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Transcription of a meditation by Fr Luigi Giussani during the Spiritual Exercises of the CL university students in December 1994

This morning's meditation ended with Kafka's strikingly effective image: "There is a point of arrival but no way". It is undeniable that there is an "unknown" (the geographers of ancient times traced the outline of what was almost an analogy of this unknown with the famous words terra incognita (unknown land) with which their large sheet finished; at the edge of the sheet they would write terra incognita. At the edges of that reality that the eye embraces, that the heart feels, that the mind imagines there is an unknown. Everyone feels it. Everyone has always felt it. Throughout the ages, men have felt it to such an extent that they have even imagined it. In every age, through their elaborate ponderings or fantasies, men have tried to imagine, to determine the face of this unknown. In Germania, Tacitus thus described the religious sentiment which characterized the ancient Germans: secretum illud quod sola reverentia vident, hoc dellm appellant (that mysterious thing which they intuited with fear and trembling, this they called God, this they call God). All men of all ages, however they have imagined it (hoc deum appellant) call this unknownbefore whom gazes pass, many indifferent, but many impassionedGod. Undoubtedly, among the impassioned ones were the three hundred people who walked in procession with Cardinal Martini

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from the Church of San Carlo to the Duomo of Milan. Three hundred representatives of different religions! And how can we call, with a common name, that which they intended to express and honor with their participation in the Cardinal of Milan's great initiative? A secretum illud, something mysterious, terra ignognita, something unknowableunknowable! Now I would like to recall an analogy that can be found in the second volume of School of Community (At the Origin of the Christian Claimanyone who has read it will be already familiar with it.) Imagine the human world, human history, as an immense plain, and in this immense plain an immense crowd of companies, of construction companies, particularly experienced in the making of roads and bridges, each one in its corner. And from its corner each one tries to launch from the point where they are, the ephemeral moment in which they live, a bridge connecting their point to the sky embroidered with stars, according to Victor Hugo's image in his beautiful poem entitled Le Pont ("The Bridge") from Les Contemplations. This poem depicts a character sitting on the beach one starry night and fixing his gaze on the largest star, apparently the closest, he thinks of the thousands and thousands of arches which would be needed to build such a bridge, an endless bridge, a never completely feasible bridge. Imagine this immense plain packed with the attempts of big and small groups, or even solitary men, as in Victor Hugo's poem: each one putting his imagined, fantasized design into action. Suddenly, a powerful voice is heard over the immense plain saying, Stop! Stop all of you! And all the workers, engineers and architects stop their work and look to the place from where the voice came. A man, raising his arm, continues, You are great; your efforts are noble, but your attemptalbeit great and nobleremains sad. Thats why so many give up and stop thinking of it and become indifferent. It is great but sad, because it will never reach its end, it can never reach the depths. You are not capable of this task because you are impotent in front of this

objective. There is an insurmountable disproportion between you and the furthest star in the sky, between you and God. You cannot imagine the Mystery. Now leave your hard and thankless work and follow me. I will build this bridge for you; rather, I am this bridge! I am the way, the truth, the life! These things cannot be understood in their strict intellectual value if we do not make ourselves one with them, if we do not try to identify ourselves with them from the heart. Imagine that from the sand dunes near the sea, you see a small group of people from the nearby village listening to someone who is in the middle of the group speaking; and you pass by to go to the beach you are heading for; you pass close by and as you pass you look curiously and you hear the man standing in the middle saying, I am the way, the truth, the life! I am the way, the truth..., (the way which cannot be known, of which Kafka spoke) I am the way, the truth, the life. Imagine, make an effort to imagine, to fantasize: what would you do, what would you say? No matter how skeptical you are, you cannot but prick up your ears, attracted by something in that direction and at the very least you look with great curiosity at that man who is either crazy or is truetertium non datur (theres no third option)he is either mad or he is true. As a matter of fact, he is so true that there has been only one man, only one, who has said this, one in the whole history of the worldof the world!a man who was often in the midst of a small group of people, in the midst of a small group but often amidst a big crowd too. So, everyone in the plain suspends their work and is attentive to this voice and he continually repeats the same words. Who were the first to be annoyed by this? The engineers, the architects, the owners of the various construction companies, who almost immediately said, Come on men, back to work, to work! Workers, back to work! He is a braggart! He was a radical alternative (trenchant) to their project, to their creativity, to their earnings, to their power, to their name, to themselves. He was
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the alternative to them. After the engineers, architects and bosses, the workers more reluctantly withdrew their gaze from him, beginning to laugh a bit, and continuing to talk about him for a while, making fun of him or saying, Who is he? Is he crazy? But not all of them did so. Some heard an accent which they had never heard before and did not answer the engineer, architect or owner of the company who said, Come on, quickly: what are you doing there? What are you still looking at over there for? They kept on looking at him. And he went closer to them. Or rather, they went up to him. Out of one hundred and twenty million people, there were twelve of them. But it happened: this is an historical fact. What Kafka saidno wayis not true, historically. Paradoxically, one could say it is true theoretically, but it is not true historically. The Mystery cannot be known! In theory this statement is true. But if the mystery knocks on your door Whoever opens the door to me I will come in and have dinner with him these are words you can read in the Bible, words of God in the Bible. It is a fact that happened. The first chapter of St. John's Gospelwhich is the first page in literature to speak of it (besides that general announcement, the Word was made flesh, that of which all reality is made was made man)contains the memory of those who followed him immediately, who resisted the sense of urgency imposed on them by the engineers and architects. On a sheet of paper, one of them noted down his first impressions and the main features of the first moment in which the fact happened. The first chapter of St John, in fact, contains a series of notes which are typical of notes taken from memory. One of the two, in old age, reads the notes of his memory (because memory has its own law; it does not have continuity without breaks as its law, like a fantastic, imaginative creation does, for example. Memory literally takes notes, like we are doing now: a note, a line, a period and this period covers many things, so that the second sentence starts
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after those many things that are just understood that the period covers. Things are more understood than pronounced; some things are only there as points of reference. Thus, from my seventy years of age, I re-read it for the thousandth time without the slightest sign of fatigue. I challenge you to imagine a graver, heavier thing, in the sense of pondus, greater, weightier with challenge for man's apparently fragile existence, more pregnant with consequences in history than this fact!) So, one of the two who was there that day reads the notes of his memory, That day, John was still there with his two disciples. Fixing his gaze on Jesus who was passing, he saidImagine the scene: after 150 years of waiting for him, the Jewish people who, throughout the 2000 years of their history, had had a few prophetsonly a few who had been recognized as prophets by allafter 150 years the Hebrews at last had another prophet, John the Baptist. He is also mentioned in other writings of the time and is, therefore, historically documented. All the people rich and poor, publicans and Pharisees, friends and those who had objectionswent to listen to him and see the way he lived in the wilderness on the other side of the Jordan, eating only locusts and wild herbs. He always had a group of people around him. Among the people that were there that day there were two who were there for the first time and who had come, we could say, from the country (although actually they came from the lake, which was quite far away and far from the life of the developed cities). They were there like two villagers come to the city for the first time, bewildered, looking agape at everything around them and, above all, at him. They were there with their mouths open, looking at him wide-eyed, listening to him attentively. Suddenly, a member of the group, a young man, starts off in the direction of the path along the river heading north. And John the Baptist, suddenly, fixing his gaze upon him, shouts, Behold the Lamb of God, behold He who takes away the sins of the world! But the people did not move; they were used to hearing the prophet

