Servant of God, Luigi Giussani | Fr. Bonaventure Chapman & Fr. Gregory Pine
January 23, 2025
Fr. Bonaventure: This is Father Bonaventure Chapman.
Fr. Gregory: And this is Father Gregory Pine.
Fr. Bonaventure: And welcome to Godsplaining. Find us – line.
Fr. Gregory: (Laughing) Thanks to all those who support us.
Fr. Bonaventure: Thanks to all those who support us. If you’d like to donate to us, you can find us on Patreon. You can listen to us and subscribe to us wherever you find your podcast stuff.
Fr. Gregory: Nailed it.
Fr. Bonaventure: Great, fantastic. Father Gregory, how are you doing?
Fr. Gregory: I’m doing well, thanks, how are you?
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s great, not bad, opening, made it through, we’re okay.
Fr. Gregory: We did, indeed.
Fr. Bonaventure: Have you ever seen the movie “The Sixth Sense”?
Fr. Gregory: I have.
Fr. Bonaventure: Nice. Do you remember, well you were like a small boy when that happened, right?
Fr. Gregory: Small child, the smallest of small children.
Fr. Bonaventure: Small child, okay. Yeah, what’d you think?
Fr. Gregory: So I had already had the plot given away.
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh no!
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, so it’s like you go to school and there’s that kid who sees the thing in the movie theaters and he’s like, I’m gonna ruin a movie for you and you’re like, why would you do that? And he’s like, it’s– And then he ruins it for you. So the movie was ruined for me and as a result of which I didn’t enjoy it as many do, but maybe that’s a condemnation of the art because it’s probably the case that the art should stand up irrespective of whether you know how it’s going to go. Yeah. I don’t know.
Fr. Bonaventure: I recently saw the conclave. I’m not interested in the movie, but that also been the ending of him in ruined. But in a sense, it was good because in the way that if I hadn’t known what the ending was going to be, the kind of the big twist at the end, I think I would have just laughed out loud and lost it. So I knew ahead of time what was going to be going on there. So it was no problem. It actually made the movie more watchable, I think. Then if I had, I would have felt entirely cheated and it would have seemed a lesser movie if I’d not known ahead of time.
Fr. Gregory: Subjected to a comical farce when you thought you were doing something serious.
Fr. Bonaventure: I was with someone who was with a couple and the husband knew and the wife didn’t. And so you got to see what it was like for someone just to find out at the ending. And so she just lost it. Just like, couldn’t stop it.
Fr. Gregory: Was it like one flesh became two flesh, that kind of situation? Like, what God had joined together…
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They’re fun. They’re fun. Yeah, I’m trying to think of those, yeah, it’s got six sense, any other movies that have, like weird endings you can’t give away. I guess The Prestige is kind of like this, right?
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. No, that’s certainly like this.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s nice.
Fr. Gregory: We don’t make good movies anymore, so probably nothing in the last 15 years. Have you noticed that the comedy genre is completely disappeared? Now we like apologize for being different genre?
Fr. Bonaventure: It’s, yes, and it’s also morphed into other things like it’s slid over into horror. You know, you can add these kind of juxtapositions of things. Okay, so why the sixth sense? Why start with that? Because the man we’re going to talk about today, Monsignor Luigi Giussani.
Fr. Gregory: Nailed it.
Fr. Bonaventure: Now, how do you say that in Italian? (in Italian accent) Luigi Giussani is probably known…
Fr. Gregory: That’s two sensitivity points.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s right. Well, they’re just, they’re excitable people. Is probably known most for his concept of the religious sense. And anyone here knows from religious sense, which is a sense of the religiosity. But before we talk about any of that stuff, I want to get into Giussani by asking you, how did you first meet this man? And how do you, what about him?
Fr. Gregory: Okay, yeah I’m from a family which is Catholic and very Catholic. But also like weird Catholic. Not in the sense that our Catholicism is itself weird, but in the sense that our Catholicism kind of takes us to weird places, maybe our Catholicism is weird. Who’s to say? But like growing up, my parents opened a religious book shop when I was maybe four with like a shelf of books in our family home. And I think 100% of those books had apocalyptic kind of whatever indications, you know, so like we’re into the end times for, for, yeah, we’re into the end times. And I think like my family, if you add up corporately, the number of times that we’ve been to Međugorje for my nuclear family, so six members of my nuclear family, I’m pretty sure that that number is in excess of like 125 visits. So that’s great work. We’re crushing it. Yeah. Also like involving the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, which to a lot of people is very normal to a lot of people is very not normal. So my family’s just kind of like weird. Yeah.
