The Path to Renewal
Michiel Peeters - We are delving into Michiel Peeters' Lent retreat, "The Road Has Come to You," offering the full text for deeper reflection.
Let us read the hymn of Lent together, paying attention to its words.
Freed at last from the burden of evil.
Freed at last from the burden of evil
and baptized in the depths of cool waters,
we arrive at the land of our trials
where our hearts will be made pure and clean.
From the slavery of Egypt you led us
and you walk at our side through the desert,
leading all unto your sacred mountain
where erected on high is the Cross.
You are water that flows from the rock,
You are manna to satiate our hunger,
You are cloud safely guiding our footsteps,
You are law to enlighten our hearts.
You are rock that is risen among us,
where we’ll find sure defense and support,
where we’ll drink at the fountain of life
that will cleanse us from all of our sins.
In this new Exodus you direct us
on the path to the great joys of Easter,
passing through from the clutches of death
to the Promised Land’s gift of new life. Amen.
Let’s now sing it, paying particular attention to singing together.
1. A Journey, Not a Miracle
“Freed at last from the burden of evil / and baptized in the depths of cool waters,
We arrive at the land of our trials / where our hearts will be made pure and clean. // In this new Exodus you direct us / on the path to the great joys of Easter.”
Lent proposes to us a path, a journey, a “new Exodus.” “Expect a journey, not a miracle,” said Fr Giussani in 1982. A path is proposed, not to those who have not been baptized or have not had the encounter, but to those who have! A road opens, not to those who “are still defined by evil.” No, a journey is proposed to those who have been “baptized in the depths of cool waters”, a road opens up for those who have been “freed at last from the burden of evil.”
A road is proposed. In fact, Jesus calls himself “the way” (and not the “miraculous solution,” for example). And His first followers called themselves those “who belonged to the Way” (Acts 9:2). (In the beginning, Christianity was not known as Christianity, but as “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 18:26; 19:9, 19:23, 24:14, 22)). With Christ, you may “expect a journey, not a miracle that dodges your responsibilities, that eliminates your toil, that makes your freedom mechanical” (Fr Giussani).
What are the steps of this road?
2. “The Road Has Come to You”
The first step is finding the road.
Last Sunday, I was 12.5 years in my parish, and I realized that the greatest grace in life is to find a path to achieving what you want most.
This has happened to us. This is Christianity. St. Augustine said: “I do not tell you: seek the road. The road itself has come to you: arise, and walk it” (Serm. 141.4).
Sometimes, you hear someone say, even within the movement, if you haven’t yet had the encounter, wait patiently and follow the community and its directives. Then, the encounter will come at the due time. Or something like that.
But we wouldn’t be here without the encounter! We have run into the road! We were set in motion by it! It is very well possible that we are unaware of it, but we would not be here without running into the road. That’s the advantage, the greatness of Christianity; we no longer need to invent the road; it has come to us. We have run into it; it has run into us. “I do not tell you: seek the road. The road itself has come to you: arise and walk it.” This is the invitation of Lent.
What you want most comes as a road, not as a “miraculous solution.” And this road has the form of a human presence that lives its human condition, its humanity, in an enviable way. “The guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, ‘Why did you not bring him?’ The guards answered, ‘Never before has anyone spoken like this one’” (John 7:45–46).
But that exceptional way of speaking was the expression of an outstanding way of being, for as Pasolini rightly said: if someone has educated you (has moved your innermost being so that you could grow and become yourself), he can only have done so by his being, not by his speaking (Lutheran Letters 1983, 27).
Therefore, the first step of the road is running into the road itself, which is “a presence charged with proposition and meaning for life, charged with radical newness” (Giussani, 1968). “I am the Way.”
At that moment, one can decide to follow that presence “enviously.” But it’s not a “decision,” in the sense of voluntaristic effort: it is giving in to an attraction. This is our only “merit,” as Fr Giussani said: that we began to follow an attraction.
We had an advantage, and it is our only merit, that we did not have the laughter of Sarah when, in that mysterious and stupendous page of Genesis 18, those three who spoke as one person, in thanksgiving for all the thoughtfulness they had had from Abraham, said, “I will come in the coming year and your eighty-year-old wife will have a son.” There was a root of naiveté and simplicity, which the Gospel calls poverty of heart, that made us perceive and adhere to this provocation.
We understood that the promise was for life: “Lord, if we go away from you, where do we go? You alone have words that give meaning to living.” And it was a provocation to follow. In order to define the Movement—and before that, what we desire—nothing must necessarily be added to this formula: a provocation to life, to follow (Giussani, Viterbo 1977).
