The Apostle Paul on Hope

To assist our work on hope, here are the passages speaking of hope in the first few pages of Volume 2 of Is it Possible to Live this Way? I quote the passages as they appear in the book, but I have linked the NAB to facilitate looking at the context of each quote.

Romans 5:1-2

"Justified therefore by faith, we are in peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ; through Him we have also obtained through faith, the possibility of acceding to this grace and in which we find ourselves, and of which we boast in the hope of the glory of Christ."

2 Corinthians 3:12

"Strong in such hope we're full of certainty."

1 Thessalonians 1:3

"Hope that is the Lord Jesus."

1 Timothy 1

"Paul apostle of Jesus Christ by the command of God our Saviour and by the command of Jesus Christ, our hope."

1 Timothy 4:10

"We labour and suffer reproach because we have place our hope in the living God."

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Faith - the first page of this book also refers to a few scripture passages on faith.

"the just man lives by faith"

Habbakkuk 2:4

"justice is faith"

Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38

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

Whoever gives up his or her own point of view to follow Jesus...becomes a person capable of facing anything

The title words above are a quote from page 144 of vol I of Is it Possible, and they are followed by these words: "The Bible uses different words: 'Vir obediens loquetur victoriam'" (Proverbs 21:28, presumably from the Vulgate, the Latin translation which the Church uses).

Have you looked up this verse in Proverbs? Here's the New Jerusalem Bible: "The false witness will perish, but no one who knows how to listen will ever be silenced." And here is the Douay Rheims Bible, which is based on the Vulgate: "A lying witness shall perish: an obedient man shall speak of victory. " From what I know of Latin, to listen and to obey have the same root (are they the same word?) As can be seen, Fr. Giussani only cites the second part of the proverb.

And what is obedience? To listen, to meditate on so as to understand, and to imitate. It is an apprenticeship. But in Christianity, obedience is an apprenticeship within the Church where we strive together to help each other better listen, understand, and imitate Jesus Christ — the meaning of life who is with us now.

This is the rosary, for example. To listen to the events of Jesus's life, to ponder them with Mary — the witness of His life, and to imitate His attitude in the midst of those daily things which impinge upon us and that we tend to regard as distractions. Jesus bore His cross, so I accept the burdens of life even when the circumstances seem to be terminal. The circumstances are not terminal but are what's given to us so that we can discover the attitude of Christ before them. The events of Jesus's life are the carnal dimension of the Our Father: thy will be done.

Like the five passages of faith (p 57), obedience consists first in paying attention to something in front of us and second responding to it. Imitation completes the listening. It's the reason for listening and the fruit of the listening. Obedience is the change that comes from encountering the exceptional presence. It is the human, free act of embracing the Father's will.

Concretely, what does obedience mean? It means that I begin to live according to an extraordinary measure instead of the common one. It means that a new affection, a new attitude lives in me and revives me. It means that one day I start paying attention to what I eat. It means that I start to see what needs to be done around the house and start to do it. It means that I look at Karen or the children with a tenderness that is beyond me.

As the Spiritual Exercises taught us: "This Is the Victory That Conquers the World, Our Faith." The bells above a sign, a reminder, of the voice we listen to and follow.

Stability amid Desolation and Consolation

"Whenever we undertake, carry out, and complete a good work, each of us has had the experience of feeling joy one time but not the next. One time we know how to seize such joy, and the next time we do not. We thus learn that knowing and enjoying do not spring from our own abilities but from God's Grace. In this way, we are healed of the pride of our own choices."

~Augustine

"Nothing plays a greater role in God's pedagogical art than the shift from one to the other extreme. No sooner have we learned something half-way and begun to grasp it than (oh, shock!) out of the warm bath and into the cold! This is meant to ensure that we do not settle into any situation but remain pliable, and to make us recognize that true insight does not come from what we have grasped but from ever- greater readiness and deeper obedience"

~Balthasar

Grain of Wheat, p 109

“Those who run toward the Lord will never lack space… One who is climbing never stops, he moves from beginning to beginning, according to beginnings that never end.”

~Gregory of Nyssa
Theme of the National Diaconia in Chicago 2002

Freedom is the active and affective willingness...

Salvatore, a friend of mine — and yes, you may know him too! — has challenged Karen and me with stability: we need more stability in our lives. What is stability? It is the recognition that nothing can hinder our freedom, our active and affective willingness ... to see ... [the] encounter re-proposed in all your relationships. I can be at the base of the mountain confronted with my incapacity and yet embrace the desire to see Christ's face in such a way that it gets me moving. Or I could be at the top of the mountain and still desire more. For the base of every mountain is the remnant of the last one, as St. Gregory suggests in the quote above. At the Transfiguration, Peter said "Lord, let us build three booths" (alas, the wrong kind of stability). So, even the Transfiguration was the base of another mountain. Elsewhere Jesus exclaims: "For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may be amazed" (John 5:20, New Jerusalem Bible).

