Witnesses from the monastery

Those who live, encounter
If obedience to the story that seized me led me to say: "If I do not enter the monastery I will lose everything I have encountered," I can now say that not only have I not lost anything. Rather, there has been a qualitative leap whereby the authority and the preference with which I began (that is, my initial encounter with the movement) always increases with time. You become more and more grateful for the encounter made, you experience an ever greater "identification" with that original preference, you understand it more and more. In the monastery, therefore, I am able to rediscover more clearly this all-encompassing power of the beginning. What happened to me at the beginning happens again here in the monastery; the movement is now not the sum of all those gestures I participated in before, but a life that communicates itself, the Coming of Christ in me. I am here in the monastery so that that beginning might continually explode. Fr. Giussani, in fact, used to say: "When a charism meets another charism, it does not exclude it, but embraces it, strengthens it, revives it". That humanity that I met at the beginning begins to coincide with me!
Giovanni

Prayer and witness
When at 5 a.m., a little sleepy, I go down to the Office of Readings, a verse from Dante often resounds in me, which has accompanied me for many years and that reminds me of my task: The bride of God rises to sing a dawn song to the Bridegroom, that we may love her. The Church, that is us, goes to "wake" the Lord by singing his praises, in order to receive that gaze of love that gives her life. In reality, after a few Psalms, you realise that He is already there waiting for you. Those thousand-year-old words that are put on your lips, the same ones that Jesus prayed, move you more than all your attempts, because they read all of your humanity in its depths. And, even if you get distracted, the riverbed of the community continues in prayer and – as in everyday life – it awaits your return.
Or, during the day, the sound of the bell calling us in chorus interrupts you while you are immersed in the midst of work or exciting reading. But salvation comes to me precisely from this interruption because it reminds me where to place my consistency, my hope, and allows me to recover the Meaning of what I was doing, giving me back the gusto of it.
Then, in this year of pandemic, when no one was able to participate in our moments of prayer, when services were suspended all over the world, paradoxically, the awareness of the universal scope of this gesture deepened within me: we are here for everyone, representing the cry and praise of the whole Church, of all humanity, even if no one sees us.
Matteo

Mercy is a place
In such a historic moment, marked by the Covid-19 crisis, I have to ask myself: what sustains this House today? And sustains me now? This monastery exists because there is Someone who is present, who wanted and wants this House to be able to meet me, to be able to build me up, to let me be myself. So that I can be happy. This, for me, is crucial because I only have this companionship, these brothers – whom I did not choose, but who were given to me – to be able to walk. I have been here at the Cascinazza for seven years, and I always have the feeling of sinking into my limits, but as time goes by I see myself increasingly welcomed within my limits. I discover myself becoming more and more a man. You find yourself doing things that you would never have thought of doing, for example cutting the grass in the ditches, and then you start working in a different way from what you had in mind, following someone else's criteria. And you experience a joy that is not the result of any particular effort on your part.
Giorgio

Born in the same year
I was born in 1971, just like the Cascinazza, 50 years ago. I have been in this monastery for 27 years. Recently, Matteo, a young farmer who had come to sow corn in our fields, asked me during his lunch break about our life. Shocked by what I was telling him, he could not understand how a life like ours, “closed in a hole”, could make sense. Then suddenly, after a pause, he said to me: "You are with the Lord all day, 24 hours, but I am with my wife only two hours a day." I too was struck by this statement and recognised in him that same Presence that Matthew saw in me. That Presence that made me take my first steps in my family, in the movement, in my call to the monastery... and then the rediscovery of this place, created by the Lord just for me, to love me, to fulfil my humanity within that mysterious continuity with the first encounter.
Fabio

Obedience as a method for life
The most important method of living in the monastery is obedience, as Christ obeyed the Father. Obedience has two characteristics: it must be total and free. "Total" because if I decide how far to obey, or when it is important and when it is not, it means that I am not obeying another, but I am following myself. "Free", and also happy, because deep down I recognise that I cannot make myself happy on my own; and so, out of the passion to fulfil my life, I decide to hand myself over to those who are further along the path and I know that they can lead me to my goal.
Stefano