Vocation, Freedom and Destiny
Julián Carrón - Through the Circumstances: Vocation, Freedom, and Destiny in Dialogue with Julián Carrón.
Moderator: We are lucky to have Julián with us, so let’s get started. I’ll read something he said the day before yesterday during a meeting on Christmas at the San Michele Arcangelo Foundation: “We are interested in understanding more and more the significance of the circumstances in which we are called to live our lives—life as a vocation.
https://www.epochalchange.org/articles/life-as-vocation
“And what is a vocation? To understand the significance of our circumstances, to walk towards our destiny? ‘Living our vocation,’ says Giussani, ‘means striving towards the destiny for which life is made. This destiny is Mystery; it cannot be described or imagined. It is established by the same Mystery that gives us life.’
Therefore, we don’t decide our destiny. So, what is the destiny that the Mystery that gives us life has set for us? Our fulfillment, our happiness. The Mystery didn’t create us for any other purpose than to achieve happiness!
“‘To live life as a vocation means to tend towards destiny, towards the Mystery, through the circumstances that the Lord puts us through, responding to them […]. A vocation is therefore to go towards destiny, embracing all the circumstances through which destiny puts us.’” (L.G. Realtà e giovinezza. La sfida, Rizzoli, pp. 64-65).
Giussani, as you can see, emphasizes that a vocation exists not “despite” circumstances—it doesn’t come about “despite” circumstances—but precisely through them. Every situation, every encounter, every challenge that reality presents us with—and there are many—is an opportunity to discover and live our destiny, our task in life.
Nothing, therefore, is to be discarded.” This perspective excites me, not because I feel adequate, but as a possibility for life. Everything is part of the journey if we use everything that happens to walk towards our destiny. But it doesn’t seem that way to us! It often seems that not all circumstances are opportunities, but only some! It seems to us that some are to be discarded.
Julián: Hello everyone, good evening. It’s always a pleasure to see you. This is exactly what we need to understand because it might seem like a sentence written on the wall, said just like that. So, if the first provocation of reality doesn’t add up, we say, “This circumstance is to be discarded.”
Instead, the whole journey I made the day before yesterday is to show how any circumstance, if you follow it through to the end, leads to fulfillment—“living reality intensely,” as it is written in the tenth chapter of The Religious Sense we are working on, without discarding anything.
“Intensely” doesn’t mean living with I don’t know what willful act or what mechanical effort; it doesn’t mean clenching your fists tightly! It means not stopping until you discover how circumstances are decisive for your vocation.
This changes everything, because when you see people who go along with the provocation of circumstances—and we have many among us who can testify to this—you discover that people flourish and don’t complain!
Others, on the other hand, in the same circumstances, complain all the time. So, we’d better get to the bottom of the circumstances! If we don’t understand them, circumstances appear to be obstacles—as the text that has just been read said; instead, they are not “despite” the circumstances but through them.
If you have children, you can see that a child is the most straightforward proof that what you have just read is true; for a child, any circumstance—crying, being hungry, being afraid, missing something—is not an obstacle to living, but a remarkable opportunity because, through it, the child can be in relationship with his father and mother.
Dare anyone deny this evidence that, at every moment, can be seen in the relationship with children? If this is the case—and we see it in children—it can also be the case for us. The problem is that, for this to happen, we need to become children; we need to become like children, says Jesus. We don’t believe that what Giussani says is true.
So we get lost; we constantly get stuck in so many problems that, instead of being a path to destiny, they become a stumbling block! But not because they are a stumbling block. It’s as if a child, when afraid, becomes stuck in his fear and, instead of going to his parents, he stands still, saying, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid…”
Or when he is hungry, he freezes instead of using his hunger to turn to his parents. And what would you say to him to help him? “Can’t you see I’m here?” The circumstance is an opportunity to start a relationship. It’s easy! Otherwise, Christianity wouldn’t be for me. And it wouldn’t be Christianity!
On the contrary, Christianity is for everyone! It is within everyone’s reach. The problem is that we have projected onto Christianity something that it is not because Christianity is what you see in children. This is why Jesus, taking a child and placing him amid the disciples, said, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Life multiplies in intensity; everything can be lived a hundred times better! The example of the child is the example of living, not because the child doesn’t make mistakes all the time: he makes mistakes, he stumbles, but he constantly returns to his father and mother, and any situation can be an opportunity for a relationship with them. If we learned from our children, everything would be easier.
This is the simple meaning—as you can see, within the reach of children—but very profound meaning of this sentence by Giussani: “We walk towards our destiny through circumstances.” Through circumstances, we progress towards a relationship with destiny—that is, with Christ.
When a child accepts to live as a child and not as an orphan, even though he has parents, you can see that life is much better. However, if we prefer to live as orphans, then life becomes complicated, much more complicated. It’s not that one decides to live as an orphan because one doesn’t have parents—we all have parents; hands up, who doesn’t have parents?