Fr. Bonaventure: Steubenville.
Fr. Gregory: And then we’re going to do a Steubenville, yeah, exactly. So, but my experience of Catholicism was sometimes like rules first. I had a pretty keen appreciation for the fact that there were rules in life and that one ought to abide by those rules. And I think my parents did a great job connecting the rules with the sense or the meaning of the rules. Like you don’t do this thing on account of the fact that it’s self-destructive or other destructive or there’s no such thing as God-destructive. Nevertheless, it’s disrespectful or it’s dishonorable. But I think that I had like kind of gone turbo on the rules. And then I met these folks in college who were associated with the movement, community and liberation. And they just kind of had a sweet curiosity about their experience and then honesty before their findings, which I found really kind of whimsical. –
Fr. Bonaventure: Priest, or were these laypersons?
Fr. Gregory: These were laypersons. Yeah. And so it’s like a really different way of interfacing with the faith and specifically of interfacing with the rules, where it’s not like it’s libertarian or otherwise ruled dismissive, but it’s kind of like let’s attend to the things which ought to be attended to first and not out of a sense of ought, but I have a sense of genuine yeah, interest. Yes, um, which involves some ground clearing or some like whatever. Um, yeah, it involves some ground clearing, but it was cool.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. And he’s a, many people probably don’t know about him and the way they know, I always pair him with, um, Escrivá, Josemaría Escrivá. The work that was day, founder. He’s more well known, of course, Josemaría. But the community liberation is like the Italian version of which has sort of laid back feel I suppose, but it’s a similar kind of movement or 20th century of lay movement with priests attached to it in different ways that has an emphasis on sanctifying the day. And you might think like, “Oh, it’s sanctifying the day through work. And then, you know, community liberation, sanctifying the day through, I don’t know.
Fr. Gregory: It’s more like sanctifying your experience through an attention to it, which will always yield something wonderful, beautiful, even if not easily recognizable as such. Maybe let’s zoom out. So who is Luigi Giussani?
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, yeah.
Fr. Gregory: Servant of God, Luigi Giussani, he was a priest, a monsignor. He lived from like 1922 to like 2005. He’s from outside of Milan. And relatively early in his priesthood, he was teaching at the seminary, but he asked permission to teach in the high school. Because he saw something going on there, which he thought was precious, and not like to be exploited, but to be explored. Like he wanted to tap into the types of questions that young people were asking so that he could help them to formulate answers, not as the end of inquiry, but as the beginning of genuine inquiry. So there’s, yeah, tons of cool stories told about that time, told of him. I mean, he himself recounts them, but he’s got this cool background because while his mother was a kind of straightforward job working devout Catholic, his father was an artist, artistic temperament, and an anarchist, an artistic temperament as well. And so like, Giussani has this cool kind of coming together of devout Catholicism and wild anarchism. In the sense that he’s questioning a lot of things which people might not be inclined to question because he knows that reality will furnish him with the answers. Because he’s confident, like he’s got the confidence of one who is raised in the faith with certainty. But he’s also got the curiosity of one who’s just wild.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. He has this, when you get to know him and you read his books, which we’ll talk about in a second, have a lot of personal stories. He’s a lot of testimony as it’s kind of, is focused on the personal relationship, the encounter of the other, this kind of, and the questions especially, like he’s not afraid of questions, I think he left the seminary teaching, he was trained, I think he did his doctrine of America writing on American Protestantism, I think, is the man he gets his line from who’s, the person who says, the only answer to an unasked question is like incredible or boring or something. That’s from [unk] I think. But he, so he has this interesting background but left teaching seven year academics to actually go and engage with high school students with local high school students, which most of us who are in academics want to like keep going higher and higher so you can actually like publish and kind of get away from that sort of thing. But he’s like the person who loves middle school students. So it’s like wow because he just really loved these nihilistic kind of question you get the sense that he loved the people in the classroom, he loved people questioning he loved people looking for things and he had this insatiable desire for for Christ and truth and it just permiates the pages so some of his books like the Religious Sense I think people are probably no no the most and then the originsates the pages. So some of his books, like the religious sense, I think people are probably, no, no of the most, and then the origins of Christian claim, and then some other ones, and you get a lot of personal stories, but the sense of asking existential questions, that’s where I get from him.