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).

Reason must be broadened by experience

“The substance of the question is clarified in the struggle that unfolds in the way of understanding the relationship between reason and experience.” Reality, ours and all that we see, is a given, and reason – if it is true to itself, if it isn’t completely irreligious, if it isn’t disloyal with what it sees, if it doesn’t renounce its own nature, this urge to find the reasons for what lies before it – cannot end without acknowledging Him at work. We’re unreasonable because we don’t submit our reason, our way of thinking of God, of the Mystery, to what we experience. This is our irreligiosity, that is, not broadening reason to the point of acknowledging the given, the real, in its arising, which is the Mystery.

An instant is enough to realize this.

Listen to this beautiful dialogue between [the fictional] Peppone [the ex-partisan Communist mayor] and Don Camillo [the parish priest]:

“Peppone, exasperated, went and planted himself wide-legged in front of Don Camillo: ‘Could you possibly tell us what you want from us? Are we the ones, perhaps, who come to you?’

[Don Camillo answered]: ‘What’s that got to do with it? Even if you don’t come to church, God exists anyway, and is waiting for you.’

The Skinny One interjected, ‘Has the Reverend Father perhaps forgotten that we’re excommunicated?’

‘That’s a question of secondary importance’ shot back Don Camillo. ‘Even if you’re excommunicated, God continues to exist and continues to wait for you. Excuse me. I’m not registered in your party, I don’t participate in the People’s House [local headquarters for the Communist Party and labor union] and I’m considered an enemy of your party. Because of these facts, could I perhaps assert that Stalin doesn’t exist?’

‘Stalin exists, and how! And he’s lying in wait for you!’ Peppone bellowed.

Don Camillo smiled: ‘I don’t doubt it a bit and I’ve never doubted it. And if I admit that Stalin exists and is waiting for me, why can’t you admit that God exists and is waiting for you? Isn’t it the same thing?’

Peppone was struck by this elementary reasoning. But the Skinny One intervened: ‘The only difference is that while nobody has seen your God, Stalin can be seen and touched. And even if I haven’t seen and touched him, you can see and touch what Stalin has created: Communism!’

Don Camillo opened his arms wide: ‘And the world where we live, me, you, and Stalin, isn’t that perhaps something you see and touch?’”

This simple observation would be enough to help each of us acknowledge Him so present as to be the origin of everything. But if by chance “the heavens to gaze upon” we sang about don’t serve the purpose, aren’t enough, the Lord unfolds right before our eyes what we just saw in São Paulo, which is like a cry, “Wake up! What abstract thing can generate what you’ve seen?”.

The Lord has compassion and tenderness for each of us, so much so that He comes help us in our difficulties, bends down in front of our need and makes happen before our eyes something that helps us acknowledge Him, and one remains dumbstruck before what He does: His presence fills me with silence.

The silence isn’t because we have to be quiet, for reasons of good order. It is born of the event, and one remains speechless before what happens before our eyes. This is why we need to support each other in this silence that His presence in our midst generates during these days, offering the sacrifice that a gesture like this can’t help but generate, that the Lord may have pity on us.

(Spiritual Exercises of Communion and Liberation 2008, p 8-9)