Empty Shelves, Full Hearts

Simone Riva - All books purchased. The empty storefront of Hoepli in Milan makes one think. Sometimes something, or Someone, happens that leaves us naked, more real.

The media covered the strange act of that guy who bought all the books in the window of the Hoepli Bookstore in Milan last August 22. He paid about 10 thousand euros for them. Strange fact that is difficult to understand. One effect, however, this bizarre purchase had: it suddenly left the shop window bare. Curious were the pictures published in the newspapers. 

Empty displays, bare shelves, even a glimpse of the power strip for the electrical outlets previously hidden by who knows what volumes. And I immediately thought of how often it happens to us, too.

Trunks, full of things, clad in everything. All it takes is for someone to walk by and take it all away, this time without paying, and we are suddenly naked. Our mysterious thief may have various faces: a fact, a trial, an illness, an unexpected event, an encounter ... the fact remains that we are displaced. The feeling of the scribes and Pharisees in Jesus' time must not have been so different, when they were told, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me’” (Mt. 15:7-8).

He had nailed it, that young Nazarene, revealing a life of formalism. Showcases are always filled with the latest novelties, books by the latest authors in vogue, those that count and make opinion, arranged so that the eye of the beholder is directed to one cover rather than another. Everything studied, including lights, to scratch the distraction of the unsuspecting passerby, immersed in their own affairs. Plastic image of a life on display. But, suddenly, there’s nothing left to show.

Before that Man, they no longer hold their criticism, “Why do your disciples not behave according to the tradition of the ancients, but take food with unclean hands?” (Mt. 15:2). One can’t trespass with God; there are no tricks that hold, no wiles that allow us to season him away. He treats them as men, Christ, as perhaps they had never been treated, and challenges them. It’s the heart that’s the real point of interest, not the showcase that, sooner or later, will remain empty. Everything happens in the heart that can have the claim to be decisive, and if it is “away from him,” it becomes the den of all wickedness.

You don’t see them in the windows of the bookstores that matter, but there are books-often not meant to be books-that hold disruptive pages, in which you find phrases like these: “The happening is your happening. It is that way of being of yours that is called ‘movement’ or ‘being in the movement.’ But the movement exists in individuals.

That is to say, the occurrence or movement -- which is the physical instrument, the physical face of the occurrence, the physical reality that makes that Presence documentable -- is you. The event is in the person who is consumed, who is defined. The movement is in the person who consumes himself, who defines himself. That is why we cannot waste as much time anymore as we have wasted, because no adults are born, except rarely, in our movement.

The adult is the one who is able to create the movement him, because he/she is a generator. The event is you: the event is your impact with that presence within the physical sign we call movement (the encounter, certain people). So the movement is you: the movement is that impact that changes you, that is received in you, that mobilizes you. The event, the movement, is you within a given” (Luigi Giussani, Certi di alcune grandi cose, BUR, Milan 2007, pp. 30-31).

You don't see them in the windows of the bookstores that matter, but there are books-often not meant to be books-that hold disruptive pages, in which one finds phrases like these: “The event is your event, it is that way of being of yours that’s called ‘movement’ or ‘being in the movement.’ But the movement exists in individuals.

The event or movement is you. It is the physical tool, face, and reality that makes that Presence documentable. The event is in the person who is consumed, who’s defined. The movement is in the person who consumes himself, who defines himself. That is why we cannot waste as much time anymore, as we’ve wasted, because no adults are born, except rarely, in our movement. The adult is the one who is able to create the movement him, because he is a generator.

The event is you: the event is your impact with that presence within the physical sign we call movement (the encounter, specific people). So the movement is you: the movement is that impact that changes you, that’s received in you, that mobilizes you. The event, the movement, is you within a given” (Luigi Giussani, Certi di alcune grandi cose, BUR, Milan 2007, pp. 30-31).

Here’s freed from the hostage of formalism, one of the realities most subject to this cage, for scribes and Pharisees as for us: belonging. Here’s cleared the field of all taste for concepts, for slogans, for buzzwords, for books that fill shop windows, and everything is open to the spectacle of the self, in what one is and does, up to the summit, up to the discovery of the truth of that ancient Franciscan ascetic motto: “Nudus, nudum Christum sequi” (Follow, naked, the naked Christ), so that nothing needs to be hidden before Him who always treats us as free men.
This article was published on Ilsussidiario.net. The author has not revised the translation.
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