Franco Nembrini. Good morning everyone, and welcome to this second meeting with Julián, whom we thank again for the concern and paternity with which he is following us.
On October 14th last, he left us a challenge—education is communication of yourself, of your own way of relating with reality.* I think I can say that this challenge has been taken up by very many of us, with great resolve and commitment, and even by many who are physically absent today, but who are following us through various means of communication; first of all our Italian friends in Calabria, Campania, Puglia and Sicily, and then those who are following us live or by recording, in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Hungary, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Korea, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Nigeria, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Uganda, USA, and Venezuela. Let’s greet them all with a round of applause.
In preparation for today’s event, we have received more than 250 contributions, and since Carrón has asked that this morning session be in the form of assembly, I have asked some of us to come to the microphone and tell us about their experience and ask Julián the questions that seem more crucial. The other day I said to him, “Julián, the questions will probably be the same as in October, but I was so struck by the fact that while on October 14th, we set off from discouragement and tiredness (remember that the first question we asked him was roughly this: “Why on earth do I go on doing this job in these conditions?”); today the same questions are posed from a positive standpoint, a challenge taken up, an effort already at work. Let’s begin.

Stefano:  While my father is going into God’s arms and my children are beginning to grow up, and my life is surrounded by a virile company of men, I am aware that “true reason” is the root of all this, and I want to talk about this.
The October meeting with Franco and Carrón turned my life upside down; it’s as if after a long time the window has reopened, letting fresh air into the room and inviting me to go out. As faras life was concerned, I felt I was in a corner with no prospects, and above all without hope. Yes, I think that this is the real question: without genuine hope.  That meeting set me once more facing the beginning: not the organization of this, that or the other, nor concern for the outcome, not even an assessment of my life counted any more, there was only Him, Jesus, who was coming back to get me or, rather, whom once more I came to see, to feel and perceive as present. The first thing that happened to me is that reality reappeared. For too long, reality had stopped being a given fact for me, and therefore a path for my life, the memory of what I have lived and of how much has been forgiven me. My wife, my children, the friends in the community, my father and my mother: everything had lost its colour and taste. It was there before me without my seeing it or, rather, without my recognizing it. What a surprise it was to notice them! How wonderful it was to notice the timid steps of my children or to be moved at my wife’s face after 25 years of marriage, or to feel love for the destiny of those kids crowding the classrooms in the school where I teach, and to realize that all this is given me now; it is Christ himself who is giving himself to me now! It is incredible: its not enough simply for Christ to be present, I have to be there, too; there’s need for my eyes and hands, for my reason open to what is happening, and for me to be simple before reality.
Recently, the School of Community has been great company for me; it has been like getting a letter from a friend who knows me well, and has helped to turn me round and sustain the enormous provocation that was the meeting with Franco and Carrón. The faith I thought I had, saying, “I am wretch, but at least I’ve got faith,” was precisely what I didn’t have.
Knowing reality for what it is, a given, the trace, His presence. How often, as I read what you write in Traces do I stand before your new humanity that looks once more at everything, truly everything, with the ingenious simplicity of faith. Thus I often find myself in the morning as if looking the other way, already wrapped up in my thoughts. I was never aware of this before, and now the morning for me means getting up and immediately entreating, praying, asking to be able to recognize Him in the day that is beginning. Help me not to lose this attitude.

Nembrini: Thank you, Stefano. This rediscovered attitude of the “I,” this opening of the eyes on a rediscovered reality, is immediately struck, though. by an ocean of need, an ocean of pain that lies before us. I was struck by the fact that many of your contributions start off from this point and put the question: “I try to tackle reality, and I want to; but how can I bear up under the effort, at this evil, this pain inside me and around me?” One contribution spoke of a “suffering humanity I see before me and in which I am submerged”; another contribution spoke of the pain we meet everyday, and asked, “How can we witness that victory you spoke of in October, that certainty, before so much human need?”
As an attempt at an answer, I have asked our friend Lucia from Verona to tell us what happened in Verona in the class in which one of the boys was in the group who killed the young man for a cigarette.
Lucia: In a street in central Verona , on the night of April 30th and May 1st, five boys aged 19-20 beat Nicola Tommasoli, 28, to death because he refused to give them a cigarette. A GS member, Elisa, a classmate of one of the attackers, was struck hard by this fact, and she immediately set herself to write a leaflet that I will now read to you.
“Before the unexpected event, which has hit us very closely, of finding a classmate of ours in prison, the question that arises spontaneously is how is it possible to reach this point, where a small spark provokes a tragedy? We have all asked ourselves this question, both students and teachers, shocked at the millstone that has fallen on us. One could give the banal answer that the fault lies in the fact of belonging to an extremist political group, or that this was an aggressive person, but that’s not enough. These reasons do not really answer those questions. What emerged from a discussion in class is that what led to such a thing is really an emptiness that is in all of us, an emptiness that we all try to fill but that no one can ignore—the need for something that fulfils us, the need that what we do and what we are may not be lost, the need to be taken seriously in the whole of our “I,” always. Raffaele is not a monster, a madman or a maniac, he is a boy who has made a very serious mistake and he will pay for it, but apart from this, he is a boy who has this need, like all of us and his question is ours, too: ‘Why?’ In the same way, Nicola was a young man like us, not an enemy to destroy. He is no more, and his parents ask the same question, ‘Why?’ What is the meaning of that wasted life and of the other lives marked forever? Who can give us an answer true enough to save us from the emptiness around us?”
Elisa got her schoolmates, teachers, and head teacher involved; she met both with resistance and with people ready to acknowledge that her human attitude was able to face up to the tragedy without censuring anything, and this was a provocation for other GS students and for us teachers. Through her initiative, we were able to know reality better, because we had before us a person who was looking at it truly and with the desire to meet everyone in order to witness something new amidst the storm of declarations that wanted to define the case. I want to ask: We have encountered something new for our life and like other teachers we feel a sense of uncertainty and impotence before an ever more threatening human disaster. How can we support  the hope of those around us, of the kids we have in class? Where do we start from to affirm that Christ is the alternative to nothingness.

