John Waters at Meeting 2008, Rimini

[Journalist John Waters shared the panel with Magdi Allam at the meeting to offer his contribution to the theme: "Protagonists or Nobodies?" As with Allam, coming to the Meeting was decisive in changing his way of looking at the world and of relating to it, as he showed in a story about his daughter. The following are my notes from his talk.]

He said sometimes he imagines a new phenomenon of meeting Jesus, as Andrew and John did, and how it might happen to him. If he were having coffee with a friend, and there was a spare chair, and what if someone sat down there. What exceptionality would it take for him to understand that this is Christ. He wonders how Christ would surprise him and what he would look like. He said it could happen, he doesn't rule it out. But for him the necessity is for an encounter in a cultural moment which is difficulty for all of us.

Our culture has effects on us which are not obvious. We look at reality and think we understand it and how it affects us. But this is not true. The culture is like a jungle that we encounter in the dark. We touch something, and we're not sure if it's a snake or a creeper, whether it's harmless or dangerous. We crawl about looking for signs.

We use the word "secular" to describe society. The word "secular" is an example of the problem. We think we understand it, but it may have no meaning or may be vague. It doesn't express the reality of the phenomenon. We need new words. Waters offered a word: "de-absolutization". The problem is not the decline of the power of churches or of religiosity, but what happens to me. The nutrients I need to survive are removed from the culture.

The question of the Gospel last Sunday from Jesus was who do you say that I am? Before this question, another question has to precede it [for each of us]: Who do I say that I am? How can I describe myself in society? How do I express the yearnings of my heart in a culture that is hostile in ways I don't understand?

On his journey, he was raised as an intense Catholic. But at age 20 he turned his back. Two years ago, he called himself a refugee from a misconception of freedom. He now calls himself a lapsed agnostic. For 20 years he pursued desires in resisting the society he grew up in. The phenomenon of alcoholism for him was a metaphor of society's pursuit of desire, of finding the limits of desire. It was not just a metaphor; he was actually drunk. It was an experience he could describe not as an excess of enjoyment but of his spirit seeking to escape his body and reaching out to a substance and imagining it had the answer. He described it as his soul emerging from his head. [Waters has a dry wit, but self-deprecating jokes don't transcribe well. Come next year to hear him!]

It's important to name the reality of what happens. The culture can give different explanations that appear plausible, which we take for granted. For example, we'll say the problem is psychiatric or a matter of the wrong desires. Another question is that conception of society of man as a machine. It is vital to understand the anatomy of the process of observing how I take for granted things in society as uncontroversial, and how these conceptions are actually inside me too.

In the myth of Narcissus man sees a reflection of himself and is changed. He sees himself as an object outside himself. This mirror is technology. Man creates technology, and it steals his humanity, there is a constant necessity to create new forms of technology. We have gone from the shovel and spade to the plow, tractor, to sitting in a combine harvester and listening to the radio. We can sit and watch the machines we created to do our work for us. It's a strange paradox. His uncles were strong men who worked with their hands. Waters himself writes on a machine and grows weak. So we have to invent a new machine to get strong again. We think this way, so we wake up and instead of having wonder at our own hands, we think: I must get coffee in this machine.

There are many example of things we take for granted, in addition to techology and machines. For example, we take opinion polls. We imagine that if we get the opinions of 50 people we know what everybody in this room is thinking. Why? In the 1930s Gallup discovered something that was true, how we are already fashioned by the ideology of society. It would be more natural to have a million different opinions and to find out what you think: shouldn't we ask you?

The language we use is constructed in such a way that permits me to speak the things that are permitted. It carries a logic that is destroying me. A new phrase we use to abolish the future is "going forward". Not, "I hope things get better" but "going forward" which implies I make the future from my dominion of reality. So the unpredictability of reality is destroyed in language. There are many examples of this.

In the public square, I can say only what is acceptable to say. A colleague of his from the Irish Times recently died of cancer. She spoke of her despair, her fear of death, that death was the end. She was asked two questions. The first was: is there an afterlife. She answered no. The second was whether she believed in God. She said it was a different question. And she spoke of the beauty of creation, art, life, all she hated to leave. She retreated back to say there is nothing. People praised her courage and honesty. For Waters, he thought it wasn't courageous or honest; she was articulate about her despair. She described perfectly, when she had nothing to lose, the abyss the culture has created for us. We conjure this abyss from fatalistic presumption, a joyless perception of ourselves. In the mirror we see hopelessness. Society speaks of progress and happiness, but imagines the worst possible scenario at the end for ourselves.

