The Cry of a Die-Hard Origin
Simone Riva - He was waiting for me in the yard with the basketball, and as soon as he saw me coming, he said: "Will you play with me?" Surprised, I jumped in. We started to play, and this first grader and I began to play.
Meanwhile, others arrive. They shoot one shot each until one suddenly sits beside me on his ball. "Your turn," I tell him. "Unless you make another basket, I'm not shooting anymore," he replies.
We resumed the game, and I thought about how simple and disarming this scene was. Who wouldn't want to be expected and included like that?
The mystery chooses the small to show the great. The next day, caught up in some organizational matters, I arrived in the evening disappointed because I had received yet another confirmation that I could not solve everything with my abilities. Over the years, I have understood that this is a temptation that never lets up.
There is a problem, and the goal becomes to solve it as quickly as possible so that everything immediately fits into the grand scheme of things that work. Reality, which is always more stubborn than we are, often makes this script impractical, but always possible surprising facts in which you are called: "Will you play with me?" One wonders: "But who is man if everything is against him? What is the value of his life if it does not depend on what he can achieve?"
These days, I came across a text that directly addresses this question: "Only the Church, in her tradition, defends the absolute value of the person, from the first moment of his conception to the last moment of his old age, even if he is frail and useless: on what basis? How does man have this right, this absoluteness, so that even if the world moves, he has something in him that gives him the right not to move? He has something in him that allows him to judge the world from which he was born. If man were born completely
If man were only born out of the biology of father and mother, that brief moment when all the flow of countless previous reactions produce this fleeting fruit, it would be truly ridiculous, cynically ridiculous, the word "freedom," the expression "person's right," would be truly absurd, the very word "person.
Freedom without foundation is flatus vocis: a pure sound that the wind disperses" (Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense McGill)
What happens reminds us of the value of who we are. Once we remove the veil of predictability and habit, everything speaks to us differently. We cannot even be reduced to the history we come from, our dreams, and the events we go through. Something in us cries out for an irreducible origin with which we can face any challenge. God does not prevent trials, disappointments, or toil. Still, He does everything possible to welcome them with an embrace that comes first.
The encounter with this child was an embrace for the disappointments of the next day, which, therefore, could not occupy the whole scene.
Man, who "carries within himself something with which to judge the world from which he was born," is destined for an embrace of all his humanity, which awaits him in every fold of reality. This is his greatness. All he has to do is jump in.
The author has not revised the translation. The article appears in the column of Il Giornale di Monza.