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, maybe as a way to kind of encapsulate that or present that to the listener in a way that’s wild. So, you know, he has exposure to all kinds of artists and literary figures and other people besides, you know, so like you’ll always come across in his writings, the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi, for instance, not necessarily, but you know, so there’s things there that are interesting, but he himself has this kind of artistic temperament as it is brought to bear in his teaching and in his leading of the lay ecclesial movement, comunione e liberazione, which we’ll talk about later. But he tells the story, I’m going to get some of the details wrong, so pardon them. But he tells the story where he was teaching in Milan and he had this particularly difficult students who was calling into question a lot of the religious presuppositions of theology, but just like faith discourse more broadly. And he was, you know, welcoming that. Insofar as like, we can all welcome that. Not in that we should encourage people to be blasphemous or ugly in their bearing towards the faith, but in the sense that we should have the certainty and confidence that the faith will yield something which corresponds to their experience. And so at one point apparently like before class, he just left a rose on the desk of this individual student and then made no further commentary upon it in the course of the class itself, but it drove the student mad and he was like where did this come from? Who put this here? What’s the explanation for this? And Guissani, you know, as a kind of provocation said like why does it matter? Yeah, like why does it matter to you? And you know, you celebrate, you know, over the course of the next few months blah blah blah, blah. He continued to ask similar questions, and then he was back to the practice of the faith and the reception of the sacraments before too long. So he has this cool way of focusing for you, the questions that you’re actually asking. Because it’s like, you know, let’s say that you’re involved in Anglo-American, apolitical debate about divine simplicity. But let’s say that you don’t actually believe in God. Like, what’s your existential skin in the game? Like why are you debating these points when you don’t actually believe in the God whose simplicity is at stake? And so like, Giuissani is always willing to bring it back to that point and say like, what do you actually think?
Fr. Bonaventure: What do you actually care about? Yeah, he’s super intense. He’s intense even for an Italian. Like I get a sense that he’s, but it’s friendly intensity, you know? He just wants to know like, no, but seriously, this is actually correspond to reality. I get the sense maybe we should talk, maybe we should talk about themes a bit and then talk about the movement that he spawned, uh, founded. And then talk about some say, practical application, what we take with this. But he has this sense of getting to the real. You know, with a sense of realism, the sense of givenness, the sense that there’s a universe out there that actually has a meaning and that it demands something of you in terms of you actually figuring sorting that out. I’m, during the about this time, so 1922 to 2005, earlier in the 20th century, in the late 19th century, there’s a lot of this kind of existential question-ing stuff coming up. This is the Kierkegaard’s earlier, but of course, Nietzsche’s at this time. There’s a sort of nihilistic sense of things as industrial revolutions carrying on and science going on. People ask, starting to ask real questions, like existentialism with Sartre’s, starting to develop, early in this time, I’m reminded of Maurice Blondell, his book 1893 Action. That starts, it’s a doctoral dissertation to the so-called, on philosophy. And it starts with this line. More or less, I think it says, yes or no, the universe has a meaning and there is a destiny. And you could imagine a bunch of philosophers at the so-called University of Paris like reading this first line. They failed him for the first thing. But because this grappling of like, let’s get down, we’ve been doing the science for a while, but like what really matters is their truth. And I get the same thing with Giussani. He has his great, “Jesus Christ, yes or no?” Like at the end of the day, yes or no. And so he has