Discovering Hope
Julián Carrón - Each person must look at what makes him truly himself. And he cannot understand it in the abstract, but only by measuring himself against the provocations of life. It is at that moment, in front of a certain bottleneck, that each one tests the path he has taken.
Therefore, the impact with reality is essential. As Fr. Giussani said, an individual who has been spared the effort of living will experience less of the vibration of his reason, his creativity, his ability to understand [ ["An individual who has experienced little impact with reality, because, for example, he has had very little effort to make, will have little sense of his conscience, will perceive less of the energy and vibration of his reason"; L. Giussani, The Religious Sense]
On the other hand, those who have been prompted in so many ways will be better able to grasp themselves and what helps them live. Discovering the “point of support” is a human, very human journey. And it implies an awareness, an understanding of what is happening to us.
Those who, for example, have made a journey in the midst of the difficulties of these months, when they returned to work, to their usual relationships with others, will have surprised, in their way of being in the real, a newness: experiencing an awe for the existence of reality and for the relationship with others that they didn’t have before, a different way of experiencing work. Those who did not — those who didn’t treasure what happened to them — returned to the old grind after a short time.
One doctor, who had been amazed to have seen so many colleagues unreservedly involve themselves in the hospital during the most dramatic moments, told me, “I was stunned because, after only a few weeks after the end of the emergency, we hardly said goodbye.” How is it possible for such an intense experience to leave no trace?
It depends on the path one has taken, on the matured consciousness of what happened to him. If he has not treasured what he has experienced, after the emergency has passed, he comes back again without having learned anything, without having discovered something that will serve to face the future. It is as if life goes by without making us grow as people, without increasing our consistency, our self-awareness.
This is why I think Eliot’s sentence is perfect: “Where is the Life we have lost by living?” (T.S. Eliot, The Choruses from “The Rock,”). We can either lose Life by living or gain it. We do not gain it because we spare ourselves the relationship with reality, and we do not lose it because reality tests us. We gain it when we accept the provocation of circumstance — whatever it may be — and are protagonists in every situation.
Question. What allows us to be protagonists in this situation?
Carrón. Here appears the big question, which each person — I repeat — must intercept on his or her own. I often used to give this example to my students, to show them where hope comes from. Imagine that you have a loved one, a really loved one, suffering from a disease to which no answer has yet been found. If one day, while watching television or reading the newspaper by chance, you learn that somewhere in the world a person who had that same disease is cured, even though the person you love is still sick and has not yet received medicine, you face the future differently; you look at it differently. Hope begins to manifest when something happens in the present that makes it possible to look at the future differently.
But this, beyond the example that my students’ questions elicited from me, is what we see happening constantly. In The Radiance in Your Eyes (J. Carrón, The Radiance in Your Eyes.), I reported the letter of a person who, at fifty, no longer expected anything new from life.
One day, in his children’s school, he met a parent like himself whose eyes were bright, and he saw life with an intensity he didn’t see in himself anymore. He started to hang out with him, watching him, and watching how he lived, until that eye became his own. Hope arises when we see something happen in the present that opens the gaze wide. We thought the game was closed, that there was nothing more to look forward to, and instead everything starts again.
Right there, not elsewhere, not after, not before, not in our imagination, but there, in the situation we live, something happens that revives hope, that opens the future of life to something different. This is why Fr. Giussani said in a succinct phrase, “Hope is a certainty in the future based on a present reality” (L. Giussani, text from Communion and Liberation’s 1996 Easter Leaflet).
Nothing may change immediately, but the important thing is to see people facing a situation similar to ours with a newness: “If what they experience becomes mine, I too will be able to look at and face adversity, the difficulties of living, with a hope in my eyes.”
Question. But is the presence you speak of any presence or a particular presence?
Carrón. It is not just any presence. Because not every presence is able to ground hope, to make us stand tall in the face of all the challenges of reality. When the trial is most powerful — think of illness or the last resort, death, or the everyday “that cuts the legs off” (C. Pavese, Dialogues with Leucò), which is sometimes the most exhausting aspect of living — the question is: what kind of event must have happened to us, what presence must have entered our lives, so that we can face that trial with hope?
