The Gift of Hearing

Michiel Peeters - Dear friends, we are in the first weeks of a new academic year, many of us in a new city or even new country, and today, in this occasion, I want to underline the instrument the Mystery has given each of us to enter into reality and to grow.

Each of us is gifted with an organ that permits him to understand what is for him, what helps to live, what is good, beautiful, and true. What stands the test of time. Whatever our background, however we live, we have this instrument. We can call it “heart,” or “elementary experience”, or “humanity,” in any case, it’s what nature gives us to walk through life and grow, instead of wandering about and withering.

Fr Giussani, a great Italian priest, said: “All of the experiences of my humanity and of my personality are filtered through the sieve of a primordial ‘original experience’ that constitutes my identity in the way I face everything.” One thing an authentic Christian company constantly does, is encouraging us to use our heart: “Each man has a right and a duty to learn the possibility and the habit to compare every proposal [and encounter] with [his or her] ‘elementary experience.’ … What [is] this original, elementary experience?

It can be described as a complex of needs and ‘evidences’ which accompany us as we come face to face with all that exists. Nature thrusts man into a universal comparison with himself, with others, with things, and furnishes him with a complex of original needs and ‘evidences’ which are tools for that encounter.

So original are these needs or these ‘evidences’ that everything [we do] or [say] depends on them. These needs can be given many names. They can be summarized with different expressions (for example, the need for happiness, the need for truth, for justice, etc.).

They are like a spark igniting the human motor. … Any personal affirmation, from the most banal and ordinary to the most reflected upon and rich in consequences, can be based solely on this nucleus of original needs.”
Unrevised notes and translation by the author.
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