Key Texts
Intrepid Will to Make the World More Human
Essential Points for the Formation of a Christian Personality
We offer this passage from Luigi Giussani's book, Alla ricerca del
Introduction
Witnessing to the faith is the task of our lives. This is because Christians have a specific task in life, which is not to practice a particular profession, but faith; to witness to faith, witness it within their personal life circumstances.
Witnessing to the faith is the task of our lives. This is because Christians have a specific task in life, which is not to practice a particular profession, but faith; to witness to faith, witness it within their personal life circumstances.
Your
family exists, your profession exists, but “the” task is to witness to the
faith. This is why we have been chosen.
John the
Baptist, in his work as a prophet, proclaimed that salvation was already
present, and thus he showed it to men. We can compare the attitude that is
required of us by our task as Christians with his attitude.
In this
way, we express our personality, not as priests, not as nuns, not as workers,
not as professionals, nor as heads of families, but as Christians, whatever
activity occupies our time, by affirming that salvation is already present and
by showing it, testifying it to others.
So it
seems to me that the essential points of the type of Christian experience which
characterizes us could be the following:
1. Christ is salvation in
history and in life
A faith
without life turns out to be useless and gets lost, just as a life without
faith is arid and has no goal, no overarching purpose. And faith is
acknowledging that Jesus Christ is salvation, present in history and in
life–present in the same way that husband or wife, mother or father, friends,
or workmates are present, present like the events talked about in the
newspapers, even if no newspaper talks about this Presence.
Salvation
does not concern just the next world, it concerns all of man, in this world and
the next, on earth and in heaven–all the more so since heaven signifies the
truth of earth made manifest. And the truth of earth is Christ, as St Paul
Christ
is the exhaustive meaning, for example, of the clear windy sky this evening, of
my person, of our persons, of all the world. To state that Christ is salvation
means to delineate a road on which everything must be realized and accomplished.
Time has
been given to us in order to bring this faith to maturity, to bring this
consciousness to maturity, to bring the acknowledgment of His Presence to
maturity.
Christ
in history is like the sun of a day that is just beginning, like the dawn. A
man who had never seen the sun, who had always lived in the night, would be
full of wonder at seeing the dawn emerging. Things would start to take on their
form, albeit in a blurred and still unclear way. And such a man, even if he
cannot imagine the sun in its midday splendor, nonetheless begins to intuit
that something new is happening, that the dawn is a beginning–the beginning of
day.
The
earth, existence, history, for Christians, are like the beginning, the dawn of
that full day to which God has destined us.
In the
Christian experience of night, in which men are submerged and where they know
things only by groping, something begins that makes everything start to have a
meaning. The clearest proof of this is that it happens even with the most
ordinary, everyday things. Thus our routine, too, takes on a dimension of
greatness and gladness.
This is
summed up by the Christian gesture that in the language of the Church is called offering. In the
definitiveness of this gesture, at this point large or small things no longer
exist, but everything tends to be converted into the immensity of the
relationship with Christ. Verifying that this is not words, but a life
experience, means beginning to understand in what the resurrection–the new
world that has begun–consists.
This
does not mean that weakness and sin disappear, but that desperation is
eliminated, and that man can walk through all his ills, and continuously
overcome them.
When the
disciples went to Christ and asked Him, “Are you the Messiah or should we look
for another?,” He replied in the words of Isaiah’s prophecy, “The blind see,
the deaf hear.” This was a message to be understood by the humble of heart; it
was not tailor-made for the clever and intelligent, even if it was open to all.
The Year of the Lord’s Grace had begun, and His message was a hope, a
possibility for festivity in all of earthly life.
Thus,
the first point that gives the fundamental tone to a Christian personality is
this: the living consciousness that salvation, liberation–words which mean the
same thing–have an answer in a reality that is already present in man’s life,
Christ.
The
opposite of this first point is seeking salvation–i.e., the meaning of one’s
actions and those of others, the meaning of time and of work–by locating it in
something made by man’s hands. This happens in our personal life, for instance,
when we complain that our dreams, our demands are not fulfilled. We are
disappointed because we placed our hope only in what man can do. During Nazism,
for example, many really cared about Hitler the way one could care about God;
we might even say that they worshipped him. The same thing is true for the
people who placed, or place, their salvation in Lenin or any other leader. For
the leader is the embodiment of ideology as the proclamation of hope placed in
the work of man’s hands.
This is
the alternative to Christianity, and it is the “world’s” position. It is not
the Christian’s position, because the Christian is, by nature, in open
opposition to “worldly” hopes.
2. The reality of Christ is in
the Church
This
presence that is the reality of Christ is located–“lies within”–the unity of
believers, and therefore within the Church. This means in the Church as Christ
founded her, with the authority, the bishops, and the mysterious gesture of the
sacrament, a gesture that involves all of life, because the sacrament is the
locus forming all of life.