So, we can all go to our destiny through circumstances, like children, because He made us so open that only by going with circumstances like children, can we reach the purpose for which we were made. However, circumstances don’t work mechanically. A child may be hungry—this is something that comes about naturally—or he may be afraid, but he can decide to give in, or he can decide to use that fear to look for another. And this is where the whole game is played.
Intervention: I want to tell you what’s happening to me. A week ago, I found out that I had lung cancer; I never imagined it could happen to me again. The first time, as soon as I was told that I had cancer, I took stock of my life: I had lived little, badly, and so on. Instead, the Lord filled me with certainty, and a whole story of certainty was born.
This time, I had been going through a period in which I always realized that I was very dry, and when I was told about the tumor, I immediately thought, “Maybe I’ll see you soon.” This surprised me a lot, and I said, “Wow! It’s impressive that He favors me so much that I can say to Him, ‘Maybe I’ll see you soon.’”
The other aspect that struck me was that I perceived this circumstance as a “being visited” because the tumor is part of me, but I didn’t give it to myself; it’s an inexorable presence. I remember that some time ago you said that the circumstance is not only a presence but is inexorable.
This inexorability, instead of oppressing me, was a liberation—because the circumstance is of an Other. I’m a bit like a social worker who must constantly try to solve problems; that’s how I was trained. In this case, however, in which I have nothing more to do, I feel a great liberation! It occurs to me that when Father Luigi Giussani was ill, he said to me, “You see, I can’t talk to you anymore because I don’t have the strength. But I’m pleased (despite all the effort it takes to accept the situation) because now I obey. I’ve always been afraid of not obeying; now that I’m in an unavoidable situation, I’m glad.” At that moment, I understood what freedom is: it’s being faced with an inexorable presence. I have nothing more to do except follow someone who has visited me. And this strikes me.
Intervention: I’ll start with an episode that happened to my wife and me. A couple—husband and wife—with a daughter who plays volleyball with one of our daughters called us one day and said, “Look, we need to have a coffee with you.”
We go to the appointment, and they tell us that with their first child, the situation is very difficult: the boy is totally out of control, he’s also a bit violent, and in the town where they live, he has started to keep bad company.
They are anxious and tell us, “We have observed that you have good children, so let’s try to get them together with our children so that he can recover. We see that they have a friendship, an environment, that they go to the oratory.” Regarding the phrase “they’re good, they have a circle of friends…,” I thought that at a meeting in Treviglio, you spoke of a “bubble.”
In reality, recently, each of my children, in different ways, for different reasons and situations, has shown infinite fragility in the face of life and circumstances that have proved harsh. This surprised and worried my wife and me, making me say, “Wow!
I didn’t think they were so fragile.” So, talking about my children also with friends who are here, what I have in mind is that it’s not so much a problem for my children, but first and foremost a problem for me: their happiness is on the same road as my happiness, and so how can I help them? I can help them if I look into what I have seen and what I have encountered, and that responds to that desire for happiness that I have—doing things with joy despite the difficulties.
Towards the end of another meeting that you held in Pescara, the speaker asked you almost unexpectedly, “You have many young people in front of you; what do you wish for them? To be free or rebellious?”
Commenting on this question, a friend of mine said to me, “I would have said free”; I, honestly, without trying to be clever, said about myself, “Well, almost free, quite free, more or less free,” but you, out of the blue, said, “Rebels, in the true sense of the word, meaning that they should not be satisfied with less than everything their heart desires, because this is what will make them truly free.”
Here you make a statement that I can’t grasp or, in any case, in concrete terms, I can’t understand.
Julián: We often know what concept lies behind this alternative. And I haven’t given up on this. It’s not that when I say “rebels,” I’m saying “let them fend for themselves.” We live in an existing state of affairs in which people are satisfied with anything! And to say “rebels” in that context is like what Giussani says: “I hope you never settle!” In fact, only those who are not satisfied, only those who are never satisfied, will be able to 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!
This is what we saw in the seventh and eighth chapters of The Religious Sense, which is called “freedom”: freedom is the fulfillment of desire. This is the decisive question we so often don’t understand; more often than not, we want adequate children who don’t make a mess and aren’t themselves.
So we’re more at ease, let’s face it. So often, we prefer a child who is always in order rather than one with something that makes him boil inside. But we wouldn't be here if I hadn’t been rebellious in some way, even within a certain order—I’ve told you many times—if I hadn’t indulged my humanity.
Therefore, the problem is what we mean by certain words—if we are truly loyal to the gift that the Mystery has given us—as the text we read before said because we don’t decide our destiny! We don’t determine the tension towards fullness and fulfillment; we were made with it.
Therefore, “being rebellious” means being rebellious against any attempt at power, because any power tries to lower the need for fullness and is thus against the humanity of man—and children.
Since God is patient with us, we too must learn patience with the children and the young people we meet because only if they are “restless” will they be able to settle for more.
Those who settle for less will be poor wretches because they will never feel at ease. We all have in mind the parable of the prodigal son: the brother conformed, even if he went to his father’s house complaining. He risked nothing, he didn’t break anything, but is this the kind of life we want? To live at home as a servant, after all?