Carrón: Where do you start from? Where to start from is before our eyes and we don’t see it! Where did that girl start from? We have to look at what is happening before us. What is happening? A girl, the least, the smallest, looked straight at what had happened to her classmate and wrote that leaflet, as we heard. Let’s try to put ourselves  in her place. What set her in motion? What was her point of departure, the origin that made her challenge everyone and risk that judgement in public? It was not particular intelligence, or special knowledge, nor a special energy, but simply the capacity of adhering to something that comes first. She looked at what had happened to that boy, to her classmate with what she had inside her, and this made her sure—it made her overcome the powerlessness we all feel when faced by this sort of thing. It wasn’t because she was better, or had more energy, or was more knowledgeable, but because she was more loyal and simpler in the face of what experience set before her.
I was asking myself this morning what happened when we heard once more the words of the song: “It wasn’t for the thirty pieces of silver, but for the hope that one day he had aroused in me”? Did the hope that He had aroused in you begin to boil again? Or did all the other thoughts predominate, all the other things because, before what happens, are we impenetrable, not letting ourselves be struck and so remain at the mercy of our own thoughts and our abilities (as soon as something happens, we can see that our thoughts and abilities are nothing compared with what happens)?
It’s striking that the Lord should choose a young girl to remind us all of the method, to make us understand that it is not our moods, our worries or our thoughts, but the simplicity of an “I” before what He does. So there is no excuse, there is no fact so nasty that we cannot look at it with that hope that He has aroused in us, for that fact that comes first, before everything else—“I have loved you with an everlasting love, and have had pity on your nothingness.” If we don’t let him come into our “I,” again and again, we are already defeated.
Franco told me that, at times, facing up to all this pain seems almost pointless. It’s just as well that the Mystery did not reason in this way! It’s just as well that the Mystery didn’t think it useless to have mercy on our nothingness, on our pain; and that it was useless becoming Man! It’s just as well because otherwise it would be all over for us. This is why He re-awakens us continually. It’s true that all this is beyond our strength, it’s quite true, and it’s useless to conceal it. This is why we need something other than the things we have in mind and, if we look seriously every day at our need, and recognize what it is that sets us moving again, we can begin to understand how much we need this look full of tenderness for our nothingness in order to set off again. The problem is that this seems little to us; our worries, our thoughts, our meetings all seem more effective and important. They all seem more important, more real, and more crucial than what the Mystery has done and goes on doing, as if He were a little distracted, or rather naïve: to become Man, renounce His role as God, His power…it seems to have little effect on our history, so we give importance to everything other than this. The result is that the first thing that happens confounds us and we are defeated. Well done! Then we ask, “What shall we do?” Perhaps we should begin to follow that fourteen-year-old girl; or that other girl called Mary; when faced with what seemed impossible (nothing is impossible for Him) she was all taken up with that emotion, because God had looked on His servant in her nothingness. What to everyone else’s eyes seemed useless and ineffective for reality, that acceptance, that “yes” was the most decisive thing in history. But we don’t believe in it! So whatever we have to face leaves us confused, overpowered, and defeated. It only needed a girl to take that reality seriously and the whole school was turned upside down. What is more effective than that? Let’s take reality seriously for once! Instead we go on saying, “The family, society, the environment etc…” It’s all nonsense. O, it’s quite true, I know. I used to tell the teachers when I was Head of a school: it’s true that the family…, the society…, it’s all true. But do we have something to offer those kids sitting in front of us? It’s all true, but do those who meet me have the opportunity to meet something, to find an “I” that has something to say about what happens, or not? This requires us not to be the first to be defeated.

Nembrini: Many interventions bring up again the question of unity, in the sense that it seems that personal efforts need to be put into action at once, along with one’s friends, with someone else. Personal effort is being made, but it often remains purely individual, not becoming a communion, not becoming a rediscovered friendship. We live in a nostalgia for a unity that is felt as both necessary and impossible, possibly with our friends, with people of the Movement who are in the same situation, in the same school or in the same town. How can a personal initiative generate a unity, many ask; for example in the same school, amongst people belonging to the Movement who ignore each other? What does it mean to be concerned—you spoke about it in October—for the Church’s presence, the ideal concern for making the Church present where we are? What fosters this expression, what expresses it publicly?
For example, in some towns, some of us have begun again to do School of Community together, and this marks an important point of departure. Then, all at once, it seems that this initiative slips away, changing the method, as you always say. In other words, it becomes once again an organizational concern, as if the problem were to go back to CLE, start the Movement again, start something again, and then everything slips away at once…

