All Saints: Surrending Longing Hearts

Simone Riva - Holiness is the only word that preserves the mystery in its original reality, in its reality as the origin of everything, and in its truth as the vitality of that origin: "Come" is the desire for holiness, it is the expectation and the demand for holiness. Of holiness, because holiness is God. But holiness is God as mystery, it is the link that makes the mystery of God more sensitive, more visible, in the face of everything, every moment that opens itself to us. 

Holiness: "Come, because I miss you. I miss you: I miss you and I miss you. Holiness is such precisely because it is mystery. It is the mystery of God that is expressed in the word 'holiness', that is rejected: in every moment it is considerable. Holiness means abandonment to a presence that surpasses us in every way, and that is not even limited to the possibilities that the mystery gives us to respond to the requests that it leads us to make" (Notes of a conversation between Luigi Giussani and a group of Memores Domini. Milan, April 21, 2002).

There is no more curious attempt to describe holiness than the one made by Fr. Giussani in 2002, who, God willing, will also become a saint. If we could only relive, in a kind of Jumanji, the vicissitudes of the saints that the Church celebrates today, we would be astonished to see how they ask, plead, and insistently beg for the presence of Christ. The most intense activity of these men and women, old and children, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, sharp and simple... was precisely the demand that made them children and saints.

"Come, for I miss you" is Don Giussani's brilliant synthesis of their question. Nothing prevents it from becoming our question as well. Distracted as we are by the realization of our projects, by convincing others of our positions, by not leaving the stage of our improvisations, by laboriously repeating the right speeches, we need this fiery and true question to break through: "Come, why do I miss you? I miss you and miss you." When have we ever been taught to experience holiness, the flourishing of life, as a cry of lack?

Yet the Gospel is full of facts documenting how Christ, by his presence alone, can awaken our whole self in its most primordial needs, starting precisely from what the body and the heart lack. Friend and companion of our humanity, he never separates himself from what truly constitutes us and constantly surprises the most secret meanderings of history, as St. Teresa of the Cross wrote: "In the darkest night, the greatest prophets and saints arise. But the life-giving current of the mystical life remains invisible. Surely, the decisive events of world history were influenced by souls about whom nothing is said in the history books. 

And to which souls we owe the decisive events of our personal lives, we will know only on the day when all that is hidden will be revealed" (Hidden Life and Epiphany, GW XI, 145). In this invisibility, there is room for all the details of our life, which remains the great opportunity we have to ask, to cry out: "Come, for I miss you."
The author has not revised the translation.

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