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come out with strange, incomprehensible, unconnected expressions, without a context; therefore, the majority of those present took no notice. The two who had come for the first time, who were there hanging on his every word, watching his eyes, looking wherever he looked, saw him look at the man who was leaving the group, and they set off behind him. They followed him at a distance, timidly and shamefully, but strangely, profoundly and obscurely fascinated and curious, as well. Those two disciples, hearing him speak like that, followed Jesus. Jesus turned and seeing that they followed him said, What are you looking for? They answered, Rabbi, where do you live? He said, Come and see. This is the formula, the Christian formula. This is the Christian method: come and see. And they went and saw where he lived and stayed with him all day. It was about four in the afternoon. It does not specify when they left, when they followed him; the whole passage, and the part following, consists of notes, as I said earlier: the sentences end at a point that takes for granted that many things are already known. (For example: It was about four in the afternoon. But does it mean when they left or when they went there, who knows?) Anyway, it was four in the afternoon. One of the two who had heard the words of John the Baptist and had followed him was called Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. The first person he met afterwards was his brother Simon. They left Jesus and the first person Andrew met was his brother Simon, who was coming back from the beach, either returning from the catch or from mending the nets the fishermen used. Simon told him, We have found the Messiah. He doesn't narrate anything, doesn't quote anything, doesn't document anything, its understood its clear; they are notes of things that everybody knows! There are few legible pages that are so realistically true, so simply true, where not a single word is added to pure memory. How could he say, We have found the Messiah? Jesus, while speaking to them, must have said this word which was already in
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their vocabulary; because to say immediately that that man was the Messiah, with such conviction, would have been impossible. But staying there for hours listening to that man, seeing him, watching him speak, they obviously thought, Who else speaks like that? Who had ever spoken like that? Who had said those things? They were unheard of! Never had such a man been seen! Slowly, a conviction was taking a hold of their souls so that they began to say with greater clarity and certainty, If I don't believe this man I can no longer believe anyone, not even my own eyes. Not that they said it, not that they thought it; they felt it, rather than thought it. That man must have said that he was the one who was to come, the Messiah to come. But it was so obvious despite the exceptionality of the announcement (of the affirmation)that they took it away with them as if it were something simpleit was something simple!as if it were something easy to understand. And Andrew took him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said You are Simon, son of John; you shall be called Cefa, which means rock. To give a nickname was a Jewish practice in order to indicate someone's character or because of something that happened. So, imagine Simon who goes with his brother, full of curiosity and a little timid, and who looks straight at the man to whom his brother leads him. That man looked hard at him from afar. Think of the way in which he looked at him, understanding his character right to the marrow of his bones, You will be called rock. Think of someone who feels looked at like that by someone newa complete stranger!who feels understood right to the depths of his person in this way. The next day Jesus had decided to leave for Galilee... There is half a page of these brief hints, these notes in which it was taken for granted that everyone understood all that had happened: it was clear to everybody. There is a point of arrival but no way. No! A man who said, I am the way, is a historical fact, about whom the first description
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is in this half-page that I just read. And each one of us knows it has happened. Nothing ever happened in the world which was as unthinkable and exceptional as that man of whom we are speaking: Jesus of Nazareth. But those two, the first two, John and AndrewAndrew was most probably married with children how was it that they were won over at once and they recognized him (recognized: there is no other word that can be used)? I would say that, if this fact happened, to recognize that man, who that man was (not who he was in detail, right to the core, but to recognize that he was something exceptional, out of the ordinary, to recognize he was absolutely out of the ordinary, irreducible to any analysis), to recognize him should have been easy. If God became a man, if He came amongst us, if He came right now, if he slipped into this crowd and was here among us, to recognize hima priori I sayshould be easy; it should be easy to recognize Him as divine. Why easy to recognize Him? Because of an exceptionality, an incomparable exceptionality. I have, before me something exceptional, an exceptional man, theres no comparison. What does exceptional mean? What could it mean? Why does what is exceptional strike you? Why do you feel that something thats exceptional is exceptional? Because it corresponds to the expectations of your heartno matter how confused and nebulous they might be. What is exceptional corresponds unexpectedlyunexpectedly!to the needs of your mind, of your heart, to the irresistible, undeniable demands of your heart in a way you could never have imagined or predicted because there is no one like that man. What is exceptional is, paradoxically, the appearance of what is most natural to us. What is natural to me? That what I desire should happen. What could be more natural than that? That what I most desire happen: thats natural. To come across something totally, profoundly natural (natural because it corresponds to the demands of the heart given us by nature) is something absolutely exceptional. It is like a strange contradiction: what happens is never exceptional, truly exceptional, because it cannot adequately answer the
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heart's demands. An exceptionality is hinted at when something makes the heart beat because of a correspondence that we believe has a certain value and that, the day after, will retract, the day after will annul. It is the exceptionality with which the figure of Christ presents itself that makes it easy to recognize him. We must identify ourselves, must make ourselves one with these events, I said before. If we claim to judge them, if we want to judge themI don't say understandbut judge them in substance and say whether they are true or false, it is the sincerity of your identifying yourself with them which makes the truth true and not false and makes your heart not doubtful of the truth. It is easy to recognize a divine presence because it is exceptional: it corresponds to the heart; and one stays and would never leave, which is a sign of the correspondence with the heart. One would never go away and would follow him all his life. And, in fact, they followed him for the remaining three years of his life. But imagine those two who stayed there listening to him for hours and then afterwards had to go home. He said goodbye to them and they returned home in utter silence, full of the impression they had of that mystery they felt, of which they had a foretaste, which they had felt, and then they split up. They did not say goodbye, not because they exchanged no words but because they said goodbye in a different way, without saying anything, because the same thing filled their hearts, and being so filled with the same thing the two of them were one. Andrew entered his house, put down his cloak and his wife said, Andrew, what's wrong? Youre different; whats happened? Imagine him embracing her and bursting into tears while she, overwhelmed, kept on asking, What is wrong? And he held his wife, who had never felt embraced in that way before in her whole life; he was another person. He was another person! It was him but he was another. If she had asked him, Who are you, he would have said, I understand I have become anotherafter
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hearing that man speak, I have become someone else. This happened. Not only is it easy to recognize him, for it was easy to recognize him in his exceptionalitybecause, If I don't believe in this man, I cant even believe my own eyesbut it was also easy to understand what type of morality, what type of relationship was born of him: because morality is one's relationship with reality insofar as reality is created by the Mystery. Morality is the correct, ordered relationship with reality. It was easy for them to understand the relationship with him, and how it was easy to follow him, to adhere to him and to the morality that was born from him! There is another page in St. John's Gospel which says these things in a spectacular way. It is in the last chapter of St. John, the 21st. That morning the boat was on its way back to the shore and they had not caught any fish. A few hundred yards from the shore they realized that a man was standing there, upright. He had lit a fire and you could see it from 100 yards away. He spoke to them in a way which I will not describe now. John was the first to say, It is the Lord, and St. Peter immediately threw himself into the lake and in four strokes arrived at the shore. It was the Lord. In the meantime, the others arrived and nobody said a word. They sat round in a circle and nobody spoke, everybody was quiet because they all knew it was the risen Lord. He had already died and had already showed himself to them after he had risen. He had roasted some fish for them. They all sat and ate. In the almost total silence that hung over them on the beach, Jesus, lying down, looked at his neighbor, Simon Peter. He looked at him; and let us imagine how Peter felt the weight of that gaze because he remembered the betrayal of a few weeks earlier and everything he had done; he had even been called Satan by Christ (Get away from me Satan, you scandal for me, for the destiny of my life). He remembered all his failings because when you commit a serious mistake once, then everything else comes to
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mind, even what is less serious. Peter felt crushed under the weight of his own incapacity, of his incapacity to be a man. And Jesus, who was next to him said, Simon (imagine how Simon must have been trembling) do you love me? (If you try to identify yourselves with this situation, you will tremble now thinking of it, just thinking, thinking of this dramatic scene dramatic, that is, so descriptive of what is human, displaying what is human, exalting what is human because drama is what exalts the factors of humanity; only tragedy annihilates them. Nihilism leads to tragedy but this encounter brings drama into life because drama is the relationship that is lived between an I and a You.) So, as with the slightest breath, he answeredhe barely answered, as with just the slightest breathHe didnt darebut, I don't know how, yes, Lord, I love you; I don't know how but it's like that; Yes, Lord, I don't know how, I cant tell you how, but... In short, it was very easy to keep, to live the relationship with that man. It was enough to adhere to the simpatiai he gave birth to, a profound simpatia, similar to the dizzying and fleshly one between a baby and its mother, which is simpatia in the intense sense of the word. It was enough to adhere to the simpatia he brought out because, after all that he had done to Jesus, and the betrayal, he was asked, Simon, do you love me? Three times over. And the third time he wondered whether there was a doubt in the question and answered at greater length, Lord, You know everything; You know that I love you. My human simpatia is for you; my human simpatia is for you, Jesus of Nazareth. Learning from something exceptional happens within a simpatia. This simpatia and only this is the logic of knowledge and morality that living with that individual made necessary. To learn is an ultimate simpatia. Just like a child with his mother: a child can go wrong a thousand times a day, but if he is taken away from his mother, there's big trouble! If he could understand the question, Do you love this woman? and reply, imagine what a yes he would shout. The more mistakes he had made, the more he
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would shout yes to affirm his love. I am talking to you as a person to people, who, being young, have fewer preconceptions, or rather, are full of preconceptions, but those inherited from those older than themWhat, then, does the morality of simpatia towards Him require you to actually do? To observe Him; It requires that active observing of Him which is called following. Follow Him. And in fact, they went back to Him the next day, He returned to them on the third day, because he lived in a nearby village. He began to go fishing with them, and in the afternoon he went to stay with them on the beach when they were mending the nets. And when, every now and then, he began to go around the villages, he would call on them as he was passing and say, Come with me. Some went; some did not. Then in the end they all went. They ended up going for a few hours, then for more, then the whole day, then he began to stay out even at night, and they followed Him, forgetting their homes. No, not forgetting their homes! There was something greater than their homes; there was something from which their homes were born, from which their love for their women was born that could save the love with which they looked at their children and their worry about their growing up; there was something which saved all of this more than their poor efforts and their tiny imaginations could. What could they have done, in front of the unhappy years of famine, or the dangers their children would meet? They followed Him! Every day they heard what he said, everyone was there open-mouthed, and then even more openmouthed. They never tired of listening to Him. And he was also good. He took a child, held him to his breast and said, Woe to you who hurt one hair of the smallest of these children. And he was not talking about physically harming the child, which one has a bit more restraint about, up to a certain pointalthough nowadays that's no longer true, and thats not the last sad sign of the timeshe was talking about scandalizing the child which, although nobody thinks about it, hurts him. He

