Dialogue on Charity, Part Two

This is the second part of my dialogue with Fr. Giussani's thoughts on charity, love, friendship, and Christ. Although each part can stand alone, it may be helpful to read this in conjunction with Part One, written on Jan 4th of this year. The Bold print is his text, the Italic print is my reflection.

b. Friendship

 Using friendship as one's point of departure and as the final goal, with all the ambiguity that this encompasses, is also incomplete. 

Ambiguity...What ambiguity? The ambiguity of making too much out of friendship? I never thought about it, but it seems true that making friendship the be all and end all of one's life ("one's point of departure and...final goal") warps friendship. It goes from beautiful to ugly, though it may keep the same name. The beauty of friendship is the love that takes friends out of themselves towards their common passion. Friendship implies an acceptance of the other as the other is, and the sharing of yourself as you are, while each goes beyond the individual self towards that which entrances them both.  But if  friendship is narcissistic, if I have to buy into your lies and delusions in order to be accepted by you, or you have to swallow mine to be my friend, then at best our so-called friendship is just an arrangement of convenience, convenient complicity, not a mutually enriching sharing of selves. Somehow, love for the true, good and beautiful, love for what is greater than we are, is integral to friendship.

Friendship is a correspondence that one may or may not find: it becomes the road to our destiny, but not the end itself. 

Correspondence...again, a word that I did not associate with friendship, but yes, it describes the way two or more genuine friends fit one another. There is a correspondence, a mutuality, a trusting, open communication that cannot be foreseen or planned. They share what they see and in doing so, each sees opens the eyes of the other a bit more. When friendship happens, it is a surprise, a mysterious, beautiful gift.  Another provocative idea: "friendship"becomes the road to our destiny".What does that mean?  I can say Christ is the "Way", or road to our destiny. So, somehow friendship means we are involved not just with each other, but with a Love and Truth that are greater than we are? In that sense, we who are friends are pulled toward a Love that is our final end. Is that what Giussani means?

2   To freely go out to others, to share a little of their life and to put in common a little of ours, enables us to discover a sublime and mysterious thing (one understands in doing it). 

Exactly what "sublime and mysterious thing" is it that we come to understand "in doing it? Maybe this is the response to what I was just asking about the "road to our destiny". It seems to be going beyond ourselves,  the freely willed, freely given, gift of ourselves in friendship, that is "sublime and mysterious", because there is nothing artificial about it, nothing coercive, or manipulative. It is given unconditionally, and it is sublimely beautiful in the reciprocation.  I think that is what Giussani means.

It is the discovery of the fact that precisely because we love them, it is not we who make them happy. Who is the reason for everything? Who made everything? God.

 

We find happiness in the gift of friendship, in the entering into it. But we didn't make it happen. God did, when we went beyond ourselves.Or perhaps more accurately: his Spirit opened us to one another so we could receive his love in our sharing, even though we thought we were in charge of the process.

So Jesus is not only He who announces to me the truest word, who explains the law of reality, He is no longer only the light of my mind: I discover that Christ is the meaning of my life. 

Again words that have so much packed into them. How does Christ explain "the law of reality"? What is "the law of reality"?  The law of the gift. I am gift. My life is gift. At every moment I am receiving the gift of my being. To enter into the reality that I am, I have to give myself away. Christ does more than illuminate and inspire me with his truth. Self gift is what I am meant to be, and the more I give myself I will find that I have more to give. Not because I am inexhaustible, but because the Divine Giver who made me replenishes what little I give of my weak limited self, and makes me capable of more giving. 

The witness of those who have experienced this value is very beautiful: "I will continue to do charitable work because of all my sufferings and all of theirs have meaning."

The value is in the giving, whether it is reciprocated or not, whether it brings immediate joy or not, whether it makes me feel fulfilled or not. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. The result is beyond our control.

Hoping in Christ, everything has meaning: Christ. 

