Faith Is Given Us so that We Communicate It

Can man save himself? To this question Christ answers, “No, man cannot save himself; it is in the companionship of God, of the Mystery who has set Himself beside him, part of his humanity, that Christ is the answer to man’s supreme need, the need for his own salvation.” This is the inconceivable and unforeseeable answer to man’s need for salvation. So the more man is aware of his limitation (his frailty, his wrongdoing, his incapacity), the more he is able to open himself to this answer. I think Reinhold Niebuhr’s phrase is significant: “Nothing is so incredible as the answer to a question that is not asked.” The gravest opposition, the greatest obstacle to the acknowledgment of Christ is, first and foremost, the non-acknowledgment of one’s own human need, of the question that our humanity itself is.

Msgr. Luigi Giussani

Is It Possible? - New Blog

Is It Possible?

The experience of the hundredfold. Now.
News, quotes, stories and events from the life and works of Don Giussani and the Communion and Liberation movement.

Mercy and the Rosary, Fr. Giussani

"Mercy is the greatest word that can be said, and while I recite the Rosary, this
word–mercy–is always close to me, always explains to me everything that is happening."

Fr. Giussani on the Fatima Prayer

Openness

This week our local School of Community is working on the section "Universality" (p. 81) from The Journey To Truth Is an Experience by Fr. Giussani. It's one of the four marks of the Church, to be "catholic" in the original meaning, which is "universal".

Here's the definition of "catholic" (small "c") according to dictionary.com unabridged:

1.	broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal.

2.	universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.

3.	pertaining to the whole Christian body or church.

Again, Fred's post speaks very well to the human method of knowledge, which starts from experience and excludes nothing. For the Christian, according to Fr. Giussani, this openness is a natural outgrowth of charity with a constant reference to the origin of all things.

The very nature of Christian action, that is, to share, unquestionably demonstrates its boundless domain: a commitment to a genuine experience of charity signifies a complete openness towards the universe. All limitations to the breadth of our existence imposed from within suppress love. Love is not a matter of taste or measure, nor is it some intelligent plan of ours. It is a humble clinging to being as it offers itself to us.

This is just the non-dualistic view of creation according to the Church, where all things are seen as very good, and evil is simply a lack or misuse of the good. The risk is to lose ourselves in a particular good, that is, idolatry, which can only be corrected by returning everything to Christ in offering our lives.

This openness does not manifest itself in an impossible contempt of, or inhumane disinterest for, the particular, but in the way in which the detail is lived. We may commit and genuinely dedicate ourselves to family or friendship, class or school, studies or profession, but the motive behind the commitment must transcend any particular desire for a higher mark or attachment to a particular person.

The Christian lives the details, according to Fr. Giussani with a freedom that is a "vigilant detachment from all particularism, ... resolute readiness for any authentic freshness [which] constitutes a sure promise, a prophecy of the coming of the Kingdom."

It is interesting to see how this plays out in an ordinary day like yesterday. I spent the morning with my granddaughter, and we stayed in doing some coloring and learning colors. I had to meet my grandson's teacher and discuss some behavior issues, to stay open despite some natural defensiveness. I met a friend from the community for lunch, and since it was a rainy day, people shared tables in the small lunchroom. We met a lady rabbi and a man who was a former campus minister and now runs a kayak rental outfit. And we talked about many interesting things from children to illness to aging to the adventure of changing careers. Then there was taking my daughter and grandson to the dentist and having a quiet evening with my husband.

Who can know what the meaning of the *this* and *that* of daily life is, except to be certain that all offered is somehow for the kingdom, and we are its joyful stewards. We are these moving targets that reality pings against, and each encounter is an invitation to respond, with humanity, awareness, offering, love. The motivation is all, with detachment from the result. It makes life ultimately fascinating instead of fearful.

Related to this is that tendency we have to make some design on another person, particularly those we would like to reform close by. A few friends of mine have to work with a very rigid and difficult person. on a daily basis. One said, maybe we can be friends with him and show him how to live differently. Another, more wise, said instead: we should be friends with him and love him as he is. He implies: God can do the rest.

Vocation

I used to think of vocation as a static thing, the one big choice you commit to for better or worse. However, a vocation is not one-time, though it is that as seed and root. Rather it is a tree with many branches, new growths, constantly shedding and regrowing, drawn through the stages of its lifespan.