this appreciation of what’s really at stake. One, two, I get the sense that there’s the real that you’re actually engaging with the world. Like the world has something for you. It’s not just this ideological game that you’re playing, not this kind of social construct, but rather it presents itself and asks questions of you as you ask questions of it. That’s striking. And then the third one, at least for an opening, is this, again, notion of the religious sense. He has this notion that deep down, we all want to know answers to things. And that, this world is not sufficient to give those answers. It demands answers, and yet the same time doesn’t seem to provide within its imminent frame the answers to those questions that we have. So we have questions, but we don’t have answers here. And that I take it as his religious sense. There’s something transcendent that is a part of the structure of the human person that he’s worried about with people losing or people forgetting about it, people not being interested anymore.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, it’s interesting too, ’cause he’s not like proving the existence of the transcendent on the basis of the structures of his mind. He’s proving the existence of the transcendent or he’s gesturing towards the existence of the transcendent on the basis of his experience. It’s deeply indebted to personal, I mean, to not know. And so there’s this sense that like, okay, I mean, you’ve encountered this argument before in CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity. He’s like, there are these things and they don’t satisfy what are you going to do? He’s like, you got the hedonist who says like, let me just try the next one and the next one and the next one, but he just lives from pleasure experience to pleasure experience with no real like sense as to who he is and what he’s for. Or there’s the guy who’s like, I’m being duped here. So I’m just going to distance myself from the whole of my experience, kind of withhold my heart as it were. Or there’s like the nihilist who says like this is all, you know, sounding furious, signifying nothing. But the Christian response is to say, there’s something here which gives indication of something beyond here. And there’s a reasonableness to that. But in order for me to engage with it reasonably, all right, I need to do some ground clearing. I need to address some obstacles or hindrances which have arisen on the way. So like for Giussani, reason is just a kind of attentiveness to your experience in all of its totality. All right. Or an attentiveness to reality in the totality of its factors is one of the way that he describes it. And then he doesn’t rail against, he doesn’t rail against anything. He’s too sweet to rail, but he cautions against what he refers to as preconceptions, which would be like reductions. So like, we as it were, filter or even contraceptive our experience for fear of what it might yield. So we like, we hold it off or we hold ourselves back because we’re not certain. We’re not confident that this exchange is going to go well. Whereas he says, be curious, be honest, and the experience will hold up. So there’s a story that’s told about these priests of the fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo, associated with community liberation, where they get out of the plane in Las Vegas, and they see all of these billboards, all of these signs, all of these things which are advertising all manner of fun, exciting thrilling, but also like sordid, voluptuous, salacious spectacle. And the one guy says, “Oh my gosh, this is just entirely too much. We ought to have gone to a different place.” And the other guy says, “No, I want it all. I want it all. We have to be honest about the fact that we’re made for food and drink and sexual intercourse, and yet our desire for those things can be an ordinate and as a result of which, we need to come before that and ask for healing and ask for growth, but still chart the court, like give indication as to where it’s headed so that we know the types of goods by which we’re perfected, rather than saying I couldn’t possibly. You know, that’s that’s to hold yourself back. That’s too preconceived.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah. No, that’s right. And there’s a there’s a nice balance between him. It’s it’s kind of reminiscent of the nearly 20th century, the debate between nature and grace stuff, where how, you know, how was nature and fitted for grace and grace and faith in nature. We of course, we know St. Thomas talks about that grace doesn’t destroy nature, but perfects it, this sort of thing. And you get this sense in Giussani that you have this kind of natural desire for the supernatural, that it’s baked in or built in or structuring us. And yet it’s not against our desires. It’s supposed to be perfected in a certain way, and they were not supposed to refuse our humanity. This sense of man fully alive