What does it mean that reality is our ally even when it seems to be at odds with what we desire? We often perceive reality as friendly, because it attracts us and draws us in to be engaged with it. But what does it mean that it is still our ally even when life’s challenges take us where we would not otherwise want to go? I was there in 1994 when Fr. Giussani gave the lesson that we saw yesterday [Recognizing Christ], and like everyone who was present, I was struck deeply. That moment was a decisive turning point for me, as it documented in full the exceptional nature of the story that had taken hold of me and determined those first twenty-two years of my life in the movement. I can say with certainty that the movement and the encounter with Fr. Giussani saved me.

A song by Claudio Chieffo, The Ballad of the Old Man, expresses well what has always characterized my life: an immense need for liberation, the perception of being one of the Prisoners by Michelangelo Buonarroti, that group of statues that seem intent on getting rid of the stone from which they are made. I felt as if I myself had to be torn from a block of marble that possesses me, moved by an immense and confusing need for something else. And, at the same time, the need to have a relationship that is free from power, as it is so masterfully expressed in the song by Dario Fo and Enzo Jannacci, Ho visto un re [I saw a king]: "And we have to always be merry, because our crying hurts the king/ it hurts the rich and the cardinal/ they get sad if we cry." Fr. Giussani spoke of this at a meeting with university students, as written in his biography, "Those who have power become sad if they see you cry. [...] However, the cutting words of this well-known song by Jannacci - continues Giussani - are very timely, because each of us can give in to a society that creates an obviously limiting and stifling atmosphere which makes our humanity become more and more like a prisoner, as if it were buried in a tomb”. None of the things that tried to fulfill me as a boy were able to entice me: a human love as the ultimate horizon, the prospect of a career, making a contribution to a democratic society... Subconsciously, I felt as if all of this was emanating from a power that wanted to "keep me under its thumb".

My encounter with the movement and then with Fr. Giussani during my first year at university, despite my foolishness, saved me from a life of rebellion, whatever form it would have taken, and made me feel from the start that a life commensurate with my desire was not only possible but that this desire could be respected and fulfilled.

I can say that during my forty-two years of life in the movement I have had the experience of the apostles with Jesus, as told by Fr. Giussani, with the same intensity, in good times and in bad. With Fr. Giussani I lived all of my desire and my sadness, my study and my work, my friendship and affection, the dramatic events of our country, the illnesses, the deaths, and the suffering around me, but also being engaged in society. With Giussani I lived all of this as one big event in a search for meaning and discovery of my vocation, as the most beautiful adventure film in which the protagonist was an Other (with a capital O), but where we became protagonists with him: the same as in the Gospel.

A Presence within the gaze. To start again to follow.
I lived with Fr. Giussani for eight years, from 1995 to 2003. After his death in 2005, while leaving the Cimitero Monumentale (the largest cemetery in Milan), after having accompanied Fr. Giussani’s casket, Fr. Julián Carrón proposed to me that I go to live with him. I had thought that at this point life would be all downhill, as if I were a wise old man who had nothing more to learn. It did not take me long to realize that with this attitude I was also throwing away the legacy of the life I had lived with Fr. Giussani because I was reducing my human question. I never felt the need to say, “With him things were better…,” I have never been nostalgic, but I was angry and sad. Not the type of sadness that is full of expectation as I mentioned before, but the sadness of Judas with Jesus because “His Kingdom was not coming.” I was dazzled by Fr. Giussani’s greatness and I thought that he had suffered and was suffering a huge injustice for not being recognized by the world for his greatness. I did not realize that in this way I was living the present as if I was already defeated.

I understood this clearly while I was in NYC where I had gone to meet the American communities of CL. On that day I was going through the Bronx and I was thinking about the problems of the New York community (similar to those of all communities…) and I said, “How can we say that we have already won? This city is immense, eight million people, while we are only one hundred and fifty and yet we argue amongst ourselves.” Right then and there I had the perception that in that moment I no longer had faith. I never stopped thinking that the movement and the Memores Domini (the circumstances of my vocation) were for me the place of Jesus’ presence, but I did not believe that in that very moment Christ, also through Fr. Giussani’s charism, was the answer to that city’s and the world’s need for life.