Carrón: Stop it! Leave it to Him, He is quite capable! What we have to do is to answer with our “I.” Everything starts from there. The question is that in all these things we think that the “yes” we say is not enough for generating everything, and this can be seen above all in the way we conceive this unity. Franco speaks of “a nostalgia for a unity that is felt as both necessary and impossible.” This is true: it is necessary ,and impossible if it depends on us. So it is pointless for us to worry about it. As we have seen in the School of Community, unity is a consequence. The first unity that came about in history was around a person: Jesus. This was the first unity, the first communion. How was it born? From an agreement between the Apostles? Try to put yourselves in their place: did they come to an agreement? Look at the way we try to generate this unity and compare it with what the Apostles did: we are so frighteningly ridiculous, and we can’t keep to our feet. Why? Because we are so terribly naïve about our human capacity. Fr. Giussani repeated it to us almost every day: all revolutions have sought for this unity and they never achieved it, because it is something impossible for man, so necessary and so longed for, and yet impossible. We can see it. It’s not even possible with the person you love, so what about with others?
So where does this unity come from? How was it born? It is born, was born and will always be born from this identification with something Other that us. We can join together, we can find unity happening (without thinking of generating it ourselves), if we find Someone able to answer all the desires of the heart. Then we can stay together without devouring each other, without all our presumptions overpowering everything else, and be at ease, as if at home, only for one reason: if we find Someone able to fulfil all our expectations, and therefore are able to generate a relationship amongst us that is new, because we are so happy, so fulfilled, so grateful that He has come to meet us, has looked on our nothingness, before anything else, just for the fact that He is there. Then I find myself treating others in a completely different way. Otherwise, if this is not our experience, what does it mean to make a community? It means inevitably merely our own attempt to manage things, to come to an agreement.
But I don’t care whether or not we reach an agreement, because we could all agree without having the One who is the answer. Is it clear? What I want is to know that there is Someone who is able to answer all the expectations of my heart and the hearts of others. If He is not there, what’s the use? If He is there, and I find Him and begin to experience a new way of living, able to embrace my “I,” and make me feel grateful and happy because He is there, then, without any planning, like a surprise, I find I fit in with the others: firstly with my wife, then with my friends and colleagues… Even though the rest doesn’t go well, I begin to experience something that makes my relationships with others non-violent, not pretentious, but gratuitous. We cannot offer this, we have to receive it, we have to be ready to receive the One person able to generate unity. Instead, we are ready to hold twenty meetings because we are the one’s organizing them, yet we are less willing to let ourselves be filled by the One able to generate unity. It is as if we were not able to understand the gravity of the question, that is to say, we don’t grasp what the problem of the “I” is, the problem of this structural disproportion that determines us, and therefore that we need an answer although we cannot find it ourselves. All the infinite desire for fulfilment demands an answer, and I find myself constantly, despite all my efforts, incapable of finding that answer. So I cannot solve my problem, and I need to open myself up continually to an Other in order to have a different experience of relationship with others.
This is why we do School of Community, not for the sake of doing “something for the Movement,” up in the clouds. If the School of Community is not this, then it is not the change of method that moves us continually from the way we believe we can generate things, if the School of Community is a discussion, instead of a following of something that is proposed, then it’s impossible. If we don’t go to the School of Community every time with the awareness of the need that we cannot answer, and that we have to learn to identify with someone else who has travelled the road before us, when what do we go there for? To make our comments on it? In that case it’s better to stay home. Do you know why? Because we increase nihilism: after we have heard all the comments, we go home worse than before. It’s an increase of nihilism, while we think we are doing School of Community. This is not School of Community! We will make a crucial step forward in history if we cancel the comments from School of Community; we must speak only of experience. I am not interested in your comments, do you think I don’t have my own comments in mind? I am not saying this only for you, I am saying it for myself—I can heap up as many comments as you like. This is not the problem.
The question is whether or not I have had an experience that can illuminate something. We are experts at analysing the darkness, but a cigarette lighter is better for overcoming the darkness. Do you see? All our comments on the darkness are less effective than a cigarette lighter for overcoming the darkness. So, if you light up a cigarette lighter that lightens up life, because the darkness has been overcome, then we can all go home relieved—the darkness does not win any more, and so, for whoever is ready, a unity is generated and he doesn’t go home with a sterile loneliness and an ultimate scepticism, as often happens amongst us. Thanks God, life is not spared us! Thank God! Because we believe that by making comments on comments life will be spared us, that there will be no consequences in the end. It’s just as well that the Lord uses this crack we leave open, so that everything can start over again.

Nembrini: I think Cinetta, from Rome, can help us with her witness on this point; and, at the same time, can you give us a judgment on the way to go?

Cinetta: On October 14th, I went home enthusiastic, like someone who feels he has met something great but, after a short time, everything faded into a reflection, a comment on reality and on the Movement. I don’t know if it is correct as an affirmation but I understood that I had come to identify the totality that had struck me with a series of things to do for the Movement, a lot of things, and in good faith, but the proof that they were not of the same nature as what had struck me on October 14th is that, instead of opening me to everything and making me more free, I was closing myself up more and more in a correct way of conceiving the Movement and reality, which in the meantime was escaping me on all sides.
Then, in December, Nembrini came to Rome for an assembly with the teachers. I was expecting, at most, further explanation but instead I saw someone in whom the things I had heard had become a challenge for day-to-day circumstances, because he was living it not as a solipsist heroism, but in relationship that was correcting him and making him grow, which didn’t close him up in the correct attitude of one who is working for Christ, but without Christ. This led us, along with some friends, to start a School of Community for teachers. We had never done this before. We began with a tremendous desire that all our life energy be directed at verifying whether or not—as the School of Community says—that Man, who had aroused so much hope, is really what He claims to be. We risked for the first time being friends not in order to organize the Movement, but so as to discover what reality is. The first outcome is that we have stopped complaining about the kids who are not what they ought to be, and about the circumstances that are not what they should be. A friend of mine who teaches in the same school, and who has a very tough class, said, “I am not coming any more to test my ability, but my faith; when I used to open the classroom door, I would think, ‘They won’t have studied again today’; but now I open it asking myself, ‘What will the Mystery have to say to me today?’” Others discovered, by doing School of Community, that their consistency lies not in the outcome, but in what comes first, and they are reinventing their way of teaching in classes that other teachers have given up with. Another friend of mine was asked by a student, “Why should I study? What does knowledge mean?” She answered proposing to her and the whole class to do School of Community. It is still just a beginning, but I feel it is shattering all the schemes, as you just said. Now, my question is this: It seems to me that to do School of Community, at least as an great desire, means finding oneself before a total proposal. Is this what makes us a new subject in the school? Is it this that can generate a unity amongst us that is not a defence of our own idea of Jesus?

