Is There Anyone Who Longs to Live?

Pigi Banna - A cut, an unexpected loss of weight, a stubborn refusal to leave the house, the rejection of job offers, the fear of not being up to standard, the fear of being judged by others... We could go on and on with the list of similar sudden needs that, in the last few years alone, have affected people close to us of all ages, in different social conditions, if not you, who are reading this. These are not only psychological needs but perhaps the most characteristic feature of the culture in which we live.

Cesare Cornaggia, a famous Milanese psychiatrist, recalled the distinction between needs and desires in his book Dalla parte del desiderio (On the Side of Desire). Very often, in fact, we treat these widespread discomforts as needs to be satisfied immediately with recipes, words, silences, advice, and doctrines. Both those who worry about them with anxiety and fear and those who underestimate them with a bit of stubbornness, believing that it would only be necessary to think about them a little less and work a little more to do good, consider these inconveniences as factory defects of the human being.

This only exacerbates the problem because those who experience the drama of these issues feel even more guilty as if they are a burden to others. A troubled teenager in Matteo Bussola's novel A Good Place to Stop asks his father: "If his father has made an effort not to make his father's mistakes, why is he still unhappy?

Instead, it is enough to give these needs a modicum of credibility, to be told where they come from and where they are headed, in order to grasp in them, as Julián Carrón recently put it, a human "spy of ontology" that does not carry within itself a factory defect. Even in his historically wounded condition, man is always made good. In fact, it is enough to listen for a moment to a question like that of Jesus to his disciples ("What do you seek?") in order to grasp, in the history of every need, the life of an unfulfilled desire, the unmistakable sign of those demands for truth, justice and goodness that every human being originally discovers in himself in the encounter with reality. It is this elementary experience of which Luigi Giussani spoke in”The Religious Sense”.

Today, however, it is very embarrassing to talk about one's failed desires. It is thought that a failed desire coincides with a total failure of the self. But one could say that every desire is born of a lack, and there is no lack without the experience of not being able to get what one wants with one's own hands, that is, without failure. We forget that, as Binswanger writes, man was born crying. The lack expressed by crying was, from the beginning, the driving force behind a relationship, the relationship with the mother, which, as we all know, did not deprive us of the possibility of crying again when we were hungry but made us realize that this lack was not a sign of a finished life, but of a need for life, for another life beyond the one we had already been given.

Behind every need, every failure, every lack, and every desire, it is possible to recognize the possibility of a relationship with someone or something that we do not yet know, that we do not yet possess, but that every time surprises us with the grace of its presence.

There is a small problem: this desire is infinite. It is never satisfied, it desires infinity -- as Pavese writes -- in every pleasure. Who will be able to face this infinity of lack without becoming frightened or angry or resorting to unsuccessful strategies of blocking it out? Only the one who has the consciousness to throw the other (partner, friend, child) over the edge of the self, as if to say, "Your happiness will be there even without me," as the father does in McCarthy's The Road. This is the fatherhood of which he is capable who has the spirit of one who continually makes himself a son.

There is no more exciting time than this, so marked by the fragility of the self, to recognize the difference between these kinds of fathers. These, like Abraham, produce a people of sons because they infinitely evoke the promise of a life beyond the self, even as they lead us to contemplate the starry sky while talking with God.

This is an unedited translation by the author. Source: ilsussidiario.net

Fr. Pigi Banna was the guest speaker at the West Coast Meeting in Finale Ligure on June 27, 2024. In this editorial, he anticipated some of the topics of his talk. Download.