Other experiences at that time made me aware of how my faith was fragile. For example, in the face of judicial investigations that affected some of my dearest friends. As Fr. Carrón said in the letter to La Repubblica dated May 1st, 2012, some attacks were generated by many pretexts based on mistakes we had made, but in certain cases some of my friends were unjustly ruined, because their innocence was eventually judicially proven. Faced with all of this, what at times prevailed was a sense of injustice, anger and desire for revenge. But not a sense of faith.

And finally, the scandal of scandals, that is, innocent suffering experienced many times. When someone dies or suffers, when enormous tragedies occur, I found myself like Alëša facing the pain of children in The Brothers Karamazov asking: why does Christ allow all of this?

Reflecting on many moments, I had to say bitterly: I have lost my faith, that is, the perception of victory in the instant. From what point could I begin again?

One fact in particular recurred before me in reality: that is, Fr. Carrón’s witness of faith. He was glad. How often I glanced at him in private and in public because I could see this difference between us. For example, in the 2012 letter to La Repubblica he said, “The event of the encounter with Christ has marked us so powerfully that it enables us to always begin again, after any error, more humble and more aware of our weakness. Like the people of Israel, we can be stripped of everything, even go into exile, but Christ, who has fascinated us, remains forever. He is not defeated by our defeats.” The head of a movement, ridiculed by every newspaper, responded publicly like this. Christ's victory was there.

How many times, face to face or in public meetings, has this answer re-emerged before me: "But we have already won, the evidence is in the experience itself."

Also, Fr. Carrón’s way of judging many tragedies, not in a comforting way, but with the awareness of the Resurrection. Such as when the son of a very dear friend died in an accident, and he told the family, and then again said at the funeral, "He was ‘overwhelmed’ by Christ. Christ wanted him with Himself, fulfilling his destiny." It was not an attempt to explain presumptuously the Mystery, but rather to become aware together of Good Friday and of Christ’s Resurrection. Such as when he said to a person of the Memores Domini who was dying of cancer, "I am very sorry not to come with you. Say hello to everyone!" He turns everything upside down: real life is the communion of saints.

So, I had to start over and follow "now" a presence within his gaze. All of the years with Fr. Giussani would have been for nothing had I not begun to follow Fr. Carrón as if I were a newcomer, because my conceit had erased the ''now ". And in addition to him, to follow a large number of witnesses in the life of the movement, beginning with my dearest friends, who let me enjoy what unparalleled things Christian friendship and affection are.

This friendship is the communion of the saints, for which a person continues to be with you even after death, like Fr. Giorgio Pontiggia, with whom the adventure of a preference was born after the death by a tragic accident of a student of his school.

I felt the same victory in front of my mother's death that was marked by the experience of an "impossible positivity" that was helped by the discovery of Fr. Giussani’s charism. Not even the aggressive cancer that attacked her in successive waves during the last eight years of her life was able to reduce this "strange" fruitfulness. My mom often used to say, discreetly, that the pain was strong but that she was following the advice that she had received: to offer the suffering to the Lord for those who lived a consecrated life in the world. And she did not want to die before she had thanked the Lord for her fiftieth wedding anniversary, celebrated in the same church where she had been married fifty years before, and where her funeral would take place four days later. "On the day of my wedding I was excited, not for sentimental reasons, but because I had the intuition that a great story would be born from this sacrament. And this is what has happened: a life full of the presence of the Lord. I want to thank him with all of you." And, although tired and weary, on that anniversary she invited us to lunch, full of joy.

The Crack and the Light
In the video, Fr. Giussani said "If you have to change your position, change it! I change it every morning." Where do we draw the energy for this change?
This renewed journey of faith made me discover many other things.

At the meeting on January 26, 2011 that was organized to present Giussani's book The Religious Sense, Fr. Carrón addressed the sadness that I mentioned, rediscovered not as a flaw to be corrected, but as the disproportion of which my nature is made, the only way to experience God’s gifts. "There is a crack in everything, and that's where the light gets in," say the lyrics of a song by Leonard Cohen. There is an ancient Japanese art (the kintsugi) that consists of strengthening broken objects with precious materials such as gold, according to the idea that a higher form of perfection can be born from imperfection.

