Fr. JC Maximilian

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With this post, I finish my reading and reflection of this book by Msgr. Giussani. Since it is an “Assembly” there is a bit of a mishmash of themes. Others reading these pages will undoubtedly be drawn to different things than I was; that is why it is best to discuss these books in a School of Community, so that we can learn from each other. Of course please feel free to make comments on this post, and if you have read the book, share your own insights.
One of the first things that struck me was Giussani’s statement of the necessity of hell. When I was a seminarian, a priest I knew gave a talk to a group of parishioners and he seemed honestly pleased with himself because he reminded the people that there was another place in which one might find oneself after death besides heaven — purgatory. Later when I pointed out that he forgot to mention hell, he told me that no one believes in hell anymore. Wow! That might explain a lot about our modern society.

Msgr. Giussani reminds us that “the ultimate idea of man is that man is a freedom, that is, something made for happiness” (p. 141). He then points out it is in this that hell is born, for without hell there would be no freedom. Why? Because freedom requires both the possibility to say “yes” and the possibility to say “no.” As Milton put it in Paradise Lost, Man was created, “sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (Book III). Hell is the BIG NO. It is where we go when we have made a definitive choice to say “no” to God. Mortal Sin is such a saying of “no” to God, and as a result the Divine Life dies within us. Of course, in His great Mercy, God gives us opportunities to turn away from our “no” and say “yes” to His will. Through the sacrament of Reconciliation, the Divine Life is restored to us. What makes it definitive for us is the state we are in when we die. No more choices after death.
Giussani points out that we need this ability to choose, otherwise the happiness that we would reach in heaven would not be our own. That choice must be the object of my freedom.

Giussani also addresses a concern that his idea of authority, the following of another, might seem to be the fostering of a dependency on the other. But if you and I are both seeking Truth, Happiness, Beauty, and those things have a real meaning (so an objective reality), we would be journeying together. Would I be depending on you, or would you be depending on me? I guess we could say we are both dependent on the one we are following, but by our free choice to follow that authority (Christ) we are making that way our own. As St. Paul says, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.”

Finally, Giussani has a beautiful reflection on friendship. Friendship is not just a nicety, it is a necessity. It is an encounter with another person who desires my life (welfare) more than they desire their own. They want us to reach our destiny, and are willing to make self-sacrifices so that we can achieve our destiny. It again reminds me of St. Paul, when he is saying that as much as he would like to be finished with this life so that he can share the life of Christ in Heaven, he is willing to continue in his mission so that others might come to Christ. When you desire my destiny and I desire your destiny we have a companionship. A healthy companionship is NEVER exclusive, it never views other people as extraneous. In our companionship we want others to join us, because we want them to share the same freedom and happiness that we have discovered. It a way, we can see how the Church’s teaching on contraception flows from this; if my marriage is truly a healthy companionship, I would never want to exclude the possibility of children.

This friendship, this companionship, is a guided one. We do not set our own way. We help each other along the way, even correcting each other when we start to wander off the way. Our companionship is guide by Christ, the Mystery in whom we recognize the deepest desires of our hearts.

As many of the readers of this blog know, for the past several years I have been very involved in the ecclesial movement, Communion and Liberation.  For the past three years I have attended their CL Priest Retreat, and this year’s was at Malvern Retreat House which is just outside of Philadelphia.  In fact, one of my seminary classmates, Fr. Phillip Forlano, who is also involved in Communion and Liberation was one of the organizers of the retreat (and he and the rest of the team did a great job).  In June, the US Editor of Traces: Communion and Liberation International Magazine asked me to write an article about the Priests Retreat.  Since it was several months after the retreat (which has always been the week after Easter, so in April this year), I decided to spend some of the article on how the retreat has borne fruit in the lives of the priests who attended.  Well, the article is out, in issue #7, and I have attached it below as a PDF file.  It is mostly readable (though my byline is not clear).

http://frjcmaximilian.stblogs.com/files/2009/09/Garrett-Cont emplateandSharetheFruit2.pdf

Here is a link to the flier for the 2010 CL Priest Retreat; share it with your favorite priests, 2010 Priests Retreat Click to download invitation

