not already changed, but having made another mistake — and there you give the example of the Samaritan woman. Further on, you say that conversion is this recognition, and that the rest will come in time. “The Gospel does not say that the Samaritan woman sent away the sixth man she was with. It does not say that the tax collector, on leaving the temple, gave away everything he owned to the poor. It says that, having left forgiven, he recognized.” Anyone who downplays the weight of that word is being gravely superficial, morally coarse — he may have an exceptional mind, but he is coarse all the same.
And further on you close by saying: the problem is recognizing Him constantly. When the Lord makes Himself present again, He amazes us again; and we shouldn’t worry, because in time this is what will win out, since there is nothing else like it. It is a road that will win us over slowly, far more than any moralism now in circulation. The only alternative is to grow more and more discouraged, if conversion were not this recognition from which one starts out again and again. Picture Peter who, after yet another mistake, finds himself in front of someone who leaves him stunned: “Do you love Me?” Do you think Peter answered, “I’ll do it again tomorrow”? That is the last thing that crosses his mind. He is so astonished at being embraced again that he clings tighter and tighter, and in time he wins, according to a design that is not our own.
That is why conversion is recognizing Him. And so I ask you: why does this seem like too little to us? Why do we confuse conversion with adequacy?
Julián Carrón. This is one of the simplest and, at the same time, most crucial questions of living. We always think that deep down the issue is adequacy. It pains all of us to make mistakes; it pains us to fail the people we love; it pains us not to be adequate. So we figure we just have to try harder, and that the answer to our inadequacy is straining toward that adequacy we feel corresponds to us.
But then we see that we make mistakes, and make them again, and we conclude that we are never adequate enough. So sooner or later a person throws in the towel. Many leave Christianity precisely because they recognize the greatness of the ideal and don’t feel able to reach it.
That is why Giussani says this isn’t what’s wrong. The question is a different one: what makes it possible for that tension to remain? Because Christian morality is this tension, not adequacy, not consistency. Consistency is a miracle: it will come when it comes. “I came so that they may have life and have it in abundance.” Only someone who follows and grows attached to Him over time really wants his own life to change.
But it is Jesus who constantly reawakens that desire in us, because He looks at us with the boundless tenderness with which you so often look at your own children. If you look at your children that way — if you don’t lose heart over their mistakes, if you don’t lose heart when they make clumsy attempts and then come back, but keep looking at them with that tenderness — then you can understand what Jesus does, and why He stooped to the one way human beings can truly understand one another.
As we have seen in the communities, He looks at us with that boundless tenderness no matter what mistake we have made, so that the desire for Him can rise again in us; and desiring Him, we can want to live up to that good. This is where the game is won or lost, because otherwise, sooner or later, we throw in the towel. To keep that tension, a person has to be constantly reawakened.
Giussani has this familiarity with the human, the same one you have with your children. Do we think that is one chapter and the Christian life another? The Christian life is of the same nature. Just as you watch your children grow, holding that tenderness for them, looking at them as closely as He looks at us, so you see that the whole business of raising children is this recognition.
Jesus knows our nature very well, and He pulled the one approach suited to it out of His hat: that is why He became flesh. Instead of preaching morals — let’s go fishing, let’s go to the wedding we’ve been invited to, let’s go preach, let’s go to the synagogue, let’s go together. And little by little the desire came out; and sometimes their reaction came out too, their inadequacy. Faced with the Samaritans who won’t take them in, they ask that fire come down on them. “You’re a little off your rocker!” Jesus corrects them almost without correcting them, simply by not going along with that reaction. That is how He teaches them to give themselves time to change.
He, meanwhile, keeps starting over, always knocking at the door. As Pope Benedict used to say, God never fails. In our lives it would often look like one long failure; and instead He never fails, because He always begins again with us, whatever mistake we have made, whatever inconsistency, whatever wrong. He starts out again with the same gaze He turns on the Samaritan woman — looking not at her inconsistencies, but at her thirst. He speaks to that woman’s desire, because if He did not answer that thirst she would go looking for the answer in someone else all over again.