3. “Arise”
“We understood that the promise was for life.” For, as Giussani explains in The Structure of Experience, the encounter “enhances the mind’s cognitive capacities, adjusting the sharpness of man’s gaze to the exceptional reality to which it provokes him.
We call this the grace of faith.” This is one of Giussani’s (many) sentences that are worth understanding properly by tracing them in our own experience; by seeing happen in our experience what Giussani describes.
(This also applies to the work of the school of community: reflecting on Giussani’s texts helps our lives only if we see each sentence, each step, happening in our experience, and verify it by the test he typically offers. As long as we do not see what Giussani describes in our experience, we have not understood and cannot move forward, for we are presented with a “human path” and not a theoretical study. Giussani becomes a teacher for life (Magister adest et vocat te) only if we follow him step by step in our experience.)
So the Christian encounter “enhances the mind’s cognitive capacity, adjusting the sharpness of man’s gaze to the exceptional reality to which it provokes him.” What is the “mind’s cognitive capacity” par excellence? What is the capacity, the criterion with which humans can appreciate an encounter or proposal?
We are used to calling that criterion the “heart.” We can also give it other names: desire, restlessness, “elementary experience,” striving. The fact remains that the encounter, to the extent of its exceptionality, arouses man’s heart.
I will read a few sentences from Vasily Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook (about his trip to Armenia in 1961):
Dilijan is a town you fall in love with at first sight. And your first thought as you fall in love is: “Yes, this is where I must come to heal my soul. Here, I can find peace, tranquility, and silence. Here, I can enjoy the charm of the evening mountains, the silent forest, and babbling streams.”
None of this, however, is true. The young Lermontov was mistaken when he wrote: “Then the anguish of my soul is stilled…” The anguish of the human soul is terrible and unquenchable. It is impossible to calm it or escape from it. Quiet country sunsets, the lapping of the eternal sea, and the sweet town of Dilijan are all equally powerless before it. […] No outward tranquility can save you from grinding anguish; no mountain air can cool you when flaming pitch burns your insides; no bloody and gaping wound can be healed by life in the wonderful town of Dilijan (132–133).
Our restlessness, our heart, is awakened by beauty, reality, and its impact, not resolved! “As it is … with every great work of art: the more beautiful it is, the less it satisfies you, that is, the more it refers to something else, it exasperates your hunger and thirst, it does not resolve them” (Giussani, L’autocoscienza del cosmo, 303). This is all the more true when encountering a presence full of message and proposal for life. Non veni solvere sed adimplere (Matt 5:17), I have not come to dissolve, but to fulfill, to fill with my presence! But to be fulfilled, we need the power to adequately perceive the meaning, the depth, the sense of this encounter, of this way that has come to us (the encounters adjusts “the sharpness of man’s gaze to the exceptional reality to which it provokes him”). We need to understand if it is at the level of our deepest strivings. For this, we need our hearts fully awake. Therefore, surge, “arise,” coincide again with your humanity, desire, restlessness, striving, heart!
So the encounter awakens, “sharpens” the heart (instead of “resolving” it). This is Christ’s characteristic: He wakes up our heart, our restlessness, and thus gives us back to ourselves; he does not “resolve” us! We can recognize Him precisely by these dynamics!
He does this also because an exceptional presence can be grasped as such only with our restlessness! Therefore, this restlessness is the most critical aspect of our personality. We live in a state of affairs where we are taught to be satisfied with anything. But Giussani said: “I hope you will never be tranquil!” Only those who are not satisfied, only those who are never satisfied by anything they can grasp, can achieve freedom. The person who is not satisfied with less than everything their heart desires and rebels against any kind of self-limitation is the only one who can truly find something that corresponds to the heart’s desire: satisfaction!
4. “Walk”
“Arise, and walk.” What is this walking? With this restlessness, this by the encounter enhanced cognitive capacity, this adjusted sharpness of your eyes and hearts, verify the exceptional reality to which we have been provoked! Verify the presence! “Each of us has a right and a duty to learn that it is always possible to compare every proposal with this ‘elementary experience.’ It must also become our habit,” Fr Giussani says in the first chapter of The Religious Sense (The Religious Sense, 7). But is this still necessary if you have met Christ? Isn’t Christ the answer to man’s desire? Is Christ not “the solution”? Attention: he is “the solution” in the form of a road in which the religious sense blossoms, not in the form of eliminating anything.