So,
placing one’s hope, one’s salvation in Christ implies judging one’s hope within
the Christian community, in the piece of the Church that arises in the
environment where we live, maybe a little and petty one, little and full of
flaws, since it is made up of people like us, but (if it is faithful to the established
authority) it is still a function of the whole Church and a sign of our
journey.
This is
why, externally, the method of faith is to bring forth and live in a community,
and this community is a group of persons who acknowledge Christ to be salvation,
and thus they are immanent in the whole Church, guided by Authority, which is
Christ as salvation–not of the soul, but of life present and future–as road and
as goal; as destiny.
The
opposite of this second point, essential for a Christian personality, would be
to reduce the relationship with Christ to the relationship with the image we
invent of Him: an individualistic relationship with an abstract image, whose
only concrete link would be the words of the Gospel in accordance with each
person’s interpretation of them or the interpretation chosen from the various
methods of the exegetes.
Christ’s
presence is manifested, on the contrary, through the experience of the Church
within the community to which we belong, whose value thus lies in binding us and
opening us to all of the Church. It is the experience of living the Church
where we are: home, parish, university, factory, neighborhood, office.
3. The consciousness of faith as the
fruit of an encounter
The
existential consciousness of what faith is, and thus of what Christ is; the
living discovery of the value of our unity, of our communion (in other words,
of what the Church is), are not the fruit of reasoning or study. They are the
fruit of an encounter.
Encounter
means the event of the relationship with a person or a community, rich with an
accent that to us rings so true that we feel struck by it as by a light and
summoned to a different and truer life.
In this
encounter, the value of all of faith and the value of the historical reality of
the Church begin to appear in a concrete way, not in an abstract or theoretical
way but in a real way, to the point that it provokes our person to give a total
response–because when the person is really provoked, he feels that all of his
life is at stake.
If this
is not the case, if it is not a question of all of life, then what we have is
not yet the discovery of faith, but simply of a knowledge and practice of
religious forms.
We can
say, paradoxically, that Christianity is not a religion, but a life.
The opposite
of this factor, which characterizes the formation of a Christian personality,
is identifying one’s relationships with Christ and the Church as some
established gestures, and not as a totality of adherence, as though Christ and
the Church were extraneous to certain needs and interests of life. But in
reality, when my “I” is struck and drawn in, I am influenced and determined in
everything I do.
This is
called entirety and integrity, while the opposite, partiality, lives as
ritualism or administrative and associative bureaucratism.
In fact,
Christ is the whole of my person; the experience of the Church is the
experience of my entire self. Christ and the Church are salvation for me, and I
am still the same person who eats, drinks, stays awake, and sleeps, lives and
dies, as St Paul
Christ
and the Church are the profound inspiration that is etched in the very
structure of my actions, in all the things I do. This is why the encounter is
an “event,” which tends to influence in a new way all my relationships, with
things and with people, and the very way I have of looking at my sins.
4. Constructiveness as the affirmation
of an “Other”
This
profound inspiration tends to create a different web of human relationships
with everyone, but above all with those who acknowledge this inspiration, i.e.,
the people of the Christian community.
So the
community, within the characteristics of the environment where it lives, is the
location of a different, more human humanity whose fundamental rule is charity.
Charity
means that in relationships the dynamic tends to affirm the other and not
ourselves, because affirming the other means increasing, growing. And in
practice, charity is developed as attention to the person of another, as the
intention to adapt oneself to his situation, in order to shoulder with the
other his wants and his needs.
This makes
the community that arises become a source of initiatives, of unlimited
initiatives. They produce a humanly more desirable portion of society, in
which, for instance, the birth of one person’s child is sincerely a reason for
joy for everybody; the marriage of two people in the community is equally a
reason for celebration for the others. Or it is where the sick are cared for,
or the eviction of one family falls onto the shoulders of the whole community,
within the limits of possibility and of the freedom of each person. I am not
speaking only of an ideal, but of things that are done in the Christian
community.
The
world and society change by means of the human realities that are already
changed in this way. But we have to remember that a truly new change cannot
come about except from outside of man, from a radically different “Other.” This
is the Grace of the Presence of Christ acknowledged and loved in the mystery of
His Church, which takes shape daily in the ecclesial community lived in one’s
own sphere.
The
opposite of this fourth point is moralism, which is thinking that we can be
upright by applying laws of behavior, doing good according to our instinct or
our conception, or walking on top of those closest to us, our nearest
neighbors.
Our
neighbor is, first and foremost, one whom Christ has put next to us. There is
no neighbor greater than those who, just like us, acknowledge Christ as
salvation–that is to say, our brothers in the community.
Through
them, through the human experience of the community, just as it unfolds, a
person becomes capable of being converted into someone more human, more just,
more full of initiatives also with those who are outside the community, with
society as a whole, in which the poor have a right to priority in our decisions.
It is like a stone that falls into a pond and produces concentric circles that
spread and multiply. However, the point of departure cannot be avoided. This
point of departure is those whom Christ puts next to us, puts near us: our
brothers in the faith.