was good. When he saw that funeral he immediately asked, Who is it? It's a young boy, whose father died a short while ago. And the boy's mother was weeping and weeping behind the coffin, not as was customary at the time, but as is natural to a mother's heart, freely expressing herself. He moved towards her and said, Woman, don't cry! Is there anything more unjust than saying to a woman whose son has died, only, Woman, don't cry? But it was, instead, the sign of compassion, of affection, of participation in her extreme sadness. He said to her son, Get up, and returned her son to her. But he could not have resurrected her son without saying anything. He would have continued to seem like a prophet and wonder worker, a miracle man. Woman, don't cry, he said, and gave her back her son. But first he said, Woman, don't cry. Imagine yourselves hearing him like this every day for a year or two, hearing him in his goodness, feeling his great power over nature which seemed to be at his service. That evening he went out in the boat with them, and they stayed out all night. At a certain point, a blustering wind arose; a terrible storm suddenly blew up on the lake of Genezareth, and they were about to go under. The boat was full of water and he was asleep, he was so tired that he did not even hear the storm and was sleeping below. One of them said, Master, wake up, wake up, we are going to perish! And he raised his head, stretched out his hand and commanded the wind and the sea and all of a sudden there was a great calm. The Gospel piece ends recounting that the disciples frightenedasked amongst themselves, Who is this man? This exact question, from the 8th chapter of Luke's Gospel, begins the problem of Christ in the history of the world, a problem which will last until the end of the world. They were people who knew him very well, who knew his family; they knew him like the palms of their hands; they followed him; they had abandoned their homes for him! But his way of acting was so disproportionate, so inconceivable and so sovereign, that spontaneously his friends