Recovering from alcoholism, Waters said, "I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex". This is a way to describe our culture. We believe we create everything, that we are all-powerful, but we have no hope. What is the point? He sees, not because he is a prophet, but he sees in the eyes of others a correspondence to his own desire. The technical arena, the public square is ten years behind the human heart. Only in moments of blurting out do we recognize the truth. We usually sing in the harmony society gives to us. But sometimes someone or you strikes a different note, says something you didn't intend, then people look at you, is this permitted?

Patrick Cavanaugh, a poet, says the nature of poetry is not the words but what happens between the words, a flash of the absolute. The words are the least important thing when the poem is spoken.

As a child, Waters loved a beautiful Jesus, but thought he was an alternative to freedom. He had a choice between the beautiful Jesus and his freedom. He chose his freedom and was regretful. He had no quarrel with Jesus, though maybe with those who spoke for Him. He was so beautiful. He thought himself unworthy, or this was an alibi for the corruption of freedom. When Jesus is gone, he will enjoy himself.

Ian McEwan, in his novel On Chesil Beach, offers a beautiful and terrible description of an argument. Two people say things which are more than they intended, the process accelerates and becomes toxic. They separate. You see this from the internal dialogue. This is what happened to him and Christ. He talked himself into it. Even language sets off an explosion.

Heinrich Boll spoke of Havel who talks of reality beyond the horizon but does not mention God. This is out of courtesy to God whose name has been trampled by politicians, and not for lack of belief. Language is contaminated. So Waters welcomes the proposal of Giussani, who asks no more than that he be honest with himself, to engage and observe his reality.

After twenty years of crawling through the culture, he has come into the clearing. Like in McCarthy's The Road, there is a moment of recognition. People look at him like he hasn't been looked at before. Not piously, which would frighten him away. He needs to make a journey, clearly, logically, to be sure of everything. It would be easy to say yes. He sees Jesus there. But he has to be clear, to see everything. These people look at him this way. Or they don't look at him but at something in him he doesn't know is there, he looks behind himself. Like the character in Taxi Driver: "Are you talking to me?" And they are. They tell him to look at his life, his desire and experience. What does it tell you? Are you happy? No. So they invite him on a journey. He's inclined to turn away, but things happen to them and so he keeps on coming back. They excite curiosity which is bigger than him. They teach him things.

For example, Waters spoke with his 12 year old daughter the other day who was worried about a friend who was moving away. He told her love doesn't end, and that sometimes it is for the better, and not to be overwhelmed. After going to the talk by Michael O'Brien, and hearing how O'Brien blessed his children in bed, as his father also did to Waters with holy water, he was touched. He remembered feeling the imprint of his father's fingernail a half hour later, even after the holy water had dried. Waters had never done this with his own children because of the impediments of the culture. Trying to kneel again, he found his knees wouldn't bend, as if the machine needed to be oiled. The most obvious thing he forgot to tell his daughter that morning and called her back. This is a 12 year old cosmologist who knows the stars well. He told her to speak to the One who knows all the stars. This is the Meeting, the only Meeting he knows of yet, He is there in his reality. He only has to open his eyes.

Prisoners Exhibit at Meeting 2008, Rimini

The prison exhibit was the most popular at Meeting 2008 in Rimini. I kept coming back to see when the crowds would thin out to get better pictures, but this is the way it was at 10:00pm last night and all though the week.

We had a guided tour in English the other day by a young man who worked as a guard in the Padua Prison for two years. He spoke of the dignity of the prisoners, the need for rehabilitation and the freedom some find even behind bars through the community of believers in Christ. He talked about how they walked the Way of the Cross through the prison corridors, and at the end they brought the cross to the bishop and asked him to carry it.



When we entered the exhibit, we walked through these barred gates and were given passes by a guard in order to offer a small impression of prison as a place.











There were several fine art reproductions depicting prison, and this one is from Andrea Pisano of the disciples of St. John visiting him in prison. It is especially appropriate today on the feast of St. John the Baptist's martyrdom.



