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by
Giancarlo Cesana
What has erased the darkness, the doubt, the violence from the faces
of the young people in the suburbs of New York is the certainty of
being loved, because in order to be certain, an idea is not enough; an
idea is enough to be a fanatic. To be certain, a place is needed,
someone who wants me. In order to live, I am not enough by myself; I
need you, and you are never enough.
But what does the other person who loves us transmit to us? The
meaning, the purpose of life, the vocation; not simply a task as
something to do, but destiny. Destiny does not want one task or
another task, it wants the “I.” The Other who loves me, wants me; the
meaning of life wants me (not what I do, but me). Imagine someone who
has a passion for a certain amount of industriousness and is forced to
stay in bed for twenty years. What can sustain him? The task? The word
“destiny” decides: he either accepts or does not accept. We are
destined to love. This surpasses all points of view, goes beyond all
the confines of a task. We have to respond to this You who intervenes
in our life, wanting us, and to respond, responding, is the risk of
getting attached, because knowledge is an affective energy (as in “affection”);
it is not the electronic mechanism of a computer. Getting attached is
the risk of a life. Responding means that life is no longer like you
imagine it, but is determined by the presence to which you respond,
and not a Presence with a capital “P,” because there is a certain
spiritualism that capitalizes all the words (the Presence, the Other,
etc.), but presence with a small “p”--the presence of you, which bears
that Presence with a capital “P.” I understood in this way what Fr
Giussani said about Our Lady. Our Lady became attached, she bore the
Mystery. This is why she is the living fountain of hope, because she
surrendered. But there could still be a final objection, the one that
Eco offered recently, summarizing the thought of Popper: “Of
everything, it can be said that it is a lie; of nothing can it be said
that it is the truth.” This is what life is like, and it is like this
if the truth is not stronger than death, because death falsifies
everything. The only truth that overcomes death, the only factor of
hope, is Christ, who vanquished death, who is present and manifests
Himself in a changed humanity, as the promise of fulfillment. We are
followers of Christ, I am a follower of Christ, not because I have
understood everything, but because I have not understood anything
except the promise contained in the response that came from Him, that
He marked with His name. There is no presumptuousness in being
Christian. And Christ is mystery precisely in the way He presents
Himself: through a human companionship.
So, if this is destiny, what is the task? Mission and education. Even
more: education as mission. Education is helping to see, so that
freedom can be gambled. “Man begging for Christ and Christ begging for
man,” in order to knock down the wall of objection, uncertainty,
calculation, and of life arranged as if we had made it ourselves.
Education is above all a proposal--not of an idea, but of me, and thus
of what you choose, of what you belong to, of what loves you and that
loves you in order to love everybody.
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