Faith: The ultimate expression of an affection for oneself

Faith:
The ultimate expression of an affection for oneself
International Assembly of Responsibles of Communion and Liberation
La Thuile, Italy, August 19-23, 2008
Tuesday evening
August 19, 2008

Introduction
Julián Carrón

Nothing rings more true to men and women aware of themselves than the consciousness of their need; for this reason, nothing expresses what we are better than crying out, the cry of the needy person to the only One who can respond to this need. Therefore, let us begin this gesture of ours by helping each other, supporting each other to be totally ourselves in this cry, asking the Spirit to come to our aid.

Come Holy Spirit

I greet you one by one and welcome you to this gathering of responsibles, desiring that it be—as said in the title we've chosen for this responsibles meeting—"An Adventure for Oneself," an adventure for each one of us.
To prepare us and help us understand what this means, the Lord always makes events happen, rather than using a lot of words; He made another event occur just before our encounter, another exceptional fact: the death of our friend Andrea Aziani, a missionary in Peru, who worked for many years in the university, and who has left a mark wherever he's been.
In a letter Andrea wrote years ago to a friend (who had left for a meeting with the university students of Cuzco), a letter Fr. Giussani later quoted, Andrea expressed well his heartfelt desire, "I am certain that in this 'missionary bath' of these days there will emerge and grow, powerful and glad in you—and thus in all of us—the consciousness, the certainty of Christ in us and for us. O quam amabilis es bone Jesu." These are the words of a man who is almost confessing it to himself, without thinking in the least that today we might read it to everyone! He continued, “…that someone would fall in love with what we’ve fallen in love with!” This is the desire that what you love becomes a love for everyone, that others as well can be seized by He who has seized us. “But for this to happen, we have to burn, literally be aflame with passion for man, that Christ may reach him. ‘The flame must burn.’” Fr. Giussani, commenting on this letter, said, “I challenge you to find a similar testimony, anywhere, any time, in any part of the world, with any man.” Testimony doesn’t mean words, but an experience perceived, penetrated, lived, felt, inevitable, inexorable, superabundantly evident.
There’s no need to add anything to these words of Fr. Giussani’s about Andrea, words that brought to my mind the deaths of other friends of ours, like Fr. Danilo (who spent years in Paraguay and was beginning in Argentina), Giovanna (for years in Uganda), and Alberto (tried by long illness): witnesses to the death, all placed before us at the beginning of this encounter. I can’t think of them without there coming to mind that great expression—which describes our situation—pronounced in the Letter to the Hebrews, after listing an interminable series of witnesses to the faith, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” These witnesses had their gaze fixed on Jesus and traveled their life in this race to reach Him who had reached them, and they lived this testimony before our eyes, so we might see how it is possible to live the faith in this cultural and historical context of ours.
At the same time, many of us have had the opportunity to begin reading the text of the Equipes of 1982 and 1983, in which Fr. Giussani—after the visit to John Paul II, when the Holy Father said, “You have no homeland, because you cannot be assimilated to this society”—described how we are without a homeland if we want to live with our eyes fixed on Jesus. This makes us perceive on the one hand the importance of these witnesses, and on the other, the decisive importance of doing the journey we proposed at the Fraternity Spiritual Exercises, because in order truly to be able to live without a homeland, the faith must truly satisfy, and not be something just made of words. This is why I emphasized at the Exercises that the test of faith is satisfaction, and this putting together of faith and satisfaction is decisive, because so often we speak of faith as if it had nothing to do with satisfaction: we would find satisfaction elsewhere, according to our frameworks or images, as if there were no real and true relationship between faith and satisfaction. Instead, beginning to put them together enables us to start the verification to assess up to what point for us faith is the acknowledgment of something so real, of a Presence that is so real, true because real, that it brings satisfaction.
Therefore, the work ahead of us in these days can’t possibly be just throwing words to the wind or someone developing whatever reflections might come to mind; instead, it will be the verification of whether faith brings with itself this satisfaction, which enables us to live in any situation with our eyes fixed on Jesus, author and perfecter of faith.
[...]

From the CL website. See the booklet insert in Traces for the rest...

(also posted at Come to See)

CL Summer Vacation (D.C. Community) 2008

The theme of the vacation

We began, the evening we arrived, with a barbecue, singing, and games. The next morning, we hiked to the top of Bald Knob, the highest elevation in West Virginia:

The hike took us through meadows studded with wild strawberries, daisies, and wild blueberries (the children had very little appetite when it was time for lunch!)

The path also led us through dappled woods...

The view from the top of Bald Knob. We sang until the clouds produced lightning. Then we all had to make a dash back to the bottom!

Pieralberto Bertazzi joined us. He met the movement in 1963 in a chance encounter that introduced him to a new way of living. He lived very intensely through the crisis of 1968 and told us at length about his experience.