A vocation invites the newness of responding to all the present which is offered to us. Fr. Giussani gives the example of Mary who, immediately after the Annunciation, doesn't sit around and worry about what to do next, but gets up to go to Elizabeth as she has just heard from the angel that her elder cousin was expecting a baby. She wasn't ordered to do so, but we often wait around for messages instead of listening to the gentle promptings of the heart. No big announcements were made about her news; she just went about her life, following the subtlety of invitation in her own circumstances with perfect attentiveness and letting the predicament of her situation be worked out in the peace of God.

The design of God is absolutely beyond us, always; it cannot be narrowed or imprisoned within the limits of our imagination. But one who is always willing to change everything according to what God wants–and mark these words, what God wants through the circumstances, because, for Our Lady, three minutes, a minute before, it wasn’t even imaginable that the Annunciation could happen–circumstances, especially those that vex us the most, that are inevitable circumstances, these are precisely the ones that mark the road of God; the person who is open to this is not attached to anything of his own, and he’s free. So the first consequence is that he is attentive, extremely attentive to the needs of others. In fact, as soon as the Angel left, Our Lady decided right away, a girl of fourteen or fifteen years, to travel that very long journey–one that when you go to Palestine you usually do by bus or by car–of over 60 miles in the midst of that stony land, to go visit her cousin Elizabeth, because the Angel had told her that she was six months along with the child in her womb. The first thing she did was to share the need and the toil of her cousin Elizabeth, at very great sacrifice. When are you free? You’re free when you’re willing to do what God wants. Before the Infinite, only before the Infinite is man free, detached from himself. When you’re like this, you’re immediately ready to feel and meet the needs of others. What a lesson for us! These are the first characteristics of a man who lives life as a pilgrimage. (Giussani, "Mary: Faith and Faithfulness"

Certainty

My favorite part of my Traces magazine is always the first section, the text from Fr. Giussani, the late founder of the Catholic movement Communion and Liberation. But over the last six months, I have been holding on to these articles more tightly. It came about because, during a difficult time, I found the answers to my questions on those pages. But I also found it too easy to lose track of these lucid answers without returning over and over to them. Simply, I found certainty in my situation from these teachings of Fr. Giussani.

Who ever talks about certainty in matters of faith? We hear about morality, charity, forgiveness, important things. But it's rare that anyone, from the pulpit or elsewhere, addresses the issue of faith and certainty. If there's anything characteristic of our times, it's skepticism and uncertainty. You can't be sure of anyone; you can only count on yourself. Faith is a nice addition to life, if you go in for that sort of thing. But it's completely subjective and personal. Pope Benedict's challenge at Regensburg went right to the heart of our uncertainty which comes from an anemic faith severed from reason.

The most recent month's article by Fr. Giussani is titled "Being Certain of a Few Great Things." The certainty he talks about is one which overcomes every circumstance and leaves one with true gladness. Instead of reacting to issues in a critical, fearful way, as we Christians tend to do from the trenches, with certainty, life is faced with creativity, in a new way.

“We have to become poorer,” using this word in a truly Christian way, going to the core of its value. Poorer… What does “poorer” mean? Do you remember what he said? “Being certain of a few great things.” The poor man is he who is certain of a few great things, so that–certain of a few great things–he builds the cathedral and lives in a hovel, a hundred thousand times more a man than those whose ultimate horizon is a totally comfortable apartment and then, if that desire is fulfilled, goes so far as to give an offering for the Church. Poor: certain of a few great things. Why does poverty mean being certain? Because certainty means abandoning oneself, overcoming oneself; it means that I am tiny, nothing, and that the true and great thing is an Other; this is poverty. This is the poverty that makes us full and free, that makes us active and vital, because the law of man, the stable dynamism of the natural mechanism that is called man, is love, and love is the affirmation of something else as the meaning of oneself. For this reason, it’s not easy to find people among us who are certain because there still isn’t poverty among us. Poverty, in fact, is a very adult conquest. […]

This is a poverty which removes fear and thrives on trust. It is one which acknowledges that Christ is greater than everything, including my weakness and my circumstances. Fr. Giussani states that, "[W]e all say `Christ', but it's as if this Christ didn't exist." This is the way we often live, and the culture around us suffocates us with the lie of not acknowledging this greatest certainty. Because, as the Psalm says so lucidly and beautifully, "Your love is better than life."