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It seems obvious that in order to follow, we need looking at someone who is standing before us. The person that stands before us is the person whom we encountered that first nudged us, gave us an idea, a desire for seeking real happiness. Maybe it was a priest or religious sister or brother. Maybe it was a teacher, or a parent, grandparent or other relative. For me it was Luca and Daniel, the first two people involved in Communion and Liberation that I met. We met in a coffee shop in Princeton, NJ and while I really did not understand a lot of what they were talking about (this thing called “Method”), I noticed a difference about them. It was nothing in what they wore, or even explicit behavior. It was more of their entire being; I could tell that they lived life more deeply to the heart in its simplicity. It was an attraction to something spiritual which spoke right to the deepest desires of my heart. And it provoked me to reflect on the seriousness in living my life. Not life as merely health, money, relationships. All those things are part of life, but they are not life itself. Life is about a goal, it is about a meaning.

This naturally led me to the next step in following: a desire to imitate Luca and Daniel. What does it mean to imitate a person? First of all it means to understand what the person says and the steps they take. If all we do is hear the words of the person standing before us, we will not follow them. While it might seem to take great effort, in truth it requires the least amount of effort imaginable. It requires simplicity; having the heart of a child. Of course this mean also having the curiosity of a child as well.

After my meeting with Luca and Daniel, I certainly was curious to learn more about Communion and Liberation, since I understood enough to know that it was their involvement with Communion and Liberation that was the source of their “difference” in living life. So I started to meet with Luca and Daniel weekly for School of Community. I didn’t understand why we were starting in the middle of the book (Why the Church?), nor why we only read such a small section at a time. After all, I had been in academics for most of my life, and I usually had hundreds of pages of reading to do each week. But because I wanted to follow Luca and Daniel, I decided to simply do what they did, to live life.

The only other option to living life as following is instinctiveness. This means just following one’s emotions and gut feelings. Instinctiveness degrades man to the level of animal.

The key to following is understanding — both the words and the actions — and understanding is an act of reason. Understanding means to grasp the correspondence between what you are told and what your are (the needs of your heart). “To understand means to grasp the profound correspondence between what you’re told and your I, the needs of your I, the profound needs of your heart, the profound needs of your life” (Guissani, IPLW-Faith, p. 135).

Obeying begins as effort and work. We recognize that what the one standing before us is telling us is out of love for our life, and therefore should be heeded. As we obey, as we follow what we are told to do, our taste for life increases. Slowly, bit by bit, we begin to understand what the one before us is telling us, and slowly we no longer depend on who says it to us. We follow because we love, and we know that the one we follow loves us. This means that real obedience is friendship. “A friend is characterized first and above all by seriousness towards life, by the affirmation that life is a serious thing. Life is a serious thing: serious before the universe (thus it has a task) and serious before destiny (thus it has an ultimate meaning that must be reached)” (pp. 138-139).

I must admit that at first I found this understanding of obedience a bit of a challenge. Many years ago I read C.S. Lewis’ science fiction trilogy, and in one of the books a character makes a statement that in a certain sense obedience is blind, because if it was just because we following what made sense, then all it would be is being reasonable, and not obedience. The point was that obedience requires a surrendering oneself into the hands of another.

After thinking about this for a while, I realized that C.S. Lewis (at least in how I understood him) that both right and wrong. It seems that Mr. Lewis was making the common dichotomy between faith and reason. That obedience is rightly associated with faith, but that does not mean that it is opposed or beyond reason. Mr. Lewis is correct, though, that obedience requires trust, and surrendering of oneself into the hands of another. In this case it is following the one who stands before us, in whom we have recognized an exceptionality in how they live. That what they say and do corresponds to the deepest desires of our hearts, and so with the simplicity of a child we follow those before us.

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Yes, it has been a while since I made a posting on this book. I have actually been trying to catch up on the back issues of Traces, the journal of Communion and Liberation. I am still at least three issues behind. But I have also realized that I really need to do School of Community, for my own spiritual welfare. It helps keep me grounded in the reality of Christ’s presence in my life. So I have been doing some more reading in this book; in fact it was the basis for my homily this past weekend, which a lot of parishioners found very exciting. The other reason for my lack of regular postings is just finding the time to write them.

With this section we begin the third and final chapter of the book. This chapter is called “Obedience,” but before getting into obedience, Msgr. Guissani wants to emphasize, once again, the reasonableness of faith. A precursor for faith is freedom. Again, this is not freedom as license to do whatever we want. Rather freedom is our relationship with our ultimate end, our relationship with the infinite. In other words, freedom is the being free of the obstacles that prevent us from getting to where God has called us to be right from the beginning.

