Rome and the Gift of the Spirit

Rome and the gift of the Spirit

Reflections after the March 24 audience with Benedict XVI, contributing to the School of Community chapter on “The Gift of the Spirit.”

Julián Carrón’s words to the CLU Equipe and the Communion and Liberation Presidential Council.

Milan, April 22 and 24, 2007.

1. The urgency of a step

In recent months we have participated in a series of events, one more beautiful than the other, from the December exercises to the meeting with the Pope in Rome, and then Easter. Above all, Rome is a shining example of what we need to understand more deeply.

Helping us to stay before these gestures—again, most importantly, Rome—we have the fortune of a singular coincidence: precisely in these weeks of School of Community we’re studying the chapter on “The Gift of the Spirit” (L. Giussani, Traces of the Christian Experience, in The Journey to Truth is an Experience McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, pp. 69-77). Here is what Fr. Giussani writes: “The apostles had happened upon an exceptional, fascinating, and profoundly persuasive reality and accepted it, but they were not completely aware of What it was” (p. 69). The Apostles hadn’t understood.

Let’s ask ourselves: what does the gesture of Rome have to do with this provocation from School of Community? How does School of Community help us to understand or enter into its meaning? The core of the question lies here: since we’re not stones, we’ve been struck by this absolutely exceptional event, but, paradoxically, even after having participated in such a gesture, we, like the disciples can remain disoriented, lost, and so the gestures, instead of being a help, become the pretext for scepticism.

I saw this the other evening, doing School of Community with a group of young college graduates. Just after reading the first section of this new chapter (“The Experience of the Divine,” pp. 69-71), I threw out the provocation of the gesture of Rome, and one fellow spoke up, saying, “This is my problem: notwithstanding the beauty that happened in Rome, during the following two weeks I felt immense powerlessness and solitude, going through my days with a lack of meaning.”

Why shouldn’t somebody like this, who participates in an absolutely exceptional gesture and then finds himself in this condition two weeks later, not say, “Well then, what has to happen so that something will change in me? Next time, why should I even bother going?” This is the creeping insinuation of scepticism. Not even his participation in an exceptional fact could defeat scepticism. This is the question. We have to try to respond to this, because here you see whether the entire journey we’ve made leads to a greater certainty. Otherwise, even after listing all sorts of exceptional facts, at the end, what remains, what comes out in the last line, is the worm of scepticism, which can make everything useless.

We’re like the apostles, and trace the same journey: they had participated in an exceptional event, but they hadn’t understood. My question is very simple: how do we know we’ve understood what we experienced in Rome? We find the answer precisely in the chapter quoted in School of Community. Fr. Giussani says that the apostles had happened upon an exceptional fact, and they were fascinated, like us, and yet they didn’t understand, because something was missing, something needed to happen: it’s called the “gift of the Spirit.” What does the gift of the Spirit mean? If the gift of the Spirit hadn’t happened to the disciples, if they hadn’t understood, in the end they would have drifted away, lost: “We were hoping, we expected that this prophet powerful in word and deed…”. So we too might say the same, “We expected that going to Rome…” It’s the same. The step we have to take is what School of Community says, and the nexus with the gesture of Rome is a way for understanding what the Spirit is, because otherwise it’s just a ghost for us. Since this passage isn’t secondary for us—without it, in fact, scepticism will grow—I want to focus on it, and not let it slip by.

2. A new criterion

How can we understand that we’ve understood?

Let’s read the text. “Without the event of His Spirit, Christ can come across as a great man, an exceptional figure, unclassifiable by any standard; perhaps a strange figure who can persuade simple people irresistibly of their expectations, stimulate those with a passion for justice, threaten the structures that perpetuate the status quo: Christ was all these to His contemporaries. Or else He may appear so great as to become a moving or dramatic mythical figure, and this is perhaps the perception that characterizes our world’s skeptical despair. Without the event of His Spirit, however, a person—whether an apostle or ourselves—remains in the dark, on the threshold of these perspectives. Without the event of the Spirit, Christ remains an enigmatic mysterious face for the human person. […] Thus Christ would be a new object to confront, a fresh risk to run blindly, and not a new criterion, another light, finally, a new answer” (p. 70). Here’s the point: we can understand whether we’ve understood what happened in Rome or at the Exercises, if we discover we are amazed (this happens through a gift of the Spirit) by the fact that a new criterion has introduced itself by which we judge everything and we begin looking at reality (ourselves, what we have to do, our activities and gestures). If what happened doesn’t become a new criterion for everything, it means we haven’t understood. We don’t get to this point, I don’t know because of what reasoning. We don’t attain this point out of a reasoning or other.