That is why He says: only if you stay with Me and start living this fullness will you enjoy it so much that you won’t need to look anywhere else. What changes is that He can fill our lives so full that we no longer need to do stupid things to be happy, because no one makes us happier than He does. This is what He wants them to understand in the Gospel of the Transfiguration; and when they do understand it, what do they say? Let’s put up three tents. Because nothing corresponds so completely, nothing is so fitting, so adequate to my need for fullness, as Your presence, Christ. And how many times this surprises me: thank goodness You’re here. Because I make mistakes like everyone else, but there is One who is always there; and because He is there, there is hope for any one of us.
Question. I’ll start with an ordinary episode from my daily life that has to do with a question I’ve wanted to ask you for a while. One evening my daughter Veronica, who is nineteen, came home. In the general chaos I didn’t notice anything was wrong, and I scolded her because her room was a mess — the usual stuff. She overreacted, which isn’t like her: she got furious, then started crying. I let it drop, because I could tell it wasn’t her night.
The next morning I got up before everyone else to get things ready and found a letter for me on the kitchen table. She had written a number of things; the first was an apology for how she had acted. But what struck me most was the reason she gave: I reacted that way because I was sad. It was the Carnival break, I think. She had been planning to go away with some close friends; but since they were all boys, she couldn’t go. Then she had gone back to school — the day before had been the first day back — and she had hoped one of them would let her know she’d been missed. Instead, like typical boys, they couldn’t be bothered, the way it happens to everyone.
What she wrote next is what got me: “I’m sorry, but this loneliness I felt so strongly, this sadness I brought home with me — I realize it’s the same one I sometimes see in you, in your eyes, even when you grit your teeth, and you can see the muscle in your jaw go tight, and you keep going.” It laid me bare with a clarity I wasn’t expecting, because I do everything I can to make sure nothing shows.
When she woke up, the conversation was the interesting part. The only thing I could bring myself to say was: isn’t it Him calling out to both of us? Because we all have that desire for friendship, for being loved — me at fifty and her at nineteen. If that weren’t the case — and I’ll put it bluntly — then let’s go get high; I’ll come with you. But if it is the case, a whole other horizon opens up.
Thinking back on this and on how I handle reality, I’ll admit my first reaction was: she caught me. The first thing I thought was, what do I tell her now? I have to find the words to set things right, because I’m the mom. Instead I had to ask myself, honestly: do I have something to defend, or is there what matters to her and what matters to me?
So here is the question. For me, recognizing His presence, as in that example, doesn’t by itself bring peace in the sense of peace of mind — which I confess I want a little of, the peace of someone who is calm and at ease. But since what we are really talking about is instants of awareness that light up the day, they are exactly that — instants — and they still leave a pang of pain and of incompleteness. What, then, is gladness, and how do you reach it? If you could give some examples, the way you do, from the Gospel.
Julián Carrón. It is beautiful to see this dialogue between the daughter and her mother, and before that the daughter’s exchange with her friends. She feels the desire to be loved; and even though she couldn’t go with them, she would at least have liked to hear that they missed her. And so she feels the whole sadness of an absent good, as St. Thomas would say, as we studied in The Religious Sense.
That young people are beginning to recognize the nature of this sadness is a wonderful thing: it isn’t sentimentality, it is the ultimate depth of me that brings my need for fullness to the surface. It is beautiful when someone starts to look at the human in himself; and it is more beautiful still when he can find companions on the road. Because the problem — I was talking about this earlier with some of the young people — is that so many don’t feel understood. That is where the drama really starts.
I have told the story many times of another mother who, faced with a confidence like that, instead of sharing it by talking about herself, the way Franci did with her daughter, answered: but I would never be satisfied. Deep down she had not understood the nature of her daughter’s sadness. Franci, on the other hand, understood that her daughter’s sadness is her own sadness. It isn’t that you’ve made a bad impression: you’re making the fine impression of human beings. And thank goodness you have this, because otherwise you wouldn’t understand your children, or your colleague, or the fellow travelers we meet along the way.