What matters is that our going beyond ourselves, our self gift, is what conforms us to him. This means that whatever suffering we go through in loving and giving of ourselves will bring us to the fullness of joy in Christ. 

I discover this, finally, in the place where I do charitable work, precisely by means of  the final powerlessness of my love; it is the experience in which the intelligence discovers wisdom, true culture. 

The charitable work done in powerless self-gift helps us see how an environment of goodness and love is created. This "culture" isn't programmable or technologically induced, it is the fruit of love. This seems to be what the apostles did, what missionaries do, what disciple of Christ do everyday. Their self gift proclaims the One who is greater than they, and plants the seed of his presence in the world among different people. In his time, it grows into a sub-culture, then perhaps a culture, an even a civilization of love. 

Clericalism Part Five: Terror of the Holy

  I do not know how to prove there is an unconscious terror of the Holy in the core of humanity as a whole.  But I am convinced it is there. Since this terror is unconscious, it moves and motivates us without our awareness. This is a primal condition begun in the soul of mankind with the sin of Adam and Eve. Before the fall, we felt comfortable in God’s presence. After the fall, we had to run and hide because we could not stand to let Him look at us. To hide an awareness of Him became the way block Him out and live as if He did not exist.  We could not experience Him as anything but Threat because of our guilt. Before the fall, His Majesty inspired awe and wonder, even though it also made us quake and tremble.  But the quaking and trembling was not terror. It was a realization of our nothingness in comparison to His greatness.  After, we could not even entertain the thought of Him without cringing in fear. His greatness was Threat to us since we were now experiencing ourselves as His enemies and not as His image. The fact that He did not experience us as we experienced ourselves was not something our minds could grasp.

I think this terror of the Holy is still common to primitive peoples and cultures. In such a “progressive” civilization as ours, the enlightenment achieved by Psychology and Progress has anesthetized this terror into sophisticated numbness. Unlike more primitive societies which are still somewhat capable of awe and wonder, for us “moderns” boredom is new starting point where our conversion into Christian life begins.  In the past, surrender to Christ as He who saves us from our sins removed our terror of the Sacred and set us at peace with God. In the present, we first have to be made open to the Sacred, become aware that the Sacred is Goodness and Love we can trust, and let this new consciousness enkindle its love in us. The complications are our own fault because of the great lengths we have gone to insulate ourselves from the Sacred.

The wrong way to avoid the terror of the Holy is to hide from Him by denial. (We have yet to find a “right” way to hide from God because there is none.)  Denial once begun becomes easier and easier in its expansion. Denial of guilt becomes denial of sin. Denial of sin becomes denial of God, of obligation, and of responsibility. Denial also ego-inflates into an assertion of freedom, independence, and autonomy. The need for consistence and coherence in our lives either  moves us to open our selves more and more to God, or close ourselves off from Him more completely.

 In our Culture we believers go back and forth, forth and back, between conversion and denial.  This movement in us affects the way we view the relation of the natural to the Supernatural.  The more converted (holy) the person, the more awareness there will be of the presence of the Supernatural in the natural. The more into denial the person, the more absent the Supernatural will be from the natural. The person who takes one step forward and two backwards (most of us) will probably imagine the Supernatural on top of the natural, as a kind of layer that blankets it in a heavy invisible fog. There will be no awareness of the immanence of the Holy. The person who lives in Faith, Hope, and Love will “sense” the Supernatural present within the natural. The mystic will “see” the natural shimmer with Glory.

What has all of this to do with Clericalism? Clericalism is obviously more than abuse of power and/or enjoyment of perks that go with the priestly profession. It is a defense mechanism: our human attempt to “protect” ourselves from the intrusion of the Holy into our lives. Since the clergyman is a sign of the Holy, two perpetually easy ways to avoid what he stands for are to idolize him or despise him.  From apostolic time to today, it is easier to stop at the sign than to face what it signifies.Thus an encounter with the Holy Itself is avoided.