Msgr. Giussani gives a few definitions in this section. First, that affection is an attitude towards a known object, and when we have the correct affection or attitude towards the known object we call this a virtue. He also defines reason as the understanding of the correspondence between what someone says about reality and what the heart expects about reality.

The reason I used this section for my homily this past weekend, is because a significant part of this section is a reflection on the section of St. John’s Gospel that we heard this past weekend. Let us recall, for the past few weekends we have been hearing from the Bread of Life discourse. It began with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, and last weekend it finishes with the people having a hard time accepting Jesus’ statement that He is going to give them His body for their food, and His blood for their drink, and that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood they will not have any life within them. Guissani, in his typical way, says that the people are not just saying “this is hard to accept.” Rather they most likely saying that Jesus is crazy. It is crazy to say that we are to eat His body and drink His blood. It was because of this “crazy” talk that many of those who had been following Jesus went back to their former way of life and followed Him no longer.

The real question is whether or not Jesus is being crazy, or are those that abandoned him being crazy, being unreasonable. This is where Msgr. Giussani has real important insight. Too often we want to set faith and reason as opposing each other. At best we put faith as something on top of reason, that takes us beyond where reason can take us. That we have reason, which takes us so far, but then we need to take a leap of faith. Guissani (as does Pope Benedict XVI) points our that faith IS reason. The way we see faith as reasonable is in our own experience.

First, the people were attracted to Jesus because His words spoke to the deepest desires of their heart. They challenged the merely human things that they think will make them happy, and help them see that only the infinite will bring them true freedom and happiness. There is an exceptionality in this encounter with Jesus because His words correspond to their hearts’ desire. Yet, they want to test or verify what Jesus is saying. Therefore Jesus works signs, miracles, as a proof of His authority and truthfulness. The Bread of Life discourse starts with one of these great signs; Jesus feeds over 5000 people, with a lot left over, with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. The people recognized this sign of Jesus’ power, because they wanted to make Him king. They knew it was a miracle, yet they still were not getting it; they were still wanting to fit things into the merely earthly, human way of being a king. So now Jesus gives them the powerful words. They knew that He was not speaking metaphorically. They knew that He was talking about really giving us His body and His blood as our food and drink. Given the evidence that they had experienced; the words that spoke to the deepest desires of their hearts, and the verification that the miracles provided, it is UNREASONABLE not to continue to follow Jesus.

St. Peter, on the other hand, is being reasonable when he says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter was able to recognize that while what Jesus was saying may have been incomprehensible to him at that time, he knew it was reasonable to follow Jesus. Peter was not denying what his heart was telling him, that Jesus was the way to eternal life, just because his own understanding, his own intellect is limited. He trusted that Jesus would make everything known and understandable when the time was right. All he needed to do was to follow Jesus.

This is exactly what we all must do. I could not understand why, at age 40 and having only been ordained a priest for a few months, I was diagnosed with cancer. But I remember clearly saying over and over again, “All for Jesus.” That was my statement of trust in God, and committing myself to following Jesus, even though what laid ahead was unclear to me. Because of my experience with Jesus, my encounter with Him, it would be unreasonable to do anything else but follow Him. I think it is easy to see how this is going to lead us into a deeper reflection on obedience

I know that it has been a very long time since I wrote any reflections on Msgr. Giussani’s book, Is It Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1: Faith. It does not mean that I have not been reading it — OK, it does a little — but it is more because things got busy, first with Holy Week, and then I had some trips away. I am not going to try to summarize what I have already discussed about this book. For that, just see my previous blog posts on this book: they started in January of this year.

The next section is the second Assembly. Again, this is when the participants in these talks, after a time of reflect, asked questions of Msgr. Giussani. Often they were questions concerning clarification of some point that he made in his talk (this last talk was all about Freedom). I am not going to go through all the questions. However, there is a section in the Assemby, pp. 101-104, in which Giussani discusses the significance of work. I thought that this was very interesting, especially in the light of the unemployment problems that the USA is experiencing right now.