is the man who was asking questions about Christ. So you get this, what would you call it? A Christian or a robust humanism? You find there that’s not reductive, that’s not imminent frame kind of stuff, that’s not imminent frame kind of stuff, that’s not too illogical, suspended or hindered, but rather it pushes itself further on to something, that humanism requires a transcendence that doesn’t leave the humanism behind. And they strike me at least when I have met communal liberation, people, they’re entirely human. They’re very real, and that kind of non-silly way of saying it, they’re authentic, they’re present and they understand experience. And that’s another beautiful word from the phenomenological tradition. This kind of sense of experience, not as a bunch of sense data and things that are just happening, that then we step away in process, what happened here, but rather living in that experience and trying to get information from it. So like desires and such, I love that attentive. He has a sense, a sense of attention, as being an attentiveness, so which has our drive to know actually has a sort of desire to it, you know, a desire to love, a desire to know that directs us. So we pay attention to something that we have some sort of desire for. And that the world for him is supposed to be something that actually draws us if it’s seen and it’s beauty. As opposed to something that we take and then process from a distance. There’s a lot of thrownness or just being stuck in the midst of everything. In Giussani’s kind of attempt to understand what Christianity is all about. I mean it’s a very incarnational embodied experience of the faith.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I want to set forward a couple of concrete things so people have takeaways and then I want to talk about moralism a little bit. But we said that we would make mention of his principal writings or principal works. I mean there are any number of published volumes, a lot of them are put out in English by McGill Queen’s press. But you’ve got the triad of religious sense at the origin of the Christian claim and why the Church. And the religious sense is kind of like the philosophical and theological anthropology that we’ve been describing. At the origin of the Christian claim is a wild presentation of the Kerygma. It’s like, what is the call? What is the vocation addressed to this space, to this openness in man, which calls forth from him a generous response, and actually makes for him a horizon beyond the current “Muck and Meyer” in which he is in schlop. And then the “Why the Church” explains the realization of this here and now and beyond in the setting of communion. So he’s in conversation with the type of communion, school folks that we’ve read. So there’s this real sense of, okay, you have to be honest with your experience, but we’re honest with our experience together. And there’s a real risk when you’re alone that you’re going to fall prey to a certain preconception or be stumbled up by whatever obstacle or hindrance. Because that’s not the basic unit of Christian life, the basic unit of Christian life is communion, that is to say, that is the Church. So on the basis of these insights and this vision that he projected, then he founded the lay movement’s communion liberation. And you’ll see like when folks gather in high school, they refer to it as GS, [unk]. When they gather in college, they often refer to it as Clue, I think. And then you’ve got like the lay, the fraternity itself of communion liberation. And folks can bind themselves to that after the manner of, you know, like a society of apostolic life. But then you’ve also got consecrated members. Members, I’m lapsing into the description of the thing. So, memoris Domini, is the consecrated person’s associated with the movement. And then the priests are the fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo. For those who know the movement better than we do, drop in the comments or in the chat. Further clarifications and so far, is there helpful for our listeners. So, there’s a whole bunch of people who are associated with this. It started really around Milan, it grew through Italy. You know, you have this big thing in Rimini, but now it’s, I mean, it’s worldwide. And I encountered a lot of these folks like in Freeburg and Switzerland. I encountered a lot of these folks in Washington, DC here in the United States.
Fr. Bonaventure: New York City, there’s a big encounter every year. It seems like a big event that gathers together. Yeah.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. So then, okay, that fills in some of the gaps that gives people the kind of biographical details or the historical details for which they are longing at this point in the episode. But then let’s round up the scoring with a little bit of moralism, because this I think is where we got communal liberation in the novitiate in some of our early years of formation.
