Dear Friends,
Merry Christmas and Greetings from Rome, from the House of Formation for the Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo. I took the liberty of translating the homily given by don Massimo Camisasca, who is the founder of the community. The italian text is available on the fraternity's website at www.sancarlo.org
JR
Dearest brothers and sisters, dearest friends
Customary on the Feast of St. Charles Borromeo, it is other priests of the Fraternity that speak and give the homily during the Mass. Today gives me the occasion to speak, and I am very pleased to have this particular opportunity. My thought principally is directed to don Luigi Giussani, through whom we, the Fraternity of St. Charles, were born, by his dedication and his understanding of Christianity. Let us ask God through the intercession of Giussani for an ever deepened understanding of the charism bestowed upon him, of the gift he received, the gift given by God for the life of the Church that it may never be exhausted by our understanding and experience. This is the grandeur of the work born through the son’s (children) of God: it is properly called so because it is not the work of a man, but the work of God, His works are inexhaustible. And therefore I also have searched and asked myself about the meaning and sense of this Fraternity. Even it is also a work of God, as the Church has so recognized, and therefore, for good measure, it is not my own personal work. If it was my own, it would be the work of one man. Being the work of God, it is a work which God simply chose to compute through me. Even I must place myself at the school of this Fraternity. And ask myself what is its significance for me. I want to give this question four responses, the responses which were born from my experience during these last twenty three years of life, from when the Fraternity was born.
1. The first response that comes to mind when thinking about the Fraternity and above all the experience of these years – I even wrote it down –is that it was willed by God for my personal healing. Jesus said very clearly: “I have come for the sick” (Mc. 2:17). And we will be and are saved only in the measure by which we recognize we are sick, and in need of healing. He has come for this reason. And if he has willed the Fraternity to exist it is principally for this reason, for my healing. He has healed me, and continues to heal me every day, from the temptations of jealousy, envy, division, allusion and fear. This is the primary sense of every community within the Church, and is the meaning of the Church herself: to heal our sick and broken humanity, and in this, also our spirit. Only by dedicating myself to the healing of others, can I myself be healed. I say this not only for myself and not only for my brothers, but also for everyone of you. The logic and nature of human existence is built in this way that only in giving of ourselves that we receive ourselves, only by giving and emptying oneself that we learn and enter into this very logic (Lk. 1:48-52). Whoever loses his life will find it (MT. 16:45). Only by emptying myself to heal others, am I myself healed. And what could be greater for a man than to participate in the work by which God every day brings about this healing of man through the sacraments of Baptism, Confession and Eucharist? This is the path by which He continues to draw to himself our minds, our hearts, our lives and, as Mary said about herself, He has lifted and exalted the lowly from their miseries and given them new life. “There is greater joy in giving than receiving (At. 20:35). All the words and phrases spoken by Jesus this one best summarizes in a profound way the affections of his soul, which are also our very own affections. This experience of healing is important since it enables us to understand that no one is excluded from the gift of God, there is neither distance, neither alieness, neither lowliness by which man can keep refuge and hide in himself that God cannot come and penetrate his heart. God is always willing to enter our darkness to bring the light of his love and friendship.
2. The second response: in this Fraternity I have learned that friendship is the vertex of charity. Particularly, I have learned that friendship is possible. When people come and say to me: is friendship truly possible? How many times people have told me “I searched for friends, and did not find any”. Or “after having found friends, I thought they would be friends for ever, however they betrayed me, and left me, abandoned me!”. And thus the experience of friendship, that ought and should be the experience of God, becomes the experience of distance from God, for the incapacity to forgive the betrayer e the rejecter. And, however, I am here to say that friendship is possible. As well, friendship is a gift that God does not keep away from man, if we ask him for friendship and dispose our hearts to welcome the signs of friendship in our lives and those to whom we share our lives with. Certainly, for friendship to live there is need of purification. And the path for the Fraternity has been the path of purification. Friendship needs, for it to live, that we purify ourselves of all temptation of possession, of superiority over the other, of the instrumentalization of the other. And this purification is never complete. In this sense, friendship is the vertex of charity and also the school of charity. Here I have learned this. And I have learned that we cannot really become friends, if we do not collaborate together in the work of God. Friendship lives, in the life of man, as collaboration. It is never enough to feel like you are friends. Or to do some things together. Certainly, the awareness of the reason for which we work together, and the scope for which we work, common work together is the path that nourishes friendship.
3. The third experience. I asked myself what does it mean being missionary. What must I do to be a missionary, where must I do? What is there that is extraordinary in whom it is right to call a “missionary”? I think that a missionary does not have to do anything extraordinary in itself to be rightly called a missionary, one does not have to go to any particular place, if not it is where one is sent. One can be a missionary very close to home or at the extreme ends of the world. That which is important is that our action follows the action of the Holy Spirit in us. Thus one is a true missionary. God works and acts continuously in our lives, through the people in which we encounter daily, through the events that happen daily, through the very facts of life. God speaks continuously and moves and stirs in our daily existence. Here is where mission is truly born. Mission is nothing other than living with the others that with which God lives with us (friendship). If we live following the action and work of God in our lives, in our person and in our community, we will surely be missionaries; however if we are first and only concerned with being tireless workers, spiritual activism, we are tragically delusional. To follow the work and action of God amongst men, in other words, we must place ourselves in the great realm of God, that is, concretely meaning to listen to God. And to listen to God, to enter into the logic of his action and work, it is necessary that we do silence. Silence is fundamental. At the beginning it is necessarily absence of words. And in time, when you have grown, silence coincides with the words (Italian does not translate well). But principally that there is within the day moments in which we do silence, in which we say a Hail Mary thinking about the words which we speak, in which we pray the Angelus thinking about the words which we speak, gazing upon the Event made present through these very words. This is silence: gaze and look at that which others have forgotten and no longer see. Therefore, silence renders and enables man capable of listening to god, not because it makes us visionaries, not because we are given apparitions, not because we are given magic spiritual powers. All of this is nothing and has nothing to do with silence! To everyone is given a proper and distinct path by which to enter the realm of God, to enter into the action and work of God: in silence and, above all in the liturgy. The liturgy is the school in which God speaks, in which he transforms, renews, in which he teaches us how we ought to act.
4. Lastly, a fourth teaching that has come to me from the life of this fraternity: I have learned that it is possible to reform our lives, that it is possible to renew life, to become mature and old does not mean to move towards something negative, but contrarily, it signifies moving towards childlikeness or youthfulness. It is possible to walk towards something much greater, a lot truer, more joyful. I think that this Fraternity, and at the same time the Communion and Liberation Movement, are works of God willed for the renewal and reform of the Church. I think of don Giussani as a reformer of the life of the Church. In this fashion, I wrote a book that will be published next February about don Giussani, reformer of the life of the Church, anticipator and actualizer of the reform of the Second Vatican Council.
But the teaching that comes to me most profoundly regarding all of the above is the response to the question: would you like to reform the world? Would you like to reform life? Let yourself be reformed. Reform and renew yourself. Let God give you continually every day new ways for you to live. It would be too easy to refer to the person of St. Charles Borromeo, whose name is a great inspiration for the Fraternity. He was a great reformer, a great liturgist. He was the one who really worked daily for the return to Christ, above all Christ crucified and Eucharistic, the form of Christ’s action. He was one who let himself be completely taken up into the life of Christ , gave and emptied himself completely for the renewal and reform of the Church without any hesitation or holding anything back for his people. And in this way he found his supreme happiness, for which I hope, we too will find our own. Amen.
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