A Dialogue on Faith, Reason and Meaning

Ignacio Carbajosa - Michiel Peeters: welcome, everybody, good evening. A special welcome to Professor Ignacio Carbajosa, our guest tonight!

He is full professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Theology of San Damaso University in Madrid, one of the best schools of theology in the world. And he’s associate professor at the Faculty of Classical and Christian Literature of the same institute. He is an expert in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, ancient versions of the Bible, hermeneutics, wisdom literature and prophetic literature.

And when we have the possibility here to speak with a person from the world of science, we are happy to grasp the occasion. But Fr Ignacio is also a friend who is being grasped by the same story that I’ve been grasped by, and several of you, a story that started with an Italian priest in the 50s, Fr Luigi Giussani, who discovered Christ as the great companion of the I, of the self.

And his enthusiasm gave birth to a movement that is now in many countries and that has somehow also reached us, reached this place. Fr Ignacio is also Nacho, how do you pronounce it in Spanish? Ignacho?

Fr Ignacio Carbajosa: Ignacio!

Michiel Peeters: Is in fact also Nacho. Those who were at the spiritual exercises in February remember the testimony Lucía gave. And the Nacho she was constantly talking about is this priest who is sitting now among us.

We are very happy that you are here.

He came to Holland for a congress in Leiden of a theological review of which is a board member. He accepted to come all the way to Tilburg, to the South, to meet us.

We have asked him some questions and asked him also to speak about himself, about what interests him in life, what helps him to live. I will start with one question that we, in the School of community here, formulated—among other questions—and then I give the word to Nacho. Afterwards there will also be the occasion for a dialogue, for questions.

In the current School of community (which is the systematic work of verifying the reasonableness of the faith) we are speaking about the ultimate questions and precisely what happens when these ultimate questions are suppressed or substituted [chapters 6 and 7 of Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense].

We all have questions and we all have ultimate questions, which are disproportional to what we have, to what we can make ourselves. They are structural, they are in the form of a desire or sadness, a lacking something. And what happens a lot is that we try not to feel them or even to theoretically deny their sense: to state that they have no direction, no sense. This happens a lot maybe also because even Christians are not so sure that those questions have sense, put us in the right direction, are the existential track of the free relationship with the infinite that is our “formula” as human beings. Maybe we believe it, but we have little experience of it, I don’t know.

We mistrust those questions, therefore we suppress and substitute them; and then happens what Fr Giussani very acutely describes and students always recognize when we speak about it: if you suppress your sadness, you don’t obtain joy or happiness, you obtain despair.

Some say, why insisting on the questions when we have the answer?

So our question to Nacho is: can you deepen this point of the questions being the existential track of the free relationship with the infinite, which is, says Giussani, the formula of man. He quotes Dostoevsky saying: the bee has the formula of his beehive, the ant has the formula of his ant house, but man doesn’t have his own formula, isn’t aware of his own formula, because the formula of man is to be a free relationship with the infinite.

Some years ago in the movement we spoke about the infallibility of the heart, using this expression.

Can you say something about this, both from experience and from theology? Well, these are already a group of questions, so let’s give the floor to Nacho. 

Ignacio Carbajosa: Well, thank you very much, Michiel, for this opportunity to come here, this invitation.

It gives me the opportunity to talk about my journey in life, my journey, my road to faith, that has to do a lot with all this reduction of the question, especially do with the objections to faith. So, what we are talking about in these chapters of the School of Community are not just cultural questions or cultural problems in our modern world. It has to do… I mean, I’ve been one hour ago at dinner with Michiel at the...

Michiel Peeters: Esplanade.

Ignacio Carbajosa: Esplanade. Yeah. Esplanade. The restaurant is called Esplanade. It’s a Spanish word!

I mean, when you are walking on this campus, like on other campuses, you can breathe the objections against faith! You can breathe them in the sense, not as heavy objections that they persecute you with, but just in the sense: you say that you are a Christian, you think that God is something real… keep calm, keep calm, come drink a beer with me, keep calm, don’t go ahead with all these questions! Those are absolutely normal objections against what we are living inside this kind of society.

So, I would like to talk about how I reached my road to faith, how I reached faith inside a society like the Spanish one, that has nothing to do with Catholicism like one century ago, not at all. Because every one of us has been growing in a society, in a family, so our approach to faith, to the religious sense, has to face this entire perception of reality that you have received from the very beginning of your education, of your life. So, I want to talk about how this has been for me, because it has been decisive for my road to faith.