For Msgr. Giussani, work is an “essential expression of man’s life and its the essential way he imitates God.” We will value our work the most when we are able to give all our energy to doing what God wants us to do. As has been mentioned in this chapter on freedom, freedom is one’s relationship with one’s destiny. Now we all have the same destiny. As the old Baltimore Catechism says, “Why did God make me? To know, love and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next.” We are made for happiness. That is our destiny. The only way in which we will perfect, or achieve, that happiness is when we are in perfect communion with God in heaven. In this life, we are on a journey. Everyone is heading to the same destination, yet along the way God has different tasks for us to do. Not to earn our way into heaven, but to perfect the Mystical Body of Christ, the community of the faithful.

Our work needs to be modeled on the work of Christ Jesus. And what was the work of Jesus? His great work was obedience to the Father. Ultimately, what matters is not what particular work we do, but rather that we obey God in our work.

One of the worse things is for a person to be not working. Of course there are circumstances beyond their control which might cause them to be unemployed, but a person must find work. Too often people hold out for the ideal job, but in doing so they are putting the value of life in the work. The value of life is not in any particular job, but rather the value of life is obedience.

Msgr. Giussani insisted that members of the “Adult Group” (much of what would later become Memores Domini, the secular institute that follows the charism of Communion and Liberation) find work. He did not want them sitting around with their hands folded while others worried about them. If you cannot find the work you want, take whatever work is available. It does not even matter if one is paid for it (well, of course it matters if you are the breadwinner, but the money is the the primary value).

I have even known people who, when they were unemployed (say due to a layoff), who made finding another job their job. They got up at the time they would normally get up for work, shower, shave, dress for their job, and then go to “work”. Maybe they set up a particular space in their home where they put in their 8 hours. My one sister, after she was laid off, her company paid for them to go to an office with a placement company, where she had her own cubicle, and she needed to work on her resume, attended workshops on job interviewing, had to identify a certain number of potential jobs each week, etc. I thought this was a great plan, of truly making looking for work a full-time, though temporary (while they were on severance pay) job. The key is not letting others look for work for us, but for us to look at the means and conditions that God is gracing us with for finding work. We search, with the help and support of the rest of the Christian community. “Until you find work that you like — that expresses you — it’s love and obedience to the Father to accept even work that expresses you less and that you like less.”

Right now, I have one friend who I know is looking for work. He really does not know what God is calling him to do right now. Of course there are people in my parish who are facing the same difficulty. How do I support them during this time? How do I help them see the presence of Jesus right now in their lives?

Dear Friends,

I will be going on retreat during Easter Week, so I will not be posting.  As readers of this blog know, several years ago I met the ecclessial movement “Communion and Liberation.”  For the past three years I have been joining a group of priests who are all involved with CL for a week of retreat.  The Spiritual Director of CL in the USA, Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete leads us in our retreat.  The past two years we had encyclicals by the Holy Father to reflect on during our retreat.  I am not sure what Msgr. will be talking on this year.  In addition to the spiritual time of renewal, we also have time to form fraternity with other priests, and we enjoy cultural events.  The first year I went we were in Emmitsburg, MD at the St. Elizabeth Seton Shrine.  Last year we were at the Jesuit Retreat House in San Jose, CA.  This year we will be in Philadelphia.  Please pray for the 40 or so priests that will be on the retreat.

When I get back, with the busyness of Holy Week past, I really plan to get back into making regular reflections on the book, “Is it Possible to Live this Way? Vol. 1-Faith”.  There will be an interruption when I go to St. Louis for my niece’s First Holy Communion at the end of the month, but we will get through it.

Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith

In my last post, I tried to describe the diagram that appears on page 64 of the book. It represents the movement or dynamic of freedom. Freedom, we will recall, is the satisfaction or perfection of a desire. Freedom is the satisfaction or perfection of our ultimate desire of the heart, which can only be God because only God is infinite. So in a sense, all freedom in this life is imperfect because we are not yet in complete communion with God. It is our relationship with the infinite Mystery, with God, which expresses the dynamic of our freedom.

However, as we noted, often times in life other people and things cross our path. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it depends on our choices when we encounter these other objects and persons. If we see in them signs pointing us to continue to follow the path leading towards our destiny, our union with God, then they are very positive things. However, if we put all of our focus on these objects and persons so that we leave the path to our destiny, then they have become distractions or worse idols. This is where sin enters in; it is literally missing the mark or falling short of the goal. Of course the problem is that there is often greater emotional satisfaction in these objects and persons along our path because they are nearer to us than our ultimate goal.