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said, Who is this man? What is behind him? There is nothing man desires more ardently than this incomprehensibility. There is nothing that man desires more ardentlyeven if fearfully without realizing it, than this inexplicable presence because this is what God is. This presence is the sign and the link with the Mystery. Indeed, it is the same question that his enemies asked him at the end, before killing him. A few weeks before killing him, while arguing with him, they asked, How long are you going to keep us in suspense?literallyTell us where you come from and who you are. They had a record of his birth; he was someone whose birth they had recorded thirty-three years previously. About no man in the world can we say Who is he that does these things, constrained by wonder and by the disproportion between our ideas of what is possible and the real that is in front of us. One can understand, then, how that time he fed over five thousand men, without counting women and childrenhe fed them mysteriouslyand then disappeared, because they wanted to make him king. With their economic interests touched to the quick, they said This man is truly the Messiah who was to come, returning suddenly to the common mentality that they had always lived, which everyone had because according to the teaching of their leaders, the Messiah should have been a powerful man who would give Israel, their people, supremacy over the world. He slipped away from them, but many guessed that he had gone to Capernaum. So they went round the lake to get to Him at twilight time. They went to the synagogue because it was the most likely place where they might find him. (In fact, when he spoke he always took his cue from the biblical passage which was proposed to the people from the scroll that the attendants chose that day.) And, sure enough, there he was, speaking in the synagogue, saying that their fathers had eaten manna, but that he would give them something much greater to eat, his word, his word is truth. He would give them the truth to eat, the truth to drink, the truth about life and the world. The door at the back opened and the group who had been
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looking for him, wholets say were after himcame in. They were searching for him. They were looking for him for a reason that was mistaken, because they wanted to make him king, not because they were struck by the sign that he was, by the mystery of his person, by the power that his gestures showed forth, but because they had an interest, they sought in him a material interest. The motive was wrong, but in any case they were searching for Him. They were searching for Him. He had come into the world that the whole world might search for him. He was moved and, suddenly, in his mindfor, being a man like us, ideas came to him out of circumstancesa fantastic idea appeared. He changed the sense of what he was saying and exclaimed, It's not my words that I will give you, but I will give you my body to eat, and my blood to drink! The politicians, journalists and media moguls of the day were at last given the opportunity they were waiting for: He's crazy! Who can give his flesh to eat? Whenever he said something that was really important to him, but which the people did not understand and, therefore, by which they became scandalized, he did not explain it, but repeated it; he just repeated, I tell you, truly, whoever does not eat my flesh cannot enter into the understanding of reality, cannot enter the depths of reality, because this is the truth. They all went away. He's crazy, crazy, they said. Duros est hic sermo (This teaching is hard)! He has an odd way of talking. Finally, in the shadows of the evening, he was left with the usual twelve. Even they were silent with their heads down. Try to imagine the scene in the not very big synagogue in Capernaum, as big as a classroom with 30 or 40 seats. Do you want to leave as well? I am not going to take back what I've said. Do you want to leave too? Then stubborn Simon Peter spoke up: Master, we don't understand what you are saying either but if we leave you where shall we go? Your words give meaning to life. (Kafka: There exists a point of arrival but no way") That man was the way. If we leave you, where shall we go? What would be the way? What could be the way? You are the way!
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***** Those two, John and Andrew, and the twelve, Simon and the others told their wives, and some of their wives went with them. At a certain point many joined them and followed him. They abandoned their houses and went with the disciples. But they also told their friends, who did not necessarily abandon their homes as well, yet participated in their simpatia; they participated in their positive position of amazement and of faith in that man. And their friends told other friends and then other friends, and still more friends. In this way the first century passed and these friends invaded the second century with their faith and in the meantime they also invaded the geographic world. They reached Spain at the end of the first century and went as far as India in the second century. And then those of the second century told others who lived after them, and these told others after them, like a great stream which swells, like a great river which swells, and they reached my mother and told her. My mother told me when I was small and I say, Master, I don't understand what you say either, but if we go away from you where do we go? You alone have words which correspond to the heart. This is the law of reason: the law of reason is a comparison with the heart. The criteria of reason are the needs of my nature, of my heart. I've been told of one of our friends who, reading one of our texts, (she is not Catholic) observed, Here I've found the word heart in a way I dont use it because, as I understand it, the heart is the reference point for feelings. I have one feeling, he has another; whereas here it's not like that, the heart of which The Religious Sense speaks is the same for everyone, it is the same for me and for you. If the heart is the seat of the desire for truth, beauty, goodness, justice, of the thirst for happiness, who among us can evade these desires, who? They constitute our nature, mine and yours, and through this we are more united than strangers one to another, as we normally are. And the last Korean, the last man in Vladivostok, the last man of