You are water that flows from the rock,
You are manna to satiate our hunger,
You are cloud safely guiding our footsteps,
You are law to enlighten our hearts.
You are rock that is risen among us,
where we’ll find sure defense and support.
Is this true? In our experience?
“To walk” means, first of all, to verify, with this restlessness, with this awakened heart, the presence. In our circumstances, as they are! Like the Jewish people could verify God’s presence in their circumstances, in the desert. Comparing this presence—when we become aware of it—with any other presence, any other offer, proposal, hypothesis, encounter…
5. From Faith, Hope
What is the fruit of this verification? It’s called faith. Faith means: because of all the signs I have seen and read, I am sure that you are trustworthy, o presence, o Christ, that I can rely on you. And hope “is none other than the expanding of the certainty of faith regarding the future” (Is It Possible to Live This Way? 2: 86). As we said during the Advent retreat:
If hope does not bloom like the fruit of faith, it is because we have not understood what happened; it is because we have not yet reached this certainty, we have not verified what has entered our lives. Therefore, we must sustain each other and help each other to follow this path, because the great grace from which hope is born is the certainty of faith.
Therefore, the encounter opens a path that we need to follow, which means: constantly to look at this grace that has come into our life—if we want to have hope. Hope is born like a flower out of faith, which is this recognition. When we say we do not have hope, that we are disappointed, the issue is the certainty of faith. Therefore, we have to insist on this certainty, and the path we must follow is to reach a certainty that is greater each time.
To arrive at a faith that is certain, mature, we need to travel along the path traced out by the disciples, following two indications of method: living with this Presence over time, and paying attention to signs. The more one follows a path in the presence of Christ, the more he sees the hundredfold in his life.
6. Hope and Poverty
If God, God present, Christ—because God works through Christ—if Christ gives you the certainty of fulfilling what He makes you desire, then you are extremely free from things. The image of freedom is born—most of all, freedom from things [as we see in the Gospel of this weekend, where Jesus is totally free from the temptations of the devil]. You are a slave of nothing, you are bound to nothing, you are enchained to nothing, you depend on nothing: you are free. […] Poverty is revealed as freedom from things inasmuch as it is God who fulfills desires (Is It Possible to Live This Way? 2: 90).
7. Gladness
From freedom from things, which poverty engenders, a feeling is born that is possessed only by the poor, that is, by those who don’t place the hopes of their lives in determined things that they have chosen….
From this freedom from things, which is born from the certainty that God Himself fulfills everything, another characteristic of a person who is poor arises, which is gladness….
From freedom from things—that comes from the certainty that God fulfills—a condition of gladness: it is here that faith gives birth to gladness. Faith does not give birth to gladness immediately, but mediate-ly: from faith, hope is born; gladness is in hope because gladness cannot be earned and lived if not in the certainty of a future…. The condition of gladness has its roots in faith: it is this attitude with which Saint Paul lived and which he described in a passage of the first letter to the Corinthians…:
“I tell you, brothers, the time is running out. From now on, let those having wives act as not having them, those weeping as not weeping, those rejoicing as not rejoicing, those buying as not owning, those using the world as not using it fully. For the world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor 7:29–31).
The substance of the world is not in what you see. The consistency of life, the happiness that the future holds for us, is not in what is seen. The visage of this world is passing, the consistency of our contentedness is not in what is seen; this is the description that is motivated by gladness. Gladness is something that exists because it rests on something that remains, even if the visage of this world, what appears now, passes….
It means that hope cannot be placed in the fact that one has a wife, one has a fiancé. Gladness is not derived from that; contentedness, which is more or less passing, is derived from that, but not gladness, because gladness rests on a possession whose perspective never ends (Is It Possible to Live This Way? 2: 91–93).
8. Creativity
In 1981, after the Italian Catholics had lost the referendum on abortion, Fr Giussani said:
We need to become poorer or, rather, certain of some great things. One who is poor is one who is certain of some great things for which he constructs a cathedral even if he lives in a hovel, being a hundred times more a man in this way than he who has as an ultimate horizon in a comfortable apartment)….
This poverty makes us full, free, active, alive, because the law of man—the stable dynamism of that natural mechanism that is called man—is love, that is, the affirmation of Another as the meaning of the self…. Poverty is a very adult conquest.
To be certain of some great things: this is faith. The word faith describes the essential relationship with “something else” apart from us, apart from our opinions, our projects, the results of our actions: an Other, greater than everything that we can conceive and construct, on which our ultimate being depends, our destiny.