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, that’s true, ’cause we, so our novice master and his friends were indebted to this group, you could say, and talk about how it’s not about… the Christian message is not about a list of dos and don’ts, but rather a particular response to an encounter. This is where, I mean, Ratzinger, when he becomes, Joseph Ratzinger preaches the funeral homily for Monsignor Giussani, but then when he becomes to Pope and [unk] his famous line, ”…being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but rather an encounter with a person, an event that gives one a new horizon and a place of direction or something.” More or less, that’s not the exact way the right quote, but it’s pretty close. But that Christianity has to be this encounter with this person, that then you change your life and you make decisions about it and revolve around. I take it that this is a part of the freedom involved in communion liberation, that it’s a freedom for something that you’re not to be hindered, and that you are free in this kind of group together, that it’san encounter with people that allows you to be truly free as opposed to you deciding on your own in this sense. But you open with this talk about the moralism business, about this list of do’s and don’ts, and how this is, once you solve that, once you solve, okay, I do this and I don’t do this, what then, right? What does Christianity have to offer once it’s kind of solved you about what you’re not supposed to do and what you’re supposed to do, as opposed to something that’s an ongoing relationship with an encounter with another person. That’s what I take. We were, and so when you preach, we were taught when you preach, you preach Christ, the person, not just a list of things again. So that’s very much, yeah, the anti-moralism, that’s how we, I think we experienced him at least. I, because that’s why I met him first time is the novitiate.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I’m really struck by, Giuissani gives this image. I think it’s in one of the is it possible to live this way volumes which go through the three evangelical councils which were a series of conferences that Giuissani preached to the members of memorized almighty Also really fruitful for those who want to read him. But he talks about our relationship with the Lord after the manner of a gaze it’s like you hold the gaze of Christ, He holds your gaze. And in the setting of that gaze, all is made right. Not in the sense of like your life gets easy or otherwise uncomplicated, but in the sense that the difficulty and complication of your life begins to make sense in the setting of the love that you share. So he’ll talk about like two people who love each other, they hold their gaze. And then they’ll like, you know, you can make comments on, are you like your hair’s kind of askew or you got like something between your teeth or like your makeup is what, you know, like you can kind of sort things out, but in a setting in which you’re certain of the other, you’re confident in the other. And you’re not worried about like, you know, that feeling that you have when you go to the bathroom after having talked to somebody for a couple of hours and you realize that you have a poppy seed from an everything bagel that you ate four and a half hours ago and it’s like devastating. It’s like that person was looking at that poppy. It’s like, I guess we just don’t have the relationship in which he or she can tell me that I have a poppy. So he says like in this gaze, all is made right in that you are certain and that you are confident and that like your life together kind of grows organically or issues organically from that gaze. And so the idea here being that like, yeah, we have to worry about the rules in a certain sense. Again, not libertines, not crazy people, but we have to understand what’s first and then come to an appreciation of what’s second on the basis of what we experience on the basis of what we encounter. Because otherwise it’s just, it’s just something else, it’s not Christianity. –
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, and I think it’s the idea that the rules are for freedom in the sense that the reason why the rules exist is that we can actually be free. I mean, this is kind of the insight to you’re free for something, not free from something, so that your freedom is aimed at a sort of excellence, a sort of flourishing, a sort of love and charity and a style of life, right? The Kingdom of God is about living together. And the rules there are set as aiming towards that greater freedom. As opposed to if I do these rules, then freedom will come later. The freedom always has to be the first part and then continuing on. The rules are assisting in that. I love this word risk. Well I don’t love the word risk, I’m not a big risk taker. But, Giuissani loves this word. This is all over the place.
Fr. Gregory: The risk of education is another great book.
Fr. Bonaventure: The risk of education is another great book. But this talk about, and he has this vision of risk that you could risk is something that happens:, it’s not unreasonable. Right when you take a risk, when you jump over something, you go into a place or in a relationship that you’re not sure about, right? But he says, risk is essential to the human person because it’s an act of freedom in the particular way to go forward. But that it’s not like our reason is going to get us to risk more. It’s rather the community, those who we see around us who are able to sustain us and show us that it’s possible to use another title, it’s possible to live this particular way. Right? And so he has this vision of the freedom of the disciple as living in communion and relationship with others that does involve taking risks, like getting outside of yourself, pushing yourself further so that you can be more free, whether it be a person who doesn’t easily talk to people, they don’t evangelize to people or share Christ with people, this kind of stuff. He says, no, you need risk, right? Because you have a community of disciples and community people with you. And there’s something bracing and beautiful about that. And also reminds us that we should, we can share more and that we shouldn’t fear or be afraid of that, the sort of attractiveness of Christ, that everyone actually, to get back to religious sense, desires. Christ is of course the answer to everyone’s deep existential question, not everyone’s individual questions, but to what it means to be a human. And so to risk, to say something about Christ, that is a, I just get this overarching theme in him that we all need to do this for each other, whether in our communion or whether people are not yet Christians.
