Happy Gaudete Sunday to all! I’ve been a little under the weather this week, so thanks for your patience.
Looking back, it would have made more sense to put all five principles in the same post… but here we are! If you are looking for the first three, as well as an explanation of what we’re talking about, read this post first.
Being Constructive in the Affirmation of “Another”
Anyone familiar with Giussani knows that to be familiar with him means to admit that, at first, you’ll always be somewhat unfamiliar with him. He writes in his own language, sometimes, that I’m pretty sure made sense to him quite clearly but to others is strange and new, and it’s even stranger and newer outside of Italian.
When Giussani says “Being Constructive”, what does he mean? Now might be the perferct opportunity to give words to something you might be thinking, namely “what does all this talk about the community and encounter have to do with morality?” A very good question, indeed. If this is a question you’ve been wondering, it’s a chance to acknowledge how skewed the Christian proposal has become, particularly in the United States, even for those who are very faith Christian people.
If you told a first century Christian that an encounter with the living Jesus and a faith that manifests itself within the community of people where you live and do your daily work they would look at you and say, “Yeah, duh.” But to us this is not obvious. And it says something, perhaps, about the fairytale-esque a lot of Americans have about Europe’s Christian identity that Giussani thought it was necessary to write these things to Italians.
So, anyway: being constructive, “constructiveness” as it is sometimes translated, for Giussani means making a commitment to actually doing with our bodies and lives what we say we are doing with our words and our prayers. In this fourth principle, he writes that the “community, within the particular characteristics that make up the environment where it is gathered, becomes the place of a different humanity, a more human, whose fundamental rule is charity.”
And therein you have the difference that the Christian proposal ought to make in the world. In the face of so many accusation’s that the Christian morality is “outdated” or “oppressive” or “misguided”, those who gives themselves over to the vision and live it out within a community know that it is this moral vision that has shown them a different way to live the human adventure, a distinctly more human way. At the heart of the “more human way” is the fundamental rule of charity, according to Thomas’ classic understanding of it: to will the good of the other as other. Or, in Giussani’s words “Charity develops as attention given to theperson of another, with the intention of providing whatever is necessary to that other person and of assuming upon one's own shoulders the needs and requirements of that other person.”
What is the effect of this? Well, “constructiveness.” Life in a community like that starts to look like something different, and for good reason: it is something different.
Giussani:
The community that arises from such a situation is a community of initiatives, of initiatives without limits. These initiatives, in turn, produce a society that is more humanly desirable. In such a society, for example, the birth of a baby is truly an occasion of joy for all. Of course it isjoyful for the two members of the community united in marriage who are the parents, but the birth is also a reason for everyone to celebrate. In this kind of society, sick people are cared for and the eviction of a family creates a respon sibility that falls upon the entire community; this happens to the degree that it is possible and that every one's rights are respected. I am not merely speaking about an ideal here. I am speaking about things that, in a Christian community, are simply done if it is a true Christian community.
The best witness of this is the example of religious women around the world. Nuns are some of the toughest, wisest, and most underrated people in the world. Fundamentally, sisters are women of initiative. Really, anybody with a missionary spirit is a person of initiative.
In seminary, a priest-professor once posed a question to us: “Do you perceive yourselves capable of going into a community and bringing it into life?”
And of course we all said, YEAH FATHER YEAH. But what we meant, in our immaturity of that time, was, “I will make a community in my image!! Since my vision of the Church is the most-lifefilled one!!!” And then when that failed, and we took a step back, we could see that it was another life (better: Another’s Life) that we were being called to bring our communities into.
Giussani notes that the opposite of the fourth principle is Moralism again…we do what we do because we do it and that’s why we do it. Talk about a ticket to diocesan-wide mergers and closures under the catchy title of “Beacons of Light” or “Renew My Church.”
The same priest in seminary asked us: “If your parish closed tomorrow, would anybody in the town even notice?”
Is your faith bearing fruit in the community of believers, and is your faith being strengthened by the community? If not, I don’t think your first instinct should be to run for the more Trad parish 2 towns over; the instinct should be initiative…how can I help bring this place into life?
The Community as the Place of Faith in the World
Why can’t we just jump ship when the place is very boring? Because boring or not, the parish is the gathering place of the healthy cells in the cancerous body of the culture. The Christian community, Giussani says, “lives within the body of society: it is in the world, it is part of this society, of this world, and experiences the same problems as everyone.”
But since you are becoming a community of people who are seeing the human condition as it is in the world, and are filled with the Spirit to such an extent that, together, you are striving to propose something more human even to those who do not believe or who do believe but have not yet had the encounter that makes Faith, you are becoming a community that “gets involved either by intervening directly in certain problems; or by educating its members so that they can responsibly and personally intervene.”
He wrote this in principle four, but it belongs here too:
The world and society change through human realities that have already been changed.
Think of the Woman at the Well in John 4. She has this magnificent encounter with Jesus, which for so many reasons almost never happened. Jesus doesn’t see her as a “project”, but he looks at her and sees the possibility of conversion based on what he knows about her daily life. She is looking for something, rather desperately. So he takes initiative and speaks some very difficult things to her. But she doesn’t run away; surely, she winces and wishes to hide, but she doesn’t go away from him. When the encounter is finished, when she is changed by him, she goes back to where she came from and preaches the Good News to her companions: “Come and meet this man who told me everything I ever did; could this be the Messiah?” (Jn. 4:29) The reality of those around her was changed because she first was changed.
Giussani writes that Christ must be the model and the power for the way the Christian communities confront the world. “If Christ does not change the way in which we confront human problems, Christ is just a fantasy.”
Why do so many people believe that the Christian moral proposal is outdated and oppressive? Because so many Christians live as if their faith has no relevance to their actual lives, or because they live the faith in a way that makes them miserable.
Giussani gives these five points because he imagines a Christian life that “alive and impactful,” and is only capable of flowering fully in the midst of the Church. The new and truly human life proposed by Jesus finds it’s first expression within the Church as Christ established her.
To live this new life, he says, the Christian needs only to choose poverty of spirit and to claim Grace. Choose poverty by claiming the Grace that makes this life possible.
The Christian moral proposal is the proposal of an ideal, and this cannot be overstated. But its an ideal that is concrete and tangible, and we have already received everything we need to see it fulfilled.