When I was 16-years-old, I had a lot of questions. It was a very dramatic period in my life, between my being 16 and 18-years-old. I had a lot of questions about life, especially about suffering, the meaning of suffering, the meaning of death. And I felt the need of a sense, a significance, a sense in my life. Especially I needed God to exist. I wanted God to be a real thing! This belonged to a need of my heart, of my being in reality.

But for me God was not reasonable, and that was very, very hard.

So, why was it not reasonable?

At the same time—I don’t know if you can understand it—at the same time I experienced this need, absolutely: “I need You to be real, to exist.” Because otherwise, what about death? What is suffering? What is the meaning of life? So, I need You to be real, but at the same time, because of my cultural background, God… I know very well what is real. For example, this here is a glass of water. But God is just a word, it has nothing real. This because of my education in school and also in my family, where God was not a real thing. My family was a Christian family, but God was not a factor in it.

When you are a child you know very, very well what is real at home. For example, on Tuesday evening and Wednesday evening, there is the Champions League. This is a real thing, and you know that your father or your mother is over there, and you cannot disturb them, because it’s a real thing.

A real thing is that you are not allowed to say bad words. But in my family—but also in society or at school—Godwas not a real thing, was not reasonable. Especially because you cannot touch it.

So those two years were very dramatic for my life. They were the beginning of a search for certainty, for meaning in my life.

When I was 18, I encountered people of the CL movement in my city.

For me, this was not the end, but the beginning of a lot of things. Let me try to explain myself. For me, to encounter those people was to encounter something that was really, really real: because of the correspondence with my heart. For the first time in my life (because I thought that my questions… I thought I was the only one in the world with such strange questions, that I was weird. I thought I was weird, like every one of you, I mean! Because of all these questions…), for the first time I met people that were looking to my questions, to all my needs, to my desire, with a point of sympathy, or just like saying, “How beautiful is your humanity!” For the first time I began to look in another way to all these questions that are pointing to God (as desire).

I mean, the only thing I want to say on this moment of my life is that I met, I encountered a real thing, a wonderful real thing in front of my eyes, with a beauty, the beauty of relationships, a wonderful world of relationships, with a capacity of judgment on everything in the world (about politics, but also about what is happening to the structure of my heart, about history, and a lot of other things).

For the first time, I encountered something that made look faith as something reasonable.

But it was the starting point of a journey in my life, because what I didn’t realize at that time is that I had encountered a real thing, real people, wonderful people (I wanted to live there all my life, didn’t want to go away from these people, from all these people!), but my cultural background was still there. I didn’t realize it at the beginning. But later I began to realize that I had still there, facing and challenging also my faith, three objections, three modern objections to my life. Only years later, when I was already a priest, I began to understand that my objections were modern objections that have a name. But I’m just talking about my objections, as they were for me at that time.

The first of those objections was when I was facing this beauty—for example, the beautiful way of singing together, the beauty of relationships, the capacity to understand my heart, or when you are listening to someone and you say, “Oh my God, it is this, finally, finally, this correspondence (that wonderful word of Fr Giussani’s)—and in that moment I felt the need to fall on my knees to say, “thank you,” in that very moment—of that natural movement in me, to say “thank you”—I find myself saying: wait a minute, to whom am I saying thank you? Whom I am addressing?

It was really, really real what I had in front of me. This person, that person, that way to judge everything… But do all those things that I have in front of me have to do with divinity, with God?

I just want to fix this example because it’s the best point to understand my problem. In front of the beauty, in front of this wonderful thing, I needed to kneel down and to say, “thank you,” and to say, “You.” But in that very moment, for me, it was not something real.

Real is you that are in front of me!

But to arrive to say, “You, God,” for me was not easy, not normal, it seemed wrong.

Nevertheless, nevertheless, I had the Church in front of my eyes. I had, I can say, Christ—Christ in the sense that… I mean, it’s important for all of us to understand what we read in the gospels: in the gospel, we see a normal person, who was not God, in the sense… I mean, He was God—excuse me, I’m a priest! Do not say it to my rector!—but for Peter, John, and Andrew, He was a normal person. He was incredible! But to say that this one was God… in the beginning, it was… So that’s what I had in front of my eyes.

And because of all this beauty that had been introduced into my life, I decided to go to the seminary. After five years of university (I studied economics), I entered the seminary.

I had already studied for five years, I have to say five wonderful years in university. I used to say that university is the market of ideas or ideology. You find everything, every kind of ideology in the university. For me it was a wonderful period with my Christian friends, friends of Communion and Liberation, facing all this ideology and putting in the very heart of the university our experience and encountering, meeting people. And that was all very important also for my faith.