The faces depicted in this exhibit are friends of ours (the Communion and Liberation movement) who are currently serving time in prison. This was almost the most moving part of the exhibit (I'll explain). It seems these are people we should have known, but who have been hidden away. These portraits gave me the same impression of depth and closeness as those of the Carthusian monks who look at us in the film Into Great Silence.









The following contribution and photo are of Joshua, a friend of ours from the U.S. I am sorry I can't translate the message here. But instead, you can find a letter of his in English here offering his witness.









At the end of the exhibit, we walk into the Patisserie or Bakery. The people serving us free samples and selling baked goods are actually prisoners and guards, dressed identically as to not be distinguishable.

Mary Ann Glendon at Meeting 2008, Rimini

Mary Ann Glendon, US Ambassador to the Holy See, addressed us on the Pope’s talk to the United Nations earlier this year. She said she witnessed the standing ovation for the Pope at the UN, but the message was complex and needs to be unpacked.

The Pope’s approach was to offer friendly encouragement to the UN. In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris. Cardinal Roncalli, later John XXIII, praised this work, as did John Paul II later; the latter called it the highest expression of human conscience of our times. The potential for peaceful change was seen in Eastern Europe and South Africa.

In 1998 John Paul II saw two shadows over this Declaration, at Beijing and Cairo. Human rights is the common language of international relations. But the more human rights gains power, the more intense the effort to capture this power toward other ends.

In 1948, people scoffed at the idea that words could change the world. In 1989, words of truth changed the world. [The Berlin wall came down.] Good and evil was called by name. Vaclav Havel was a man of words, an artist, but he also worried about the power of words to be used as lethal arrows. A noble enterprise can take the wrong turn. The Human Rights project is so powerful it could be turned against the person.

Pope Benedict XVI praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for putting the person at the heart of the institution. But he pointed out fully nine warnings at the heart of the institution, nine dilemmas more acute as human rights advances.

1. Cultural relativism
2. Positivism
3. Problem of Foundations
4. Utilitarianism
5. Selective approach to rights
6. Escalating new rights
7. Hyper-individualism
8. Relationship of rights and responsibilities
9. Threat to religious freedom by dogmatic secularism

1. Cultural specificity can be used to hide behind vs. legitimate cultural pluralism. The inculturation of the Catholic church in various cultures has shown an accumulated experience which is not in opposition to rights and cultural underpinnings. On the other hand, the rise of cultural imperialism characterizes the professional international institutions which can be insensitive to local particularities.

2. The critique of positivism. Justice is denied when legality is divorced from its ethical foundation. The American founds of the Declaration of Independence acknowledged that rights are not erected by government, but are pre-political. Hamilton stated that the sacred rights of man are not found in old parchments but are written in human nature by the divinity.

Human rights come from laws discovered by reason and experience. To remove them from their context risks them. These laws are extremely important, as found in the Declaration of Human Rights. They are hard-won cultural achievements which are fragile in the postmodern world.

3. Foundations: Philosophical relativism is in the popular culture. Values are just preferences. There are no common truths. How can we uphold universal rights. Czeslaw Milosz said the fate of the old repertoire of the rights of man is beside an abyss, without religion how will they last?

Benedict XVI emphasizes reason and experience. But who decides? Liberal democracies depend on separation of powers, checks and balances, an 18th century European invention designed to govern large groups of people in freedom.

4. Another problem of foundations is utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest good for the greatest number. But this puts at risk the weakest members of society and can become just the will of the stronger.

5. Fundamental human rights can be treated with selectivity, with a menu of favorites while others are flaunted. For 60 years, the Holy See has been the biggest supporters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, providing for marriage, family, parental rights, religious freedom.

6. There is the pressure to expand the category of universal rights. The category can’t be closed as new situations arise, but there are more goods and desires which some demand to become universal rights. This trivializes core needs. They are agenda items. The Pope called for great discernment for legitimate vs. illegitimate new rights. The way to discern is to see what is healthy vs. harmful, and to see that these rights don’t privilege some groups.

7. The individualist approach denies the social dimension. Rights and duties come from human interaction, from solidarity in society. What are the assumptions about persons and their relationship to society? De Tocqueville predicted a new form of the despotism of the individual withdrawn into themselves and their banal pleasures.

8. Does a right recognize responsibility? A correlation between rights and duties is necessary.

9. The threat to religious freedom by dogmatic secularism, which insists on keeping religion from public life. This ignores the Biblical roots of modernity.