That is why most people live in this loneliness: not because they have some disorder, but because they have no one to share it with, no one who understands it. It is a problem of knowledge more than of consistency, more than of the ability to beat it. Don’t you feel that the two of us have the same need? Start to see what kind of conversation you can have with your children: man to man, as Péguy would say, adult to adult, one on one, because you share the very bottom of human experience.
That is what we have seen happen with Jesus at the heart of the communities: only the divine saves all the factors of the human, only the divine can take in the full density of man’s drama. And then a horizon opens up — of conversation, of walking together, of a shared adventure — where everything turns on this deep sharing of life.
Imagine how grateful that daughter will be when she sees that her mother doesn’t save face by saying, “This isn’t a problem, let me explain it to you,” but simply says: this is life. Your problem is my problem, your drama is my drama. And the daughter feels understood by her mother. That opens the possibility of their becoming real confidants in the road each of them is walking — without being scandalized, without tearing their clothes over every difficulty, but keeping each other company. This is true companionship. Companionship that doesn’t reach this level is pathetic, because it isn’t equal to the drama.
That is why people in a hard situation don’t want anyone calling them to commiserate, handing them stock phrases: it wears them out, and they’d rather keep those people at arm’s length. That is how, by contrast, we come to know who the real companions on the road are — the ones we’d go to the ends of the earth with, the ones we can share the truest thing about ourselves with.
And when someone arrives at this, he realizes what experience he is having and what all of it points to. The Gospel is full of these passages: the Samaritan woman, Zacchaeus, the sinful woman. They are, on the face of it, people who have gone wrong, and they find someone who is not scandalized, who is not surprised, who looks at them the way He looks at the Samaritan woman, and with that boundless tenderness says: the problem is not the mistake. The problem is that you can’t find anyone who answers your thirst; and if you go looking elsewhere, you’ll find another one who leaves you as unsatisfied as the ones before.
That there is someone in history, whom we have met, able to answer our drama and the drama of our children — this is unique. We have nothing else to share with them and with the companions we meet on the road. This is the moment of the caminante, of the one who, not having been spared the road himself, can be a companion on the road to those who are searching. Because so many would like to find someone who understands them at this level, and they don’t find him. When you do find him, it is like finding a treasure.
So let’s pay attention: only someone with this familiarity with the human can offer anything to a child, a colleague, or the person in front of him, because he can tune in deeply to that person’s experience. And the other feels singled out, feels understood, feels embraced. It is what Giussani said about Jesus: that gaze was so penetrating, so capable of embracing the person, that everyone who was searching found himself taken in by it.
We are living through a particularly challenging time. But for that very reason this irreducibility comes out more clearly — even in those who have gotten up to all kinds of things, even in those who have been successful, even in those who have reached the top of their dreams. In the end, that is the result of this irreducibility. Companions are not easy to find: which is why the more intensely we live, the more we will be able to keep each other company and be company for others. At a level that has nothing to do with the usual moralizing, with stock phrases. Someone with this capacity to tune in to the bottom of another person doesn’t waste time on stock phrases: he has something interesting to share.
Question. Lately a friend of mine has stopped wanting to see me, for very questionable reasons, and another friend, Michele, has stopped answering me altogether, with no provocation at all. Both have been a source of pain for me and, at the same time, a real provocation. Through those two very simple episodes I realized that generosity is very often at the root of what I do: generosity even in Jesus’ name, but generosity all the same. And what struck me was how that generosity slipped a virus into my days, to the point that with my family and at work I was no longer able to be open to anything new.
Three things showed me where the question was really being played out. The first: while we were thinking of inviting Father Pasolini, who is now the Preacher of the Papal Household, I remembered something he said at a meeting in Como. He said that when we enter the Kingdom of God — he meant it in an eschatological sense, but I think of it as the fullness of life, right now — we may well read the good Lord the whole list of the fine things we have done, like a résumé, but that isn’t what will let me in. What will let me in is the love with which I let myself be loved.
