Notes from School of Community with Father Julián Carrón
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Notes from School of Community with Father Julián Carrón via video connection from Milan, December 16, 2020 Reference text: L. Giussani, S. Alberto, and J. Prades, Generating Traces in the History of the World, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010, chapter 2, point 7, “Responsibility and Decision,” pp. 68-70. • Sou feliz Senhor • Nostalgija Glory Be Good evening everyone! Let’s start our work on the text of School Community that tonight, despite being only a few pages long, is packed with substantive content, as shown by the contributions that have been received. I have a question—actually, I have a series of questions—to which I really don’t know the answers and to which it seems to me that no one knows the answers. I read and reread point 7 and also asked my School of Community group to work on it twice, but I can’t get past the first line. Fr. Giussani states that God loves us, and he says this as a clear fact. He adds that I “am,” that is, that I have substance, only because God loves me. He emphasizes that what I have been asked to do, what is important for me to do, is to “acknowledge and accept” that He loves me. Fr. Giussani then says that to acknowledge this,—to really acknowledge it, in action, not in words!—is what makes me the protagonist of my own life and gives me pleasure. Well, if I think about my life, how I live, what I feel, what I want, what it means to feel loved, I can’t really grasp this: How can I say that God loves me? How can I be sure that He loves me? What must I “acknowledge and accept”? I tried to follow a process of elimination. It certainly cannot be a syllogism, the result of reasoning like “God created me, He still creates me (so much so that I continue to live), therefore He loves me.” It can’t be that because reasoning doesn’t make me feel loved at all. Not at all. This is just some reasoning that doesn’t move anything in my life. It can’t be an emotion I feel because and when things are going well for me. It can’t be like saying, “God loves me because he gives me and Liberation what I ask of Him,” because many times this doesn’t happen—things go wrong or go differently from what I want. It can’t even be like saying, “I have friends who make me feel loved by God,” because many times I feel alone, even though I am surrounded by friends, maybe even good friends. munion Fr. Giussani gives the example of the twelve apostles, of Peter and their relationship of friendship Com with Jesus. But I don’t have Jesus as a friend and no one, really none of my friends, can be Jesus- of y like for me. So, I don’t know how to answer the questions I asked you. Does your mother love you? Can you answer yes to this question? Yes. Fraternit 20 Despite the limitations she may have? Yes. © 20 How do you recognize that? Because you are in front of a presence that loves you. Then it becomes easy to understand everything that Fr. Giussani says about the love of God. The only thing that matters to you, as it does me, is recognizing and accepting it. That your mother loves you is not 1 the result of reasoning and is not even a feeling, and the fact that she may have limitations doesn’t make you less certain of her love. The difficulty you speak of exists in every relationship, my friend. The key question, before we talk about other things, is whether, when you go to bed tonight, you can say that your mother loves you. How can you say that for sure? What do you do to be able to say with certainty that your mother loves you? What would you do to verify it? I would hug her. Why would you hug her when you don’t know yet whether she loves you? How do you know she loves you? I know it based on the fact that she takes care of me and how she looks at me, based on what she does and… You look at the signs your mom gives you, don’t you? Yes. You do not do this through reasoning or by having a feeling, and it is not something that you question when you see her limitations. In fact, despite all her limitations, in certain gestures you perceive all of your mother’s passionate dedication to you, until you reach the certainty that she loves you. This is the same journey that the disciples made with Jesus. So, the question is whether we can make the same journey in the present and come to recognize Jesus’s love, God’s love for us. If this isn’t possible, then you would be right. Christianity is just like the event of your mother’s love: it manifests itself through certain signs. You can’t photograph your mom’s love, but you can see signs through which she shows it to you, through which she shows you how much you are a good for her, how much you are truly loved. This makes it easier for you to recognize that “I am loved.” I insist—it is the same path that the disciples followed. At one point, they had to answer the question about His love for them when Jesus provoked them: “Do you want to leave too? Aren’t you sure I love you?” “Where can we go? Only you have words that fill life” (cf. Jn 6:67– 68). Have you ever experienced such a jolt in your life, in front of some sign through which you perceived this love for yourself? Why are you a Christian? Why are you here tonight? I understand your difficulty. Think of someone like Azurmendi—whom we saw at Beginning Day—who had heard about Christianity all his life. It wasn’t reasoning that moved him, but rather, running into something he couldn’t avoid, something irreducible to his own thoughts: a presence that met him through some faces. So you have to follow the same path to see if you find signs that God loves you. If you don’t find them, you can’t produce them by yourself. If your mom doesn’t give you and Liberation signs of her love, I cannot be the one to convince you that she loves you by giving you a lesson on love, or on the feelings experienced by someone who is loved. If someone doesn’t fall in love, I munion can’t make them fall in love by reasoning—if that were enough, I would open an agency for those Com who are looking for someone to love them, and it would be a big business! Christianity cannot be of created by us, we cannot produce it ourselves. That’s why during this year, in our study of y Generating Traces, we have seen that it all starts with an event. In point 7, Fr. Giussani takes this for granted, because it is exactly by virtue of an event that we can recognize that “we are loved”— Fraternit as we saw—because we have been chosen, preferred, made capable of a new knowledge of reality, 20 embraced, and forgiven. Everything we have seen is a sign of this event. If one has not recognized © 20 it, if you don’t recognize it as you live your life, no one can generate it. The only thing to do, then, is to look. Keep looking! To be sure of your mother’s love, you need to look at the signs. In the same way, you can see whether you have ever felt loved by God in your life. If you have not 2 perceived this but are struck when you see someone who has, begin to ask; pray for it and pay attention to those who have perceived the signs of His love. I am not saying you have to believe because of something other people see, but that if you pay attention, maybe you will start to see signs too. Maybe even tonight, if you look closely. Best wishes in this work, dearest. Point 7, “Responsibility and decision,” strikes me when it says, “We have been loved and we are loved: this is why we ‘are,’” because it doesn’t say that we “feel” loved, nor does it say that we are loved and for this reason “we are well,” but suggests that being loved is a real condition of our being. The text says that the moral law and morality, our being commensurate concretely to the mystery of Being “expressed in action, [...], are judged by this first and fundamental ‘law’: acknowledging and accepting to be loved” (p. 68). In working on this point with our School of Community group, everyone recounted episodes in which they felt loved, and I realized that I want to better understand what this means to me, because I sense that everything in my life is played out in light of this recognition. The risk I see is that of reducing (even unknowingly) my being loved to my perception. This is terrible because then everything, even the way I look at myself, is reduced to my measure, and so first of all cannot hold because at a certain point this measure is confronted with dark moments in circumstances and relationships that aren’t like I imagined them.