I read and reread this so that I will begin to know it and to start looking at everything from the point of view of this certainty in Christ. The victory is His, now.

The Design of God

The design of God is absolutely beyond us, always; it cannot be narrowed or imprisoned within the limits of our imagination. But one who is always willing to change everything according to what God wants–and mark these words, what God wants through the circumstances, because, for Our Lady, three minutes, a minute before, it wasn’t even imaginable that the Annunciation could happen–circumstances, especially those that vex us the most, that are inevitable circumstances, these are precisely the ones that mark the road of God; the person who is open to this is not attached to anything of his own, and he’s free. So the first consequence is that he is attentive, extremely attentive to the needs of others. In fact, as soon as the Angel left, Our Lady decided right away, a girl of fourteen or fifteen years, to travel that very long journey–one that when you go to Palestine you usually do by bus or by car–of over 60 miles in the midst of that stony land, to go visit her cousin Elizabeth, because the Angel had told her that she was six months along with the child in her womb. The first thing she did was to share the need and the toil of her cousin Elizabeth, at very great sacrifice. When are you free? You’re free when you’re willing to do what God wants. Before the Infinite, only before the Infinite is man free, detached from himself. When you’re like this, you’re immediately ready to feel and meet the needs of others. What a lesson for us! These are the first characteristics of a man who lives life as a pilgrimage.

Fr. Giussani, "Mary: Faith and Faithfulness"

Sent to Proclaim Christ's Presence - Fr. Giussani

Monastic Musings: Sent to Proclaim Christ's Presence - Fr. Giussani

In today's Gospel, Jesus appointed and sent 72 people to the towns and villages of Galilee, proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God. His instructions to them were still in my ears when I began to read some of the earliest writings of Fr. Luigi Giussani - Reflections on Experience in The Journey to Truth Is an Experience. Written almost at the birth of the Communion and Liberation movement, this essay describes the method for carrying Christ - not his morality or his edicts, but an experience of Christ - to people in the secular world. I can hear the echo of Jesus' instructions to the 72 in his words, and it is a call as strong today as it was 2000 years ago:

It is through us that Christ proposes himself to men and women. Our attitude and words constitute the proposal through which others can know him. ... Jesus said: "Go forth through the entire world and preach to all the peoples." Each person is responsible for a specific task ("go forth and preach") but is free to choose how to achieve his or her particular vocation.

Video Presentation on Giussani, The Risk of Education

You can find a video of the presentation on Fr. Giussani's book The Risk of Education here. Fr. Julián Carrón, successor to Msgr. Giussani as leader of the Communion and Liberation movement, begins his presentation about halfway through.

See my post of 6/30/07 and the previous one from Deep Furrows.

Judgements of comfort and hope

Judgements of comfort and hope
Passages from Don Luigi Giussani two years after his death

Two years have now passed since Don Luigi Giussani died on the morning of 22 February 2005, and his last words addressed to us all, a few days earlier, as prayer intention for the Holy Mass on 11 February, echo more dearly in the heart and grow in the experience of those who loved him in their poor fashion: «Let us recall Jesus Christ often, because Christianity is the announcement that God has made himself man and only by living our relations with Christ as much as possible do we “risk” doing as he did».

Fr. Julián Carrón's Address to Pope Benedict XVI

CL website (via Vitus Speaks)

Greeting to Holy Father Benedict XVI by Fr. Julián Carrón
President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation

Your Holiness:

The feeling that invades each of us is one of immense joy, and we are so happy to be able to meet You and to share this moment with You. Permit me to thank You with all my heart on behalf of my friends for this priceless gift.

The last time that we met You, on the occasion of the funeral of Fr. Giussani, is still very alive in our memory. We will never be able to forget how moving was Your willingness to come to celebrate and Your words which were so full of affection and profound comprehension of him. Since then, often we have found ourselves speaking of Fr. Giussani with the same words you used to described his personality to us that day: a man wounded by beauty, who led people not to himself, but to Christ, and thus conquered hearts!