The second. Those words reminded me of what you said to Tiziano last year: faced with his hatred of his sister, you didn’t tell him, “Love your neighbor.” You didn’t ask him to love her more, only to let her in, to let himself be loved. And you said: this is a highway for him.
The third episode, which floored me, happened during a very recent confession. At one point this elderly friar asked me, “How are we doing on prayer?” Thinking I’d impress him — poor man — I told him, “I say the rosary all day, every day.” And he, impressing me far more, said, “Forget it, it’s no use. Two or three words said in front of a You would be enough.”
It seems to me that what I’m missing on so many of my days is exactly that awareness of standing in front of a You. So I wanted to ask you: why do we look for other roads, the ones that seem easier right away, like generosity? And what does letting Him in mean to you?
Julián Carrón. This is a decisive question, because we can fill our lives with acts of piety: but how many of them are in front of a You? Think of the conversations among yourselves. It is one thing for someone to say the right things to you; it is another for someone to be truly a you, and for you to look at him as a you, in a way that wakes up his I, so that you look at yourself as a you. Without this, the Christian life sinks to the level of practice, and practice cannot touch the bottom of the drama of man, which is what we are. That bottom — only a you can wake it and answer it.
So the whole question is whether, as we go, this you becomes more and more a presence that defines my life and my days — whatever happens: consistency or inconsistency, mistakes or no mistakes, distractions. More and more in front of a you. If life does not become this, then we really do lose our lives while we live them.
It struck me to reread a text we have quoted before: it is not mathematically true that because we grow, our relationship with this You grows too, that Christ really becomes a presence for us. We can have done any number of things. How often the Gospel speaks of the Pharisees not simply as hypocrites, but as people who knew the rules inside out and were sometimes even aware of it. But how many of those things were a dialogue with a You? All that interested them was going over the precepts they had kept; while the presence of that You who had begun the story, and who had made Himself plain across the whole history of Israel, stayed a stranger to them.
That is why, Giussani says, He can be present at some moment of prayer or in some work we do in His name and still be far from the heart: not a presence that captivates us, not something we miss, not someone we feel nostalgia for.
Look at what Franci’s daughter said. What interested her wasn’t whether or not they’d had the weekend away with the guys, but whether she had been missed. They hadn’t done anything against her, hadn’t offended her, hadn’t made fun of her, hadn’t hurt her: she wanted to know whether she had been missed, because that is the measure of who she was to them. And how do we know who we are to another person? Not because he does things for us, but because he misses us. In the same way: how do we know Jesus means something to us? If we miss Him.
Careful, let’s not reduce this to sentimentality — anything that even sounds like it gets under my skin. That you miss your wife, that you miss your daughter: is that sentimentality, or is it simply, as Giussani says, a sign, a judgment of esteem? Precisely because it is so powerful a judgment of esteem, you miss her. It has nothing sentimental about it: it is an act of reason.
So if Jesus does not become a real presence, everything else falls short, because it cannot be equal to the need. He became flesh precisely to answer the objection that deep down He is a fairy tale, and He could make Himself visible in the flesh, touchable in the flesh. The capacity to stir affection for Him is the most decisive thing, because if He cannot touch our bottom and draw us, we are lost, we will let ourselves go, we will lose our lives while we live them.
The real question, then, is whether we have recognized in our lives this presence that has come in and begun to take up room inside us, and whether we give it more and more room. Not out of moralism, not to be good boys: only because without it life is less than life — as though it were missing the very fabric that makes it life. That Spanish philosopher, a rationalist to the bone, only saw it when his wife died: without her, life has no flavor.
Do we feel that what we live has no flavor if He is missing? The Mystery is what makes everything different, and the mark of the road we are walking is exactly that He becomes more and more familiar. Because what is surprising is that it is not mathematically obvious that the passing of time makes Him more familiar.