Carrón: You see? All you need is for someone to begin to follow and things begin to fall into place. The whole way we approach reality (school, family, friends, pain, the circumstances) reveals the meaning we have discovered. The problem is not that certain things happen, or that we find particular kids in our class, or problems in the school. The problem—Cinetta said so just now—is how I reach school an instant before climbing the first step. If what determines me is what has happened to me, then I have an original position as I walk into school. But if I am already determined by all the difficulties, all the circumstances, all the prejudices or facts that I saw the previous day, then what can I expect?
The whole analysis can be absolutely correct, and I don’t want to deny the difficulties that there are, but the question is that, as soon as you let something else come in, things go on being the same as before—the circumstances don’t change, the school has not changed, it’s not that overnight the kids begin to want to study, it’s not that, everything is the same as before—but the novelty is in him, in the way he walks into school. This is why on other occasions I have recounted that episode that struck me, of a student of mine. There had been an accident and one of the group of CL in the school had asked, “Why does God do these things?” In other words, first comes rebellion. So I said, “The problem is how you face up to these facts.” And I gave him an example, “When you go home this afternoon, what will you do if someone gives you a slap?” He was a strong kid, so he said, “I’ll give him two back.” “But if when you get home your mother gives you a slap, what will you do?” He was paralysed , and then said, “I will ask her why.” Why is this? What is the difference in the way you behave after being hit by someone unknown and by your mother? Materially, the slap is the same, but you won’t accept it from a person unknown, while from your mother you will. In front of your mother, you cannot bring in a doubt; you have too many facts at your disposal; when you look at your mother, since the slap does not coincide with your experience of your mother, you ask why. The question is that when we have to face up to reality, is there something so certain, so consistent as not to break the link with the Mystery—just as that slap does not break that boy’s bond with his mother—the link with that Mystery that reawakens in me the certainty and the hope of living? So Cinetta is right when she says that what we test in our relationship with reality is our faith, the certainty of our faith. Before the most painful circumstances (for example that described by our friend from Verona) at times we ask, “What can I say?” or “What’s to be done?”
You have to tell me what’s to be done, because that is where you show what faith is for you, if you have something to tell the kids, if you have something to tell those families, if you have something to say! So, before every event that happens (school, the kids, an accident, bulimia, everything…), the question is: “What have I to say?” Can my consistency, can the bond with Him whom I have encountered stand firm before this? Otherwise, we build a kind of huge Indian Reservation, which is useless for staying within reality. And if my faith doesn’t help me to stay within reality, to face up to reality as a whole, with all the drama, then what use is it to me?
One of the most wonderful things in these last few weeks was when I went to see a priest friend of ours who was dying. I was amazed at what a friendship we have when we have this certainty in our eyes, because we can look even death in the face. He was there so calm that I was almost sorry not to have gone with him. “Why? Why can we challenge even death?” I was asking myself as I watched him, there on the bed. Why? Because we have reached an agreement, or because we have an organization, or because we are clever at making analyses? Or is it because of that certainty that comes before all impediments, in other words, with what I had before walking into that room where our friend was about to go into Christ’s arms? The question is how I approach this meeting with my friend who is dying, how I walk into the classroom for lessons every day, how I approach the encounter with myself every morning, how I embrace myself. What determines this “first,” what fills it, what invades it? Is it invaded by my powerlessness or by the presence of an Other?
Here we have to come to grips with the dominant mentality, the mentality of the enlightenment. For many of us, what we call Christianity is nothing other than this enlightenment mentality, which leads us to promote Christian values without Christ. We can see how we are reaching the end of this history by the failure that everyone acknowledges. Why can we not go on? Because of this naivety over human nature, because of the denial of original sin as the acknowledgment of an ultimate incapacity; because we ignore the fact that only what an Other makes possible can be done. Christ did not come down to take a stroll around the world because he had nothing better to do with his time. He was absolutely aware that “without me you can do nothing,” and so he died for us and rose for us. This is not only for Holy Week or for Mass, and then we need something else for school. We need that victory of the Resurrection, otherwise we complain, and we have every reason to; but all these good reasons are nothing compared with Christ’s victory, because none of these things can destroy this victory. So it is only when we allow His victory to enter that we are not dependent on the outcome, but on this “first,” on Him who comes first, and so we have a hypothesis for living. My friends, this is what the School of Community proposes to us, first of all for us, not for others. Each one can decide whether or not he needs this proposal, before any meeting and before any organization.

Nembrini: The third question I wanted us to tackle seems to be the most crucial, if only for the fact that it has been raised by 50% of the contributions. I’ll phrase it in this way. The greatest confusion is over the presence, how to have a clear proposal to make in the work environment, particularly to one’s students. Many of us are in doubt about this. “I do a good job of teaching, I manage, I am able to arouse interest in myself and in my subject; I go for a pizza with my students, and I have a relationship with them. Then comes the question of the proposal: if, when and how to invite them to GS, to the Movement, to the School of Community.” It is somehow difficult to know when and where to speak of Christ, to say where I belong, which is the more extraordinarily meaningful thing for me, because when I look at my students or my colleagues, or the parents I meet, I really want them to live the same thing as me, to look at what I am looking at, but it is as if it were an abstract step, alongside all the rest. I think it is a crucial point, because it seems there is an underlying dualism we have to look at so as to help each other to overcome it.
I’d like to ask Caterina from Pisa to give her contribution, because it brings out the point clearly; it can help you to answer.