So I enter the seminary after having studied for five years, five wonderful years. But every time it came back, this kind of… at that time I used to call it a kind of doubts about my faith. This difficulty to say, “You.” I used to say that I had no faith, that I doubted.

Why me? Why did this happen to me? I didn’t understand the fact that a companion at my right hand could kneel down and say, “God,” without any problem, and at my left the same thing. Why I had this kind of problem? Why is it not normal for me? Why is it not natural for me to say, “God”? Every time, every now and then this kind of problem came back.

When I finished my seminary, we used to go to a Parish for one year. At the end of that period, we become a deacon and then a priest. But you understand, after these five years, having in mind this horizon, the fact that I was becoming a deacon and then a priest… I mean, I cannot become a priest with this kind of doubts! So I decided to go to talk with Fr Carrón, a Spanish priest that was one of my teachers at the Madrid seminary. Just to share this thing, just to try to understand.

So I had begun to talk with him one year or two years before. I trusted him, I needed a hand to understand. I remember very well, I went to his office in the seminary. I tried (because at that time, I think I didn’t understand very well what was happening to me) to explain my problem. And I remember that for a while, he was just listening to me. At the end of my speech, after I had been trying to explain something I didn’t understand, he just said to me: “OK, you’re right. OK, you have that problem. But in this very moment, you are not making yourself right now. Someone is making you right now. In this very moment, someone is making you. And you have to face this fact.”

Well, in that moment, I thought: “But what about my problem? It’s a wonderful sentence, for sure…” But after this meeting with Fr Carrón—because I had a problem, and I trusted Fr Carrón—I decided to verify what he had told me. So every time that uneasiness came to me, I came back to the words of Fr Carrón. And that was an incredible moment. I remember those months after this conversation with Fr Carrón, that I began to realize… I used to say: I am a very reasonable person. That’s why God for me was not a real thing. But Fr Carrón was challenging me on a real thing, on the fact that I am alive.

I’m not the one that this morning has put me into being. So I am made. In this moment, someone is making me. And you have (he told me) to face this very fact. It was then that I began to realize something that was real, but that for me, for so many years, was just, how do you say that? Taken for granted. I took it for granted: the fact that I’m living. As if I’m the one who is from the beginning! Me, myself, from the beginning there! Judging everything, thinking about everything, deciding if God exists or does not exist. Wait a minute, you are not the one who is making yourself right now! Someone is giving you life, breath, and everything! For me, it was not that something added to me by Fr Carrón. It was revealed, in the sense that a veil had been taken down. I began to see, to watch, to contemplate reality! I remember that in that epoch I began to literally touch everything, just to say: this is not virtual, it’s wonderful that I can touch it! You have to do this way. We’re talking about real things. But real things means being. We’re not talking about virtual things, happening in my mind, in my head (which was my way of living life: everything happening here in my head. Nothing to do with reality). It’s amazing. I’m not the one who is letting all reality exist.

I used to say that for me that was the most decisive moment of my life from the cultural point of view. Absolutely. Because it was the moment that God began to be part of reality. Not part of reality. The reality. He was a real factor. The most real factor in our life.

And that consciousness happened because I had encountered Christ in a fact. Finally, in front of this beauty, I could fall on my knees and say, “thank you.” “Thank you,” to the one who is making me right now.

That’s what I want to stress. That all these reductions of the questions and all the objections against our faith are not something we need to study, you know: “We are Christians and they over there are the world. And we should study the history, the reduction of Christianity in history, the objections, the heresies and so on…” No, no, we are talking about my, our cultural background. And facing all these objections has been for me the way to grow in certainty.

And that’s wonderful. So it’s not that after this episode, finally I did not have that problem anymore, that I was free from this problem. No, no. That was the way to understand better myself and to grow in certainty regarding Christ. That was my way.

When I was 16, 18 years old I used to say I’m an—how do you say it?—unfortunate person, disgraced person.

Michiel Peeters: Unlucky.

Ignacio Carbajosa: An unlucky person. The most unlucky person in the world because of all these problems, of these strange questions, those difficulties. Instead, right now, after this episode, I began to realize, how lucky I am!

Because this path, this road to faith, I have suffered it a lot. Those two, three years, but also afterwards, when I was in the seminary. But I’m so lucky because of this path. I’m lucky because now I can understand the world. I can understand everybody, every student that is crossing the street. Because I’m the same as them. I have the same background.

And now I have a certainty that I did not have in the beginning.

This was the first objection. In our culture it is called (something I understood after doing my studies) “positivism” (that does not mean that I’m a positive person! Positivism comes from Latin positum, and means that only the material things are positum, i.e., placed there. They are all, they are the real things. God is not a real thing, it’s just a word, just a desire. Positivism says: reality is only what you can touch, what you can see. You have not to think of other things. Reality has no direction either. This is positivism. It’s a terrible reduction).