Or risk making mistakes to be able to verify the difference between my clumsy attempts and realizing what it means to have a father, thanks to whom life is fulfilled? We want to skip the step of freedom constantly. We can’t—we’ve always said—reach the destiny for which the Mystery made us if not through freedom! And we find it very difficult to pass “through freedom.” For the Mystery, it would have been easy and would have cost him much less to generate another being that perfectly fulfilled the rules of nature, as he did with the stars, the sparrows, or the dogs: one more being… perfect! But he preferred one who loved him freely. Don’t you agree? And it’s not as if, as I always say, you need to be very intelligent or God to realize that if you create a free being, some inconvenience may arise.
But if we are not the first to cheer for the journey of our children or for the journey of each of us—even if we stumble, even if we grope, even if we make ironic attempts—the journey will never be theirs, because “one cannot go to destiny,” says Giussani, “if not through freedom.” If we didn’t go to our destiny through freedom, it wouldn’t be our happiness—mine or any of us!
Lastly—this is another fundamental passage of what we have said regarding the circumstances—it is a moment in which we are challenged and if we don’t look deeply into it to understand that this passage is decisive for us, for our children, for young people everywhere, we don’t understand what it means to be rebellious! So, we interpret things backward and want people to be formally in order.
However, this “formally in order” does not mean fulfillment; it will never be fulfillment; it is simply being satisfied with less than what the heart desires. “All this is too little for the soul's capacity,” says Leopardi. And when one has not found what is adequate to his capacity, he is always restless. For this reason, if we confuse this restlessness with a sort of rebellion, we are completely mistaken.
“Rebels” means to indulge in this restlessness because the Mystery has put it inside us; indeed, it pushes us every moment from within! We take desire and restlessness for granted, but if the Mystery didn’t constantly stimulate us, we would all already be brain-dead!
We rebel against this desire, but without this desire and restlessness, what would life be? It would be lived less and less, and therefore, it would be absolute boredom. Therefore, I don’t know if it’s better for us to have the idea that we have: “It would have been better if He had done it differently.”
It is difficult to find a better order than the one that the Mystery has made. We have to correct the whole design because it doesn’t add up… But it would be enough, as I always tell you if He hadn’t created freedom: everything would have gone perfectly. Everything would be mechanical, following the fixed laws of physics.
But would that be human? If we don’t start, like you did, from the circumstance that provokes, or that bothers, or that doesn’t add up, to investigate the nature of the circumstances themselves—to be able to perceive them as an essential part of the path to destiny—they are a millstone around our necks.
On the other hand, when one understands them, they can be tiring; they can sometimes even be unpleasant, like the one our friend was just talking about, but they are part of the journey to destiny. In fact, destiny uses an illness that leads one to say, “But why am I made this way?”
How many people, through a similar provocation, recover their lives! Without drama, after all, we lose our lives by living! So, why are circumstances essential? Because they are a constant provocation to our desire for a flat encephalogram. But this has nothing—nothing, nothing—I’ll give it all to you—to do with fulfillment.
Intervention: I want to tell you about something that happened. I’m referring to the meeting we discussed earlier, the one in Treviglio.
That evening, a friend told me he would be there, but I couldn’t go because I had invited people to dinner at my house. As soon as I heard about it, I knew that these people wouldn’t come to the meeting. I called my wife and said, “Let’s cancel the dinner, and I’ll go to Treviglio.”
We started texting each other, and at a certain point, she wrote to me, “Don’t worry, the newspaper is enough. What are you afraid of losing?” Since I’ve always clashed with her on this, I was forced to say—counter-attack, 1-0, ball in the center—“Let’s go see if it’s true,” which seems contradictory to the dynamics of desire.
Saying “look, the newspaper is more than enough” is astonishing, especially when you think, “Well, it’s always the same routine, always the same road to work, always the same activities.” Instead, in what you say, I’m discovering that in the end it all comes down to a choice—not only of freedom but also of reason. That is, “Let’s go and see if there’s anything!”
So, I notice, for example, the colleague whose son died three years ago, whom I asked, “When shall we say Mass for him?” And she was surprised that I had asked her because, in three years, no one had ever asked her—neither colleagues nor relatives. And I was surprised too because she was surprised. Is this how the dynamic of desire works?
Julián: Absolutely. Why did you tell your colleague this? Because you, having grasped the significance of what this event meant for her, took the initiative with her.
Then, as your wife says, the verification of what happens at certain moments happens in everyday life. Certain moments are like a paradigm, but then the paradigm needs to be verified in everyday life because Jesus says, “Whoever follows me will have a hundredfold here below.” he doesn’t say any circumstance, but he says that in life, everything becomes a hundred times more. In this sense, the problem is whether what we experience, verified in everyday life, makes us understand what the hundredfold means in the daily life that normally trips us up! Because otherwise, we jump from one subject to another, one meeting after another, but we never manage to touch the daily fabric of life so that it can become more and more ours.
