Preparing for the Fraternity Lent Retreat

Here is my summary of pages 28-40 of the 2008 Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation ("This is the Victory that Conquers the World, Our Faith"). These pages will be the focus of the Fraternity Lent retreat this year.


1. Those who believe have eternal life:

• We first receive this life, which derives from faith, at Baptism: "The only thing that makes faith reasonable is its promise to bring us life. This is why God intervened in history, to bring us this life, and this life reaches us in Baptism" (p. 28).
• "Baptism is the sacrament of faith, which, however needs the community of believers" -- "Baptism encorporates us into the community of believers through the fact of becoming one person in Christ" (29).
• But if we're not careful, we can reduce our companionship to its external appearance: "If there's not a personal 'I' that says 'You' to Christ, as you say it to a man who is present, Christ is 'bleached or faded away from the beautiful and glad appearance of the companionship of faces that should have been a sign pointed to Him!' but we stop there; we stay there with the sign.
• "It's as if one of us had received a stupendous bouquet of flowers, and never tired of talking about the bouquet of flowers, but felt no urgency to say the name, to speak about the person who had given the flowers."
• Two temptations to avoid: "first, conceiving a Christ without Church, that is, excluding Christ from reality, to a far-away supernatural world, and reducing Him to our interpretation or our measure, or, second, having a Church without Christ, where the Church is perceived not as the body of Christ, that makes Him present, but as the substitution of Christ.
• "Jesus Christ isn't a presence isolated in far-off history, so as to seem the fruit of imagination. He is a Presence ten years after His death, a thousand years after His death, two thousand years after His death, up to today, through this different humanity of the saints, a human presence impossible to think up" (33).
• "Anything but Christ in the abstract! He is something so real that through His historical presence in the Church and His witnesses, He becomes a reality that can't be reduced by any attempt of ours, challenging man's heart, reason, freedom, and affection. Anything but abstract!"
• "Our companionship isn't here to spare us the drama of freedom, but to continually provoke our responsibility.... 'Our companionship means not to let time pass without our life asking, seeking, wanting the relationship with God present and without our life wanting or accepting that companionship, without which not even the image of His presence would be true'" (34).
• "Christ reaches us through our communion to introduce us to a relationship with Him, so the Mystery may become familiar" (34).
• "The test of faith, of the true relationship, not virtual, not with someone abstract, is satisfaction. Only if we experience faith as satisfaction, the greatest satisfaction one can imagine, because of the hope that He has brought forth in me, do we have an experience so powerful that it sustains all of life, because life consists in the affection that sustains us most, not outside reality, that sustains in satisfaction, in the unique correspondence that Christ is for life" (36).

2. New Knowledge and affection:

• "The new knowledge is born of the adhesion to an event, born of the affectus for an event to which one is attached, to which one says yes. [ You have to say yes. Faith is a free gesture: you need to say yes to this event, so that this newness can begin to happen.]" (37).
• "To think, starting from an event, means first of all accepting that I don't define that event, but rather, that I'm defined by it" (37).
• "the new judgment is possible only in a continual relationship with reality, in other words, with the human companionship that prolongs in time the initial Event: it proposes the authentic Christian point of view. The Christian Event persists in history, and with it persists the origin of the new judgment" (38).
• "Remaining in the position of origin in which the Event brings forth the new knowledge is the only chance for relating to reality without preconceptions" (38).
• "In order to acquire this, a work is necessary. 'For the mentality to be truly new, it's necessary that out of its consciousness of "belonging," it continually engage in comparison with present events. Since this new mentality is born of a present place, it judges the present. Otherwise it doesn't exist: if it doesn't enter into the experience of the present, the new knowledge doesn't exist, is only an abstraction. In this sense, not to make judgments on events is to mortify faith'" (39).
• "Faith grows in this way, risking it in reality and challenging everything with Him in our eyes. This is why it's not a matter of learning a discourse by heart and repeating it, but learning a gaze, says Fr. Giussani" (39).
  
• "How can we learn this gaze? 'It's a matter of staying before the event encountered': it's the precedence given to the event, to what happens, to what He does" (39).

3. Witness, the task of life:

• "Mission can be nothing other than a more acute awareness of what Christ means for life, because only to the degree that we live this newness will we feel the urgency of mission" (40).

Obedience and the Shema Yisrael

Thanks to Suzanne for bringing in the Hebrew. One of the priests at my parish last week preached on Jesus's allusion to the Shema in the Gospel of Matthew.

Mt 22:34-40 (NAB)

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a scholar of the law tested him by asking, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

And here is what the Shema says:

"Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One
(Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom for ever and ever). And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
And you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall speak of them. When you sit at home, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. And these words that I command you today shall be in your heart."

Fr. Giussani has a way of mentioning significant details in an offhand way, and it's only during the Assembly that somebody presses on and gets to the importance of the details. And here's what Don Gius says about his friends, Manfredini and DePonti:

"Why did I become such a great friend of Manfredini and DePonti, whom I was always with? From third year of high school to fourth year of theology we were always together — always — I mean always! — and nobody ever said anything because the great reason that we were together was so evident to everyone. In fact, anyone who showed up, at any moment of the day or week, would have heard us speaking about certain things, so much so that a lot of people said, 'Oh brother, not those guys again! and they left. The same people who left other things! Why did we, who didn't even know each other, become such close friends? Because we began to intuit and to speak about certain things, things apart from which life was not worth living. This was the depth that God gave us the grace to have at thirteen or fourteen years old: to understand that apart from certain things, in other words, from Christ, life was not worth living in the literal sense of the term. (Is it Possible? Vol 1, p150).

To hear, shema, is to listen, to ponder, to speak of at all times and strive to understand and internalize it more. To set up reminders on one's head (thoughts) and on one's hand (action), at the doorpost and gate (the transition between house and world). Or as Fr. Carrón said in La Thuile in August, "Testimony doesn't mean words, but an experience perceived, penetrated, lived, felt, inevitable, inexorable, superabundantly evident."

none of the rest is enough

«"If Jesus came here in silence - softly - and sat on that chair over there, near her, and at a certain point we realized it, I wonder if in many of us the amazement, gratitude, joy... I wonder if in many of us the affection would be truly spontaneous," as if He were a well-known friend, with a simple familiarity. "I wonder if we all would be covered in a blanket of shame, if we realized in that moment that we had never said 'You,'" that we had been together, that everything had been beautiful, but nobody felt the need to say His name.»

Fr. Carrón quoting Fr. Giussani at the Communion and Liberation Spiritual Exercises

The problem of faith

"The problem of faith concerns not what we fail to see, but what we do see, what we touch, what we experience." Julián Carrón