The second objection was about my desire, my needs. After a while, after years and years, I realized how terribly influenced I was by it, by my teachers, by the philosophers of the past, especially Feuerbach. We call it the objection of Feuerbach.

I was an adolescent, and you know very well how it goes because you belong to that generation yourselves. When I was 16, 17, 18, I had a lot of desires. Especially this longing for someone. In so many senses. An otherness in the shape of a woman. But also an Otherness with a capital O. The longing for a divine presence. The desire for eternity. The desire for a life after death, eternity.

But from my studies, I mean at school, when I was 15, 16, I learned that all those desires, all this longing too, is just something that perhaps has to do with evolution, but it has no reference, no object, no direction. What is religion? Don’t worry, we have Feuerbach who says to us: well, religion, as everybody knows, is just a projection of our desires.

This was terrible for an adolescent like me: because when you have a stomach ache, or another pain, you go to the doctor; for a pain is a symptom, because something is not working. But now, instead, I have all these symptoms, this pain, and my doctor (that’s Feuerbach, my teacher) says: that pain is not the symptom of anything. We don’t know why we have this desire. But God is just a word. Religion is just a projection. Your pain has no object.

And only now, only now, looking back to all those theories, I think they are terrible, terribly unreasonable. But it was very, very terrible for young people like me to say to them that all that they were going through, that belonged to my nature, to the nature of all of us, has no object, no direction. Perhaps there is a problem, a fault in nature.

Then we have also psychology or just society with beer and alcohol. We want to make them keep calm. It’s terrible, isn’t it?

So that was another objection. To face that objection, well, the first thing was the encounter with the movement, with the Church, in the sense that the first step was the fact that those wonderful people were (and are) looking to my needs in a positive way. That’s the way you can understand that they are something worth to be seen, to follow, to understand, to understand better.

But how do they work? Here was the objection in me. After the encounter with the Church, with the movement, I thought that my desire, these needs, this longing, this longing for, is a kind of radar, to identify the truth. And it’s true, it’s true. We have this: a desire, a need, a need for justice, for truth, for eternity—f.e., when a beloved person passes away. A longing for eternity. We have all these needs, these desires. And when Christ arrives, these are the radar that permits me to say: this is the truth, the true person, no? And I can say it is, it’s true! But what did I realize after a while, on my path, in my journey of faith, when I was already a priest?

It was again in my relationship with Fr Carrón that I realized… I mean, just to say, I remember very, very well some spiritual exercises with Fr Carrón, it was very funny, because he was… it was a kind of battle or fight between Fr Carrón and all the students, because he was saying: you have a desire, so there is a fulfilment. And we: No, no, no, I have a desire, but I don’t know if there is a fulfilment! Only if I find something, I can say, there is a fulfilment. But he: No, no, you have a desire, that means there is a fulfilment. I remember this battle, this kind of battle, and I began to realize that the very fact, when I wake up in the morning, the very fact that I have an uneasy feeling, or a need, a longing, that very fact of my structure was the place where He was, He, God, calling me to a dialogue.

For me it was very important; it was similar to that first encounter with Fr Carrón. Similar in the sense that it was a kind of revelation of my nature, of my reality, of my structure. To give an example: this is my hand, and I can say to it (it’s fantastic, pay attention!): get down, get up (it’s incredible, incredible!). I can do whatever I want with my body, but I cannot say: dear heart, this morning you are going to be happy. Or: okay, heart, right now a bit of nostalgia. And right now, calm down. Calm down because it’s Monday morning, I need to study, I don’t want to worry about this problem or this girl, and so on. I cannot do it. I cannot do it; therefore I must say (and it’s real!) that my heart does not belong to me. It does not belong to me! That’s why I used to say that the heart is the embassy of Another in me.

You know, an embassy is the place where the police of the country in which it is situated, cannot enter. It belongs to another country. It’s in my country but it belongs to another country. So, my heart is the place of someone, the place where someone is talking to me. It’s in a dialogue. From the very beginning of the morning. From that moment on, I began to realize, especially when I wake up, when I experienced this uneasiness at the beginning of the day… I say “thanks” to God, that he does not permit me, allow me to be just “calm”! He’s asking me: you must ask, you must search My face! Search my face. And your longing, when you discover in yourself nostalgia or sadness, this is longing for Him.