This is why Giussani said, “Don’t expect a miracle, but a journey!”—that every step in life is a journey is a step along a journey, and the journey is made step by step in everyday life. So, what one experiences as a decisive moment must then be verified in experience because it is in experience that conviction comes!
Many people do extraordinary things: they go on a trip, they go on an outing, and they realize an image they have in their head, but all this is useless when it comes to facing everyday life.
In fact, as everyone knows, the test of a vacation is the first day of work after the holiday.
A person checks if they want to get their hands dirty—if they have had such an experience of living that they want to get up again in the morning with the awareness that life has been given to them, that time has been given to them, that challenges have been given to them—to check if what they discovered during their vacation also holds up in everyday life!
Otherwise, over time, we become skeptical. Ultimately, it’s all right—we see each other, we’re happy, it’s a pleasant occasion—but if everyday life doesn’t change, we say, “See? Everything is something that leaves no trace.”
That’s why we always need two things: first, something that reawakens us; then if what we experience at certain moments impacts our life—because what convinces us is verification in life. Otherwise, the next time we go somewhere and something awakens in us, after a few days, it’s all over again.
So, this is crucial to understand that not only certain circumstances are valid, but all circumstances! Some particularly relevant ones introduce you to reality, but then you have to verify in every circumstance that life doesn’t spare us—even in a challenge, as our friend was telling us before, like illness.
Intervention: Last week, one of my colleagues got married to a man. He invited us to celebrate with him; deciding to go wasn’t natural. In reality, I went with a friend who is also part of the movement, and we were both happy to have gone for him.
However, I’ve had this question about him all week: not to look at his union as if it were something normal, to which we are all accustomed by now, being surrounded by similar situations, and not to look at him as if I were judging him and saying, “What you are doing is not according to our standards,” because it is not a marriage, but a civil union. However, I’m interested in being able to look at him for who he is.
Julián: You all know the story of the Samaritan woman? How many husbands did she have? And what does Jesus see?
Contribution: Her desire.
Julián: Her desire, her thirst. He doesn’t deny her mistake and even makes her aware of it, but he doesn’t get confused about that woman’s true desire—so much so that as soon as he mentions it to her, she says, “Give me this water.”
The real issue is that He takes the person where they are but doesn’t just focus on one part of the person, because He knows that the person is not their mistakes; they are always something more than their mistakes. And if we reduce the person to their mistakes, we are making a mistake ourselves.
So, one must look at the person for the fullness of desire to which they are called. Once this has happened, the challenge is no different from the one with whom you are legally married.
The challenge is whether we are as aware of what we are experiencing with one as with the other. And who is to say that this person, with all their drama, is not more troubled than the other who has everything in order? Who can say? What does this mean for us? What are we being asked to do?
Look at the other person, as Jesus does with that woman, for who they are! The rest will be their problem. And who knows if you, living this challenging situation to be able to stand before him, need such an intense memory that doesn’t allow you to forget that the other person cannot be reduced to their mistakes.
And so you need to grow in your awareness of what it means to be human, of what we were originally given, which is the nature of our nature, which remains intact in him too—so that you know, when you look at him, that he has this desire inside him that not even he is consciously aware of.
Only if there is someone who looks at him in this way will he have the chance to see the full density of the desire he has inside him awaken. This is what Jesus constantly bears witness to. He goes to Zacchaeus’ house and doesn’t get stuck on everyone else's thoughts.
Everyone says, “He’s gone to be hosted in the house of a sinner.” One could give in to that evidence, but instead, He challenges everyone, going against everyone’s opinion! And the unimaginable happens: that gaze can awaken the conscience to such an extent that Zacchaeus begins a new life—limping, groping his way, like all of us. Christ did not give in to what everyone thought. We live in a society like that.
This doesn’t mean justifying; it means looking at the man, the woman, the colleague, the son, and the student with the same awareness with which we felt we were being looked at. Because if we hadn’t been looked at like that, we—who were in the same situations as everyone else—would be like everyone else.
But this, instead of weighing us down, makes us even more aware of the grace that has happened to us! And so we can live even when faced with situations that don’t change from one day to the next because we can live by this grace, waiting for the right time—like God, who lives so full of the mystery of the Trinity that he can wait.
Otherwise, if one doesn’t live by this, he can run over the other and throw everything in his face. But it takes much more superabundance to not asphalt it and wait for it to reach its fulfillment than to asphalt it freely.
To asphalt it, nothing is needed; emptiness is enough. To look at it this way, superabundance is necessary! “Because I (as they often ask me), in the meantime, what do I do?” The problem is the “meanwhile.” What do I live on? One lives off the superabundance that one has received.
If we didn’t live off this superabundance, we would give in to acting like everyone else. I was struck by something a friend said recently: he felt hurt by a situation, and he reacted as one sometimes does. Then he asked me what he should do, how he should respond to this hurt. Then, at a certain point, he experiences a series of circumstances that fill him with gratitude.
And I connect that moment with the wound. “In that moment,” he says, “I didn’t need revenge. Because even revenge was too little compared to what I was experiencing as fullness!”