the furthest and most out-of-the-way region on all the face of the earth is united to me precisely through this heart. From that evening a human stream was born which has reached the present, which has reached me. Just as my mother belonged to this flow, so I belong and by telling many friends about it, I make them participants of this flow too. Even if you have already read this letter in Traces I'm going to re-read it, because it is not a waste of time. It was written to me and unfortunately discovered late, from a young man suffering from Aids, who died two days after writing to me. He writes:
Dear Father Giussani, I address you as dear even if I don't know you, I've never seen you, nor even heard you speak, but, to tell the truth, (if I've understood anything of The Religious Sense and of what Ziba tells me) I can say that I know you through faith, and, I now add, thanks to faith. I'm writing to you only to say thank you. Thank you for having given meaning to my arid life. I'm a school mate of Ziba's and I've always remained friendly with him because, while I didn't share his religious position, his humanity and his disinterested openness always struck me. I think I've reached the end of the line on this tormented life of mine, brought by that train they call Aids which gives no one a break. To say this now no longer frightens me. Ziba has always said to me that the important thing is to have a true interest in life and follow it up. I've chased interest many a time but it was never the true one. Now I've seen the true one. I see it; I've met it and I'm beginning to get to know it and call it by name: its name is Christ. I don't even know what it means or how I can say such things but when I see my friends face or I read The Religious Sense (which is always at my side) and when I think of you and the things Ziba tells me about you, everything seems clearer everythingeven my evil and my pain. My lifewhich at this stage has been razed and made sterile, flattened like a smooth stone where everything runs off like wateris now surprised by a meaning that brushes away evil thoughts and pains and even embraces them and makes them true, making my larva-like and
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putrid body a sign of His presence. Thank you, Father Giussani because you have communicated this faith to me, or ratheras you call itthis event. Now I feel in peace, free and in peace. When Ziba used to recite the Angelus in front of me, I used to curse him to his face, I hated him and I said that he was a coward because the only thing he could do was say those stupid prayers in front of me. Now, when I stumble in trying to say them with him I understand that I was the coward because I couldn't even see the truth that lay right under my nose. Thank you, Father Giussani is the only thing that a man like me can say. Thank you, because amidst my tears I can now say that dying has a meaning, not because it is more beautifulI am very afraid of dyingbut because now I know that someone loves me and that perhaps I too can be saved and I too can pray that my companions in the ward can meet and see what I have seen and met. Just think, I now feel useful just by using my voice. I feel useful with the only thing I can still use well: I can be useful, I who have thrown away my life can do good just saying the Angelus.

you. Whatever position you are in, change it if it needs to be changed! Every morning I too understand that I must change because I am responsible for many things that He has given me. All I say is that this event or this presence is of todaytoday! That human flow of which we spoke is what I bring today into your life. There is nothing but God: God, God alone, yesterday, today and forever. A great event, said Kierkegaard, cannot but be present, because it is not something in the pasta dead manthat can change us. But if something changes us, it is present. One of our texts says, He is if He changes. But there is not just this beautiful letter. You may have read (in the newspaper or in Tracce) the prayer written by our friends who lost all their relatives in the recent tragedy in Piedmont:
In this tremendous and great hour we want to thank the Lord, our God and Father, for having given us Francesco, Cecilia, Lucia e Cecilia in Christ. Through them, You, O Christ, have begun to make yourself known to us with Baptism, education, the adherence of Lucia to the movement and the birth of Cecilia, welcomed as a miracle. Grant, O Christ, that now they are in You as You make all reality, they may help us to recognize you more and more in every instant of life.

It's incredible but even if it were an illusion, it is too reasonable and human, as you say in The Religious Sense, not to be true. Ziba has stuck the quote from St. Thomas Aquinas onto my bed, Man's life consists in the affection that principally sustains him and in which he finds his greatest satisfaction. I think that my greatest satisfaction is having met you [I've never even seen him!] by writing you this letter, but the even greater satisfaction is that with God's mercy, if He wants, I will meet you and know you where everything will be new, good and true: new, good and true like the friendship which you have brought into the lives of many people and about which I too can say I was there; I too in this wretched life have seen and taken part in this good and true event. Pray for me. I will continue to feel useful for the time le ft to me by praying for you and for the movement. I embrace you, Andrea. Two thousands years are burnt away by this letter. He wasn't yesterday, he is today, he is not today for me, but he is today for

After two thousand years He is now; for Alberto, Mario, He is now. Cry out to Him, who is now, that He may win over your coldness, your ignorance, your distance! When I was a boy and I was ill in bed with a temperature, it seemed to me that people were very, very far from me. The bedroom, the walls, seemed to be miles away; the furniture seemed very far off and it used to scare me to have this perception that I was all alone in a huge, long room. And when my mother came in, she seemed to be tiny, almost non-existent. It is a similar pathological condition which makes us perceive Him as far away because He is present. That which is not in our present experience, which is not in our present experience in any way, that which is not in our present experience in any way does not exist, would not exist.