Fr. Gregory: And I think that, I mean, as a kind of final point, I suppose that it meshes nicely or it comes together nicely with this kind of understanding that the ultimate horizon of our life is something that God gives us. So it’s a gift. So this is something that comes up throughout the entirety of the 20th century in Catholic theology, but especially with figures like St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This idea that like, this could have been otherwise, it could not have been. We have no rights to the life that God has seen fit to lavish upon us. And yet He has. And that’s real. Like there’s a kind of historicity to it. There’s this image that you’ll often seen drawn in communion liberation publications or like pamphlets handouts, whatever. Where it’s like all of these arrows that are going up to this one thing, which then comes back to where those arrows originated from. But in oriented fashion, I’m not going to be able to describe it. We’re not going to flash it on the screen. But the basic idea is that you look for Christ and then Christ reinvests you in your life. He doesn’t abstract you from your life. It doesn’t pull you away from your life because he’s the one that’s giving it. And when you find him, you find your life at its source. And so you’re able to be reinvested with a sense of meaning and purpose. And so I think about this line from Giussani, I think about this often. He says, the real protagonist of history is the beggar. It’s Christ who begs for the heart of man and the heart of man, which begs for Christ. So it’s like we come before our lives as beggars, we come before the Lord as beggars in the sense that like none of this belongs to us by right, but God in His loving kindness has seen fit to give it to us as a kind of mercy. And so we ask Him for that mercy that He continued to pour out that mercy, and that He makes sense of it, because if it belongs to Him by right, then He holds together the meaning of it in Himself. And so we go to Him not to say like, “Give us the meaning.” But to say like, “Give us yourself in whom all things make a certain sense.” But we’re here and we’re ready. We’re completely content to beg for it for the rest of our lives until such time as you see fit to call us home to that ultimate horizon of meaning in which the gift becomes our all in all. It’s just like, I love it. It’s awesome.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, well, he’s so good to read, especially the, I think viewers, if you have the same recommendation, but the religious sense, I think it is a good place to start with them. – And nice reminder of the point of Christianity. And we all need to be reminded, it’s like when you live in a family or something, and you have those moments at Thanksgiving or Christmas, we remind like, what it means to be a part of this family. And I love Giussani, for this, that he reminds you essentially like, what it means to be a Christian. At the end of the day, what’s going on here? Yes or no? Jesus Christ. Like, you can always strain, wander and do our own projects and try to fiddle, fit Christ in in our own, particular times and particular places and such. But rather, no, no, we fit into Him. Like, He’s the one who’s the whole shooting match of this and He’s the answer to all our fundamental longings and the longings of those around us. And you read that you read Giussani and you think, you know, I want to, I should tell some about this too. You know, he has this sort of explosive evangelistic potential. So it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful to read him and be excited about him.
Fr. Gregory: I have one final thought.
Fr. Bonaventure: Go for it.
Fr. Gregory: And it’s whenever I meet parents associated with the movement who have children who have wandered away, it’s a very beautiful gaze on their children. So it’s like you got mom and dad who believe in practice and you might have seven kids, like six of whom believe in practice. But one kid who’s just doing whatever at this stage of the game. And it’s because mom and dad have a kind of fixed gaze on Christ because they’re begging Christ for their lives and the meaning of their lives that they have a certainty and confidence that God is gazing on, that Christ is gazing on their child and that that won’t be without sense. Like it won’t be without meaning and purpose. And it’s beautiful because like it’s super easy to worry about your kids, especially if your kids have wandered away from the faith. And it’s super easy to think like, what is going on? I can’t see what’s going on, this can’t possibly have any purpose or meaning. But the idea is that becomes a occasion in which to gaze yet more fixedly, deterministically on God who holds together. Yeah. Yeah. Again, the sense of things.
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, and the risk with dependence, if you’re at the depending that you’re actually depending as beggars, because that’s what a beggar does, and depending on on Christ and at the end of the day, that’s all we live for. So folks, if you want to know more about Giussani, you can check out the religious sense. There’s also a biography that just got translated a couple years ago into English. About him, you can find plenty of links and things. I’m sure people will put in the comment boxes, but if you just type in communion and liberation, you’ll be able to find him. But that’s enough for us here. Thank you for listening to our episode. If you’d like the episode, leave a review, five stars, like, subscribe, and a TikTok, or whatever. No, we don’t have TikTok, Instagram. Other social media sites, what have you. If you’d like to support the podcast and our work here, you can sign up on Patreon to do so and make a monthly donation. But know of our prayers for you. We pray, know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us. And we’ll catch you next time on Godsplaining.