Until then I had somehow always fought my human need and thought that becoming mature meant to become a little 'invulnerable” to reality. Instead, I accepted to be fragile, troubled, affected by someone’s illness, or by a project that wouldn’t come to fruition, by a desire that did not come true, by anguish for the fate of a friend and of the world. It is inhuman to censor the holes that we feel in our experience, and it is a deception to try to fill our human need with something that cannot satisfy it.

To a young woman in Memores Domini who felt she lacked something in her life, Fr. Carrón answered, “Thank goodness you feel this lack!” By not censoring what is lacking we can discover the Presence.

The question is to have Someone who perceives this drama and walks with us, carrying this burden with us, giving us certainty, positivity, like I recognized in the Audience with Pope Francis with the CL movement on March 7th, 2015.

I was helped to perceive my true human dimension thanks to an encounter with an exceptional man, Italian songwriter and singer Enzo Jannacci, whose friendship will always be one of the greatest gifts of my life. In February 2009, when the case of Eluana Englaro exploded [she was an Italian woman who died after 17 years of being in a coma, when her feeding tube was removed], Enzo spoke during an interview of the “caress of the Nazarene.” Shortly after, he was invited to the Rimini Meeting and a relationship with some of us was born, one that lasted until his death. For many in the movement, Jannacci was already a significant presence for his poignant way of "seeing" the wounded, marginalized man in his structural disproportion, seeing him so much in his truth that at times he even becomes a hero.

The simple and discreet friendship with Enzo profoundly changed him and us. During the years of his illness, which was discovered a few months after we met, he became paradoxically more and more joyful, in wandering through Milan, in seeing the skyscrapers that kept growing, in enjoying the soccer matches of the European Championship, in getting his feet back into the sea... Enzo was a ‘whole ’man who lived everything with unique intensity. At the meeting with the kids of Portofranco on December 2, 2011, to the question, "What do you wish for these guys?" he replied, "I wish them all the happiness promised by the Nazarene, through a caress and a wound. [...] I told you this so that you never forget that He sent you these things.”


The hundredfold for a poor wretch
In the last part of the video, Fr. Giussani refers to the possibility of living the relationship with everything: work, affections, service to the people as gratuity, obedience and charity. How is it possible?

This existential path had a radical impact on what defines me as a grown man - professional work - making sure that it did not remain merely a duty, but was a tool to express myself and to grow. I started my university career in 1980 and followed the long honors course that led me to become a full professor of Statistics, experiencing all of the attitudes that you may have at work: the anxiety of not succeeding, the reduction of the work to a career, forgetfulness of everything including the vocation, being overwhelmed by the need to do. For example, sometimes I would go to the Exercises of the Memores Domini and in front of Fr. Giussani who was speaking I would think of the theorems that I had to prove. At first I could not stand statistics. I wanted to be an historian and I ended up being a statistician almost by chance. I still remember those endless and oppressive afternoons in the early years, in front of books full of formulas, in the Institute of Political Sciences at the University of Milan.

Today the responsibilities as a full professor are many more than before and everything is much more competitive. But the Christian vocation has allowed me to take some steps, first of all to learn to love statistics. I was attracted by the possibility of discovering the structure of reality, because even a formula describes something that exists and that is not created by you. It is fascinating to retrace a path of the universe, albeit in one particular detail: it means that in your work you have a continuous thread that runs through all that seems disorganized and fragmentary. In short, I found that work, with all of its associated details, is a way in which I am introduced into the mystery of reality.

The second factor related to the search for truth is the idea of a path: you walk to improve yourself without being afraid of being ignorant, because life is precarious, and therefore it is in the nature of things that you will solve 20%, 30%, or 40% of the problem, little by little, as you improve.

I got the idea that the way to treat professional life is comparable to the GPS in a car. When you make a wrong turn the "voice" does not care that you were wrong, but begins again to speak to you from the point where you are at that moment. It says, "recalculating the route," that is, it starts from your mistake and recalculates the route. Life at work is like this: you make a mistake, and for a moment you say, "I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong." Then you say, "I was wrong, I will recalculate the route." Early on the mistakes upset me and I could not bear the corrections. When one of my papers was not accepted I used to think, "The referee is on the take," or, “He doesn’t understand anything.” I defended myself from the mistakes. Now, instead, I have understood that the mistakes are to "recalculate the route": you were wrong, but if you're smart, if you're human, if you take it as an aspect of reality, as an invitation of the Mystery to progress, then the error, the mistake, the limits are useful. You don’t move forward only by being brilliant, but also by accepting the correction of your limits.

