The Key Word is Experience

Interview with Julián Carrón by Pia De Simone - The encounter with the difference of the other will make us more and more ourselves if we avoid schematism in the face of what is strange to us if we accept the provocation and second it is using all the capacity of our reason and freedom.”

With these words, Julián Carrón, professor of Theology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, theologian and biblical scholar, and former president of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation from 2005 to 2021, reverses the perspective with which we usually approach relationships with the other, with the different.

You state that you have "never perceived a risk when entering into a relationship with anyone.” But the difference usually generates fear; the consequence is wanting to defend oneself against the other. Why is this not the case for you?

The encounter with the other has always been a richness for me. I have always had something to learn from the other, with all his history, trajectory, and experience. Diversity does not generate fear in me: I do not try to defend myself because the other is not a source of fear, the other makes me more aware of what I live. It can be said that only when one has a certainty, a consistency of what one lives, one is able to enter into a relationship with the other. Problems are not created for us by others. Others make us aware of the problems we have, of the inconsistency, of the difficulties, of our fears. A certainty is necessary to be in front of the other.

But how can we achieve that certainty, that "consistency" that allows us to meet the other?

This consistency depends, to a great extent, on the human journey that each one of us has made in order to grow in our own self-consciousness. I always remember the phrase of a friend whom I appreciate very much for his ability to describe what I am trying to say: the strength of a subject resides in the intensity of his self-consciousness. The more conscious a person is of his self-consciousness, the more possibility he has of encountering the different because the person does not depend on the external but rests on a fullness, on a personal consistency that allows him to embrace the other.

In ancient comedy, Terence had one of his characters say: "I am a man; nothing human is alien to me." Does the fact that the other is different from us necessarily imply that he is strange to us?

To answer this question, we need to understand what we have in common with the other, and we can only understand this if we ourselves are familiar with our humanity. In order to be able to listen to the other in his depth, in his truth, I must start listening to myself because otherwise, I unintentionally reduce the other. 

When I taught, I presented literary texts and always asked my students what was necessary to understand a love poem. My students would tell me to know the date of composition, the circles in which it was written, the meter of the verse, and the vocabulary. But I would ask them if all these facts were really enough. A love poem is the literary expression of an experience, and to grasp its true meaning, one must somehow have had an experience of love. Otherwise the text is reduced to our measure. It seems to me that the same thing happens in all circumstances because we can situate ourselves in front of the difference of the other with the capacity to participate in his experience or to remain on the margin of it.

You assert that education is not a set of speeches or instructions for use and that only those who try to awaken something in others, to set their freedom in motion, educate. Is it possible to educate about diversity?

Educating for diversity and having the possibility of entering into a relationship with the other seems to me to be one of the greatest difficulties we have. In a relationship that is different, a person can be hurt. We often see, in everyone's experience, that this generates difficulty because we tend to see the other only through the hole of that wound. It is like looking at reality only through one aspect; everything else is as if it did not exist. 

Thus, the other is reduced to what I can see. This really requires an education. If one does not dwell on the wound, one can find oneself on a path that leads not to deny what has happened but to broaden one's gaze, to see everything anew. For example, if a child were with his parents and other siblings in an environment like Disneyland, everything would be a provocation for him: the attractions, the games, the various possibilities for fun. 

The moment he is separated from his parents and lost in the crowd, he may feel everything as a threat, as something that is alien to him. Although reality would still be what it was before, separated from his parents, he would only see through fear, and only being with them again could give him back that glimpse of reality that the other presents to him. In order not to see only through the wound or the loneliness with which we so often look at reality, it is necessary to be pacified, to have healed the wound in a relationship that allows us to return to the other in his truth.

What can help build bridges and not walls?
Every wound, and every encounter with the different can be an opportunity to build a wall or to build a bridge. Starting from the same ingredients, different decisions can be made. At stake is the ability to educate oneself to relate to reality in a certain way. Only those who have grown in humanity will be able to build bridges in any situation. On the contrary, those who live in insecurity use anything as a justification to build a trench to defend themselves from possible danger. The question is: how to build from the data of reality? Only those who are accompanied to live everything as an opportunity will be able to live in fullness. If no one has educated you to build bridges with what happens in reality, everything that happens will confirm that reality is a threat that must be defended against.

What can make words like "peace", "fraternity", and "solidarity" not empty words, but words full of meaning and life?
It seems to me that the crucial word here is "experience". Many of these words are often empty because they lack any real content of experience. But how do we experience it? We need places. Without educational places where one can perceive these words not simply as instructions for use, or as moral appeals, but as a real experience of a fullness that makes life more life, that makes life more intense, that makes life more worth living, it will be difficult for these words not to become constantly empty again, even if we repeat them over and over again. 

These words "happen", for example, by a gesture of gratuitousness, by a participation in moments of conviviality in which we touch with our hand a fraternity or we perceive an absolutely gratuitous gesture, in solidarity, and then we see the good that it means for life. Sometimes we are afraid of differences because we fear that they also force us to change. Does the diversity of the other threaten our identity?

If diversity is perceived as a threat to our identity, it means that our identity is very fragile. On the other hand, the consistency of an identity is revealed in its ability to cope with any difference. It is paradoxical, but the more powerful the identity, the less it needs violence to impose itself.

Can education be an antidote to the violence, individualism, and nihilism that permeate minds and hearts?

Yes, if education is perceived as an introduction to reality in its entirety because the more one enters reality, the more reality opens up. I used to give this example to my students: if a child has a toy in front of him, the presence of the toy fills him with curiosity and the desire to start playing but to perceive the full potential of that toy, the child needs to be taught how to use it. If a child uses a modern electronic device as simply as a brick, he loses its enormous potential. He will use it in a violent or individualistic way and will end up abandoning it, because he is not interested in it. If there is no such capacity to introduce us to the totality of reality, reality is reduced and is only perceived in an individualistic way. The risk is that we miss the best of reality.

What is the real educational challenge of our time?

Education is the only thing that can really bring out in man a look capable of entering into a relationship with everything and perceiving the value of what he finds before him. In my opinion, the real urgency is: who educates? Who is the subject that should do it? We need places that open up reason and freedom and allow a true relationship to intercept all the good that we have before us, but for this, we must allow ourselves to be generated. This is a great responsibility that we adults have towards young people. It is not enough to make speeches, we need witnesses in whom the new generations can see that this is not an abstract ideal, it is not unattainable, but that it is possible to touch in people a fullness of life, an openness, a capacity to embrace the other, a recognition of the freedom of the other. Only then will diversity not become a threat but a richness capable of making life more alive.

Unrevised translation. Published on paginasdigital.es