First of all, then, it’s a matter of recognizing: I realize that I’ve understood, if I discover that I have a new criterion in me. The Holy Spirit isn’t something phantasmagorical, a strange, mythic figure: we realize that He has entered and has made us “understand” by the way we relate with everything after Rome. If I continue being skeptical, it means I haven’t understood, and I still have to ask for the gift of the Spirit and look at what happened. As I said in the letter to the Movement, we have to identify ourselves with it. This doesn’t close the issue, but opens it. We have to ask for the gift of the Spirit to understand what happened. Like the apostles, we’ve participated in an exceptional fact, but it’s evident that we still haven’t understood, because it hasn’t become a new criterion of judgment about everything.

I’ll give you another example. The other day, in the School of Community I mentioned, after having said these things, a young woman spoke about an excellent job offer her husband had received. I won’t go into all the details, but even though she said some interesting, thought-provoking things from this point of view, I interrupted her. “Look, my dear, if your husband had gone to Rome blind and returned seeing, and if later he had received this stupendous job offer in Switzerland, today, what would you be talking about?” “About the fact that my husband can see!” “Well then, why are we here talking about work in Switzerland?” You understand that you’ve understood because an entirely new light enters on the way you face everything—everything that engages you and with which you enter into relationship.

In order to understand what Rome meant, we have to look at what happened after the audience. By observing ourselves in action, we can find out for ourselves whether this “new criterion” Fr. Giussani described has entered us. I can’t believe that after this morning’s session, each of us hasn’t attempted to answer the question I asked. Each of us now has to compare what he had in mind and what School of Community says.

If someone, like the fellow I described before, had participated in the Rome event, and then for the following two weeks had experienced total powerlessness and meaninglessness, he would be totally in contradiction with what School of Community says--that we’ve understood if we recognize that “Christ is the viewpoint that explains everything” (p. 70). How do we know that Christ has become the viewpoint? Fr. Giussani responds, “Human solitude dissolves with the advent of this gift” (p. 71). If I find myself in total solitude and meaningless after having participated in the gesture of Rome, this means that I haven’t understood. This is why scepticism creeps in. I’m not saying it as a reproof, but simply to call us to identify ourselves with this event and help ourselves understand what has happened; we have to ask for the Spirit, like the apostles, because only with the advent of this gift is human solitude dissolved. “Human experience is no longer a lonely, disconsolate powerlessness [thus skeptical] but awareness and vitality” (p. 71).

Therefore, I realize that I’ve understood because this new criterion has been introduced into me, dissolving my solitude, giving me a new vitality. This was so true for the apostles that instead of staying benumbed behind locked doors for fear of everyone, they went out and engaged. So then, if we have understood, we discover it by looking, looking at what has happened, how we were surprised in Rome, because it is a gift (as for the man born blind we spoke of at the Exercises). Each of us has been able to say something about Rome, just as everyone was able to say something about Jesus, that He was an exceptional man, a rebel, or irresistibly persuasive, but they hadn’t understood. You’ve understood if you discover in yourself a new criterion, a new judgment on everything. But mark my words, the judgment isn’t an intellectual question: it’s that I find myself looking, judging, entering into reality with a new light, with a new viewpoint; I get up in the morning, I look at myself, and see I’m invested with something new, that I can’t shake off. The gift of the Spirit is an event, something that invests me so powerfully that I can’t help but teach at school, take the subway or drive to work, and be entirely suffused with that Presence that becomes a new judgment, which is a new criterion.

This is the victory over scepticism: the exceptional fact remains something that invests me, as the viewpoint that explains, that provides meaning, that gives sense to every detail, to every activity. I don’t excogitate a line of reasoning; rather, I discover in myself a new viewpoint that gives sense and meaning to everything.

Now we realize how far we are from having understood. I don’t say so to discourage you, but because we need to get in gear, to identify ourselves with this event, to ask, looking at the fact, at what has happened. If two weeks afterwards scepticism can weevil its way in, it’s because deep down we haven’t understood what happened in Rome, that is, the power of Christ alive, risen, who through His Spirit took us entirely. The Rome encounter was the demonstration of the power of the Spirit. Someone who feels alone after having seen this, this power of the Spirit, hasn’t understood that what was made evident is precisely that we are not alone; he hasn’t changed judgment, and continues to conceive of himself as he did before, alone, continues to look at himself with an old criterion; but it’s false, because there we had a demonstration of the power of One who enables me to say “I’m not alone.” Without the power of the Spirit of Christ alive and risen, that gesture could not have happened. We can say, “I was struck by this, or by that..” by all means, of course, it’s all very fine, but this is only the surface. If we remain on the surface, afterwards we ask ourselves, “How does all this endure?” without having understood the newness that has made itself present. This newness casts out all doubts; all the withdrawing into ourselves is overcome. You see that someone has understood by the fact that all this has been overcome (it’s not a matter of setting out to play the intellectual!).

