Opposing the dominion of the apparently obvious

What you say reminds me of a note I jotted down at a recent assembly of Communion and Liberation in Rome: "Itis not at all certain that someone who has a particular religious propensity is facilitated [by this propensity] in encountering Christ." This could seem "heretical" to today's mentality. Don't you think so?

GIUSSANI: I do not see anything "heretical" in this statement, because the religious propensity can also work in such a way that one is attached to formulas he made up himself, or to identifications that are moralistic, for example. During Jesus' time, the Pharisees certainly had a pronounced religious propensity and this did not favor at all their acceptance of the Messiah... For accepting Christ requires a forgetting of self that is implied exclusively in the wonder of a recognition. In the instant when one recognizes a presence like this, it is like a baby looking at his father and mother: the first instant, as he holds out his arms, is a forgetting of self in which his true love for himself becomes real. Naturally, it is then necessary for this original purity to be maintained, by constantly opposing a fall into the dominion of one's own reaction, the dominion of the apparently obvious.

-- from an Interview with Lucio Brunelli and Gianni Cardinale, published in 30 Days