Notes from the talk given by Pieralberto Bertazzi, a medical doctor and Memores Domini:

• [Fr. Giussani's genius lay in] going back to the root, back to the beginning -- to ask the question: What is faith?
• Our faith is knowledge of a fact -- this is the indicator of our faith's truth -- NOT what we decide, otherwise, Christ becomes the starting point and support for our projects...
• Today we have been living something so similar to things that I did as a high school student...everything done, lived, tasted...
• I met Fr. Giussani in 1963, on a ski vacation. [It was pure chance...I was looking for a way to go skiing, and I found a flyer...] Chance is one of the ways in which the Mystery operates in history, Reality.
• GS was not a religious group -- I encountered a life, a way of living everything, something unexpected that I didn't know existed.
• [It was so attractive] that it made me willing to become a part of it. [Being part of it] allowed me to do everything in a new way -- full of joy, love, solidarity...
• God entered into the life of man as a man -- to be with God you have to encounter an experience of life.
• Living the usual things of life in a way that reminds me of God.
• Giving the usual terms of our language a new taste that was inevitably appealing and attractive.
• Began following and sharing my life.
• What you liked was still there but in a new form.
• It was if those people knew the best way to do everything!
• 1968: Revolution among young people -- not just young people but everyone, around the world.
• This was a fundamental event in my life.
• [It provided a] verification of the encounter, when it becomes really true for you, becomes yours.
• [It was during that time that I knew that] I will never leave it, it is mine.
• For some of the GS students, though, they thought that the experience of the Movement was not enough -- "something else" was needed to change the world.
• But the Movement is not a "religious" movement, it's a life. So everything is included in it.
• If you encounter what answers the deepest needs of your humanity, you have to follow...
• The greatest friend I ever had in my life left... [I remember a conversation with him in which he said,] "What I've seen by meeting you, what I have experienced with you, has helped me to see that I don't need you, I won't follow you."
• [But] I met something that made me a living person...
• 1968: [There was] a generalized request for authenticity in life -- justice, freedom, unity...
• To build this new world, they got rid of their tradition, their family, their home, and you cannot build anything from yourself alone.
• We haven't made ourselves, we are not ours.
• There is something you have to depend upon.
• They thought they were going to invent and build a new world. You have to recognize who you are, that you depend...
• [While Fr. Giussani was in America...] we did the typical things: meeting together, communicating to other people, and doing charitable works. We wrote leaflets.
• [We had to communicate with others because we realized that] what they were looking for was exactly what we had already met!
• [The name "Communion and Liberation" came about in this way...] We were trying to decide on a name for the leaflets we were writing to others in the University. I suggested, "Communion and Liberation" because I said, "We are concerned with liberation that everybody wants, and we have found it in communion." Nobody liked the name. They thought it was too long, but one person [who had a lot of influence said we should use it.]
• Later, when Fr. Giussani returned, he saw the title of a leaflet that was taped to a door...he said, "Yes, that's what we are..."
• I recently read a study done by sociologists. CL is the only new thing born during the sixties that is still alive and growing.
• Question: Why did 1968 happen? Response: This is the first generation that had not experienced war. There was great prosperity. We had everything, didn't have to fight to build our life. But young people didn't find the response to the needs of their hearts. It is not something we build, it's something we receive.
• Question: What is the "1968" challenge of today? Response: That we put our reason before experience. What had happened was greater than we can conceive with our reason. Our impatience is deadly -- we begin to think that this method isn't effective enough. But it wasn't true that what we had encountered wasn't suitable to meet our human needs. Don't start from what you can plan or conceive, don't make plans by yourself. Remaining, instead -- convinced of what our eyes have seen and ears have heard.
• Teresa: Our problem is a reduction of what we've seen. We must remain faithful to our own history.
  

We also watched a video presentation, the same one we watched at the Fraternity Exercises, of the Zerbinis' witness about their life in Brazil.

The choir was so great! Some of the GS kids joined in and were a tremendous gift to the vacation. They helped us with the singing several times a day.
Special thanks to Margie and Stephen for leading.

There was another video presentation, which contained an interview with Joshua, who met the Movement while in prison. I couldn't take notes during the video because I was riveted by what Joshua said, but here are my notes, from the brief introduction before the video, by one of Joshua's friends:

• What I really want to say is that Joshua is a fact that I can't ignore or reduce. There is Something that changes him and changes me. He's been in prison 12 years already, and he has six more to go, but he has this amazing gratitude...
• [...] When you go into the prison, see all the prisoners, and see Joshua -- the prison is oppressive, grey, you don't open your eyes all the way -- Joshua doesn't fit, he doesn't belong there. He lives an alertness, awareness and attention to the world around him.
• He has a lively engagement with things and people.
• He'd had a Protestant friend, and he looked at Catholicism in order to argue with him, but his research convinced him.
• He survives, remains interested and interesting. His hope is in a real human presence; he's built on this.

The kids joined in the frizi on the final night. We had performances by the littlest ones (shown here), the elementary school kids, the middle school kids and the GS kids, in addition to a full-blown series of adult frizi! We weren't done until midnight!

There was so much more, so much that I can't even put into words! It was all so beautiful and rich...