For me, this has been a kind of liberation. Liberation! One of the most important things for which I am grateful to the encounter with Christ and with the Church, with the movement, is this knowledge of all the movements of my heart, of my humanity. And also to understand the sadness, the uneasiness: that is Someone who is (and in this sense, and that’s a wonderful thing, it’s not just a radar to find someone): it’s the presence of Someone in me. It’s not that I have a lot of questions, therefore I need an answer. No, the fact that I have a question is the place where someone is talking to me, is a dialogue.

In fact, I want to quote this wonderful poet, Leopardi, and to quote it in English is not easy. But in a wonderful canto(poem)—it’s called “Dominant Thought,” Pensiero dominante—he says, in Italian: “Come solinga è fatta / La mente mia d’allora / Che tu quivi prendesti a far dimora!” In English it would be: “How lonely my mind has become since you took it as your home.” So from the moment in which you—“you” could be the woman or the “You” of the divinity I am longing for—took my mind as your home, I’m “alone.” What are you talking about? My loneliness is the loneliness of someone who is longing for someone. It’s not the loneliness of someone who needs physically someone. It’s the loneliness of someone who is longing for someone. I’m alone from the very moment that you took my mind as your home. That’s wonderful. I mean, when I, you, are longing for your girlfriend or boyfriend… that’s because your boyfriend is there. Maybe in another country, but he is there. He needs to come.

I will try to finish with the last objection that came to me every time. It has the name of another philosopher: Kant or Lessing, as you want. (I didn’t know that, years ago.)

But after I had encountered the fact of Christ in the faces of that fact—that wonderful fact, capable to judge everything, so beautiful, the friendship, and so on, the capacity to understand all the movements of my heart, and so on—this objection came to me every time: okay, it is wonderful that you say you have encountered God, the solution of the world, of humanity. And that it was an historical fact. Wonderful, an historical fact! And when did it happen? 2,000 years ago, during the Roman Empire. Oh, wonderful! And, excuse me, before the Romans? And 10,000 years ago? And 20,000 years ago? The people who did not meet Christ, what about them?

I mean, I was born in Spain. In Spain there is Christianity. So this is the form of religion. You know, religion is the projection of your heart’s desires. In Spain it’s called Christianity. Here in the Netherlands it was called Christianity, too. In India it is another thing. In Africa, another thing again. So don’t be naive, please.

After a while, during my studies and reflection on this thing, I understood that that was a very important objection for Western culture, too. From Kant and Lessing onwards. They said that Christianity had brought us wonderful things, but obviously Christ, the Christian thought, obviously Christ has nothing to do with God. He is not divine. That cannot be. Are you pretending that an historical fact is the key to a universal problem of reason? I mean, we have a universal question or problem of reason: What is life? Is there anything after life? What is the meaning of life? These are universal questions of reason. And in order to solve them, to answer them, we need just reason! That is the field of everybody, the common field. But to pretend that an historical fact is the key to understand everything! That is inadmissible.

For me, the way to overcome this objection in those years was just to trust in the criterion I have found in myself. The criterion, i.e., my capacity to judge what I have in front of my eyes. First of all, this is very nice from the point of view of philosophy: the category of possibility. Is it possible for Being to incarnate itself in order to enter history? For Being, for God, to enter history? Well, I will say, it is possible. It’s very, very strange. But it is possible.

Then we have an announcement: this has happened. There are people, someone or some people have said it has happened. Then we need to verify that and for me, this was to begin to trust my capacity, the criterion of my heart. To trust my capacity that I am able to find this impossible correspondence with this wonderful fact I have in front of my eyes. And that’s incredible, because we are made to find this correspondence! But usually we don’t find it! To find it, is an incredible thing, I have to say! OK, dear Kant, dear Lessing, I’m lucky, I have found it. This objection does not make me doubt because it’s not a general objection, it is an objection only if you have not encountered what I have encountered, dear Kant, dear Lessing… I cannot follow you because of what I have encountered. You need to come with me to see what I am facing…

I stop here. I just want to stress that for me to face, to study, to pay attention to all these reductions or objections, was not just a cultural lesson... For me this has been the way to grow in certainty, to know Christ better in my life.

Michiel Peeters: Good. I have many questions already, but I will leave the floor to you Kristina.

Question - Where do you stand on the problem of suffering now?

Ignacio Carbajosa: Also for me the problem of suffering has been very, very important in my life. And it still is, today. I teach the Biblical book of Job. I’ve also been the curator of an exhibition about Job at the Rimini Meeting.