Caterina: I have two questions to ask. We notice a separation between our work in the classroom and the experience of GS. Let me explain. There are students and parents who are interested; they respect us and thank us for what we do in class. We are not the only ones in school who do their job well. We met a number of times this year to ask ourselves what makes us different from the others. You reminded us that we want to be, above all, people who go to school with one supreme ideal: Christ and the Church. How do we live out this ideal concern in detail? When we teach Latin or mathematics, we are concerned to help the kids understand Latin and mathematics. We understand that Christ, the only one who challenges us with the truth of people and things, cannot be added on, disconnected from the lesson, a proposal detached from what we do in class, concern for whether and how to invite the kids to GS; so what does it mean to make a clear proposal to our students? We want our students to know Christ, to meet this reality we never name in our lessons. How can this happen? What have we to look at? Where should we focus our attention so that we don’t miss what happens? In a word, how is GS born?
Second question. Many families in the Movement have children who come to our school. They asked us to do something for their children, and this creates a certain embarrassment; it seems a kind of delegation. Then we see GS communities with a huge presence of CL members’ children. On one hand, it’s right for parents to be concerned about their children’s Christian education within the experience of the Movement but, on the other hand, we teachers are in a fix, because it seems something forced, not in the dynamics of an encounter as it can be for our students. We ask you to help us in judging this, because we feel weighing on us inside our communities an image that risks making life a burden.

Carrón: Do we sometimes ask ourselves what it really means to teach? What really is knowledge? Because if someone says he does a good job of teaching and then has the problem of adding something, I ask myself if he really is a good teacher, not whether or not he promotes GS! Because if I can explain something without looking at the whole of reality, I do not explain reality well, because to understand something means to understand the link with the whole (as far as I know… correct me yourselves, you are more ‘teachers in Israel’ than myself). Tell me if to explain something is not to connect it with the whole! And if someone tells me that he explains things well, successfully, and does not reach that point, I ask myself: do we sometimes really ask ourselves what knowledge is? It’s the same thing that we saw in the School of Community on faith, that is, that we can begin to speak about reality like everyone else and then add something on—the Mystery. No! What’s the problem? The problem is that when we speak of reality, the Mystery has nothing to do with it. And since it has nothing to do with the way we look at reality, a false problem arises: “At what point should I introduce the Mystery?” or “How do I stick it on?” Do you see? It’s inevitable, this dualism is not overcome; it cannot be overcome if we have to see when and how to stick it on. No! We need sometimes to ask ourselves what teaching is, and what understanding is, what it means to use reason according to its nature (becoming aware of reality as a whole) and what this has to do with Fr. Giussani’s teaching on the concept of reason and with what the Pope keeps correcting us over, asking us to “broaden reason.” Without our history with Fr. Giussani, even what the Pope is telling us would be nothing more than a slogan, and we wouldn’t know what to do with it. We can understand what he means because of the way Fr. Giussani began to introduce us all to reality. Because to teach, to educate—we have always said—is to introduce to totality, to reality as a whole. If I can explain something without linking it to totality, then I am not educating; it’s not that I am not promoting GS (in this context I don’t care about this), I am not educating and, above all, I am not being a good teacher. See how we can be teachers like everyone else and then “add on” GS? Who cares about this? This will never be the Movement. Never! This will never be Giussani! I challenge everyone who wants to to look clearly at what he said. So the question, my friends, is whether or not we begin to look again at how we teach, but not regarding a certain CL “spirituality,” which is of no interest to anyone; we need to ask what it means that I teach according to the way I use reason and how I explain all aspects of reality in relationship to the whole. Otherwise, as often happens in Catholic schools, we explain all the subjects just like the others do and then some add on one ideology and others another, but in the end we are all regimented the same way. The problem is that we have often accepted this principle and we are satisfied with it, without looking at what it means to educate, what it means to teach, what it means to understand something in relation to reality as a whole.
This is the challenge facing us, our challenge, because until we, as teachers, as people who teach, in virtue of the value of our teaching, ask ourselves this question and try to answer it, then in actual fact we go to school already defeated, and—I’m sorry to say it—that’s why we need to add something more. Tell me if Fr. Giussani had any problem, when he went to teach, other than explaining reality exhaustively! And all his effort, the whole course he covered is because he spared himself nothing in that journey, a journey he had to make himself so as to document it step by step, to make it easier for us to be loyal to reason to the end, to show us how this use of reason introduces a novelty from another world without having to stick anything on; so much so that he says that a truly religious man is one who lives reality intensely, whereas everyone else would say that a religious man is one who performs the most religious actions alongside reality. No. Fr. Giussani challenges us on the intensity of living and—note this—the whole approach of the Movement, from the first person who met him to the Memores Domini, stands or falls on whether or not Fr. Giussani is right on this point. Otherwise, it is impossible to keep a proposal like ours on its feet, if it is not true, that is, if my relationship with reality is not like this, if religiosity is not to live reality intensely. If it is not, then why should we teach, so as to find activities for the kids outside reality? No! This will never be the Movement! Why? Because the whole approach must be unitary: wonder at reality and at the Mystery, all in one stroke—we can see it in the School of Community: all in one stroke, from the first desire to infinity. It is not that there is a fork in the road at some point, and then some go right and the others go left. No, no, no! Everything, from the first moment up to infinity. Remember the diagram, the sketch in the book Is it possible to live this way?
This is Fr. Giussani, this is his proposal, and we have to test whether or not this explanation of reason and desire, and therefore of knowledge and the answer to freedom, is true. Fr. Giussani’s challenge is on this point: is this true or not? If it is not true, let’s say it clearly, and let’s give up. If it is true, then either we overcome this camouflaged dualism or we are defeated by it. So, how is GS born? It is born of a person who lives reality in such a unitary way that others want to join him. The question is whether a person’s way of teaching mathematics or Latin, his way of introducing others to reality through that detail, offers whoever meets him such a unitary perception that the question arises: “Who is this?” GS is born as Christianity is born: with a person, a witness who, in his way of living reality, arouses a question. If, while we are teaching, we are unable to arouse a question in the kids, if they do not sense something new in the way we tackle our subject, then we have to ask ourselves why. Since I made this discovery, I have enjoyed teaching, I get pleasure out of the lessons. If there is something to see, then the kids see it; if there is nothing to see, why should they want to come with me to do something at the weekend.? The question is whether or not I see someone before me and don’t want to miss it. As we said in October, education is the communication of oneself, of the way each of us relates to reality. We see this all around, even in the child-parent relationship. How do we communicate?
In the way we relate to reality. It’s inevitable. If we are unable to arouse curiosity with the way we live reality at school… And this is not principally because I have to promote GS or the Movement. No! It is so as not to be suffocated at school myself, it is a problem of mine; I don’t do it because I have to be a witness. So, I was saying that in order to live this way I have to let this “first” in, because without it there is no way I’ll go to teach. If I do have this, I cannot but walk into that situation in a new, original way, not determined by the outcome, nor by the circumstances, nor by anything else; then my colleagues or the kids may find their curiosity aroused, and may even want to share my life; and this happens both for kids whose parents belong to CL and for those whose parents are atheists, it makes no difference. We have not to have different attitudes towards one group or another: the problem is the same for both. If “our” parents do not accept that they don’t own their children, and that they have to bow before the way the Mystery is leading their children to destiny (which we cannot know), and that the only thing they can do is to witness what has been given to us; then in the end we can give our children everything by telling them things, but we don’t stir up anything in them and we bore them so much that they don’t want to hear any more.
“The less you disturb, the more you get done…” We do a lot for our children and our friends by not putting obstacles in their way. Because every person is a mystery, not a mechanism you can influence as if he were the product of previous events; he is a mystery. We can do all we like, but the other person can leave us on the threshold of his inner self, and from there we cannot move an inch forward, whether he is our child, or a friend, or a colleague. This is the dignity of the “I.” So the only tool we have, the only means to show love for the other’s destiny, is to witness it: “Look, and see if there is something that interests you in what I say. And how do I say it? By living where you can see me.” In this way, I don’t leave him to his own devices. No, no! I am so concerned for him that I live before him, where he can see me, and keep watching him like Jesus does. Give everyone you meet all that you have within you, that look full of tenderness and affection for that person. Then wait. What else can we do? The other is a mystery. What scandalizes us is freedom, but we belong to a Movement in which the one who generated us said, “For fifty years I staked everything on pure freedom.” And who can stake everything for fifty years on pure freedom? Someone who is so certain of the truth he carries that he has no need to skip over freedom, or put it to one side, to force anything. All that is needed is to show all that beauty so that whoever wants to live can feel the challenge. When we need to use other methods, it means that we ourselves are not sure; it is a judgment on our certainty. We stake everything on this, because a presence—in short—is an “I” who is a proposal because of the way he lives reality, because it is not possible to live what I have before me (be it mathematics, or the relationship with my colleagues or with my students) according to all the factors of reality without involving the whole; and here it can be seen whether or not I have encountered Something that enables me to live in this way. All the rest is additional dualism, and in time it will fail. It tires me out and is of no interest to others. So, my friends, it is in this that we have to help each other and keep each other company. We help each other by unmasking dualism when it appears. If we are not clear about this, then we are discussing non-existent problems.