The problem is not that we have to be consistent: it’s not a problem of consistency, it’s not a problem of voluntary effort, it’s not a problem of energy—it’s a problem of superabundance.
Paradoxically, these circumstances lead us to ask ourselves: what is the purpose of life? If the purpose of life is not fulfillment, not this superabundance, we act like everyone else. Instead, if the purpose of life for us—wherever we are on the road—is to live more and more of this fullness, this makes us free to leave free space for others so that they can travel the road according to a plan that is not ours. If they don’t discover this plan through freedom, they won’t perceive it as adequate to their needs; it won’t be fullness for them!
If God had wanted, he would have set laws from the beginning that are carried out mechanically, but if it were a mechanical law, I would not perceive it as my happiness, as my fullness!
As you can see, in order to talk about a particular aspect, we are forced to go to the very end. And in this, circumstances are an essential factor of our vocation, because the temptation is to remain all in the familiar—that is, not to travel this road.
If you didn’t find yourself facing such a challenge—or each of us facing the challenges, we face—you wouldn’t be forced to travel the whole road yourself! Not him! Your colleague will have to do his own thing, but you, to stay ahead of him without paving the way for him, without giving him a hard time, you have to wait for him to reach his goal freely—so that he can perceive it as his own; otherwise, you wouldn’t be able to resist.
For this reason, paradoxically, circumstances are an essential factor of vocation. In every circumstance, each of us has our own challenge, which annoys us, or makes us furious, or brings out all the anger we have inside. What if this were the road that we are forced to walk to our destiny?
Then you start to embrace and love your circumstances, not suffer them, and everything becomes less violent and more peaceful. In fact, we talk about peace, but in the end, violence wins.
Before the holidays, I asked my students, to talk about Christmas, “If you had all the possible and imaginable resources you think you need to change the world, where would you start?” Imagine the varied quantity of answers: war, the world itself, hunger, home… And if there is someone who resists? Violence imposes itself.
Do you see where dictatorship comes from? From a good desire to change the world! But since some resist, violence imposes itself. Think about Christmas. Could this be what can change the world? Does the method God chose challenge our way of thinking and changing the world?
It’s not like we celebrate Christmas for some kind of sentimental escape. It challenges our reason, our way of being in the real world. If someone compares what they can think of to deal with the circumstances and what God did, it seems to me that there’s still something to learn.
Intervention: Thank you, Julián, because you have already partly answered, but I want to ask you about the circumstances. For me, circumstances are very challenging; some serious events have challenged me, and I don’t want to miss out on the best. My brother is going through a very difficult time, and it’s hard for me to be close to him. The challenge is twofold: it concerns my path, and his, even if, for me, mine comes first. I’m asking for your help: how can I not censor myself, and how can I get to the bottom of these circumstances? The other thing that happened is the death of my brother-in-law—life doesn’t spare us any blows.
But there are some beautiful things; not that the death of a loved one is beautiful in itself, but I saw a friend who was here come back from the coffin smiling; she came down the steps of the funeral home smiling.
The other thing is that my brother, despite his enormous difficulties despite being agnostic, told me that he prayed, adding, “It helped me, but I have to be consistent; I can’t just pray when I need to.” I immediately interrupted him and asked him, “Did it help you?” “Yes.” “That’s enough.” I want some help with the question of circumstances; I don’t want to lose them. Sometimes, when I’m with my brother, I feel lost, but I don’t want to eliminate the feeling of being lost; I don’t want to put things right anymore. But I want help because I realize that I have this opportunity to grow.
Julián: Who’s stopping you? Don’t miss out; it’s easy.
Intervention: Everything’s always easy for you.
Julián: I remember once, when I was invited to talk to a group of kids before the state exam, one girl said, “I want to study medicine, but I don’t want to waste the whole summer preparing for the test I’ll have to take.” I immediately cut her off: “Who’s stopping you? Go to the beach!”
She immediately replied, “But I want to study medicine!” “Go for it.” It’s easy, understand? It’s the same for you. What interests me is that in you, as in the girl who then spent the summer preparing for the test, the desire is awakened from within. If I had started to talk about everything, going through all the steps, she would have let me speak for an hour and then she would have told me that I hadn’t convinced her. I know the chickens in my coop.
But at a certain point—as a brilliant theologian says—you have to jump in to understand. If you want to understand water, you have to jump in the water. We can’t wait to understand what water is without getting wet. So, there are certain things that you only understand if you jump in.
It’s the same for you as for me—this, for me, is the fascination of adventure—we can’t understand if we don’t jump in! And what does it mean to throw yourself in? That you, in front of your brother, must decide how to stand in front of him.
You already know what you need to do to stand in front of him—even when he makes you angry, makes you furious, or when you see him fall back into his troubles—you know the way.
You don’t have to perform; we never perform! So it’s easy: you must return to the relationship that generates you. It’s easy, like the small child who goes to that relationship that puts him back in place from hunger or fear. It’s easy.
We want the magic formula, the magic wand, but it doesn’t exist! There is nothing mechanical in human life, which is determined by freedom.
