We Lose Life by Living It
Julián Carrón - Cristina Sánchez Aguilar - The former leader of CL showed his latest book at the Fundación Pablo VI in Madrid. It is a collection of conversations with people from different cultures. He suggests that people interested in Christianity can become Christians by being drawn to them.
The book's title says,” We have never seen anything like it.” What is unique about it?
Julián Carrón - It is the easiest way to communicate to others what Christianity has meant to those who have seen it come into being. I like this phrase because it describes the reaction of ordinary people, Pharisees, or those who belonged to the religious milieu to the event that happened by being with the person of Jesus.
They were so surprised they couldn't help but say they had never seen anything like it in their lives. His humanity, how he looked at people, and his freedom with everyone made him an original presence.
In the book, composed of interviews and lectures from 2017 to the present, we talk about, among other things, the attraction to faith, which cannot be imposed by obligation but spread by contagion. We now find ourselves in a particularly emotional social context, immersed in an ecclesial debate about whether over-emotionality is a sin since it relegates reason to the sidelines to foment a simple attraction.
Julián Carrón - Beauty, by its very nature, attracts. The problem is that it fails to engage if we reduce Christianity to ethics or discourse. But what do we mean by attraction? Every effort made in society and the Church today must be welcomed because we are looking for ways to share Christianity in a way that makes new generations want to believe it. They no longer have the burden of tradition. However, any attempt must be subjected to the verification of what endures over time because it may initially fascinate, but it must possess sufficient density to continue to attract. The attraction must be tested in the “everydayness” of life: in work, in study, in illness, in failures, to see if it endures and if it gives a consistency to life that confirms that, really, we have never seen anything like it.
Perhaps we have focused too much on the experiential aspect, which is fundamental but not sufficient.
Julián Carrón - What is the relationship between initial attractiveness and training? This question is often approached in a dualistic way: I live the experience and then I have to train. But typically this remains external to the person… If we don't touch the center of being, you can have moments of enthusiasm, but the dualism will persist. If people do not grow, they lose life by living. This living does not make a strong person, full of reasons, who is different by how he talks about things. He does not do this just to be religious, but he can talk to reality and face the challenges of life. If not, training will go one way and emotional experience another.
Don't you think we sometimes get lost in numbers?
Julián Carrón - We saw this in Jesus: he attracted crowds, but he was not satisfied with that. He tells us that man does not live alone with bread; many people have bread to live on, but they are not happy. He ups the ante and says that unless we eat his Flesh and drink his Blood, we will not have life in us. It doesn't just depend on things going well at work, in marriage… He wants people who have perceived the greatness of what they have seen.
We go to Jesus to meet our most immediate needs, but the real healing is the relationship with Him. The meeting with Christ makes us want to think and be free. We don’t want the bubbles of champagne, which are too little compared to the need for happiness we must respond to.
We are in a giddy moment, but the irreducibility of the person now emerges. Paradoxically, the more successful things are in people's eyes, the clearer it becomes that it is not enough. The problem today is that we often reduce everything to a psychological matter. But is this a symptom of a pathology or an ontology, that is, of man's nature, whereby everything is insufficient compared to the capacity of his soul, as Leopardi says?
If we do not address this question, Christianity cannot do anything about it.
So how do we resolve it? You are a man of dialogue, something we consider crucial in the Church today. But aren't we in danger of limiting ourselves to dialogue, mostly among ourselves?
Julián Carrón - The only possibility is the unexpected. It is the only hope. And this happens only if Christianity is not reduced to words that fill pages but becomes an encounter with an event, with a person who, living in reality -- in the neighborhood, in the kitchen, in politics -- is different, to the point that others are interested in what he or she lives.
Dialogue is highly valued in his movement, Communion and Liberation, which he chaired until 2021.
Julián Carrón - I have talked to everyone at every level over the years.
Indeed, the book includes interviews with Jot Downmagazine and El Mundo and dialogues with well-known personalities such as Pedro G. Cuartango or Pilar Rahola.
Julián Carrón - You have to reach these people through serious dialogue. It interests me that a person like Pedro G. Cuartango finds an interlocutor capable of establishing a conversation with him in the Church.
If this does not happen, we have lost the battle.
Otherwise, you don't get to challenge people or even get beyond their surface.
This translates into the lives of people who, returning to work after a weekend meeting, conference, or retreat, are confronted by a colleague who asks where they have been because they look different. If this does not happen, Christianity will not communicate.
The authors have not revised the translation.