This is the end of a year in which we all worked on The Origin of the Christian Claim. In the first short paragraph, which is the methodological key to the book, Don Giussani sets out the opening challenge: what is decisive for understanding a presence that has revealed itself in history? Becoming aware of one’s own humanity. If that awareness isn’t there, we won’t understand Him, who offers Himself as the answer to that humanity. So there is nothing more decisive than this tender, passionate gaze on myself; otherwise Jesus, for all the gestures, all the practices, all the devotions, will be a bare name.
At the end of a year in which we have made this whole journey, the question is not whether you can tell me what each chapter is about. The question is: has Jesus become less of a bare name? Has He become more real? More familiar? Or is He still a bare name, so that when we talk about Him we are practically talking about a fairy tale and not about a presence so dear that, if it is missing, life is tasteless?
If that is not the case, what is left of living? What is left is that nothing is equal to this human need of ours. We can fill our lives with activity, with gestures, with practices — but where is the verification of the faith? It is that Christ is real enough to answer this hunger and this thirst that Sunday’s liturgy spoke of: “All you who are thirsty,” you who are hungry. Like Jesus, who steps out of the boat, sees the people, and feels compassion for them — who is all passion for their life, because they haven’t eaten. He came to answer this hunger and this thirst: His presence. Each of us can look — not to beat himself up, but to feel the whole desire — that He may truly become, more and more, this presence that gives everything its flavor.
Question. It seems to me that this vacation puts the personal relationship with God on the table. My question is this: I’m at a point where I’m very angry with God, because I asked Him for certain things and He gave me the opposite. I wanted to ask whether you, in your own experience, have gone through this anger, this blind rage. The second thing is that I’m at a point — as I am every summer — where work ends and I don’t know which way to turn: I don’t know where to start over to put my life in order. If it has happened to you too, I’m asking for a hand: whether you’ve had this experience and whether you got past it. I’m keeping it simple here: I know what I know.
Julián Carrón. The difference, Tiziano, is that I don’t want to get past it. You can get past it; I don’t want to. Because deep down you think it would be better not to have this need: our dream is to be self-sufficient, our dream is to need nothing. But I don’t envy you all that self-sufficiency. You can keep all that autonomy — I don’t care about it. I need to feel Him in my flesh in order to look for Him, because otherwise I wouldn’t feel the urgency of this familiarity.
We have a hard time changing the chip, because deep down we think it would be better not to feel this drama. And yet it would have cost the Mystery nothing to make another being with no needs — to put the laws of its nature inside it, to make it capable of total consistency with them, like the stars, in perfect harmony. All of it splendid. He preferred to be loved freely. He preferred people who, even when they get it wrong, can be moved by His tenderness, by His capacity to embrace us.
That is why it is astonishing that Jesus, stepping out of the boat — as Sunday’s Gospel had it — and seeing all those people, people like you and me, Tiziano, feels compassion: He feels this capacity to suffer with them, to see how much they need. You are astonished at how great He has made us. Need is not a disease: need is the sign that He has made us so great that without Him we could not answer the greatness that our person is. And because we don’t understand this, we take it for a pathology, a manufacturing defect, instead of the plainest sign of the greatness with which God made us, so that we might reach in our lives that fullness which is He.
This is not a problem of consistency: it is a problem of conception. Someone like St. Augustine, who had gotten up to all kinds of things, understood this well: You show so plainly the greatness You chose to give the rational creature, that its blessed rest, its peace, its happiness — all of it is too little, if it is less than You. The fact that this You exists is the greatest gift we have. Anyone who grasps the nature of the drama knows that being a little more consistent wouldn’t be enough for him, Tiziano: all of this is too little. Because the disproportion is so enormous that it is nothing next to everything we lack. But He made us this great precisely in order to fill us with His presence.
So everything depends on our letting our own flaws go and centering on this recognizing Him: thank goodness You’re here. Then everything gets simpler, because you can look at yourself even when summer comes and you feel adrift, the way you can when other things happen to you: you can look at yourself and say, thank goodness You’re here. And then you start looking at your own humanity for the purpose God made you this way for — not to make you angry, but to let you enjoy it all the more.