By making that joke to that girl, I made her realize how much she wanted to study medicine and challenged her to go to the beach if she didn’t want to waste time preparing for the test!
But at that very moment, she was surprised at how much she wanted to enroll in medical school; if we, no matter what we do, don’t reawaken in the other person the desire to take the step towards fulfillment, nothing will convince them! For this reason, in every challenge of this kind, your freedom comes into play: my freedom, the freedom of the girl, the freedom of the child. It’s very easy!
For a child to tell his mother he’s hungry is very easy. But we are unwilling to do this: “No, I need to do it myself; I can’t expect the answer to my need only from my relationship with another person.”
And then everything gets complicated! Not so much because it’s complicated, but because we complicate it; the child doesn’t complicate it!
That’s why Jesus uses the child as an example: if we don’t become like children, we won’t enter the kingdom of heaven. We need to stop saying it’s difficult because if it is difficult, Jesus is wrong when he says it’s a “childish” matter. It’s not stupid infantilism—it’s simply recognizing what puts you back on track and puts you back in a relationship.
When you have recovered this recognition, you then have the emotional energy to study during the summer because you have recovered the reason to study and prepare for the test—even if you then failed it.
Intervention: I want to raise a problem. I must be very honest; forgive me for my honesty. I have been in Italy for twenty-nine years since I got married, and in all these years, I have built friendships with people: real friendships made up of relationships in which you risk yourself, move forward, build—together with wounds, tears, and happiness. A year ago, after my husband fell ill, he went on a summer vacation with friends he had never met before, and for the first time in many years, I saw him happy—really happy. I was surprised because I hadn’t seen him like that for a long time. In short, he changed, and I decided to go along with what had happened. I supported him without leaving anything behind, without denying anything, and throwing myself into what was happening to him.
After three years, he fell ill again, and on this occasion, I saw him change even more profoundly; I really felt the presence of an Other that was changing him. He joined the Quadratini group by chance, and I continued to follow him because where he was looking, there was a possibility for me too—and it wasn’t just a theory.
And so I was living my daily life, living it peacefully, but I was also surprised by myself. Then it happened that, with friends we’ve had for a lifetime—whom I care about a lot because we’ve built a history, a path together—three weeks ago, I decided to tell them what had happened to me.
So I told them about my and my husband’s experience of change. When I finished my story, one of them corrected me; he wanted to correct me about my experience, about my change. Since I’m a foreigner, I said, “I don’t know, maybe I misunderstood.” But I hadn’t misunderstood; he had corrected me!
But this dizzying, true, and real experience set me in motion even more—to the point of making me get to the bottom of myself. I haven’t understood everything that has happened to me, and like everyone else, I’m groping in the dark, but I realize that when you experience something like this, there is no going back.
I look for Him, for where He moves me, for where there is life, for where I can recognize Him and continue to recognize Him; anything less is not worth moving for. I care about my friends, and they care about me and our relationship, but when I try to explain what happened to me, they can’t understand me. And here I stumble because, in human relationships, I care about the other person completely.
I don’t worry about one or the other; I know where to look and where to go and keep going. But when they ask me… it takes a lot of freedom and love for myself to look at them and stand in front of them, even if they don’t understand.
Julián: This is amazing and in the most beautiful sense of the word, because when something like this happens, first of all, you really have to get to the bottom of what has happened to you.
So you are right when you ask yourself, “But is it true or not true? Did I understand or didn’t I understand what happened to me?”
So it’s part of the journey that each of us must make with ourselves to reach the certainty we need to continue to adhere to what changed us.
Then, when one communicates this, it’s very normal that the other person may not understand, as happened to you.
Each person has their own path. God’s method is that he doesn’t give his grace to everyone at the same time and in the same historical moment.
We all know that God acts in such a way that he doesn’t give the same grace to everyone at the same time. He gives it to someone for someone else—starting with Abraham, because Abraham is the sign of this new method of God.
Regarding changing the world, when I went to Madrid last year to a meeting I had been invited to on the transmission of faith, at a certain point, I stopped after asking this question: “I’ll give you a second for each of you to think about how you would change the world. I challenge you because none of you would choose what God did: choosing a man like Abraham to change the world.”
Everyone agreed, but no one had thought about it. So, in the method that God uses—precisely because it is the only one that respects freedom—grace is given to one in order to reach others. What you say, I understand. I told the children, “Imagine the man born blind who returns home happy because he could not see before, and now he can.
He meets another blind man he knows, and the latter says, ‘You know, I have something wonderful, something beautiful to tell you: I was given a dog as a guide so as not to bump into walls.’ What could the blind man say? ‘I’m really happy! But it’s not the same as seeing!’
But how can you explain the difference between having a dog and seeing to the other man? And if he then finds himself in front of another blind person who has been given a stick to prevent him from walking into a wall, he can only be happy! How can he explain to someone who can’t see the difference that has happened to him?
