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).

Work: Tenaciously Seeking the One Who Has Found Me

Several weeks ago my job ended, and in the same moment my company assigned me a new job. In some ways what was lacking in the first job gave me a hunger for aspects of the new job that otherwise I wouldn't have had a taste for. My new job is more demanding and requires greater accountability. I need toil in my life in order to grow, and I'm grateful to have been put into a position where I could want it.

Several recent articles in Traces have helped me understand work better, and which I've blogged about at Broken Alabaster (1, 2). I've also been challenged by Scott, Sharon, and Suzanne to meditate on the theme of the Diakonia: "Something that Comes First," notes from a talk of Fr. Giussani's at an assembly in 1993: 

 "Ten or twenty years later, the same experience proceeds if your point of departure is the impact with a new reality and, 'as a child rests in its mother's arms,' you abandon yourself, follow, obey, because that diversity doesn't spring from your imagination or thought, from your dialectical skill or your obstinancy, from everything, that is, that has kept you away for years: it's something other, irreducibly new — an event — to be obeyed" (4).

The word that recurs in this talk is "diversity" or "human diversity." Now, this different humanity is someone whom I've met who paradoxically brings me closer to the most diverse people I may speak with during the day. The word diverse reminds me that I will always be surprised by this different humanity. It means that those I regard as adversaries may in fact bring me to gape in wonder at the world. Something different, new, an event, obedience — where better to find all this than at work: where reality resists the inevitible expectations of my thoughts, and where assigned tasks bring me together with people that I wouldn't find through common interests or the usual affiliations and associations?

How can it be that I'm discovering the value of work at the age of 41? I've seen it before — more than once — and yet now there's something else. My friend, Salvatore, pointed out bluntly: "you need stability," and I agreed with him, but how to find stability? When I mentioned this need to another friend, he pointed me to a definition in Is It Possible to Live this Way, vol 1: "[virtue] is a habitually correct attitude toward the known object" (117). Over time, this definition has percolated within me. It's one thing to realize at this moment or another moment the value of work, the greatness of reality, the gift of human diversity; it's another to cultivate the habit of rediscovering it every day, every hour, every minute. And how do I rediscover it? By obeying, by submitting to my condition — not blindly or like a robot — but wholeheartedly giving myself to the needs that I see in front of me. And I'm never disappointed when I do — I'm always surprised by something great. What's really amazing is that on a day like today, a lazy, distracted day filled with excuses, this tender sprout of a virtue is still with me and presses with certainty that something great is here if only I would look for it. The victory is not me, not my coherence, but that someone great has found me, and if I turn I will see him.