The problem of suffering. I will talk just a few minutes about my experience during COVID, during the pandemic. I offered myself as a volunteer, as a chaplain in one of the hospitals in Madrid. I began as a chaplain the same day that we reached the highest point of mortality in Madrid. In Spain, in one day, there were 1,000 deaths. Only Madrid, one third of that number. I was there for six weeks. After a while, I wrote my testimony about what I saw (perhaps some of you have read my book)... Of course, I did not intend to write a book about it. But after a while I realized that I was living a very special experience, that nobody could see what I was seeing, for example because there were no family members allowed in the hospital.

I’m talking about this because after some days—I was a priest, obviously, but—I began to face something that was very, very, very hard for me. Namely: suffering, but a kind of suffering—it’s a paradox—that is like an incapacity to breathe.

And I was facing this thing with people I began to be linked to day after day after day; the suffering, and so many patients dying every day. Suffering and death, again and again—and I was a priest.

But, and that’s the point: perhaps I went again a path of reason about the problem of suffering. First of all, facingsomething, in this case suffering. There is suffering, there is death. So there seems to be no order in life, in the world. There seems to be no providence. There seems to be no God. And I was a priest.

I didn’t say there is no God, but it was something facing, challenging me. Oh my God, all this suffering, all this illness! There is no order… is there any order, any real order, a providence, a God when I’m facing all these things?

The following weeks I began to go a path, also with the patients, facing all these things. I think I went the path, the same path we read in the Bible with Job. That is: to shout this question to God, to throw this question open. Open. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand all things. How it is possible, God?

Surely, in my life, God had become a real thing, a real person. So it was possible to engage in a real battle—as Job did—and a real dialogue: “Why?”

Why? In this sense, there is an example. Perhaps some of you know this example also from Fr Carrón.

He was a teacher in a school with teenagers, 15, 16-years-old. There had been a car incident, a motor or car incident, and one of the students had finished in the hospital. So the others approached Fr Carrón saying: how can God allow this thing? We cannot understand it. And Fr Carrón says to one of them: “Excuse me, let’s try to understand it better. I give you an example. If you—right now—if you are walking back home and on the street there is a person you don’t know, a stranger that gives you a slap in the face. What will you do?” “I will give him a harder one back.” “Okay. Instead, when you arrive home and you ring the bell and your mother opens the door and then gives you a slap, what would you do?” “I will ask her, why?” “Why? What is the difference? In both cases they slap you.” Then the guy said: “The difference is 16 years of living together with her.”

16 years of living together. That’s the point. If we arrive to the suffering with 16 years of living together. If I arrive to the problem—a real problem: the problem of suffering—with years of living together with Christ in the flesh of his Church, with the certainty that I could obtain after some time, then the suffering, this problem of reality, does not come to me as if I were slapped violently and I have to react instinctively… no, it becomes a question, an open question. Why does this happen, in a relationship? For me, this was very important in my dialogue with the patients.

For example I began to realize—and I think from then on—that there on that wall, there is a cross. It’s a normal thing. This is a Parish. There’s a cross. But I began to realize that in all the rooms of that hospital, there was a cross. For us, it’s something normal.

But for someone coming from China, for example (I say, from China, because I have encountered many people from China who do not know anything about Jesus Christ), imagine someone who arrived to Madrid from China in that period of the pandemic, just for a fast trip, and then got ill and was recovered in that hospital. And after seven days, they opened their eyes and saw a beautiful picture of a river and a tree. Well, beautiful for a hospital! And then, next to it, a naked person on a cross. What is that?

For us it’s a bit difficult to realize that what I have on that wall is a historical fact, not a thought, not a hypothesis about the meaning of suffering. No, I’m facing my illness, my suffering, in front of a historical fact that is still living with us.

I remember when I entered in one of the rooms, where there was a woman. I asked her, “How are you today?” “Bad. My faith is going down.” “Why? I’m suffering. I’m suffering, so there is no order.” I’m suffering. And I remember that time that I said to this woman: “You are suffering, so you have to look at Him. You have to look at Him in front of you. He’s also suffering. He didn’t want to suffer. You have to remember the Garden of Gethsemane, when Christ, the man Christ, said to the Father: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to suffer (because of His human nature. If you have a human nature, you cannot want to suffer). I don’t want to suffer. So also for Him, suffering was a problem. A problem in the sense: I don’t understand why it is in this way. I don’t understand. And I don’t want the chalice. Please, let the chalice go away from me. But (that’s a wonderful thing): “not my will but Your will be done, because of my real relationship with my Father, with the Father.”

In the same way it is for me, in my real relationship with Christ; that’s why I can say, like Him: “But I trust in you, your will be done, be it done according to Your word.” In the book of Job you see the same thing. After a while of shouting, crying, there is the revelation of God in the incredible world of nature, just to say: “I’m here.” Like—this is a wonderful image—the baby with his or her mom: I’m suffering, I’m crying, but you are here.