From him, from his tireless witness, we learned what You have never tired of repeating to everyone since the day you assumed the Papal Throne: the beauty of Christianity. We are fascinated by the beauty of Christ made persuasive by the contagious intensity of Fr. Giussani, to the point of repeating the words of Jacopone da Todi: “Christ in His beauty draws me to Him.” We have discovered this beauty of Christianity without abandoning anything that is authentically human. Instead, for us, living the faith coincides with the exaltation of what is human. Fr. Giussani’s entire educational endeavor aimed to show the correspondence between Christ and all authentic human needs. Fr. Giussani was convinced that only a proposal addressed to reason and freedom, and verified in experience, was capable of interesting man, because it is the only one able to making him perceive its truth, that is, its human usefulness. In this way he showed us how it is possible to live the faith as men, in full use of reason, freedom and affection. We want to follow in his footsteps.

When faced with so much grace it is impossible not to tremble at our own disproportion. We have therefore often revisited, particularly in preparing for the meeting with You, the words Fr. Giussani spoke to us in 1984 in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the birth of the Movement:
“As we mature, we are a spectacle to ourselves and, God willing, to others. A spectacle, that is, of limits and betrayals, and therefore of humiliation, but at the same time of an inexhaustible surety in the grace that has been given to us and renewed every morning. This is the source of the naïve boldness that characterizes us, through which every day of our lives is conceived as an offering to God, so that the Church may exist within our bodies and souls, through the materiality of our existence.”

Aware of our nothingness, we beg each day for the ability to say “yes” to the grace that is given us in order to give witness without pretence, but also without fear, to our fellow men. In this moment of confusion that the world is living, we are certain that man’s heart, though wounded, remains capable of recognizing truth and beauty, if he finds them along life’s path. We desire to live the new event that has happened to us in all the situations and environments where our existence unfolds, with confidence in being able to give witness in our smallness to all the beauty that has invaded our life, so that it may be encountered.

God has always used the same method for becoming a companion to every man, one which we hope will be carried out in us: God gives grace to one person so that through him it may reach everyone. Just as God gave grace to Fr. Giussani so that it could reach us, so it has been given to us in order to reach others. And this makes possible that encounter which results in Christian faith, as Your Holiness reminded us in Your encyclical Deus caritas est: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (1).

Throughout these years we have sought to take seriously the invitation to be missionaries which the Servant of God John Paul II made to us on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Movement: “Go into the whole world and bring the truth, the beauty and the peace that are found in Christ the Redeemer” (September 29, 1984). The spread of the charism and the growth of communities of the Movement throughout the whole world are signs of the mercy of God who made our endeavor bear fruit. In my travels all over the world I have seen that Christianity lived in its essential elements can find so much acceptance in the heart of man, beyond any culture or religion.

We have the same desire that always moved Fr. Giussani’s heart: that in all and for all the persuasive strength of the Movement may be an “instrument for the mission of the one People of God” (Witness of Fr. Luigi Giussani during the meeting of the Holy Father John Paul II with ecclesial movements and new communities. St. Peter’s Square, Rome, May 30 1998, 2); in other words, that the fascination of the charism we have encountered may serve the good of the Holy Church throughout the whole world and present in every particular Church.
That is why we have asked to meet with You, Your Holiness. As You well know, the history of our Movement has always been marked by this close relationship with the Apostolic See. From the very beginning Fr. Giussani sought to live the grace he received in full communion with the successor of Peter, the only one capable of assuring the authenticity of any endeavor: from Paul VI to John Paul II. We are witnesses to the immense gratitude of Fr. Giussani’s when John Paul II recognized the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation. And we are fully aware of how he expressed his devotion in front of everyone by kneeling at the feet of the Pope on May 30, 1998.
With the same devotion we come to You today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Pontifical recognition of the Fraternity and two years after the death of Fr. Giussani, well aware of the value of Peter’s successor for our faith. Without his testimony, assured by the power of the Spirit, Christianity would decay into one of the many ideological variants that dominate the world.

We are here, Holy Father, completely poised to welcome your indications, and even corrections, for the journey we have ahead of us, convinced that, in following them, we will make the gift of the charism that fascinated us useful to the whole Church and the world. We will treasure your words, and I am sure that I speak on behalf of each of my friends, when I say that we will commit ourselves to living them with all of our strength, certain of Fr. Giussani’s impassioned companionship to our lives.

Julián Carrón