Nembrini: On this point, I would like you to help us by answering this question from Martino, from Padua. Perhaps it’s a question that doesn’t concern all of us, but it is so loaded with responsibility that it’s worth tackling together. It is about GS. If I understood what you just said, helping a GS community in a town or in a school means spreading, widening the attitude you just described. So why is it that there is so often a rejection, a schematic approach, a closing up of our communities, which at the same time suffer from being closed up in organized structures? All the events are organized: the ‘ray,’ charity work etc.; everything is guaranteed as regards the experience of the Movement, but it is as if real life and reality were somewhere else. Some GS students formulated this supreme example of ambiguity in describing their leaders: “You are very good, perhaps even Memores Domini, and completely trustworthy, so limit yourselves to organizing the meetings of the Movement, School of Community, charity work , but don’t poke your noses into what we do on Saturday evening.” This seems to reveal a duplicity, an ambiguity as the outcome of a generous initiative, which needs to be corrected and judged.

Martino: Ours is a simple story, even exemplary: ray, group sessions, charity work, choir, study together, lunch together for the teachers who promote GS and above all a deep companionship for some of us. The fact is that after that warm autumn, after the meeting in October and Franco’s session in Padua, something moved, even if only as a desire for renewal. There were several attempts to respond to the proposal in October: a School of Community, meetings for teachers, a revitalization of Diesse (“Didattica e innovazione scolastica”, a centre for on-going formation training). In all these initiatives, good as they are, there seems to be something missing, since the temptation is still to sort out, to reorganize teachers as a category. Now, if something new has happened, then it seems we need to start over again from that famous question: “Who am I?” In the last meeting of those who promote GS, many asked the question “What is GS for me?” The question arose from the difficulty some have in organizing GS, for others, the difficulty arose from resentment for the time they sacrifice. The doubt came from the fact that in GS there are children of members of the movement, not their own students. The question then is “What is GS?” We sense that something new is happening and so we want help, an example, not just now and again, but on a regular basis, from someone more mature.