So for me, today, suffering is still a mystery, a problem. It’s still a mystery. And it’s still a mystery that makes me ask God, and also go back to Christ, to the suffering of Christ, and that’s an incredible thing. That’s an incredible thing.

Also, I have the possibility (also that’s an incredible thing)… because of the suffering of Christ (and for this I need the faith, the path in life to the faith), I can offer my own suffering as part of the redemption of Christ. But obviously, this is not something to say as a theory. I need the whole path of the journey of faith in my life to become so close to Christ and so certain in my life, that I can offer my own sufferings as a contribution for the redemption of the world.

Question - I have a question. About the first point, on positivism. Maybe I didn’t understand what helped you to realize that you are wanted, that there is someone else who wants you like this, because you said that you went to Carrón, and the words he said to you, you couldn’t really understand. So what helped you to realize and to be aware that you are wanted?

Ignacio Carbajosa: Well, this gives me the opportunity to return to that episode, and also to say that still today, thinking about that very moment, I have to thank Fr Carrón, because he didn’t say to me those things that perhaps a priest can tell you: “Oh, don’t worry,” or: “I am with you,” or “Perhaps once, in a week or two, we can go to the cinema,” “We have to pray more,” and so on. No, no, he identified my problem. “You have a problem of reason. You are saying that God is not reasonable.” Instead of saying, oh, you have to pray more, or you have to think more, or you have to feel, I don’t know what… he said: dear Nacho, you are really unreasonable, because you think that you are God. You do as if you are creating everything, as if everything was born with you, and you are the one who decides the meaning of life. Dear Nacho, you don’t realize that in this very moment, you are not the one that is making yourself. In this very moment, someone is making you.

And it’s important, your question, because I stressed that in that moment, I didn’t understand the answer, and that may be the same for you.

No, that was an hypothesis, or, better, that was a challenge, saying: Nacho, you are living life as absolutely alone, and this is an abstract perception of yourself and of reality. Reality is there, therefore someone is making reality, so there is being and not not-being, as you say in philosophy.

This is the amazing thing: there is being and not not-being, nothingness—and these are things I used to take for granted. I needed to return to this hypothesis, this new hypothesis, or this challenge to my life, and then to begin a work, to engage in a battle, but it’s true what he’s saying to me. Why is he saying to me this thing, that I’m taking for granted a lot of things? But in this very moment, it’s true… If you have a grave incident, after a while you may say: oh my God, my life was saved, and you begin to see everything like the first day of your life. Or when someone beloved passed away, and you begin to say: oh my God, what is life? Who is the one who is making it right now?

So I stress the fact that I need to face and begin to put at work that challenge; and doing it, I began to realize that the most real thing in my life was the divine, Being, God who is making the things. But I challenge also you to begin to say every moment: but am I alone, am I really alone? I used to say to the students, many times, when someone said, “No, I am alone, I feel alone”: “So you think you are God?” You’re alive. You depend. In this very moment, someone is making you, and you depend on someone.

We need this consciousness and courage—also courage—to face this fact. And the wonderful thing—and I finish—is that Fr Carrón challenged me in the fact and the use of my reason, not escaping from reality with our feelings, with some spiritual things I don’t know. No, no.

Fr Carrón, that is the Church, that is Christ, because it’s the same thing Jesus used to do with the disciples. After 2,000 years, Carrón began to do it with me, challenging me with reason and with reality to realize that the most real thing, the most reasonable thing, is the fact that the things exist, so God is the most real thing. It’s a challenge also for you.

Question - I think if I understood correctly, your second point is that you have a longing and that the dominant culture said basically that it doesn’t point to anything, it’s just there, your longing (I’m not exactly sure how you said it), it doesn’t have any sense, it’s just random, basically it’s accidental. Would you describe this longing as an emotion and is what you say about longing —that it has a sense—also true for other emotions, like anger or joy or liking or whatever, or sadness, do these also point to more?

Ignacio Carbajosa - Absolutely, in the sense, I mean, if you are angry because something has happened that makes you angry, or sad, and so on… I can understand it better with this example: if you are students, perhaps some of you study medicine, they will be paid in the future for how they use their reason; you have to use your reason correctly, if you don’t, you will not be paid or you will go to jail. And when someone has a pain, for example a headache, you need to understand what it is that is not working. Instead, in all that is happening to us in life, in our nature, we change method!

Why do we long? Nobody knows it, nobody faces this fact, we change the method. It’s because of some strange things, perhaps, evolution or so! It does not have any sense!