3. To be at work: identification and entreaty

Fr. Giussani wrote, “The experience of their encounter with Him and the long, fervent, anxious, and uncertain period that they had shared with Him suddenly became another absolutely unforeseen and disconcerting experience: divine reality, the encounter, the sharing of life with God—luminous, sure, and strong” (p. 70). Either this passage happens or it doesn’t. It’s a gift. We all desire to reach this point, but we must be aware that we are on a journey, and not be discouraged.

The disciples were bewildered by His death, and even after His resurrection stayed closed behind locked doors. But what did they do? They prayed, asked. We too, like the disciples, can ask to understand ever more deeply the import of what we have seen, to begin to recognize the meaning to the exceptional gesture in which we participated, as a point of no return and as a test of what the School of Community says about the gift of the Spirit.

We can all help each other to understand. How?

With identification and with prayer, asking. It’s not a prayer that justifies laziness; it’s one of active looking, a looking that becomes prayer, asking. In looking, the prayer to understand ever more deeply arises, asking that in time the import of what we’ve experienced will be revealed.

Remember in Saint Peter’s Square when I talked about begging? I said that it was necessary to become aware of oneself and use reason even in that moment. The power of the Spirit is what moves us, what is able to move all the resources of my ‘I’ so that I can understand. In fact, the one who has to understand is me, not someone else. Otherwise, everything always happens outside of me, and ultimately doesn’t concern me, doesn’t interfere with me—to the point of making me understand—and therefore I become skeptical. What is the instrument for my capacity to understand? Reason, that opens wide to let in something absolutely new, a new criterion. And this is a work.

Why doesn’t what happened to us seize hold of our heart? Because the heart remains far, and, deep down, untouched, not “guaranteed” (as expressed in Fr. Giussani’s text on Lent, “God is Mercy,” published in the Page One of the March Traces, page 2). A person told me that after travelling by bus to Rome, when she finally sat down in Saint Peter’s Square, she thought, “Enough! We have done it.” She believed that she had already done everything. When she heard that “the true protagonist is the beggar,” she felt it like the recoil of a rifle. “So I realized that I hadn’t done the most important thing.” We can participate in a gesture, do everything, and yet remain immobile: if I’m not present with all of myself, I can have done everything, but it’s as if the center of my ‘I’ hadn’t moved. This is called “rationalism.” It’s very widespread, even among us, and it’s the core question. This is why when the Pope invites listeners to “broaden reason,” he’s saying something that concerns us above all. We can do everything without asking for anything, because we don’t feel needy: we belong to an organization, but our ‘I’ isn’t needy.

We can’t continue talking as if we’re experts on the Movement. Something has to happen that documents that we’ve understood. What saves us from constantly backsliding into repeating words, what puts us up against the wall, is the verification of what happened in Rome. In this sense, Fr. Giussani is an absolutely exceptional help. He tells us, “My dear, you can say you understand when a new criterion has been introduced into your life. It’s like when we fall in love. We find ourselves using our free time, money, and everything differently, because something new has been introduced, something that either is there or it isn’t. This is the sign that we’ve understood. On the contrary, “’unless you possessed the Spirit of God you would not belong to Him,’(1 Cor 2:11), that is, you would be a stranger to Him, incapable of capturing His intimate makeup, His secret nature, of becoming familiar with His mystery” (p. 69-70).

This is why the gesture of Rome is clarified and illuminated by the School of Community on the gift of the Spirit. Just think what wonderful company Fr. Giussani is for us! If we are attentive to what happens, we come to see what grace was given us in Rome: Fr. Giussani’s charism endures and continues through the tests and points of reference. The test of this enduring charism is in the Pope’s words: what wounded Fr. Giussani has also wounded his spiritual children, that is, us.

If we would only realize! This is the most shocking thing, because this is the concrete way Christ is companion to our powerlessness. Therefore, as I reminded you earlier, “Human solitude dissolves with the advent of this gift. Human experience is no longer a lonely, disconsolate powerlessness.” Much more. “Existence becomes an immense certainty” (p. 71) precisely because in Rome an Other made Himself present in a spectacular way, a Presence at work among us, without which that gesture wouldn’t have happened, couldn’t be explained. In fact, it can’t be explained merely by CL’s renowned organizational capabilities. Just think of each of you, each with his own story, think of how all of you were bowled over by a fact that struck you, that isn’t mechanical. A Presence at work: this became a shining evidence. “Our strength is an Other. Our certainty is an Other.” For this reason, “human existence is an inexhaustible, supremely powerful friendship” (p. 72).

This is the beginning, only the beginning--like the tip of the iceberg--of what we’re beginning to start to understand about what we’ve seen. Already, just beginning to glimpse it truly introduces a new criterion. The more we understand it, the more we’ll become certain, and thus luminous, sure and strong. This is the road we have before us, friends.