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Go and read a third testimony in Traces. Six of our friends are in Novosibirsk, in vast Siberia. They have been there for three years and they have a certain group of friends who have been baptized. One of them recently recounted what has happened in his life. He is a young boy of 17. He writes:
I met the Movement straight after my encounter with the Catholic Church. At the time I knew practically nothing of Christian life and I understood even less. I met a group of fairly young people, principally made up of students and some Italians who spoke little or no Russian. I heard them speak of life and of work. They spoke of their Christian experience, of their first encounter with Christ. They also sang and enjoyed themselves. Then they went to Mass together and sometimes to the recital of Evening Prayer. They seemed like good friends but, truly, something seemed strange to me: why had these foreigners come from so far away, why? Why here where it is so cold and life is not as comfortable as in their country? And they were so young, so different one from the other, and yet such friends. Why were they together? Probably the grace of the first encounter lies and is constituted precisely in this: when you sense, intuitively, what you need in life, you sense something that corresponds, something good that reawakens your curiosity and desire, so that every time you relive the first encounter without recognizing its ultimate reason. And in fact it was only afterwards that I started to intuit that in this group of people Someone is present, Someone before whom everyone bows and who puts together people who at first sight could never stay together. I think that when I recognized the presence of Christ, when I discovered Him in that companionship it was a sort of extraordinary moment for me. I recognized that I am loved [like Andrea], greatly loved by Jesus, precisely through, these people whom He Himself has put beside me and who accompany me. I have been in the Movement of CL for three years already and this helps me. I can say that I now experience the taste for life and this seems to me really very important [the opposite of what dominates today: the loss of the taste of life is a symptom of the macabre nature of our present culture]. Indeed, life is made up of various aspects (work, rest,
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study, holidays, etc.) and to see meaning in all aspects of life, to recognize that God became an event in our life: this is really Christianity. Nothing happens by chance; nothing happens simply by chance and every moment of history can witness to the presence of Christ here and now. I have many friends. I meet many people and I always feel a great sorrow for the fact that they have not yet felt the grace of the first encounter which allows one to perceive His presence and compels one to follow it. I want to communicate to all those that I meet the desire to feel the taste of this life [taste: taste is such a natural term, so carnal and so divine. It is eternal happiness. Eternal taste: it is the aim of life]. Certainly my experience is still small, but I ask that in all aspects of life I may witness Christ, present here and now. Josif

And in fact, just like Josif, the greatest surprise for me as a Christian is to experience now, to discover how He corresponds to the heart, now. Because when a journalist approached one of Mother Teresa of Calcutta's sisters in Indiaa very young sister, not yet 20 years oldand asked her some questions, she said among other things, I remember picking a man up off the street and bringing him into our house. And what did that man say? He didn't mumble, he didn't swear, he just said, I lived on the streets like an animal and I am about to die like an angel, loved and cared for. Sister, I am about to return to the house of God, and he died. I have never seen a smile like the one on that man's face. The journalist replied, Why does it seem that even in the greatest sacrifices you are not in difficulty? You do not seem to have to make an effort. Then Mother Teresa intervened, saying, Jesus is the One for whom we do everything; we love and recognize Jesus, today. Today: yesterday is no more. Whatever was yesterday either is today or no longer exists. I am sorry that I cannot read the whole of this next letter, because it is too long, but in Traces you will also find this letter from our friend Gloria, a young teacher who has gone with Rose to Kampala in Africa, and who writes:
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Nothing here is easy for me [nothing corresponds to me, nothing is easy for me] and in certain moments have found it almost impossible to face people here who are sick, dirty and without the minimum of hygienic sanitary conditions. [But who makes her act like this? The memory of something that existed two thousand years ago? Something now. A presence that is now]. One morning while I was saying goodbye to Rose she said to me, Pray our Lady that you may not be afraid today to see how Christ presents himself to you. With these words in my heart I went with Claudia to the juvenile prison. Everything disgusted me: the smell, the dirt, the scabies, the fleas And in that moment I understood that my prayer, my plea coincided with the position of my person.

Bending over a sick person, or over an imprisoned child, bent over in this way, in that position, her asking, her asking for being, which is the plea in man's heartbecause even if we don't talk about it we are crying out for this, we ask for being, we ask for happiness, for truth, for goodness, for good, for justice, for beautythis plea was in her position, it coincided with the very position she assumed. But the most important piece of recent newsperhaps the most important in all of our historyis what happened in Brasilia. I beg you to go and read the story in Traces of the murder of Edimar, one of the most delinquent boys in Brasilia, several times a murderer because his gang was a gang of murderers. At the start of the year a young teacher from Memores Domini, a Lebanese girl who is now in Brazil, went into his class. She spoke our language. Edimar was completely overwhelmed, he too wanted to have blue eyes like hers and not dark, black, dirty eyes like his own. He promised to change. The leader of the gang understood that something was wrong and immediately put him to the test, ordering him to go and kill a certain person. Edimar said, I won't kill anyone anymore. And the other: I will kill you, then. He killed him. He is the second martyr of our history. ******
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But what is the formula that sums up the whole figure of Christ as a mana man who was registered in the town of Bethlehem and who is present now to urge on and demand each of our lives and hearts, so that through us the world may be happier, so that all the people in the world may be happier, that they may know the reason behind all things, that they may be able to die like Andrea? The formula that sums up and describes the whole dynamic of Jesus is that he was sent by the Father. Why did Jesus, being God, the Word of God, the expression of God, and therefore the origin of the world, become man? Why did he enter the womb of a 15 year old girl? Why was he generated inside her womb and born a baby? Why did become a young man, an adolescent, a man, and a thirty year old man who spoke and, as we have just heard, move Andrea? Why does he strike our friends from Villa T. [the AIDS sufferers whom our friends look after] and Edimar? Why did he become man? Why does he act in history like this and become present in history in this way? He does so in order to carry out the plan of an Other. He Himself uses the extreme word to indicate the origin of everything, from which life is born: the Father. His life is defined as being called b y the Father to carry out a mission: life is vocation. This is the Christian definition of life: life is vocation. And vocation is to fulfill a mission, to carry out a task that God determines for each one through the banal, everyday circumstances, from moment to moment, that he allows us to go through. This is why Christ is the ideal of our life, insofar as our life is an attempt to reply, a desire to respond to God's call. Vocation: God's calling, the plan that the Mystery has for me. Because in this instant, if I am sincere, thoughtful, I understand that there is nothing as evident (not even the fact that you are two yards away from me) nothing is as evident as the fact that in this instant I am not making myself, I do not make myself, I do not give myself my hair or my eyes, I do not give myself my nose or my teeth, my heart or my soul, my thoughts or my feelings:

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everything is given to me that I might fulfill His plana plan that is not minethrough all things, through writing, through speaking, through the Angelus, as Andrea said, through everything, everything. Whether you eat or drink, says St. Paul, making the most banal comparison that you could imagine, Whether you wake or sleepwhether you live or die. In other places he says everything is the glory of Christ, that is, God's plan. Christ is the ideal of life. He whom John and Andrew heard speak was the ideal of life. Their heart leapt within them because of this; they went home in silence for this; that evening Andrew embraced his wife like he had never embraced her, without being able to say anything because of this. They had met the ideal of life. They could not express this immediately, poor things. They said it a few years later. From then on, they went all over the world to say it: Christ is the ideal of life. What does it mean that Christ is the ideal of life? He is the ideal for the way we treat all of nature. He is the ideal for the way we live affection and, therefore, how we conceive of, look at, feel, treat and live the relationship with our woman or man, with our parents and with our children. He is the ideal by which we face others and live our relationships with them, that is, how we live with society as a whole, as a companionship of men. What characteristic does this ideal infuse into our way of treating each other, our way of treating everythingfrom nature (and by this word I mean everything that is, because I can treat this microphone badly, unjustly, as I did before without realizing it) to our father and mother? The characteristic can be described with two words which have the same root, but one is the beginning and the other the end of the trajectory of action. The first word is gratitude. Why? Because of what I said before: there is nothing more evident in this moment, for me and for you, than the fact that you do not make yourself, that everything is given to you, there is an Other in you that is more you than yourself, you arise from a spring that is not you yourself and this spring is the

mystery of Being. Thus, analogously, you understand that all things are made by an Other. You, as a person, are the consciousness of nature. The I is that level of nature in which nature becomes aware of itself. Just as I become aware that I do not make myself, so all nature does not make itself; it is given: a gift. Hence, I am grateful. And gratitude is the foundation of every action, of every attitude: their premise. What does this gratitude infuse into every action? It infuses an aspect, a nuance, an aura of gratuitousness, pure gratuitousness. It is that gratuitousness of which Ada Negri speaks in one of her incomparable poemsas we have recalled many timeswhich expresses it in a way that I cannot better express, You love, and you do not think of being loved. For every flower that blooms or fruit that reddens or child which is born, to the God of the fields and of all races, in your heart you give thanks. You love, you enjoy the flower not because you smell it, but because it is. You look at the fruit that reddens not because you bite into it, but because it is. You look at a baby not because it is yours but because it is. This is absolute purity. Please, make an effort to identify yourselves with this absolute purity. A shade of this purity, of this gratuitousness enters us even without us realizing it; almost naturally it enters our every action. Because if any attitude of mine towards you does not have this gratuitousness within it, just a touch of this gratuitousness in it, it is ugly. It is a fallen, short-lived relationship; it is a relationship at the start of its collapse, of its falling to pieces. It is only this purity of gratuitousness that no longer destroys, that no longer destroys anything, that maintains everything that was in the past. In the present it maintains everything that was born in the past. So, my person in the present is enriched by everything that I did yesterday and the day before, and nothing is useless, like Andrea said two days before dying. Because of all this, the result of following Jesus as the ideal of life,
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of life as vocation, the resultas the Gospel saysis the hundredfold. Things become greater, my relationship with you becomes stronger. It is as if we were born together. I did not know you before, until a few years ago I did not know you and I have no interestin the sense of advantage, of gainnone. It is not for my gain that we are together and the reason I get on so well with you, despite what you think. I am not your friend for this reason. Therefore, there is a more powerful richness in all relationships, in the way I look at a flower, in the way I look at the stars, in the way I look at trees or leaves, in the way I put up with myselfI who impudently claim that you should stay here another five minutesin every way, in the way in which I think of my faults yesterday, and the day before: Lord, forgive me, forgive me, I am a sinner. But to speak in this way does not disappoint me, does not depress me; it renders me more true. If I did not speak in this way, I would be less true, because I am a sinner. From this richness comes a capacity of fruitfulness that nobody has. Fruitfulness, that is, the capacity to communicate one's own nature, one's own richness, one's own intelligence, one's own will, one's own heart, one's own time, one's own life. That is to say, I would lay down my life for each of you. Each one of us for each one of the others would say this and does say it. If one does not say it, it is because he has never thought about it and if one has never thought about it, it is because he has never thought as he became aware of the presence of Christ. If one starts from this awareness, then he says, I would give even my lifeJesus, help me, though! So, we gain a fruitfulness in work, a passion for work that is not for what I can grab or for my particular taste or for particular results from my presence in society. I gain a love for work as the perfection of action, no matter how it comes out, no matter the outcome. It is a fruitfulness which is love for giving myself as I am, for giving you myself, that is to say, to give oneself to one's children: love for

everything which enters and will enter into relationship with one's children, love for the others who are also children, even they are children, for all men, for the people. We are given fruitfulness in work, fruitfulness in front of one's children, and fruitfulness in the life of the people. In other words, the ideal of life becomes the good of others, the good of others: what is good for others, your good, my good. This is the aim for which God made the world: the good of everything, the good. It is the opposite of the book by Bobbio, a serious and moving book on evil, (I believe it is moving from some of the pages that I've read). But, a father's plan for his child is the good. The ideal of life becomes good. *********** Now I would ask you to pay attention for these last five minutes because what I am about to say is the sharpest thing of all we have said today, the sharpest consequence of today's theme. There is a form of vocation that chooses an unforeseen and unforeseeable path, unimagined and unimaginable by the mind of anyone who is called. Forgive me for saying it straight out: it is called virginity. It is a form of vocation that passes through, like light passes through glass (the phrase "pass through" cannot really be substituted by any other), a form of vocation that passes through the most natural urges that appear in everyone's experience. Those who follow this path have the natural urges that everyone has. But this form of vocation passes through the most natural urges as they present themselves in our experience and paradoxically fulfills them, according to a new potency. In them, with this life, with this form of vocation, work becomes obedience. Everyone goes to work for many reasons, among which there is also a touch of what we call gratuitousness. But here, in this vocation, work becomes total gratuitousness. Its aim desires to be totally gratuitous. Why do you go to your law firm? Why do you go into your classroom? For pay day or career prospects or the fact that it is normal to work: all these reasons,