Why do we long for a “you”? What is this longing for eternity? What is longing for a real companionship in life? What is this longing for, or this sadness? Why is that when I have a wonderful success in life, I reach what I want, from an academical point of view, your exams, or a fantastic car, and then “the” girl, and then “the” house, and then, then, then... it’s never enough! Then you need to go to the psychologist because you have a problem, you have a pathology! We change method, no? Instead, for me, it’s a very simple thing, very simple: someone has put in me (only in us, not in the animals) the tendency to look out for him.

This longing, these questions we have, are the existential track of our free relationship with the infinite (last phrase of chapter 7 of The Religious Sense). I mean that without all those questions, what good would God be for us? The only room left for God would be the ethical, ethics, like in Kant.

Sometimes we think, I just need a girl, I just need food… I just need some well-defined things, and then I have to say thank you to God, because you are giving me the things that I need. No, no, no! The most important needs that I have, have to do with my relationship with God. In the sense that my questions and needs are the track, the path of this relationship.

It’s like when you are in love with a girl: this need of her, this longing for her, is the possibility, the “track” of your relationship with her!

Michiel Peeters: If I may add one thing on this. You have said the questions we have are the “embassy” of something else. It’s a clear image! I have another image. But there is a, let’s say, some sort of premise, some sort of reasonable position that we must assume, that we must choose to assume. If the question would not imply the answer—the fulfilment—it would be the only case in nature, that some striving, some direction, some arrow, molecules that go in a certain direction, birds that fly in a certain direction, rivers that flow in a certain direction… it would be the only case of a direction without a goal, which is senseless. It could be, theoretically, but it would be very unreasonable.

Ignacio Carbajosa: All science and all human acting is founded on proven hypotheses. What you say is a step that is not, let’s say, demonstrable by logic, but by experience, it’s an existential thing. When things have a direction, the thing they point to, exists.

I have to add that, obviously, for me this was not a philosophical, logical path. It was the result of my historical encounter with Christ: he was the one who opened, like with the disciples of Emmaus, my reason to understand the most logical things in the world. But it was the historical fact of Christ that opened my mind (he opened it! He did not “add” anything; he did not “add” all the things that the “heathens,” those “bad people over there,” cannot see), he opened my reason to better understand the most simple things of the world.

The other image I love to use is that my heart, my questions, my longing, is like a wedding ring. It’s my wedding ring. I love this image. It’s like a wedding ring, because it speaks to me about him, her, the “other”, if you want.

So this uneasiness, this longing, these are things that you need to recognize. Sometimes they kind of scandalize us, but no, no, they are wonderful. Perhaps we can quote Psalm 63, that we pray in the liturgy on Sundays:

“O God, you are my God,

I will earnestly seek you,

my soul thirsts for you,

my flesh longs for you

in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”

I find it amazing that the Church has us pray this Psalm on Sundays and on all Solemnities (like Christmas and Easter). On the most important days, when you would say: I’m fulfilled, finally I found Christ born and Christ risen and so on… in those very moments the Church, instead of saying: “Finally we are happy, we are fulfilled”, says, “O God, you are my God, I will earnestly seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you in a dry and weary land when there is no water.” It’s like in the relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend: when you encounter him or her, it’s not that everything is fulfilled. The day after, I long for her more and more and more. Your presence makes me long for you more and more. It’s your presence, your real presence that makes me long. My longing is my wedding ring.

Michiel Peeters: What really struck me is that you say (and this is very interesting for our circumstance and for our time) that these questions, these objections that were in you, in the encounter were not resolved into nothingness, but in time, became bigger, became more present. And then you surprisingly felt free to put them on the table, which is also, I think, a sign of a really great encounter: that we can ask our questions. But that was not the end, if I understand well what you are saying.

Then you were offered some hypothesis, let’s say, for a verification. And certainty is the fruit of this, of all this work, of permitting what is happening in us, the questions that arise, the objections that arrive, permitting them to be freed up in an encounter, because it’s not always that our questions are liberated to be put on the table. When I am free to ask them, it’s a very interesting sign.

My growth begins then. So, it’s an encouragement at least for me to see that we can take seriously everything. All parts of our experience that the one who makes us makes us live, are important.

And it is really great to have a place where we can, where these are seen not as a limit, not as an objection, not as a need to pray more, but as part of a road, as a possibility for a road. And when we see that this works, that the certainty grows when the circumstances are grasped as an occasion for verification, then life becomes really interesting. Then the fear becomes less and the enthusiasm to be human, to be alive in this time and this circumstance, can really grow.

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This is the unedited, exclusive first-time publication of a dialogue with Professor Ignacio Carbajosa and college students at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Download. Italian. Spanish. German.