Giussani on Friendship in Christ

    "The true companionship, meaning a constructive, creative factor of life, and therefore generator of beauty,  consolation, - repairing what falls down - a positive companionship in this sense can be born only from a friendship. Friendship is the virtue, the energy that constructs the companionship. This is why the Lord, wanting man to know Him, became man and this man generated a companionship. He became present here and now, in every moment of history, within a companionship. And if one claims to have a relationship with the mystery of God and leave out the companionship, and in particular, leave out the authority that guides it, one deceives oneself; it would be an illusion....

    "So what is friendship? Friendship in its minimal state, is the encounter of one person with another person whose destiny he or she desires more than his or her own life. I desire your destiny more than I desire my life.  The other reciprocates this and desires my destiny more than his or her life.  Friendship is like this, and the proof that this is true is that you'd want anyone you'd meet in the diversity of circumstances to understand this, so that everyone would embrace each other. Those who do not experience this must humbly ask the Lord and the Blessed Mother to make it understood to them, because without this, not even the relationship with God is true."

    Is It Possible to Live This Way?  Vol.1 Faith, pp.145, 146

New Wine, old wineskins

         "...The first Christians were well aware that everything happening in them and among them - the new and exceptional compared with the lives they had led before, the revolutionary compared with the lives so many others around them were leading - was not the fruit of their adherence, of their intelligence, or of their will, but a gift of the spirit, a gift from on high, a mysterious energy with which they were invested."   Luigi Giussani, Why the Church?  p.89

Just like what makes us Christians so different from everybody else around us today, right? Of course not. The newness of the Christ event doesn't come through to so many of us Christians today because we are old wine skins,  and Christ is always  New Wine. With our set ways of thinking and feeling inside secure Comfort Zones we reduce Him to sentiments, ideas, rules, and acceptable norms that cannot contain Him. And if perchance, by a miracle of grace, He does slip inside, how furious we get when He bursts the wine skin apart.