If you were a rock — I could have made a rock — you wouldn’t even have needed to get angry; you wouldn’t feel, you wouldn’t suffer. But He loved you so much that He makes you desire. Hence all the things you think about, the moods that come into your head: that you have to ask, and if He doesn’t give it to you, you get angry. Even if He answered you the way the Gospel answered the hunger of those people, a moment later, with all the tenderness of the universe, He would say: look, folks, man does not live on bread alone. It isn’t that He’s pulling our leg; on the contrary, precisely because He isn’t pulling our leg — if He were, He wouldn’t be credible as Savior — He says: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, unless you make room for My presence in your hearts, you will have no life.
That is why the first decisive question is that the chip has to change. The way it changed in St. Paul. Paul was worried; he was a Pharisee — you’re an amateur next to him. He cared about consistency. But at a certain point, in front of that presence, he said: whatever I had as gain, I count as garbage in order to gain Christ. That gives you all the consistency; but he stays with what fills his life: for me, to live is Christ. This is Christianity. Without this, everything else is too little to answer the greatness for which He made us this way.
Question. I have a question that comes out of a struggle: I have a hard time praying. For me it was always, maybe, a sense of duty — in the morning, at night before bed — and after a while it turned into repeating and repeating words, and it wasn’t enough for me anymore. So at a certain point I stopped. I never stopped believing, but that element has been gone from my day. And yet in a moment of need, in a moment of difficulty, I always go back there: when I’m in bed and can’t sleep, the only one I have beside me, the one I can entrust myself to, is Him. So I feel a little selfish sometimes, because I think: I don’t pray, and yet when I’m struggling I go back to Him.
Julián Carrón. That isn’t selfishness. It is recognizing how He made you: as desire for Him, as needing Him. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for I will satisfy them.” The real question is not to do things formally, because then you get fed up and in the end you drop it, as you’ve seen. And that’s perfectly fine: it’s human, it’s healthy, it’s mentally sound. None of those religious moods that lead nowhere. Wait for the need to come up, and when it comes up you’ll see how you do — as you’ve seen. Because He has to wait too: He has to wait for us to feel the need. That is why, Agostino, Jesus says He came for those in need, for you and for me, not for the healthy but for the sick: because only they can understand.
Change the method and you’ll get fed up. But go along with the way He does things, and you make your peace with it and start to see the reasonableness of your need for a relationship with Him. Plenty of times you could take or leave your mother; but when you needed something, what did you do? In your own experience you have already walked the road to understanding how your mother became so dear to you. Because you did mental exercises? Because you trained for it? Because you took a course in being a son so you could grow up? No: because whenever you needed something, of any kind, all you did was go knock on her door.
That is how your mother became a presence such that they could tear the skin off you and you still couldn’t think she doesn’t love you. Not because you did mental gymnastics, but because when you were sad, when you were afraid, when you were worried, there was someone who was always there. And that has made you so certain that if someone tells you you’re making it up, that it’s a sentimental problem, you’ll take him apart. In a time when nobody thinks certainty can be reached, you have reached it. That is how certainty is reached, and that is how, as time passes, familiarity grows.
So how does familiarity with Christ grow? Not by some other method: by the mother’s method. It is the method Jesus stooped to by becoming flesh, because it is the only human method. Nobody had to explain much to Augustine about how it was done: he had the need, and he had a presence right there.
The question is whether we, whatever the situation, instead of getting angry, notice: what luck, to have a presence like this, always there, within reach, that instead of boxing me in opens up room for me. It’s easy: even children do it. And whoever is like a child enters the Kingdom of God and starts sharing in this experience that is within everyone’s reach. It takes no brilliance, no great consistency, no strength of will: all it takes is to need. To feel the urgency of a presence that becomes more and more familiar, because that presence is a good. This is what we have to help each other with, more and more, living through all the ordinary ups and downs of life, so that this presence is recognized more and more as a good. Thank goodness You’re here.
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