If I can see and I tell someone else, and the other person can’t understand, I say, ‘Go ahead! Enjoy your dog.’ I say this without irony: ‘You have been given this; go to the end, verify what you are experiencing.’ We can’t enter into a dialectic based on what someone perceives. We have to support the freedom of others: ‘You see it this way? Go to the end! I’m happy! Because if you don’t see what I see, there’s no way I can impose it on you.’ I have to wait for the other person to see it because there is no other access to truth than through freedom. We always come back to the same point; each person must verify it.
We, too, must verify the path we are taking: does what we have recognized as true fill us with life or not? In this sense, I remind you of the dialog quoted by Ratzinger between the rationalist and the person who goes to pray—the ‘maybe it’s true.’ It’s always a dialectic between ‘maybe it’s true’ and ‘no.’ We will always be like this, but in the meantime, I say to the other, ‘I am happy that you are going your own way, but I cannot give up what totally fills me with fullness.’ Each of us must go our own way; if over time, each of us goes our own way and we meet again, great—otherwise, we will meet in eternal life.
But I cannot renounce what I live and what makes me live because someone else cannot see it! This is the ultimate level of the person who—‘the person,’ says Giussani, ‘is a relationship with the Mystery’—a direct relationship with the Mystery.
And each person plays their own game. This doesn’t mean that, knowing this, I’ll get it right every time; no, I’ll have to verify it like each of you, like the other. Each person’s responsibility before the Mystery is personal, and therefore, each decides.
Whatever path one decides to take because of what has happened in life needs to be constantly compared with elementary experience! We read in the fourth chapter, ‘immanent to the person.’
Let no one think that they can’t learn something new, can’t correct something—we are all at the same point. Therefore, if the dialogue continues in these terms—that each one loves the path that the Mystery makes them take and loves the path that it makes others take—we can continue. I am in contact with many people with whom, being on different paths, I maintain a cordial relationship despite our different approaches.
But I cheer for their freedom as they respect mine. I try to be myself with them. If there is something of what I live that is useful, great; otherwise, they should look elsewhere. And the same goes for any of us. This is the challenge we are facing now, and it can happen anywhere—it can happen with a colleague, with friends, with the last person we meet on the street.
A moment like this is particularly challenging. We are lucky; we have been graced to have met Father Luigi Giussani and to have the tools to judge: tools with which the Mystery throws us into the fray. We can take advantage of them, or we can be at the mercy of everyone.
Intervention (Husband): There’s something I urgently need to say because these circumstances we’re talking about are particularly painful in our case—because less than a month ago, our son passed away after two years of illness.
Two years of illness, during which we saw our son get worse day by day. Sometimes, I don’t deny that in such circumstances, I feel like saying, “What do you want from me? And what do you want from him?” And all the weapons—forgive me if I’m a bit harsh—all the chatter that 25-30 years of movement life are useless.
When someone tells me, “The Lord is sending you a test,” I think it’s a blasphemy to be confessed.
The Lord cannot send such a test to a nineteen-year-old, nor to a family, nor can he try to teach us something through such a method. The experience I’m having is bringing with it, on the one hand, great pain and on the other, great anger. I walk around during the day as if I had a sword stuck in my stomach—like this all day long.
And yet, and yet—and here I connect with what we were saying—I would have to be deeply disloyal to deny that incredible things are happening through this experience. The example my son set during his illness: nine days before he died, he took two exams at university, getting a 30 in Mechanics and a 26 in Statistics—and getting angry because he couldn’t think of the exercise during the Mechanics exam. It’s something that made me follow my son. I’ve often said, “I feel like my son’s son” because of the position he held.
Intervention (Wife): I was also sick and had to undergo chemotherapy; despite the fatigue, which I also know, my son did everything he was asked to do and had to do to the maximum. He was a teacher, and on Wednesdays—chemotherapy day—he had to rest for two hours to go and teach at the oratory. The same is true with studying: he struggled because he had oxygen, yet he studied until the very end.
Husband: It’s hard to accept. I have a big question about him, but about me, I see what’s happening, and I’m amazed. I don’t deny that now and then I’m tempted to say, “Keep these things and give me back my son!” However, from the university, for example, we receive letters of thanks from people who have never met my son and from his friends for the way he lived with his illness.
Wife: It’s as if he had taught us that evil, as my husband was saying before, does exist, but not only that—because we are free, as you said before, and Jesus is there and is giving us many signs to tell us this.
He was unwell during the night, and the next day was my birthday; my friends didn’t know anything about it, and they gave me a statuette of the nativity scene that I adore: a mother carrying the baby on her shoulders to see Jesus. When they gave me this statuette—and even now—even though I know the good and the signs that reality does not deceive, the positivity that has arisen from that moment, I feel like saying, “Okay, but I want my son, Jesus, to see it here.”
We can’t say we’re crushed by grief, and I see people who see their cross not just as an overwhelming weight. But despite this, I would like my son to be here—even with the certainty of Heaven and the certainty that he is in Heaven. We have been part of the Movement for many years; he was an oratorian, but many young people have noticed that there was more to this story than just desperation.
