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.
Within this psalm lies the meaning of the definition of man's life - his relationship with the one who creates him. The whole cosmos reaches for a certain point of evolution, at which it becomes self-awareness: that point is called "I". The "I" is self-awareness of the world, of the cosmos, and of oneself. The cosmos is the context in which the relationship with God, with the Mystery, lives.
The Psalmist asks, "Lord, what is man that you keep him in mind, that you remember him?" Among all the beasts and little creatures of the cosmos, man is one-hundredth, one thousandth, one then thousandth. But the greatness of man, the honor and glory of man, lies in the fact that man, the individual man, is in relationship with the Infinite. To live what man is, to realize his person, man must grasp everything God has done. Happiness is the final end of this process, the process of penetrating the eternal.
The Psalms, Luigi Giussani, pp. 18-19
In His Name We Find Hope
If the judgment called faith dominates life, you see it in the fact that this being seized is what comes forth in the way we face all the circumstances of life; it comes forth by default, as they say, as when one, no matter what experience she has, no matter what happens to her, is invaded by the memory of something she cares about, a presence she cares about. So then, you see that the relationship with this presence dominates because it reappears with evidence in every experience; I do not invent it when I need it. I do not create it when faced with the dramatic circumstances of living. It comes to mind, imposes itself on me, in front of all the circumstances, be they beautiful or ugly. At times they are more meaningful when they are beautiful because they are less at risk of "being invented"; when they are ugly, since there has to be some meaning, one can run the risk of inventing a meaning. When life is full, this risk lessens: that acknowledgement imposes itself and that memory arises, because I cannot watch the sunset, or an evening together, without the emergence of that urgent need, the strong pressure to say his name.
Fr. Julian Carron, Magnificat magazine, July 2013, p. 284
"Jesus Christ did not come into the world as a substitute for human effort, for human freedom, or to eliminate human trial - the existential condition of freedom. He came into the world to call man back to the depths of all questions, to his own fundamental structure, and to his own real situation. If certain human values are not safeguarded, all the problems man is called to resolve in the trial of life do not dissolve, but rather become more complicated. Jesus Christ came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution of those problems is a lie. The problem of the knowledge of the meaning of things (truth), making use of things (work), human awareness (love), human co-existence (society and politics), lack a proper formulation, and so, to the extent that religiosity is not at the foundation of the search for their solution, they generate ever greater confusion in the history of the individual and humanity as a whole."
At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Luigi Giussani, p. 97
"We belong to the truth before the truth belongs to us. Although both of these statements are true, a reversal in their order changes the meaning and integrity of both the truth and ourselves."