Each person must ask himself, “But have I encountered such a presence?” The disciples had met a person—Jesus of Nazareth — who helped them when they were in normal life or during a blizzard. This person not only told them good things, but also helped them face everything, even the blizzard, in a different, real and more human way. They saw how Jesus was facing sickness, death, difficulties, contradictions.
They saw Him end badly and put Him in the tomb. But then they saw Him alive, resurrected. Those who had that Presence in their gaze couldn’t fail to say — like St. Paul—“Neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither present nor future, neither powers, neither heights nor depths, nor any other creature will ever be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:38-39).
I used to say to my students — from whom I learned so much, because they were a constant stimulus to make sense of things—“But do you think your mom loves you?” “Of course.” “Are you sure?” “Very sure.” “Then, if you are so sure, can you think that there is any time, because of something that happens in life, when your mom might stop loving you?” “No, absolutely not!” they would say. Why? Where was that certainty about the future based? On a present, on a present experience. Because of their experience of living with her, they could not even imagine that her love for them could fail.
The simplicity of the experience of this relationship, which is anyone’s, is identical to what the disciples experienced with that exceptional presence. With one difference: mother cannot deliver me from death or illness; she can only accompany me, while the disciples encountered a Presence that introduced into history a hope that, St. Paul says, does not disappoint. Indeed, this is St. Paul’s formula: “A hope that does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5), in whatever situation one comes across. This says, then, that the problem of our hope is our faith.
Do we have, with respect to the presence of Christ encountered, the same assurance that a child has in the presence of his mother? Do we have, of His presence, a certainty so human, so true, so rooted in the bowels of ourselves, that in His company we can look forward to whatever happens to us? That is, do we have the certainty that, come what may, no one can detach us from this Presence?
If there is not a Presence that loves me so much that, whatever I do, whatever happens, I can look forward to the future with indestructible positivity because of the certainty of that Presence—because of the experience lived in relationship with it—in the end hope is reduced to an empty word. We can spin it any way we want, but if there is no historical Presence of a Man who, from dead, is risen (therefore truly present, contemporary with our lives), hope will always have an expiration date. Christ, God made man, dead and risen, present here and now in a human reality, is the origin of our hope.
And Christ is encountered by Him today. As happened to our friend Mikel Azurmendi—he testified to us in the video we saw two days ago—he intercepted Him in flesh-and-blood people, first by listening to a certain journalist on the radio while he was in serious condition in the hospital, noticing a diversity in his way of talking about events, and then finding another who looked at him in an incomparably human way, and then another and another, and noting that all these people had a way of being in the real that was so human that it attracted him, filled him with admiration, and challenged him to the core (cf. M. Azurmendi, The Embrace. Toward a Culture of Encounter, Bur, Milan 2020).
At a certain moment he realized that everyone was generated by the same encounter, recognized the same Presence. Thus he discovered that Christ—the Presence of which we Christians speak—is real, is risen, that is, He continues to be present in history through the human diversity he had encountered.
Christ moved someone like him, who had lost his relationship with faith for fifty or sixty years, enabling him to rediscover life in all its intensity. Seeing these things, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that the same story that began two thousand years ago continues to happen in the present.
Question. So the ability to stay within and in the face of any situation is proof that one has a hope that does not disappoint. By experiencing confrontation with circumstances, even difficult ones, is this hope strengthened, confirmed?
Carrón. Absolutely! Because the more one is faced with difficulties, the more one tests—that is, verifies—the consistency of this hope. Someone might say, “These are abstract matters.” No. Why not? Because—first issue—what Mikel Azurmendi or the friend who, at fifty, thought he could expect nothing but for life to slip away are flesh-and-blood people, encountered in the world, within life, who challenge our skepticism, our measure, our resignation.
It is only something real, something present, that can restore hope, not an idea, an abstraction. We don’t need all that. We have seen this in the face of fear over the Coronavirus, as in the face of other situations. We need a fleshly, historical reality, which we are amazed is there, to revive hope. These are presences in which we see embodied an adequate meaning to living, a promise. As Benedict XVI said: the most important concepts of living have become flesh and blood
The real novelty of the New Testament does not lie in new ideas, but in the very figure of Christ, who gives flesh and blood to concepts—an unheard-of realism”; Benedict XVI, *Deus caritas est*, 12.
