Why Does God Dedicate Himself To Me?
Simone Riva - “Why does God dedicate himself to me? Why does he give himself to me by creating me, by giving me being, that is, himself (he gives me himself, that is, being)? Why, moreover, does He become man and give Himself to me in order to make me innocent again and die for me (which there was absolutely no need for: all it took was a zic of the thumb and middle finger, and the Father would have acted by force)? Why does he die for me? Why this gift of self to the extreme conceivable, beyond the extreme conceivable?”
Fr. Giussani, in “Can One Live Like This?” unsettles with this question that, like the most radical questions, leaves no escape: Why does God dedicate himself to me?
The approach of Christmas, in effect, overturns the usual logic whereby we would always be the ones to take, or should take, a step toward the other. Goodness, voluntarism, moralism are dissolved at the source by God's initiative to dedicate himself to us. He could have done without it, he could have avoided it, and, as St. Bernard effectively put it, “He wanted to come the One who could have been content to help us.”
By taking the initiative to enter into our human, Jesus definitively occupies the role of the protagonist of history, that of today, of the “here and now,” which we all must face. The one that becomes our story, mine and yours, and that awaits us at the door when everything seems too little, too small, insufficient to meet our need.
Habits, shortcuts, achievements, commitments are not enough for us. Words, reasoning, arguments, insistence are not enough for us.
We are not satisfied with the opportunities to prove ourselves right, the illusions we fill ourselves with believing we are number one and win easily with everyone. These oppositions force us always to have an enemy to fight to believe we are alive. Time passes and we realize that all these things do not hold up. They demand great investments of energy; they drain the mind and heart, but they need to be more, they are hopelessly insufficient.
That is why God has dedicated Himself to us. In this insufficiency, he has found an ally to show us the difference of His way of being, present and protagonist, “beyond the extreme conceivable.”
Echoed are those facts that speak of an unpredictable superabundance. There is a knock at the door, during class, of three pupils from another class — the more agitated one — to bring me a piece of cake from the 18th birthday of one of them.
That means they went to see what class I was in, “took a chance” themselves, and put themselves on the line. They gave face, hands, feet, and heart to the great Protagonist who only has in mind to devote himself to us.
And I, who was already getting angry that they had interrupted the class, had to come to terms with that impetus I had on me to verify the real reason they had knocked, inviting me out for a “surprise.” God is dedicated to us because He knows well that even if we look forward to good surprises when they come, we miss them. After all, they disturb us.
“Why does he die for me? Why this gift of self to the conceivable extreme, beyond the conceivable extreme?” We cannot but be continually displaced by questions such as these if we are not to run the risk, to borrow a lapidary phrase from Eliot, of “losing life by living.”
The author hasn’t revised its translation.