The third feature is comparable to what a mother does every day while taking care of her child, or washing the dishes, humbling herself to a form that is not chosen by her. The scientist must also submit to something that is not his to discover something great and beautiful. It is like "cleaning your child’s bottom." This, in scientific research is critical, because research is made for 10-15% of inventiveness, but the remainder consists in bowing to reality that, in its form and in its essence, is never as we would like it to be. For a disorganized person like me, this was a huge education: having to rewrite an article over and over again, to redo the demonstrations, to simplify them...

From this, many initiatives originated.

I said that my story is marked by a big commitment, since my college years, to support the life of initiatives undertaken to address people’s social needs. In recent years this commitment has not changed, but the external conditions have. Years ago there were people from the movement with great responsibilities, even in politics. Today this is no longer so. Furthermore, the recession has made it very difficult for many of these initiatives to continue—or even forced people to cut back some worthy projects due to a lack of resources. What is the point of dedicating yourself to building initiatives under such conditions? What can we do?

In an episode of Guareschi, while talking with Don Camillo, Christ on the cross seems to answer to the question: "What the farmer does when the river overflows its banks and floods the fields…You have to save the seed. When the river is back in its bed, the earth will emerge again and the sun will dry it. If the farmer has saved the seed, he will be able to throw it on the ground made even more fertile by the silt from the river, and the seed will bear fruit, and swollen and golden ears of wheat will give men bread, life and hope. You have to save the seed: faith.”

In this sense, a CL flyer entitled "The Crisis, Challenge for a Change," was emblematic; as it said that what has the power to create a change is not something that can be planned, but something unexpected that happens, an ''unpredictable moment" in which one, starting again from the infinite desire of his heart, from the certainty and emotional fulfillment that faith provides, faces every difficulty by constantly restarting to build, to work, to seek new ways. In my opinion, this is our most important contribution in recent years, also publicly, not only in Italy, but all over the world, as the video made for the sixtieth anniversary of the movement and the Rimini Meeting show. I try to give my little contribution as well with the Foundation for Subsidiarity and the online newspaper ilsussidiario.net.

And now? I do not feel settled. I'm a man on a journey, full of contradictions, of evil, of stumbling blocks. But there is one thing that I am deeply aware of and that has to do with the essence of what I said: my vocation to virginity. Fr. Giussani told us that, while for the monks the door was closed behind them, we must close it on our own, that is, living in the world, but looking at that Presence that we talked about and that gives us our consistency. Today, this has to do with the theme of silence, the stable dimension to which we are called to live in the Memores Domini, sustained by an hour of silence each day and half a day of silence each week. For many years I lived silence poorly, I could not stand it, because it seemed like a waste of time, like a void.

One day I let the darkness, the sense of emptiness, emerge in me; I did not stop it. I wanted to see what was at the bottom of the darkness. I began to perceive that this silence was like that of the Neapolitan song, a “silence that sings". Silence is inhabited: if the strength of your life is something that is not yours, in the silence, when you're passive, you can find this ‘singer’ who is present in reality. I'm alone in my room, there is no one, but today I do not want to fill the void, today I want to do like Adriana Mascagni in the song Il mio volto [My face]: I want to find out what is at the bottom of the darkness ("I look into my depths and I see endless darkness ").

I began to feel that this presence is there waiting for you to free yourself of the things that you use to fill the silence, waiting for you to go to the core. He wants to talk to the abyss of your heart. Now I have not stopped living actively, but I need this silence, I need this dialogue. I don’t need to be alone with my thoughts, but to speak with a You in order to find myself. A You is not the sum of all the other ‘yous’, rather it is a You that is He waiting for me.

"Live everything, but look for me.” The You that you discover in this passivity is the culmination of my life today, because to look at a Presence is a passivity, to surrender to our structural disproportion is a passivity, to acknowledge the beauty of the work of another is a passivity, even working like this is a passivity. However, it is the greatest activity, because this ‘now’ that can accompany also a poor wretch like me emerges more and more imposingly.