In July, I met He Li, a friend from China. His family moved to the United States when he was a child. He is a Yale graduate, and had been in Italy for a few months for his PhD on Piero della Francesca. During the week of the Meeting, he came to Rimini every day from Ancona, where he was staying. A journey of 100 kilometers, but one that had begun from much farther away and was directed towards a much more “essential” destination. I asked him to share his story.
Massimo, Modena


I have always been searching for something that I could not name. Ten years ago, as a 20-year-old student at Yale University, I was living a solitary life, totally fed up by everything I knew: from the rough New York suburbs where I grew up, to the well-groomed faces in the Ivy League classrooms and dining halls where I lived.

Instead of socializing, I preferred to walk through a quiet part of town filled with tall trees and Victorian houses. One evening, during one of these walks, walking down a long road built in the early days of American history, I remember that the sun was beginning to set in a radiant light. Its orange rays pierced the edges of large clouds and the countless leaves of the trees towered over me. It was then that I saw that “something” I had always been looking for. I “saw” reality, which revealed itself to me as a presence, as something “given.” I had seen it many times before, even as a child, when I was in Beijing, before my family moved to America. But this time it was different. This time, I understood. Every once in a while, I would think to myself that reality looks at humanity with benevolent eyes and opens up the outer shell of our being to pour upon us a deluge of other-worldly beauty. This overabundance penetrates the human mind and allows us at last to see the world in the light of its eternal and immaterial components, at least for an instant. That was my conclusion, without having read anything on the subject.

I spent the next ten years searching for this “something” I had glimpsed. A search that led me to the texts of the Gnostic sects, which moved me with their radical transcendence in God and Christ, then to St. Augustine, who taught me to direct my will towards this God. Then St. Matthew, who taught me that this God became flesh. The search took me to Plato, Aristotle, St. Albert the Great, and St. Thomas Aquinas, all of whom taught me that this “something” shines through every smallest fragment of life.

It led me under the towering trees in old American parks late at night, in front of huge concrete university buildings after closing time, and there I learned to see that light in bare walls and empty shadows. It led me to Piero della Francesca, in whom I saw, in the purest form, a true image of the mysterious “something” I was searching for. Entering this world, I no longer felt disgusted by everything around me. I followed in the footsteps of the Renaissance painter through vast repertoires of ancient knowledge, and I began to paint with his spirit, but with my own hands. Eventually, I found myself writing my doctoral thesis on him, wondering what it was about his art that allowed me to see inside the world.

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My academic research on Piero took me to Italy, where I learned once and for all not only to stop disdaining the world, but also to embrace it in spirit. Here, it was in some ways easy for me to learn that mysterious logic in people, in the way of life of this population, in the eyes of the people, in the love and capacity for understanding that is common and seems to pervade every thing. I felt a deep desire to become part of the Catholic Church, until then I was evangelical. I let the great and living breath of the Church take me where it wanted me, and so it took me by train from Ancona to the Rimini Fiera, where I participated in the Meeting and finally learned to see that same ancient divine phenomenon in that wonderful collective network of friendship they call the Christian community, and now my only desire is to be part of it.

He Li