That is, we need not abstract values, but people who themselves first live a hope, in a way that fascinates and challenges us. So, no abstraction, but something real, which — second issue — generates in history a new subject.
People like those described by Azurmendi or by the 50-year-old friend, if one truly indulges them, if one simply sets out to follow them, as the disciples set out to follow Jesus, are instruments of generation of a type of subject capable of holding up in the face of the shocks of reality; not because they are heroes — as we so often think, reducing Christianity to a moralism — but because they were and are themselves generated by the same event, by the same Presence, through other encounters, other persons.
The relationship with the living Christ, present here and now, generates a new subject in history, who walks with hope. Those who encounter Him and allow themselves to be grasped by Him live, says St. Paul, as a man “upright,” present to himself, who does not withdraw from the real. Indeed, facing the real, however it shows itself, represents for him a possibility of verifying the consistency of that hope.
For me, the moment of confinement was a wonderful opportunity to ask myself, “Does what I live, what I believe in, what I have entrusted my hope to, have the consistency to make me face this circumstance?” Each person must ask himself this question, otherwise it will be difficult to stand before any situation that exceeds our measure. This is where the contribution we Christians can make in today’s society is revealed to be decisive.
Many people are surprised that we had the Meeting this year. It is the first public gesture after the lockdown, and many thought it would not be possible. How could it be done?
Because there are people who do not give up in the face of difficulties, who do not pull the oars out of fear, sensing the provocation that comes from reality. The Meeting is there because of the hope that distinguishes us—not because of our own merit, let me be clear, but because of the grace that has happened to us and that we wish to communicate to everyone.
Question. I would like to elaborate for a moment on the fact that hope is always played out in a historical context. In public discussions we often talk, even in comparison to today’s situation, about the postwar period. If we go and look at what happened at that time, we see that every energy a person spent — working, intellectually — improved the situation. There was continuous growth, also supported by technological progress. Hope almost coincided with something automatic, at least as far as the material circumstances of life were concerned.
Then in 2008-2011 a break happened for the first time. There was no longer continuous growth, but we had to face the fact that our situation could get worse, that the won standard of living was not assured, that perhaps our children could have a future no better than ours, and perhaps even worse.
And there changed—let’s say—the way of dealing with even the waiting that we talked about at the beginning. So hope either became more consistent or ended in resignation. Incidentally, I read an article the other day that, looking at the last decade, talks about an “epidemic of despair” (ilsole24ore.com, August 16, 2020), an increase in depression not for pathological reasons, but precisely as a sign of a mentality that I would say is resigned.
So, I ask you: how does the historical context in which we live affect our hope, the way we conceive of hope, especially in this pandemic moment? For we do not live in isolation, but in a social, cultural context, which also affects the way we conceive of ourselves within the world.
Carrón. I think that these events—the economic crisis and now the pandemic—have tested our conception of hope and especially the experience of trust. A break has happened — as you say — with respect to the trust we had in continuous, almost mechanical progress in the economic, health, and so on. We have seen that this is not true.
I am always amazed by a phrase of Benedict XVI, that we think all progress is cumulative, while this is true only for certain realities—let us say mechanical-scientific—but in everything that concerns human life, always a new beginning is needed
Additive progress is possible only in the material field. (…) In the sphere, on the other hand, of ethical awareness and moral decision-making there is no such possibility of addition for the simple reason that man’s freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew. They are never simply already made for us by others—for then we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions every man, every generation is a new beginning”; Benedict XVI, *Spe salvi*, 24.
We have seen it: as soon as trust is undermined, families begin to save, they no longer invest, they are afraid of the future, they only think about how to deal with the situation in the immediate. So, when this starts to happen, how do you get out of it? What you say about despair is a risk always lurking, because once confidence is broken, it’s not as if you can move on the next day as if nothing happened.