Carrón: I think what I said before goes some way towards answering this question. A better way of phrasing the question, though, in terms I prefer, following what the Pope said about St. Augustine, is “What moves man in his inner self?” What is able to awaken his “I”? Because if we don’t ask this question, if we don’t face this question, we think we can solve the problem by organizing things, by sorting them out. We can be very good at sorting things out until there is nothing left; that’s all very well, but if this is the question, I couldn’t care less about it. It ends up like some Catholic initiatives, where we organize what’s there, until we end up closing the church because no one comes any more. The question is that we have encountered something for which, whatever the circumstances, wherever you go, something begins: we are in a similar situation to that in the early days of Christianity. If we go to a school, do we awaken something in the way we are present? This is the most complex question, as I said before, because in order to generate something, to awaken something, sorting things out is not enough, it’s not enough to organize, because now we see a transversal problem, involving the Church, schools, political parties, and associations, everything, because, thank God, we can’t go on like this. Why? Because, up to now, we, too, have been living on what was left of that type of “I” that is a survival of the time Christianity had an impact on history and was able to stir up desire.
In fact, we have been living off the profits of a tradition. Now that Christianity, tradition, is less and less influential and what prevails is everything else, we find ourselves facing this paralysis, this lack of interest in everything, this incapacity to be interested in anything at all; and we are affected by it ourselves, and we see classes where the kids are “parked” because they have nothing else to do.
So it is truly a challenge for us. Have we something to offer, or something to answer to this? This is the test of our faith, as it was in other moments of history. After the barbarian invasions, St. Benedict had to start again from the beginning. Now that the barbarians have arrived again, we have to start over again, and see whether in this situation we have something to offer, otherwise we can just make do with what is still left over from the past. We see the desert advancing, we see that there is less and less interest, that the “I” gets weaker and weaker, that the “Chernobyl effect” of which Giussani spoke is spreading more and more. So, faced with this, have I found something for my own life (which is often in the same state as that of the students), to start over again, and something which I can offer to those kids? If not it is already a defeat with an expiry date (at most we can postpone it a bit). So it is very important how we generate GS: either we collect a few “Japanese” or we are able to begin to interest people who, if they don’t find an experience like this, a humanity like this, which challenges their history, will remain indifferent. I went to visit a school and I was struck by what our friends working there told me. The have to call the parents every morning asking them to put their children on the phone to convince them to come to school. We have reached this point. And, I said, it is the same at all levels of society; and this is just one example; it will be more and more like this in the future. So either we have some answer to this or, if we satisfy ourselves with making do with what is still left over, we shall be the first to be defeated.
In this situation what does it mean to promote GS, if not to have the kids share in this new discovery? A test of how we go about GS is what Franco said about Saturday evening. A boy says, “Limit yourselves to organizing the meeting of the Movement, School of Community, charity work , but don’t poke your noses into what we do on Saturday evening.” It is a very tough judgment, because it means that he takes part in the normal gestures of GS, but these gestures are not able to attract his “I”: “I come to the meetings, but leave me to organize the rest; keep your nose out!” Can you imagine someone who is in love saying, “I am in love, but leave Saturday night to me!” Is it a truly totalising event, or just a series of meetings to hold? I ask myself what happens in those meetings. If we don’t look at the origin, then even GS will propose the same losing scheme. In other words, you are not able to strike the “I” in a way that involves everything.
This is a judgment on ourselves; what proposal have I to make? And if you who are responsible for GS don’t have this at heart, I would say that it’s better to close GS and start again, because there is total ambiguity. Do you see? We can propose things to do, but if this “doing things” is not able to strike the “I,” then this is what happens. So the question is: what proposal do we make? What proposal am I? This is not a judgment on the kids.
Here, too, as in other ambits of life, there is a kind of ambiguity at the base: do we place our hope in organizing, and so are always dependent on the outcome, and when it doesn’t come we are depressed; or do we place our hope in what we have encountered (the hope that he aroused in us), and so can challenge everyone? Only in this way do we begin to see how the Lord is acting. The most terrible thing is that we can do is that we use what He does, what He reawakens, in order to put Him in order, to close Him up into our boxes, and so suffocate Him. I am sorry, my friends, but we have a great responsibility if we do this. I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes. We have to ask ourselves if we want to “serve” what Someone else does, or if we want to “manage” what Someone else does. So in the end it is a question of faith. We acknowledge that there is Someone at work, and so to guide GS is not to “manage” GS, but to obey what an Other, to follow what an Other is doing. Or do we use what an Other is doing so as to do something of our own? We need to be careful, because what often happens with us is that a problem that we have, as adults, not resolved at a personal level, produces a void that we want to fill by managing the kids. It’s not right. It’s not right!. I wouldn’t like that responsibility. Because many things are not the kids’ problems, but ours, and since we haven’t solved them in our relationship with the Mystery, we think we can solve them by being bosses. I tell you clearly: it is useless, because this doesn’t help us to solve the problem. Even if you manage to organize, this goes nowhere towards solving your unease, you will still be uneasy. Do you understand?
It doesn’t solve anything, because a drop is not enough to fill a glass, and we will be more and more uneasy. This is why it’s a new beginning. Either we set ourselves to obey what an Other is doing because we recognize Him at work—and it’s a problem of faith, of which we are talking in the School of Community, it’s a problem of faith: do we believe in the end that there is an Other at work, and that therefore we must follow what an Other is doing? –or we are like everyone else, that is, we organize others within the structures. It’s not right! And you must tell me where this is happening, because we have to purge our communities and GS of this ambiguity. You must ell me, because it’s not true, it’s not right; it’s not right that the kids should pay for this. Have I made myself clear?

Nembrini: One last question to conclude. In many places we see and hear of an attempt at a presence in the environment, using the instruments that our story has generated. Many have found new interest in their profession, by joining together with others in offering proposals, projects and initiatives. For example, the DS Association is growing and opening new centres; something is beginning to move where nothing has moved before, groups of friends and colleagues are getting to work, often in schools. Even here, though, the witnesses and the reports end with an ultimate doubt, still a sign, I think, of that dualism which you helped us so clearly to recognize this morning. People ask me: “I am doing a good job with my friends, with DS, etc.,” but it is as if the person were finding himself bogged down halfway. Once the work is done, a deeper study of the discipline of the profession, the question is: “What has this to do with faith? What has this to do with a relationship with the Mystery that is sought-for and so intensely desired?” At times, these activities are felt as being opposed to true religiosity.