I have been trying to think of an example from my own life, my own experience, which I could share that would not be embarrassing to someone else involved or myself. OK, I just thought of something, which might not be the best example, but I think it will work. I like technology. While I may not always have the latest gadget, I do like reading about them, and often I do get them down the road. My computer is an important object in my life. I use it nearly everyday, and often for a good part of the day. On it I write my homilies, posts for my blog, as well as other projects for both the parish and myself. And the Internet is often a very valuable tool in some of the work that I do. I can quickly look up Church documents. Since I do not have a School of Community nearby, I have been meeting each week with a couple of priests for a video iChat in which we do School of Community. These uses of my computer and the Internet often assist me as I follow the Lord. However, the computer and the Internet can also become a serious addiction that takes me way from following my path to my destiny. Of course there are the obvious misuses of the Internet (visiting pornographic sites, gambling sites, etc), but there are also the more subtle which might not always seem to be morally objectionable. There are many sites for viewing videos. While I am not much of a YouTube fan, I can find Hulu and Veoh very tempting with some of the old movies and TV shows you can watch (I am a classic Star Trek fan, and Veoh has all the original episodes available to watch for free). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with watching a video on the computer, but when it becomes something that keeps us from doing the work that God has called us to in the best manner we are able, then we are missing the mark, we are falling short. We are giving into the quick and easy satisfaction, and losing sight of that which will bring us ultimate satisfaction/perfection — God. When we lose sight of our destiny we err, we sin.

So how do we resist the stronger, more immediate attractions and keep following God? First we need to keep a clear awareness of our destiny. We need to be reminded of our real desire, our real goal. Second, we need a wrenching force to pull us away from the more immediate attraction and put our energy into moving towards our destiny. The Church calls this wrenching force mortification and penitence. The reason we fast and abstain from meat on the Fridays of Lent is not because meat is bad, but so that we can call to mind how we are often distracted from our destiny and to get back on track. The word “penitence” comes from the Greek word, metanoia, which literally means “change of direction.” So instead of going after the thing or person which we are more immediately attracted to, we make an effort to change our direction to go after our destiny.

The important thing to learn from this section is that if it was just left up to us, we would not be able to stay on the right track. We would easily become distracted by these other attractions. We need companionship to keep us on the way. I learned this lesson during my training as a psychologist. I learned that it is not a question of IF you become attracted to a client, but rather a question of WHEN you become attracted to a client. The important thing is to acknowledge this “countertransference”, as we call it in psychology, to your supervisor. He or she then help you keep on track so that you are working towards the client’s therapeutic goals.

As a priest, I find the same thing happens. People come to us broken, and they share great intimacy with their priest. I can understand how a priest can start to feel an attraction for something more with a person. Sometimes the life of a priest can be lonesome (my married sisters tell me that married life can also be lonesome at time). What I find so helpful in spiritual direction, and now with School of Community, is I can be be challenged about keeping my eyes on my destiny, the road that God has called me to follow. And, when I am trying to change my direction, when needed, the community helps me to stick to it. I guess it is why AA and other 12-Step programs are so successful; the sponsor and the group helps the person see their blind spots, where they are getting off track, and then support them as they start changing their lives. Of course this keeping on the right track is what brings about true freedom; not freedom to do what one wants but the freedom to become the person that God has created us to be, to become united with God the supreme happiness. We are made for community.

Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith

Last time we discussed how Msgr. Giussani defines “freedom” as one’s relationship with the Infinite, with the Other.  Like any relationship, there must be movement, a dynamism, in the relationship or it will die.  So how does freedom move?  What is the dynamism in freedom?

We really just need to look in the mirror, and at the people around us, to recognize that if it was left up to us, there would be no movement in the relationship that is freedom.  We too easily fall into the routine, and being that we are very much limited/finite, we cannot make the first step towards the Infinite/God.  All is grace.  In other words, all is a gift from God.  God, the Infinite, reaches for us; He solicits us to enter into a relationship with Him.  God calls and invites us to participate in freedom.

Not many people receive this call in the extraordinary manner that the prophets were called, so how does God stimulate us to move into the relationship of freedom.  We always need to start from our own experiences.  God works through His creatures.  While it certainly can be through the beauty of nature or of music or some other art (all things are a sign of God), the most common way in which God becomes present within our hearts is through other people.  Working through others, who have already entered in a conscious way into the relationship that is freedom, God makes Himself present in our lives, and our hearts thirst for this freedom.