The people who built the [Cathedrals] were poor because they were certain of some great things, greater even than the work that they were capable of completing. Only the relationship with this “something other” allows the building of great and beautiful works, allowed them to build unceasingly and to surpass themselves even in the beauty of what they created. Faith is certainty of a “great Presence” that allows the building of my relationship with reality, of my work and of my involvement in society, that allows my work to become something useful and “beautiful” before my eyes. Beautiful, because if it doesn’t become a work of art, man’s accomplishments are not human (Un avvenimento di vita cioè una storia, 143–144).
“Faith is certainty of a ‘great Presence’ … that allows … my involvement in society … to become … a work of art.” Thus, what is given to us becomes a gift to others. In his Armenian Sketchbook, already quoted, Vasily Grossman sighs:
What simple and frugal means nature uses to create a picture of extraordinary power. A calm and clear winter’s day, snow on the mountains, pine trees. Some white, some green, some deep blue… […]
A man looks at this clear silent world, a world of crystal peace and purity, and decides that he does not need the valley of everyday life, that its vain bustle is destroying his soul. Tempted by the great purity of the snowy summits, he imagines feats of asceticism. He sees a little shack in the woods; he hears the sound of a mountain stream; he gazes at the stars glimmering among the pine needles. […]
We imagine that there are no hermits left in the modern civilized world. Really, however, there are a great many of them […]. Their cells are disguised; they are located in modern cities, in communal apartments, […] [they] work as painters and decorators, or in factories and ministries. They wear smart jackets [and] autumn coats […].
But they too have withdrawn from the world. They too are desert hermits—like those heroic ascetics who, long ago, wore torn animal skins and shirts woven from dry grass as they sought for some supreme revelation. […]
What unites all these […] people is that their worldly lives do not matter to them; what matters to them are their hours of seclusion, their lives as hermits. All serve their god in secrecy. Non aspire to return from the wilderness and tell other people about the illumination that has visited them there. […]
There are many hermits in our modern world, but few prophets and preachers (126–131).[1]
9. The Need for Contemporaneity
Attention: this road from faith to creativity and missionarity—via hope, poverty, and gladness—is not “consecutive” but, so to say, “simultaneous.” Only a Christian experience in the present—“the road has come to you; arise, and walk”—permits hope, with all its fruits.
It is not enough to “have run” once into this road. Fr Giussani said, famously: “What we know [this road] or what we have becomes experience if what we know or have is something that is given to us now—there is a hand that offers it to us now, there is a face that comes forward now, there is blood that flows now, there is a resurrection that happens now. Nothing exists outside this ‘now’! Our ‘I’ cannot be moved, aroused, that is, changed, if not by something contemporaneous—an event. Christ is something that is happening to me [now].” In fact, the verb in Augustine’s phrase, ipsa via ad te venit, can be both perfectum and praesens (“the road itself comes to you”).
Where does this happen now, where does this road come to me now?
10.“The Important Thing in Life Is Recognizing a Master”
I conclude with some phrases Fr Giussani said in Varigotti in 1968:
We learn this path by walking! Maturity comes by doing. But how can you walk, if you do not know [if you have not yet experienced] the way? Therefore, the norm, the fundamental rule for this history, for this journey is just this: following, to follow. To follow! To follow those who already know the path, however they walk it. Because a teacher shows you the way, with confidence, with persuasiveness, by demonstration.
Your project to grow in maturity cannot come from you... The important thing in life is recognizing a master, a teacher!
Because you do not choose a teacher: you recognize him!...
This is called authority, we all agree, it’s called authority, but for the love of God, destroy the blasphemous concept of authority as you think of it! Because it is really a corpse, mummified. The concept of authority you have is a fossil. It comes from a schematic that makes me furious, I mean, outraged, when I come across it. Because authority is not at all identifying with the person, but rather identifying with the person as a set of values, with the person’s values…. What are these values? Everything that helps you understand and trains you to live the instant proportional to its destiny. Every instant according to its content, your relationship with your girlfriend or with your father and mother, or your teachers at school, your political group or with your community that weighs on you because it doesn’t do just what you’d like.
I am fragile, my friends…, because I live by this following alone. What I am is because of the experience of following I live. A following that passes through the signs of people, of men and women, those signs who are the people God had me meet; but, over time, though always in following these people, becomes more and more clearly and directly Christ who is the only master: “You have but one Master!”
The author has not revised the text and its translation.