Carrón: This is a question I have already dealt with on other occasions. Often the encounter is the point of arrival for us, not the point of departure. In other words, if what I have encountered, what fills my eyes, my reason, may affection, my heart and my freedom, does not enable me to enter into all I have to study, to teach, to want, then I remains outside, it does not throw light on all of reality, and from this point of view we are often lazy. What do I mean by lazy? Our friend Cominelli said this the other day: often it’s as if one were to say, “I’ve read The Risk of Education,” and kept revising it, and that’s all very well, but The Risk of Education cannot be the point of arrival, it must be the starting point from which I enter into all my subjects. The Risk of Education does not do this work, and neither does Fr. Giussani; each one has to do it himself, each one has to go through all his material with all honesty, without setting aside anything, and without adding on anything, without ideology, from the inside, so as to verify every word of The Risk of Education. Everyone has to do this, and these are the instruments. Because, as I said last time, if we don’t get down to applying it to didactics, then we are dualistic. So it’s not enough to revise The Risk of Education; it is the viaticum for the journey, that is, the hypothesis for entering into everything, not something that replaces my effort, otherwise, I do what all the other teachers do, and then I quote something from The Risk of Education. It is the opportunity we are given for entering into everything, for throwing light on everything, for challenging the darkness. But this is a work for us. Just as I, with all this, had to work on exegesis, studying biblical texts; I was not spared it, it rather stirred my desire to do it better, even the Greek accusative (I had to get to grips with that accusative, you understand?). So, if we don’t go that far, then our study is of no interest, because if it has nothing to do with what interests me most, then I don’t perceive the relationship between the accusative and what interests me most, what is most dear to me, but not for a sentimental or merely affective problem, but for a problem of reason: if He is the keystone of reality, I have to discover it and get to the bottom of it. This is not made of The Risk of Education. The Risk of Education is the entrance. And I say thanks to God because we still have a lot of work to do: taking part in this fascinating adventure and seeing how it leads to everything, and makes you interested in everything. If we had already finished with The Risk of Education, then it would only be a repetition, and sooner or later you would be fed up with it. The question is that this is what enables me to open the doors to everything, to be interested in everything, because what interests us is reality. This is why I say that since we cannot do all this alone we have to make use of the instruments. The association must be concerned in helping us in this, in getting together people who have this interest, preventing initiatives from getting lost, since everyone is called to contribute to this: not what comes to the mind of the organizer, but the organization at the service of whatever point of creativity the Mystery arouses in anyone. As I see it, this is the subsidiarity, , that we often talk about. That is, that whatever the Mystery stirs up amongst us not be lost, and so the adventure is fascinating for us, for our teaching, for the relationship with our colleagues in the subjects, because we have a point of dialogue about our subjects that interests them, for the kids’ sake. All this brings a unity that is out of this world. And this is what can be of interest to us, because otherwise why should we care? Why don’t we do something else for a job? We have to experience that this is the way that prevents us giving up because, on one hand, we see the difficulty in the kind of work we are in, in this job but, on the other hand, for someone who wants to live, it is what leaves you no truce.
So we have to decide if, for us, all this difficulty, this whole situation at times complicated and difficult, in which we find ourselves, is simply an obstacle, and not rather a challenge, the opportunity we can have precisely because of that “first” of the faith which enables us to enter into everything. And so faith grows, and this is the one thing that interests us, the certainty grows that there is a Presence in history on which we can base all our hope. Thank you!

Nembrini: Thank you Julián. I think you have given us matter for reflection and work for the whole of next year. I’d like to ask you one last effort. I would ask you to give two announcements, those that you always give us. Help us to leave with a clear assignment: the announcements about the mission, that is, what does it mean that this experience contains a passion for the world, and the announcement about the School of Community, as a method, as a road and as an instrument.

Carrón: The mission. We have been given this grace for everyone, and we can contribute and collaborate in Christ’s mission in as much as we respond to this grace we have been given. Because Our Lady contributed with her “yes,” and each of us contributes with his own “yes,” travelling this road first, not in order to demonstrate something to the others, but so as to travel this road first ourselves.  So, lets set aside all our concerns about the outcome, about the Movement… I have never been “concerned” for a moment about the Movement, it’s not my problem. If you want someone to be concerned about the Movement, look for someone else. Concern for carrying the Movement is not something that concerns me, because there is Someone else who made it who is carrying it. What am I concerned about? To say “yes” to what an Other is doing and to ask, to be ready to acknowledge what an Other is doing (whether it’s Cleuza, or Vicky, or the last to come, like the girl in Verona). What I am concerned about is to be like this, because it is He who is at work, and so I am glad to be in a place where I see these things, because that is what contributes most. And we have to decide on this point: either we recognize Him at work, and then this introduces something new, a hope to go to school with every morning, with which to face the difficulties, the stress, the students’ situation, everything, and so we collaborate towards Christ’s glory, or we bank only on our own energies, and then it is impossible for us not to get tired. But the problem arises earlier; it is a problem of method, a problem of where we set our hope, of where we base it, because the rest comes like something that overflows from this new humanity, original in the way it presents itself in reality. It inexorably gives rise to mission, even if it doesn’t speak, in the way it looks, in the way it relates with colleagues, in the way it lives in peace, in the way it is not concerned over roles, nor with managing things and in the way it is glad because He is here and makes us free from all the rest. And this can arouse people’s interest in a person like this. This is why we make use of the help that is the School of Community. We cannot leave the School of Community at the level of nominalism typical of the scribes with their exegesis: there are many scribes in Israel. We have to avoid this at all costs. And do you know how? Every passage of the School of Community has a verification. We are witnessing it these days. What is the verification of faith: that we have had a real experience of faith and not just chatted about the faith? Freedom. If you narrate to me all the steps of the faith from A to Z and have not become a tiny bit freer, what are you telling me? Why should you want to go ahead with the chapter on freedom, if nothing happened with the chapter on faith? It is not reasonable for us! Whoever has had the experience of recognizing a Presence begins to find himself free, free, that is, satisfied, whatever his circumstances are. So if you don’t let this method go, the School of Community becomes something else, and then try and say that it doesn’t interest you!

* The reference is to the meeting of the teachers of Communion and Liberation with Fr. Julián Carrón in Milan, October 24, 2007. See the booklet “Educating: a Communication of Yourself, that is, of Your Own Way of Relating with Reality”, Traces Booklets, supplement to Traces No 10, 2007.