Msgr. Giussani, and now Fr. Julian Carron (the current head of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, now that Msgr. Giussani has died), says over and over that it is important to go back to our original encounter which awaked this thirst in us, to recall it, so that the impression becomes deeply impressed in us.  That is why I frequently talk about that encounter I had with Luca and Daniel in the coffee shop in Princeton, when I first encountered the Movement of Communion and Liberation.  It was the joy of life that I experienced in those two men, a joy that I recognized as being greater than just the men in front of me, stirred a desire in me.  I wanted that joy.  I wanted that life.  I recognized in them what my heart was truly yearning for.  Not that they would be what would make me ultimately happy, but rather I recognized that they were on the road to what would bring me to that ultimate happiness/beatitude.  There are different paths, within the Body of the Church, leading to the Infinite, and He calls people to different paths.  Just as I knew that God had called me to be a priest, I knew that God was calling me to be a priest who follows the Movement of Communion and Liberation.  At that time, I still had little to no idea what all this talk of “method” meant (and I only know it a little bit better now), but I knew that I must follow.  The dynamic of my freedom had been engaged.

There is a prerequisite, if you will, for this to happen.  We must be attentive.  We must be free of preconceptions, and face things and feel the pure and original reminder of them.  “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike” (Matt. 11:25).  “The simple are those who call a spade a spade, who tell it like it is” (IPLW-Faith, p. 68).

This has really given me a new perspective, and appreciation, of my first 18 months of priesthood.  Six months after my ordination I was diagnosed with cancer.  While it was a very treatable form of cancer (thyroid), it did wipe me out, physically for close to the next 6 months.  Just as I was getting my stamina back, and my doctors said that all my “numbers” were where they wanted them, my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  I got transferred to a parish closer to my parents, so that I could help my mother care for my father, and 11 days after I arrived at my new assignment my father died, right before Christmas.  It was a month after my father’s death that I met Luca and Daniel.  At that time I felt broken, that it had all been too much all at once, and I could not catch my breath emotionally and spiritually.  Now I see that God was helping me to strip away my preconceptions — of what priesthood, especially the first year (I remember saying to myself that I felt “robbed” of my honeymoon period as a new priest), was suppose to be like, of what my life was going to be now that I had given myself to God.  He was preparing the soil of my soul so that when I encountered Luca and Daniel, I would have the simplicity of heart to recognize the Infinite Presence which is the true desire of my heart.

Holding on to preconceptions leads only to falsehood, and falsehood is the opposite of freedom.

Now there is one other aspect of the movement of freedom that Msgr. Giussani discusses in this section.  Since I was not able to reproduce in this blog the figure he has (on p. 64), you will need to be patient with this description.  Imagine a large “V”; at the bottom of the “V” is an “X” — that is us.  At the top of the opening of the “V” is a infinity symbol (∞) which is our destiny, union with God, and there is an arrow from X to ∞ representing our relationship with God, the movement of freedom.  Until we are united with God, our freedom is imperfect because our heart is not totally happy/satisfied.  Now, within the “V” between X and ∞ there are a lot of other letters, representing our experiences with creation in our lives.  Because these other letters are closer to us than ∞, they often have more emotional attractiveness, and they can cause us to veer off our path towards our destiny.  This is the concept of sin.  “In the dynamic of freedom the possibility of sin — which is choosing, in the face of a creature, what is immediately more satisfying, instead of using the creature to extend further towards the destiny we’re made for — is implicit” (IPLW-Faith, p. 69).  Sin, from the Greek, literally means “to come up short, or to miss the mark.”  Sin is coming up short on our journey and taking another road.  St. Paul says, “everything created by God is good” (1 Tim. 4:4), because all created things calls us back to the Creator.  However, the more immediate (though far imperfect and finite) beauty of a created thing might attract us more, but we will never find fulfillment in them, and without that fulfillment there will be no lasting happiness, no freedom.  In exercising our freedom of choice we must choose to follow that which will bring us to our destiny, even if it might not seem to be the most attractive option at the moment.  “Freedom will be complete, full, when it’s in front of the object that totally satisfies it.  Then it will be totally free, total freedom” (IPLW-Faith, pp. 71-72).

Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith

Msgr. Giussani mentions that ‘freedom’ is a word that we use all the time, though most people really do not know how to define what freedom is. To most, freedom is just “doing whatever you want,” and as Msgr. Giussani notes, there is some truth to that, yet the way that most people use the term is very superficial. Why? Because they often equate what they “want” with what they “feel.” As I discussed in a previous posting, while emotions are important, and are part of who we are, they are NOT who we are. We are much more than just our emotions. In fact, our emotions are part of what St. Thomas Aquinas would call the sensitive part of our soul, that pertaining to our senses and is common with the animals. However, what makes us unique, distinct from the animals, is that we have the spiritual powers of the Intellect, Memory, and Will.

So, how do we come to understand what freedom is? As with everything, we need to begin with our own experience. What makes us feel free? What makes us not feel free? Simply, we feel free when a desire is satisfied. So freedom is equated with satisfaction, and in philosophy (particularly in the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas), another word for satisfaction is perfection. When something, some desire is perfected/satisfied we are free.

Do we ever experience perfection in our lives, in the sense of being completely satisfied? I would wage to say that we would all say “no”. Our satisfaction, our perfection, is never total. Once one desire is satisfied, we desire something else. We can look first at the most fundamental human needs. I experience hunger, the desire for food, so I eat a sandwich and for a while I am satisfied, but I will feel hungry again. Today I got a satellite radio, not that I thought that I needed it, but I desired it. Has it made me completely, perfectly happy? No! It seems as if our desire is infinite; which can be troublesome for us since we are very finite.

Msgr. Giussani was a great fan of Dante, and he used this quote from Dante’s Purgatorio, “Everyone vaguely pictures in his mind/ A good the heart may rest on, and is driven/ By his desire to seek it and to find” (Dante Alighier, Purgatorio, XVII). What makes most peoples’ idea of freedom superficial is that they have a superficial “good the heart may rest on.” Sex, drugs, money, reputation, a big house, a fast car, etc… on none of these things will the heart truly rest upon. So what is a good that the heart may rest on that will lead us to authentic freedom? St. Augustine gives us the answer in his Confessions, where he says to God, “Our heart is restless until it rests in You.” Only God, who is infinite can satisfy, can perfect, our infinite desire.

On page 64 of the book, Msgr. Giussani provides one of his famous diagrams, to demonstrate his understanding of freedom. It is too much for me to try to re-create in this blog, but the key is that freedom is our relationship with the Infinite Mystery; our relationship with God. We must start with our experience, which is always in the present. That is why God came into human history, when the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us. This is why Christ established the Church as His Mystical Body so that His presence extends through time and space. This is why we have the Eucharist, His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. We can always enter into a relationship with the Infinite, the transcendent Mystery; the Other. We exercise our freedom when we follow this Presence in our lives, ever drawing closer to the Mystery, the infinite that can perfect us. Freedom is becoming who we have been created to be.

Is it Possible to Live This Way? Vol. 1 Faith

With this section we begin the second chapter of the book Is is Possible to Live This Way? An Unusual Approach to Christian Experience, Vol. 1: Faith.  This chapter is called “Freedom” and will explore Msgr. Giussani’s understanding of what human freedom is really all about, and how faith — properly understood — is necessary for freedom.  He begins the chapter with a quick review of what he calls the Five Passages of Faith.  Since I have not been the best at making these posts in a timely fashion, as I had hoped, it would probably be best if I reviewed these Passages as well.

First, Faith is a fact, it is a fact that takes the form of an event, and this event has the form of an encounter.  It is an encounter with another person that gives you something of a shock that causes you to discover something new.  Personally, this is the most exciting insight for me.  Being that I spent half my life as a student and academic, I often fell into the trap of thinking that I could reason my way to the truth.  Rather the truth is something that must be discovered in a determined moment.  We are “surprised by truth.”  Why?  Because ultimately Truth is a Person, Jesus Christ, and discovering truth is a gift that we receive from God.  It happens in our encounter with Jesus.

Looking back, I am amazed that I am involved in the Movement of Communion and Liberation.  When I first met Luca and Daniel, the first two people in the Movement I met, while I enjoyed their company and our time together, I really did not “understand” what Communion and Liberation was about.  There was a lot of talk of “method” but I did not understand what they meant by that.  Yet in my encounter with those two people, I recognized that truth was there and I wanted to follow it.

