What Do We Need to Live

Emilia Guarnieri - For so many, the long-awaited holidays have begun. We may be surrounded by the beauty of nature or enjoying the cherished company of family and friends. But we know that life is not made up of separate parts. We know that contradictions do not leave us. We continue to experience our own fragility, including that of us adults, not just the young. The madness of violence continues to rage around us. It is difficult to put this world in order, to rearrange everything and start again. These are the realities in which we are called to live.

Then it is legitimate to ask, "But what do we need to live in this situation?" Are vacations, economic well-being, stable affections, personal success, physical health, fulfilled desires enough? All of these are certainly factors to be sought after and for which to be thankful. But experience tells us that all too often even these factors are not enough to live by. The tragic stories of suicides, of desperate violence, of desolate situations of unhappiness, tell of that weariness that Pavese had so effectively described in Dialogues with Leucò. "The endless fatigue, the effort to stay alive from hour to hour, the news of the evil of others, of petty evil, annoying like flies in summer-this is the life that cuts off the legs".

Perhaps it is no coincidence that in Pavese's text these words are addressed by a man to a deity. And that it is she, the goddess, who reminds the human interlocutor that human life has to do with the world of the gods. "You know that immortal things you have them at your doorstep. You must live for them. Every gesture you make repeats a divine pattern". Perhaps it is in the proximity of these immortal things that lies the beginning of a possible hope for life? But how does one live for them, as the goddess suggests?

Let us leave, however reluctantly, the evocative language of poetry and try to translate the question into the terms of a more everyday language. After all, by introducing the theme of the relationship with the divine, the quoted dialogue enters into the question of religion or religions. We live in a time of secularization, but, perhaps paradoxically, there are many who talk about religions. From those who consider them guilty of wars and conflicts, to those who, in the name of a desperate secularism, would like to banish them from public life, to those who have no qualms about making them the object of ridicule, not to mention those who manage to turn them into a political banner. But beyond these reductive juxtapositions, religions are a far more serious matter.

Since time immemorial, in the most diverse historical contexts, people have sought an answer to their agonizing question of meaning, of the life that cuts off their legs. And religions, often in the midst of so many contradictions, have been a point of comparison in this search. Today we live in a secularized age. The propositionality of religions has diminished, but man's need, his irreducible desire for meaning, has not diminished. Our daily experience tells us this. If we let the heart speak, we find that we are truly defined by a restlessness in which, as Montale said, “all images carry written ‘on.’”

Nothing is enough for us. We need to be touched by these “immortal things. We need to realize that we really have them “at our doorstep. It is so close to being identified in a piece of bread we can eat and in a person we can embrace. We do not deserve it, but it happened to us. Christianity has happened to so many. And it continues to happen as a present event. As Pope Ratzinger said in his first encyclical, “At the beginning of being a Christian, there is not an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather the encounter with an event, with a person who gives life a new horizon and thus a decisive direction.”

A collection of unpublished talks given by Fr. Giussani to young people at the Peguy Center in the years between ‘68 and ‘70 has just been published by Rizzoli Editions. The priest addresses those early Giussanians who, now entering adult life, want to continue their school experience in their relationship with him. The texts convey the passionate power of the Christian experience that Giussani wants to continue to share with his friends. “We must help each other so that this passage from faith and hope as a state of mind to the judgment of the world, the passage to a criterion of judgment, takes place in us.” Giussani’s words vibrate when he recounts how Christianity began: “How did they begin to believe? What was the event that aroused such interest that people for the first time had faith kindled in them, that the Christian began to be in the world? They did not believe because Christ spoke and said these things, they did not believe because Christ performed these miracles, and they did not believe because Christ raised the dead. They believed because Christ appeared. They believed because of that presence. They believed because of a presence charged with a proposal, therefore a presence charged with meaning.”

The title of the volume — “A Revolution of the Self - Life as Communion” - can be an invitation to be “revolutionized”, or “shaken”, as Giussani says, by this very event. An invitation to check again, or‌ for the first time, if this meaningful presence is enough to live. Because that is all we need, something that doesn’t depend on our achievements or our abilities, on our possessions or our plans, that doesn’t retreat in the face of our fears or our anxieties, but that mysteriously reappears in our lives, embracing us and enlarging our hearts once again to desire that fullness for which we were created.

Translated and edited by the Editorial Team at Epochal Change from Giuseppe Reguzzoni’s Article published on Ilsussidiario.net. The author has not revised the translation and editing; it is for educational use only. Download.