This morning, we could all grasp the magnitude of the challenge that familiarity with Christ poses for each of us. At the beginning, our friend asked how we can come to recognize this “ultimately unique face,” that has “unmistakable traits, distinguishable even from those things that He created as a sign of Himself” (L. Giussani, L’attrattiva Gesù [The Attraction of Jesus], BUR, Milan 2001, p. 148). This is the decisive question. And he added that what amazed him was that this personal relationship with Christ was the stated origin of the joy he saw in some of the friends around him.
The steps we tried to lay out this morning helped us to better understand what this familiarity consists of. It came out right in the first interventions that this familiarity does not happen abstractly, outside of reality, but rather right before our eyes through the facts that happen. Certain facts introduce something else in our life, pointing us to see His presence. Just like the rediscovery that happened for the first person who spoke, telling us about the conversation with an old high school classmate whom he saw again after a few years. A passionate student of Nietzsche and Sartre with a brilliant mind and a lot of initiative, that classmate sought him out because he was going through a rough time: “I’m going through some circumstances that are making me think there’s more out there than, until recently, I believed,” he wrote to our friend. “Since you have been working on your heart for a long time, I’d like to see you to try to understand if you can help me to see more of myself, too.” And then, when they met, he said, “I found myself to be weaker, more fragile than I realized, and the most beautiful things that have happened to me over the last few years aren’t the ones that I wanted to create or control, but rather those that I didn’t make myself.
I’m starting to think that they were given to me.” At that point, our friend broke in to say, “It’s the same for me, right now this beautiful conversation with you carries the same evidence: the evidence that you, right now, are being given to me.” Hearing these words, his classmate was awestruck; he stopped, repeated those words and thanked our friend. What makes it possible to perceive another person that way? “I was able to say those things because of an awareness that I learned while walking a certain road. Thanks to his amazement, though, I was able to regain this awareness as an event, as something that happened and not just an idea I’ve appropriated over the years.” His classmate was amazed, overcome by that gaze he received. For both of them, this gaze was an event that introduced them to something “other.”

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