Restoring trust, when suspicion and distrust have been introduced, is not immediate. This is why the kind of hope we have—that is, whether we have a foothold for our lives that does not leave us at the mercy of one crisis or another—is really put to the test. We can restart from the ashes, in whatever situation we find ourselves, only if we have consistency in something that is more powerful than all crises. Otherwise, a genuine restart is difficult.
What we are experiencing here together these days is an example—visible—of how it is possible to restart. But many other new initiatives, documentations of creativity, may appear in Italy and around the world, redeeming us from the situation in which we find ourselves. Let us therefore keep our eyes open.
The problem is only our consistency. Our grandparents were tried more than us by wars and dramatic economic situations, but they had a consistency that so many times we dream of. I am not saying this to look back, but to emphasize the magnitude that this issue has with respect to our children.
Only if we have hope to communicate can we avoid injecting fear into their blood. We often inject all our worries into them, instead of accompanying them to realize their resources, their possibilities. This is where the game of the future is played, as Mario Draghi said in opening the Meeting.
If young people find people who will accompany them to face reality with a hypothesis of meaning, instead of inoculating fear in them, they will be able to grow and build, to go through the situations that will arise. But meaningful adult presences are needed, witnessing that it is always possible not only not to withdraw from reality, but to build, even in unpredictable and obstacle-filled situations.
Question. Let us delve into this aspect, which I believe is decisive at this time. Faced with an often uncertain future, how should children be looked at?
Carrón. I think there are two ways in which parents can relate to their children or educators to their students. On the one hand, there are those who try to spare them the relationship with the real, thinking this way they defend them from the unexpected, from difficulties, from all the things perceived as threats. It is as if the world is interpreted as a great threat from which the adult must protect the children. In this way, even unknowingly, he communicates a distrust.
On the other hand, there are those—families, educators—who, instead of injecting fear into the children’s blood, of sparing them the impact of reality, introduce them to it, slowly, inviting them to take risks in the face of difficulties, offering—first and foremost through the way of life—a suggestion, a hypothesis, an initiative to be taken. A boy sees people who, in the face of difficulties, do not give up.
This is absolutely essential today: to witness to young people—who, many times, being young, can be frightened—a possibility of a positive relationship with problems, circumstances, contradictions, showing, as adults, that one can look to the future with a well-founded hope, not overwhelmed by fear, not determined by the difficulties that are always there.
Communicating this — I am thinking of teachers — is also crucial to deepening knowledge. Indeed, in order to give young people back the enthusiasm they need to know, it is necessary to communicate, through the way you lecture, the hope you live by, a confidence that will enable them to bring out all the resources they have, with a creativity that will surprise even us.
The more you urge a young person to take a stand, the more you estimate his possibilities, the more his value will emerge, to his and our amazement. Often, hearing them speak, I say to myself, “If these kids would realize the magnitude of what they are saying, it would be a wonder to them!” Sometimes they don’t realize it, and our educational ability lies in making them aware of all that is contained in their experience, of all that they say, so that they can discover the footholds that support the path of living, that make it possible not to give up, that make it possible to look to the future full of hope. This is the educational path.
Question. And maybe some kids could educate us as well by living with this immediacy.
Carrón. Absolutely! I learn so much from them. They often overtake us left and right because of their characteristic lack of filters in dealing with reality.
Sometimes, they don’t know how much they are saying. I find myself repeating what I have heard and learned from them for years, even though they may have already forgotten. The problem is that, to remember something and treasure it, you have to know how important it is to life.
Question. Historically, especially in modernity, Christianity has often been accused of diverting attention from earthly life, from real problems, and of consoling people with the afterlife. This would prevent it from affecting the pursuit of greater social justice, from shaping the world to make it a better home for man. Christianity, in short, as Marx said, would be “the opium of the people,” distracting from engagement with reality.
Today certainly this accusation is no longer so present; however—I ask—isn’t there a risk that one lives the Christian hope downward, that is, that one withdraws, that one creates a certain reacquainted world—perhaps with a less good standard of living than before, but in essence locking oneself inside a circle where one is more or less fine—while the hope you described is a hope that leads to engagement, to risk, to create, to shape reality? Where is the difference between these two types of hope?