And some have thanked us because they thought they were coming to say a rosary in a house where there was only despair: “We came expecting to see a defeat. Instead, we saw the thousands of people there, and we saw that he had a happy face.” Although similar events happen daily—I could tell you about them ad infinitum—I would still be inclined to say, “I wish he were here; I wish I could see him here… But it’s not like that.”
Husband: I recognize—because I shouldn’t be disloyal, as I said before—that incredibly, reality has a positive note.
And I say this with a sword in my stomach. Of course, it’s a struggle to reaffirm this. It’s a daily battle I must redo every second—not every day, but every second. When my son was ill, people from all over the world prayed for him—from the United States to Russia—and it was all in vain, so I think, “Well, okay, now I want to see you win; now I want to see you win.” The problem is that then I realize that I create the images of how Christ should win.
Julián: Perfect. I was about to ask you how you know if he wins?
Husband: How do I know if he wins? I have my images, Julián.
Julián: But are you sure that this image you have is the victory?
Husband: No, it’s exactly what I have to fight against.
Julián: The problem is using reason to the fullest. First of all, can you say that what you saw is everything—can you swear that what happened to you is everything?
Husband: No.
Julián: The challenge is to reason! Because if you can’t swear that what you saw is everything, the only reasonable position is to leave the category of possibility open. And if she is convinced that he is in Heaven, what does it mean to love our child’s destiny more than our own?!
To enjoy the fullness that he now experiences, or for him to return to fill your void? What if this is how the Mystery introduces you to that relationship that your child is already experiencing? Freedom is at stake here. Because I’m not saying that God uses this instrumentally for something else—no, it’s just that we find ourselves faced with this situation.
And this situation leaves everything open. So the real question is whether, when we arrive at a situation like this, we can leave our reasoning open to this possibility—because otherwise, I would have to say that I am the criterion for judging everything that is or is not there.
And if this is the way in which the Mystery introduces you to the whole, why not get the best out of it?! And also get your son back—in a big way, much more than if he came back?!
Because if it’s not this, I’m not interested. It would simply be postponing the matter for a few years, but if there is nothing else, it’s a defeat for everyone: for you and for your son. And if there is something else, your son is already sharing in the victory and will ask you, “But what are you doing there? With your reasoning, instead of looking at how I am already living my life?”
And he adds, “Why are you wasting time?” This is not mechanical; it is a struggle, as you say—it is a struggle, and in this struggle, the game is played—not by visionaries or devotees.
No, it is played by people who are genuinely themselves with all their openness to the totality of reality, which is reason. Therefore, the greater the challenge, the greater the freedom at stake—because the more serious what is happening, the more dramatic it is, the less it is possible to return to the flat encephalogram we spoke of before.
So the circumstance is an essential circumstance for the vocation! Why has the Mystery decided to call you through this circumstance? I don’t know. Ask Him when you get there. But in the meantime, you already see that this circumstance is now essential for you and your vocation.
And therefore, only those who take risks will be able to discover in experience, leaving this possibility open, and see how life explodes or sinks; this is the struggle.
And we see this here—we won’t see it there. We will see it here. So it’s not that we have to postpone the matter until we’re on the other side… No, now, now. Because it’s enough to leave open this possibility that, through this crack, light begins to enter. I hope you can live with everyone, like everyone else; we haven’t had what you’ve had, but our problem is no different from yours.
You are not more challenged because this has happened to you. My problem, if I live up to my reason, is identical. Two weeks ago, while talking to someone, he told me that he had been rejected as a child, and he said to me, “How can you live without a father when you have lost him because you were rejected?” I said to him, “But have you had other fathers?”
He replied, “Yes.” I told him, “It’s easy; you just have to find another father. If the Mystery gives you the grace to find another father… Have you had another father?” “Yes,” he said. However, I had forgotten to tell him the most important thing. By chance, I saw him two days later, and I said, “I forgot to tell you the most important thing: even if this father abandons you, there is a Father who will never, ever abandon you!”
Furthermore, he was stunned when I said, “What happened to you didn’t happen to me. But my problem is the same as yours.” The problem is whether there is a Father who never abandons us! The fact that there is a father who abandoned you when you were little doesn’t matter; my problem is now.
We—and you too, as you have seen—have wanted to give our children everything they could possibly need. However, the first time you held them in your arms, you already sensed their greatness and little by little, you realized how incapable you were of satisfying their need for happiness.
So the real question for each of us is this: if we reach this point, this overwhelming challenge—we may not get there, but someone who doesn’t deny, or who listens to what you all say, realizes that this is his problem. Or when he happens to have a moment of self-awareness, the drama is the same.
Because if the drama has already been resolved, it’s because there is an Other. Your son’s problem is that he was lucky! I would have gone with your son. Why? Because I know where life is, as Saint Paul says, “For me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” I don’t know what you think, but I assure you that I would have preferred to go with him.
Do you want me to go back to living? I respect your opinion, but if I were in his place, I would say to you, “Thank you, Mom and Dad, but I’m staying here, waiting for you!”
Ugo: Thank you, thank you for everything!
Julián: Thank you.
The author has not revised the text and its translation.