In the
moralistic attitude, the point of departure is the opinion or plan of one’s
conscience.
5. The community, the locus of faith
within the world
As I
have already said, the Christian community, which is the locus of faith, is
inside the body of society; it is in the world, it is a part of this society
and this world, and lives all its problems.
It does
this either by intervening in a united, “compact” way in certain problems, or
by educating its members so that, responsibly, they intervene personally.
Therefore,
the sign of a lively Christian community is that in the consciousness of its
faith in Christ, and in the consciousness of its belonging to the Church, it
faces all of society’s problems either directly or through the commitment of
each of the members of the community.
Two
fundamental aspects of this commitment should be pointed out.
The
first is that the solution of a problem is false, illusory, if it does not
respect the values of the ecclesial community, the values by which it lives,
which is the conception the Church has of man, the meaning of history proposed
by the Church.
The
second is that the consciousness of belonging to the community, the
consciousness of our unity, of our communion, is a determining factor for the
consciousness itself with which the Christian approaches (also individually)
the problems, great and small, of society. The community is an ideal point of
reference, one that illuminates the conscience of the Christian in the
commitment with which he faces the problems that come up or with which he
shares the intentions of other men of good will.
The
opposite of this fifth point is dual.
On one
hand, we can conceive the Christian life as shut up in itself, without any
effect on social problems, i.e., without reference to the context in which we
live.
On the
other hand, we can reduce the influence of faith and the Church on our social
and political action to an extrinsic impulse, a mere inspiration, as though the
ecclesial experience pushed man to take an interest in social problems,
instilling in him an ethical thrust toward them, but without having any effect
on the way he approaches these problems.
This is
very important today. For example, people say, “The Gospel pushes me to take an
interest in the poor,” and this is certain. But if one stops here, then the
Gospel tends to be only an ethical, moralistic urge. Instead, the Gospel has
something to say also about the method, the structure of judgment, and the
behavior with which the problem of poverty is approached.
In a
certain city, a lecture was held, entitled, “The Christian and the Marxist.”
Who is the true Christian? Someone who wants to do justice to the poor. Who is
the Marxist? Someone who wants to do justice to the poor. Therefore, the
Christian today has to be Marxist. This was the scheme that was developed, as
was the custom among many people during those years. A little old lady in the
audience raised her hand and asked timidly, “Then what is the difference?” The
lecturer, after an instant of perplexity, answered, “The Christian sees Christ
in the poor; the Marxist does not.” So a friend who was present in the room
stood up and said, “Then I could say that the Christian is a visionary.”
We
should reflect at length on this episode, because the reply is a meaningful
one. If Christ does not change the way we approach human problems, Christ is a
fantasy. This is why dualism, which divides man into the religious or Christian
man on one side, and the civic or political man on the other, is to my mind one
of the greatest errors today. Many baptized live this dualistic position,
according to which the Christian is “Christian” in certain given moments, for
certain–basically religious–activities, but the rest of the time his faith
remains, in the best of hypotheses, like a vague ethical urge. For his other
activities, the Christian is “a man like everybody else.”
Instead,
the newness of the world which is faith, maintained by an authentic experience
of community life, fills all of life, creates a different subject, a “new
creature.” And the entirety of this man’s activity, his judgment about things,
his view of man and history, his relationships and his behavior, cannot cease
being determined and qualified by this faith.
Faith
fills all of life, and is a proposal for the life of every day.
Conclusion
I
believe that these five points, with their opposites, can be the object of work
toward the discovery of a lively and incisive Christian life, one that is
capable of assuming our condition as sinners on one hand and as children of our
times on the other.
For a
new life, all that is needed is grace and to be poor in spirit. In other words,
it is necessary to acknowledge the Presence that is in the world.
The
saints are those who recognize God’s plan, that is to say, the presence of
Christ, and through their sequela of this, try to work together for the good of
mankind in accordance with its authentic and profound destiny. While all
ideologies build on scandal and violence, the new thing is the peaceful miracle
of the life of each person who risks everything within an ecclesial life.
A
thousand years ago, man traveled on the back of a mule and could be more human
and happier than today’s man who streaks through the sky in a jet. “Progress”
is desirable, but human good is not necessarily identified with the development
of technological civilization, which can, on the contrary, turn out to be
counterproductive in terms of human civilization. In fact, it has constructed
an enormous number of means for alienating man within power.
The main
problem is the humanization of man, the truth of the subject. The task of the
Christian community for collaborating in this lies in the ripening of its
faith. This is the best instrument for creating agents that utilize
technological civilization “for” man. When we say, “Thy kingdom come,” we are
asking for salvation for the entirety of the human fact in the world.
Such is
the ideal, and it is the opposite of dreams or utopia, images made by man. The
ideal ends up changing, little by little, every step of the human journey. This
is why the ideal is the most concrete thing that exists.
This
ideal is in faith, which is our whole life.
