Source of Our Certainty
"He had pity on me, the one who was so forgetful and petty. If our life is normal, with what we’ve had, it is difficult to be able to find particular sins during the day, but the sin is the sin of pettiness of distraction and forgetfulness. The sin is the pettiness of not translating what we do into something new, not making it shine like the new dawn. Instead, we leave it opaque, we leave it as it is, without striking anyone, yet without giving it over to the splendor of Being.”
This then is the source of our certainty: “He had pity on me and on my nothingness and He chose me. He chose me because He had pity on me. He chose me because He was moved by my pettiness! What marks the devotion with which the Mystery—the supreme Mystery and the Mystery of this man who is Christ, God made man—what marks the Mystery’s devotion to us, the devotion with which the Mystery creates the world and forgives man’s pettiness, and forgives him while embracing him, embracing him who is petty, disgusting, is an emotion, is like an emotion; it is being moved, it has being moved within it. It is precisely this that exalts the maternity of God.” Instead, “in all the other conceptions, this unity of God with the world and with man is stated in an arid and mechanical way. As with Dr. Schweitzer: you must dedicate yourself, it is ‘your duty.’ This is like the champions of the Third World cause in the post-conciliar, post-World War II era: to go, to sacrifice yourself for humanity; it is your duty to go, it is not a case of being moved.”
However, we must pay attention to a detail, in order to avoid misunderstanding. “This being moved and this emotion bear, bring with them, a judgment and a beat of the heart. It is a judgment, therefore a value, a rational value, let’s say; not inasmuch as it can be boiled down and reduced to a level that only our reason is capable of, but rational in the sense that it gives a reason, it carries its reason within it. And it becomes a beat of the heart for this reason. If emotion or being moved doesn’t carry this judgment and this beat of the heart within it, then it is not charity. What is the reason? ‘I have loved you with an eternal love, therefore I have made you part of Me, having pity on your nothingness.’ The beat of the heart is pity on your nothingness—but the reason is that you might participate in being. In talking about nothingness, as with an animal, you can use the term compassion. But when dealing with man—we’ll conclude what I said before this way, by coming back to it—it can’t be called anything but being moved, because man is called to happiness, man is great and is called to happiness; man is great like God and is called to God’s happiness. The fact that he is crushed by pettiness, destroyed by distraction, emptied and turned into nothing again because of unlimited laziness, this generates compassion.”
—Luigi Giussani, Julian Carron