Carrón. In the kind of Christianity one lives! There is a Christianity that is unable to awaken the man it encounters, so it sends him back to the hereafter because it is afraid of the here and now.
And there is a Christianity that awakens all of the human, all of a man’s capacity, all of his energy, all of his creativity, all of his intelligence, all of his freedom, so that the man has the desire to get his hands in the game. So much for escaping into the afterlife!
A Christianity that distracts from reality is the opposite of authentic Christianity. The issue is that many times we can run the risk of living the faith in a way that is not the way that introduced Jesus into history. In the beginning everyone was surprised not by one who withdrew, but by one who stood differently in relation to everything, so much so that they said, “No one has ever spoken like this man, no one has ever acted like this man, we have never seen one like Him!”
He did not think of the hereafter as waiting for it all to end; He was so committed to any encounter He had, any situation He was in, any circumstance that provoked Him, and so corresponding to the heart was the way He looked at and treated people and things, that everyone was amazed: “We have never seen anything like this!” (Mark 2:12).
This is Christianity when it’s Christianity, and if it is not this, it isn’t Christianity. It isn’t the Christianity that the Gospel has delivered to us. “Whoever follows Me […] will have a hundredfold down here” (Mt 19:29), Jesus said; that is, whoever follows Him begins to experience—down here—“the hundredfold” of everything: a capacity for creativity, for energy, a capacity to love, a capacity for self-delivery, a capacity to walk in the midst of difficulties, to recover from any defeat, which is normally impossible. The human, a hundred times over!
I don’t know which Christians they met who made such a claim against Christianity. But we also have a responsibility. If we don’t prove that Christianity isn’t a piece of extra stuff added to man’s life from the outside, but an event that saves and fulfills man in his basic structure—that is, in his expectation, in his need for meaning and fulfillment — it will be hard for Christianity to be interesting to anyone today.
Instead, a Christianity that is able to awaken the whole human, to make it more and more attractive to put one’s hands to work so that one can’t wait to get involved — because life is beautiful when it is spent for the good of others, for the good of everything — that is what interests people. Only the presence of people who document such intensity of life makes clear the contribution that Christianity can make to people today. Our hope is a certainty that lets us look to the future without leaving the hereafter. Christ’s presence makes us face any future, no matter how hard or uncertain it is, with a certainty in our eyes. It is precisely because of what we see happening in the present that we can also hope in the hereafter.
Question. Let us take up again, at the end, the initial question: where does the experience of hope come from? Is it something we have to do ourselves or is it a gift we receive?
Carrón. It’s a gift we receive. As Montale said, “an unexpected [gift] / is the only hope.” But it is a gift we can only receive by crossing someone; it does not fall from the sky.
It’s a gift that one can see, like John and Andrew, who received it by meeting a man; or like Mikel Azurmendi, who intercepted it by hearing on the radio a journalist who spoke differently; or like a student, who can be invested in it by seeing a professor who involves himself with him in a certain way; or like a sick person, who discovers it by seeing a doctor who has a different implication with it.
Only presences in which “something else” is documented—something that happened in their lives and that generated them—are, come what may, a factor of hope for us.
But only if we are willing to let ourselves be affected and attracted by them, by what in them corresponds to our desire for fulfillment. We are made for this fulfillment, not to reduce our hunger and thirst for fullness. He who has found, through the encounter with a certain human reality, that which constantly reawakens him, and seeks—because he needs it in order to live—the coexistence with certain presences that put him back on track, is truly on the road. He is a man who walks—I was saying before—upright, straight, going through any circumstance.
Question. I think this evening was a gift that strengthened, intensified our hope in a highly dramatic moment that, without this hope, would risk becoming tragic. Lived with the hope that Fr. Julián Carrón has witnessed to us, it can become a fruitful, creative moment that makes us seize the opportunity that this change of epoch, so accelerated by the pandemic, represents. If we look at it with “the sparkle in our eyes,” as the title of his latest book, just published, states, it reveals itself as an unsuspected possibility. Thank you very much, Fr. Carrón!
Carrón. Thank you!