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with the passing of time, really become less convincing as motives. The only thing that lasts is the desire for the good of others, that God's will be done. In other words, work becomes obedience. What is obedience? Obedience is acting in order to affirm another. What is an action? Action is the phenomenon by which the I affirms itself, realizes itself. In order to realize myself, my action is not for myself but for another: this is obedience. An Other, to affirm an Other, to love the Word, to love Christ is the law governing action. Work is to love Christ. And just as work becomes obedience, love for a woman or for a man is exalted. In the physical sense, a man who exalts himself is a man who holds himself up straight, to the full height of his person. Love for a woman is exalted as a sign of perfection, the attraction for which man is made. This was Leopardi's intuition. There was a point in his life, from which he then fell, in which he had the intuition that the face of woman was a sign. He had loved many women, but in that moment, he had the intuition that it was not this or that face, but another Face, with a capital F, a woman with a capital W, to whom he wrote that beautiful poem and that he was looking for. Love for woman is exalted as a sign of the perfection and attraction of the beautiful, the good, the true and the just, which is Christ because perfection, the source of attraction, the source of beauty, of goodness, of truth and justice is the Word of God. That which shines through, as Leopardi said in the poem, To His Lady, in a natural landscape, in the beauty of a dream, or in the beauty of a face is the divine which is at the source of everything. It is in the face of the other, the utmost other, who, for a man, is a woman and for woman, a man. It shines through; it shines through in an ineffable way that cannot be expressed. Leopardi was the one who managed to say it in the best way, I think, although he did not actually say it, but was right on the point of saying it. So that these things do not seem abstract to you, I will read the letter that a boy sent to his ex-fiance. They had been together
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for three years. After three years she had the intuition that her vocation could be one to virginity and told him she was going to try to verify that. Her ex-fiance wrote this to her:
Dearest, I want to imprison only a few words because everything is already closed in our hearts forever [Forever! Nothing is eliminated]. I am moved, that is, moved to awe for what is being accomplished in your life, or rather, because of Who is accomplishing it. The destiny of goodness which has taken you to Itself is a joy which will lead me through time. Even the pain which assails me, sometimes stronger than others, for what I did to you in certain moments of our time together, is full of a mercy that makes it truer. It remains a mystery which is, nevertheless, already revealing itself. The fullness of our relationship, of that piece of history through which we walked together, is explained better like this. I like believing that every instant you spent with me, even with my incapacity, is not lost [forever!] and was useful, that is, used by Christ to accompany you to Him. I ask you for forgiveness, that is, that you give me your begging, in the certainty that you have loved my person more by belonging to Memores Domini, than if you had married me. I thank you for your waiting and I ask Our Lady that faces full of hope may always be around you, as they are now, to protect you and love you in each step you take. I gave you an icon of Christ, sign of His incarnation [a concept the orthodox are very clear about] so that His presence may always comfort you and remind you to pray for me, for the task now entrusted to me of loving Elisabetta, for my family and our friends. But above all pray that I may not abandon that embrace of the Holy Spirit which is the Movement and its mysterious sentinel.

He understood. Do you see that he understood? Work becomes obedience. Love for woman becomes a supreme sign of the perfection, of the attraction we see in her, of the happiness which awaits us. And the people, instead of being the subject of a human history full of arguments and fights, becomes the history of people, of a stream, of a river of consciences which slowly
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become enlightened and which give in, at least upon dying, to the glory of Christ. It is called charity: these changes are called charity. Work which becomes obedience is called charity. Love for woman who becomes a sign of the final perfection, of the final beauty, is called charity. And the people who become the history of Christ, the Kingdom of Christ, the Glory of Christ is charity. Because charity is to look at a presence, each presence, with our souls held by passion for Christ, tenderness for Christ. There is a gladness and a joy which are possible only in these conditions. Otherwise gladness and joy would be two words to rip out of the human lexicon because there is no other possibility for gladness and joythere may be a certain satiation, a kind of satisfaction, but there is no gladness because gladness requires absolute gratuitousness and that is only possible with the presence of the divine, with the foretaste of happiness. And joy is the momentary explosion of gladnesswhenever God so willsgiven in order to sustain the heart of a person or a people in educationally significant moments. However, this lawthat makes work become obedience, makes love for woman become a sign (as Leopardi's intuited) and makes the people not just a sea of faces but the kingdom of Christ which moves aheadthis law of charity is that of all people, not only of virgins. Virginity is the visible form of life which recalls everyone to the same ideal: Christ, for whom alone it is worth living or dying, working, loving a woman, educating children or sustaining and helping a people. Charity is for everyone but some are called to the sacrifice of virginity precisely so that they are present, in the midst of all people, to recall the ideal thats for everyone. You should have studied the concept of miracle in Why the Church, if you have gotten that far. As it says there, a miracle is an event that inexorably points towards God, a phenomenon that inevitably makes you think of God. The miracle of miracles, more than all the miracles of Lourdes, more than all the miracles of any
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shrine in the world, the miracle of miracles, that is, the phenomenon which inexorably forces you to think of Jesus, is a beautiful 20 year old girl who embraces virginity. The Church is the place of this path and of the entire operative, fruitful, flowering influences on people who walk together, in the companionship that God creates, in which all the paths are united. The Church is the place in which all these people are enriched, give themselves and are enriched by the gift of others. The Church is a really moving place of humanity, it is the place where humanity grows, increases, continuously expelling anything false that enters it (because we are men, the Church is human and men are human when they expel what is false and love the pure). The Church is truly a moving thing. The struggle against nihilism is this moving, deep feeling which lives in the Church.
i

Simpatia, in this context, takes its meaning from the Italian word simpatico, which means likeable, friendly, loveable, etc. Thus a simpatia is the attraction to a person because of his likeability, his loveableness.

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