This leads to the second Passage of Faith.  This encounter is exceptional.  In a sense, we have many encounters everyday.  We say hello to many different people.  But those “meetings” with others are usually very ordinary.  The encounter that leads to Faith is exceptional.  What makes something exceptional?  When it corresponds to the deepest longs/desires of our heart.  As I mentioned above, when I first met Luca and Daniel, I did not really understand (with my intellect) what they were talking about, but I knew that I had these very strong desires, the desire for God, and I recognized that they were talking about that, and journeying towards God, and I knew I wanted to go with them.  Go back to the example that Msgr. Giussani refers to over and over again, the encounter that Andrew and John had with Jesus, as described in the first couple of chapters of John’s Gospel.  Andrew and John were devout Jews.  They prayed and reflected deeply on the Scriptures.  They knew and embraced their deep desires for the Divine.  It is what first drew them to the preaching of John the Baptist, and when they heard him say about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God,” they knew that they had to follow Jesus.  At the end of that first day with Jesus, when they responded to His invitation to “come and see,” they didn’t really understand what He was talking about.  They did not know that He was God in the Flesh.  However, they recognized that His words spoke to their heart, to their ultimate desires, so they knew they had to follow Him.

This exceptionality of the encounter creates wonder, the third Passage of Faith.  Wonder is an excitation of not just the emotions, or even the intellect, but an excitation of the soul, of our spirit.  This excitation, this wonder leads to the forth Passage of Faith, the secret question.  Who is this man?  Is it possible to live this way?  How can this happen?

The fifth and final Passage of Faith points to us.  It is where it becomes our responsibility to act.  Up to this point it has all been grace, but now we need to decide to act.  Will we bow our heads and follow, or will we turn away?  It requires a fully human act, since the exceptionality of the encounter touches the core of our heart, our being.  This is where our freedom comes in.  Andrew and John did not understand fully with their intellects what Jesus was saying to them, but they recognized the correspondence between what He was saying and the desires of their hearts.  In their freedom they chose to follow Jesus.  In my encounter with Luca and Daniel, I did not understand all that they were talking about, but I recognized the correspondence with what my heart was searching for, and so I literally, after about a month passed, decided that I needed to continue my companionship with them so I called and set up another time to get together with them, which lead to a commitment to do “School of Community” (which I had no idea what that was) together each week.

It might seem that after such an exceptional encounter that we really do not have the freedom not to follow, but we only need to look at the Gospel for evidence to the contrary.  In the 6th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, after Jesus gives the beautiful “Bread of Life discourse” when He says that He will give us His flesh to eat and His blood to drink, it says that many of those who followed Him followed Him no more (John 6:66; incidentally, the only passage in the New Testament where the chapter and verse numbers are 666).  Of course there were also those, who like St. Peter, responded to Jesus’ question of whether they would also leave Him, with “Lord, where would we go?  You alone have the words of eternal life.”  Or after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, while many were astonished and praised God, others ran off to plot His death.  Clearly, our human freedom is being exercised, and to the full, when we have such an exceptional encounter.

How could people walk away from an exceptional encounter?  It is unreasonable to not follow that which corresponds to the deepest desires of our heart, so how is it that some people in their freedom do just that?  It is because of their preconceptions.  They have become so attached to a particular position, belief, feeling, whatever, that they refuse to see the evidence, and no longer see the truth.  Louis Pasteur faced this when he talked about microbes as the cause of many diseases.  It was his fellow scientists who rejected him and even tried to have him committed to an insane asylum (who could believe in something they could not see?).  For them to accept Dr. Pasteur’s theory would cause them to toss out much of what they believed.  (I can’t help to think that something like this might be happening with Intelligent Design’s challenge to Darwinian evolution.  While clearly there is evidence of an evolutionary process, Darwin’s followers are seeking to make God’s work in creation irrelevant, or just to deny God — a journey that Darwin himself made, from being a believer to becoming an agnostic, to finally rejecting the idea of God completely.  Intelligent Design, while acknowledging the evolutionary process in many things, points to examples of “irreducible complexity” which cannot be explained by random evolutionary processes, and indicating an Intelligence acting.  It is not Creationism.)

Lent is a time to look at what preconceptions we have in our lives that keep us from searching for the Truth.  These are the real scandals in our lives.  By becoming aware of our preconceptions we can in freedom decide to let go of them, and this frees us to pursue the truth.