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(Paul Klee.  At the Core , 1935) Experience itself, in its totality, shows the way to an authentic understanding of the term reason or rationality. Indeed, reason is that singular event of nature in which it – reason – reveals itself as the operative need to explain reality in all of its factors so that we are introduced to the truth about things. In this way, reality emerges within experience and  rationality illuminates the factors within it. To say “rational” is to affirm the transparency or intelligibility of human experience, its substance and depth. Rationality is critical transparency of our human experience: “critical” means according to an all-encompassing view. (Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense , p. 101 )

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from  english.clonline.org What We Are Learning: Our Silent World Letters by witnesses “ Life Changes ” : a conversation with Italian author Maurizio Maggiani “ The Renewal of My Humanity ” : Giorgio Vittadini reflects on the temptation to cling to all sorts of  “ have to be ’ s ” “ In the Right Place ” : cardiologist Francesco Rotatori talks about what is happening in New York “ A Continuous  ‘ Here I Am ’ ” : monk Sergio Massalongo on  his experience of “our yes to Christ is, before all else,  our contribution to the salvation of every man and woman today.” “The Touch of the Mystery ” by Luigi Giussani

“What I grasped most covetously in my clenched fist came apart like the rose under the vault of eternity. . .the more so for what I most treasured.” The more one loves, the more he needs Christ, because Christ saves what man loves, forever. At least from this point of view, we have to accept Him. Either we love nothing or, the more we love, the more Christ is necessary to safeguard what we love, to maintain what we love, otherwise we lose it. The day after tomorrow it’s gone. —Luigi Giussani

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. [...] In order truly to be able to live without a homeland, the faith must truly satisfy , and not be something just made of words. [...] 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.

Mary: Faith and Faithfulness Notes from Fr. Luigi Giussani’s words at the XV Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Snows in Andro, Italy, on May 7, 1989 I would like to thank Our Lady and also Fr. Gino for giving me the opportunity to participate, at least in part, in this great, beautiful gesture that a pilgrimage is. It is a great and beautiful gesture because it is a symbol of life: without our willing it, without our thinking of it, one step after the other, life, too, is a walk toward the destiny that is God, He who made us, He who gave us our father and mother, and He who awaits us at the end of our labors–yes, because life is toil. If God came among us (you’ve already meditated on this along the course of your pilgrimage), if God came among us to die, to work like everybody else, but above all to die, it means that life is something toilsome. And, in fact, it is the test for going where there awaits us, as Jacopone da Todi says, the “heavenly reign, that fulfil...

One need think about the entire world, need worry about Christianity in Africa and Asia, and not only busy oneself with daily occasions of disobedience and errors. . . .Only what is great, what is total, and what brings everything together can help a man put up with the humiliation of care for and attention to details. If one bears within him or herself a sense of the world, then he or she can remain in jail for his or her whole life with the fantastic serenity of a cloistered monk. Yet, if one has not within him or herself the vastness that human nature demands, then tackling the daily fatigue in the name of an energy one is supposed to possess becomes a grueling and exhausting work. —Luigi Giussani

God Is Mercy Notes from a talk by Luigi Giussani during the Memores Domini Lenten Retreat in Pianazze, Italy, on February 16, 1975 The prayer last night [ “Through our annual Lenten observance, Lord, deepen our understanding of the mystery of Christ and make it a reality in the conduct of our lives.” ] called us to the two results of conversion: the passion of the knowledge of Christ (“knowledge” in the full, biblical sense of the word), thus the passion for Christ, the love of Christ as the desire to cling to Him, and hence the second result, good works. Lent is the instrument–the sacramental instrument–for fostering this conversion. In other words, operating the Lenten sign, making ours the pedagogic indications that the Church uses for the Lenten call to conversion, something happens in us through the power of the Holy Spirit that is greater than what our usual efforts would yield. It is a sacramental time, a time destined by God to give us a greater impetus of transf...

Very often, for this [a particular profession], too, the great criteria for a decision are only personal profit and desire. These should form part of the question, but not everything. In the choice of a job or a profession, one should keep in mind the third category we mentioned, the needs of society. For the Christian, however, these cannot be a criterion isolated from a deeper concept, the needs of the Christian community, because the needs of society are nothing else but an aspect of the needs of the Christian community, the needs of the Church in every era. (Luigi Giussani)

You have to encounter love before you encounter morality; otherwise, it is agony.                                                                                                —Albert Camus It is in Him that I hope, before counting my errors and my virtues. Numbers have nothing to do with this. In the relationship with Him, numbers don’t count, the weight that is measured or measurable is irrelevant, and all the evil I can possibly do in the future has no relevance either. It cannot usurp the first place that this yes of Simon, repeated by me, has before the eyes of Christ. So a kind of flood comes from the depths of our heart, like a breath that rises from the breast and pervades the whole person, making it act, making it want to act more ju...

"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, disg...

The forces that change history are the same forces that change the heart of man. — Luigi Giussani

Excerpt from “ God is Mercy , ”  notes from a talk by Luigi Giussani The letter said in the beginning, “Feeling that I’m not and never will be guaranteed in the perseverance of my faith [I could say vocation; it’s one and the same] worries me; knowing that my freedom is and always will be able to reject God worries me. At times I reproach myself for this as a residue of rationalism.” Exactly! This is precisely the reason. “Rationalism” means that man can claim to judge his own life and things from his own point of view, that is, man who claims to be the measure of all things. What determines our life is the event of Christ; the event of the covenant is what gives meaning to our life; what has happened to us determines the security, the certainty, of our life. “Yes, but I can always reject what happened.” Will you please understand the error of this objection? Because one must truly reject, and this is a possibility only if one fails to remember, if one does not make memory o...

Reference text: L. Giussani , “The Three Constituent Factors,” in   Why the Church? , McGillQueen’s, 2001, pp. 87–95. Notes from School of Community with Julián Carrón

In anticipation of the international eucharistic congress (IEC) in Cebu , a contribution to familiarizing and deepening That “something more” that everyone desires, that vague but urgent “something more,” that “something more,” unknown, of which man is often or normally unaware, whose meaning he never manages to grasp, that “essential thing,” of which Yevtushenko speaks, and could not put a name to (“After every lesson,” quoted in L. Giussani, The Religious Sense , McGill-Queens, Montreal, 1997, p. 71), that vague “something more,” in such a situation, becomes a reality just as measurable, physically perceptible, physically detectable, feasible, familiar, clear, like a person with whom you are talking at table, with whom you live under the same roof, you eat, you discuss. (L. Giussani) Eucharist: A Present, Familiar Reality Notes from a meditation given by Luigi Giussani at the Spiritual Exercises for GS of Switzerland . Fribourg, November 1967 1. The Mystery has be...