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).

QOTD: Carrying the Answer to the Crisis

Then, political commitment is approached as cultural work, because we are aware of what it means to work for a cultural need. It is a question of the awareness of a people that grows deeper and deeper, in contact with the events, the clarity that we carry within us the answer to the crisis.

Our position in cultural commitment is that of a people that deepens its awareness of carrying within itself the principle that can resolve the crisis for everyone. We bring salvation.

Fr. Giussani, In Faith, Man and People

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."

Face to Face with Christ

Today, there is a lead article at il sussidario.net, an interview with Antonio Socci, about the Pope's judgment on the financial crisis. I will attempt to translate just a piece of it which is relevant to Fred's recent postings.

Giussani parlava con persone a lui vicine, in un momento di forte entusiasmo al termine di un Meeting di Rimini andato particolarmente bene. Nel mezzo dell’entusiasmo lui se ne uscì con una frase impressionante e vertiginosa: «tutto passa, l’unica cosa che resta è il tuo faccia a faccia con Cristo». E questo è anche il giudizio finale su tutta la nostra esistenza.

At one moment of great enthusiasm at the end of a Meeting in Rimini that had gone particularly well, Giusanni spoke with some people close by. In the middle of the excitement he only offered a single impressive and dizzying statement: "Everything passes, the only thing that remains is you face to face with Christ." And this is the final judgment on all of our existence.

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

Only Wonder Knows

When I listen to Schubert's Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano, I cannot help hoping that the progress of each man along his life journey may reach the same perfection of expression - harmonic and melodic - as this masterpiece possesses.

It is rare to hear a more beautiful and more fully achieved piece of music than this composition. The music, so intensely full and vibrant with sweetness, unfolds discreetly, making no attempts to impress, accepting to be born out of what it is, as though obeying something other than the flow of the composer's thoughts and feelings. And right here in this obedience, in the loving pursuit of a deeper relationship with what is given, Schubert discovers Mystery and approaches perfection.

Thus, the composer's course becomes a metaphor for human experience. Each of us was made so that what God asks of our life - life as vocation - may reach a perfection of harmony and melody. Of what can joy be born, if not this obedience? Because harmony is an obedience; on the plane of freedom, of intelligence and of love, harmony is an obedience. Whoever recognizes what he was made for, whoever desires perfection for his life, asks for it, follows it, obeys it. Indeed, what is the second movement of this Sonata, if not an impassioned and tenacious entreaty?

I imagine Schubert striving for beauty and perfection in what he was writing, open to the true and beautiful. What human attitude reveals this openness, which is, as well, the only way to know truly? Above all else, wonder. Wonder is the gaze of contemplation, it is the consequence of the only way of truly embracing a fact, an event, an encounter. "Concepts create idols, only wonder knows," said Gregory of Nyssa, a great Father of the early Church. For it is only by embracing the true and beautiful that our personality is constructed. Personality is given a consciousness of the goal, by a judgment about things, by the consciousness of the relationship of things with the goal, and by freedom as adherence, as energy that makes us adhere to the goal of our action. Every time we are reminded to listed to the Arpeggione, let's try to identify with the accomplished genius of Schubert, in the hope that, in the same way, the development of our personality may reach the perfection of expression to which it is called.

Luigi Giussani
Liner notes from Spirto gentil: Sonata per arpeggione e pianoforte, D 821;
Trio n. 1 in si bemolle magg. per pianoforte, violino e violoncello, op. 99, D898

On Prayer, Fr. Giussani

The desperate outcry of Pastor Brand, the character who gives his name to Ibsen’s play, (“Answer me, O God, in the hour in which death swallows me: is not the whole will of a man sufficient to achieve a single shred of salvation?”) is answered by the humble positiveness of Saint Teresa of the Child Jesus, who writes: “When I am charitable it is Jesus alone who acts in me”.

All that means that man’s freedom, always enfolded by the Mystery, has as supreme, unassailable expression, prayer. That is why freedom presents itself, according to all its true nature, as request to belong to Being, therefore to Christ.

Msgr. Luigi Giussani before John Paul II, Rome, Saint Peter’s Square, 30 May 1998

A Real Direction

Fr. Carron quotes Fr. Giussani in "The Enthusiasm for Truth Is Called 'Faith'":

“Following the Movement is following it in its real direction, and its real direction is the one with the absolute and only passion of making Christ known again, that Christ become the judgment of life and affection, that He become memory and affection, because this is what changes the world. This is what changes the world, folks! This alone changes our life, nothing else–not [our] opinions on culture, not [our] opinions on the way to live the life of the community, because, if we follow on this level, we understand that even the way of living the life of the community has to be learned and followed. The Movement has gone ahead because of its unity, certainly not because of the autonomy of its members’ opinions” (Certi di alcune grandi cose [Certain of a Few Great Things], p. 80).