The positive answer from the Pope comes elsewhere in his writings, particularly in the address for La Sapienza to the legal faculty on juridical norms for dignity and human rights. The argument from the majority means that sensitivity to truth can be overruled by self-interest.

What is truth? That was the dilemma of Pontius Pilate. The Pope did not answer for them, but offered an invitation to search for the truth, to join the journey with the great ones with a restlessness for truth which beckons beyond an individual answer.

An 18 year old on another occasion asked the Pope this question. There are only two options. To recognize the priority of Reason at the beginning of all things, or to recognize the priority of the irrational where everything in life is accidental. The great option of Christianity is recognizing rationality and giving priority to reason.

The applications to the Human Rights Project show that self-serving tendencies to freedom are not the whole story. We have the same freedom to be protagonists, not nobodies. This should inspire us to decisive action so that we can help shift probabilities in favor of human dignity. In Spe Salvi, the Pope said that every new generation as the task to find the right way to order human affairs. The stakes are high, but can we embrace the task and accept the challenges.

Aharon Appelfeld at Rimini

[A few months ago, I posted a quote from Traces from an interview with the Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld. I was very fortunate to hear him speak at Rimini yesterday and transcribe my notes below in first person. The title of the talk was "Bellezza e positività della vita" or "Beauty and Positivity of Life". He gave a very poetic and deliberate delivery, so I reproduce it as closely as possible.]

I refer to my generation, 1939'44, to children condemned to death. I was born in 1932 in Chernowitz in Eastern Europe which was Jewish and assimilated. My parents thought of themselves as European. My grandparents followed the Jewish commandments but without belief. They couldn't change their way of life. They had a sadness that was one of defeat.

The Holocaust buried us in suffering without distinction between believer and the alienated. Our suffering was physical as children, we had no soul-searching. For our parents, it was the loss of the world, their beliefs were overthrown. We were left only with naked Jewishness. It was an empty loss. Tens of thousands of Jews were separated from dear ones, deprived of everything, stigmatized with shame. Their heritage hemmed them in, blocked the path to full freedom. Together Jews from East and West were under an iron sky.

We were first exiled to the railroad station, with an enormous panic of hunger and crushed. We absorbed our parents' bitter silence before our separation. Our parents protected us until the last moment when they left us, as Moses' mother left her baby to the mercy of heaven.

Loneliness was our lot. Some were in the forest, others in monasteries and others lived with tyrannical peasants who treated us like beasts. We learned the secret of Judaism. It's better to hide it. Those with no parents were isolated from humanity and grew up like animals, cold and fearful. Judaism made us fair game. Without it, existence is more meager. That secret was the only shelter over our misery. We had images of our parents and our homes, our last refuge.

We lived with death as familiar but not ceasing to be afraid. Every encounter with death increased our fear. The promise to our parents was that we would look out for ourselves. This made us stronger than we were, when we wandered from forest to forest. We were not children but animals, who are lost in the dark thickets of forest. We learned to get food from trees, fire from stones and to reflect.

Why were we so persecuted? In the woods and on riverbanks, that question arose in all its nakedness. We thought it was our smell, our longer ears, our fear of darkness. If we overcame our flaws, no one would guess we were Jews. We did not know that was the old Jewish curst passed on.

In 1945 at the end of the war, I was 13. What to do, where to go? There was a sea of refugees flowing from place to place. We had a huge debt and didn't know where to put it down and get rid of it. A great catastrophe leaves us mute. What can we say about the death of one person, what more a heap of corpses. Speech was blocked, almost nothing was said. Speech is to serve existential needs, approaches the depths of the soul, is metaphysical. It is silent. The depths are full. Appropriate vessels were not raised up for what had accumulated.

I was orphaned not only from my parents, but their values and beliefs seemed naive and ridiculous in the face of the monstrous people who tortured us. What would our world be from now on? To go into the pit of cynicism, betray the beliefs of our parents, to betray the faith of my grandparents, inward religiosity, betraying my communist uncles who had sacrificed life for the redemption of humanity.

One dark evening, I realized the ghetto, camps, and forests would never leave me. I was lost in a world of lost values. I wrote the names of my parents, grandparents, uncles, cousins on a piece of cardboard. I wanted to make certain that they had existed, that the house I came from was not imaginary. By writing their names, I brought them to life. They rose and stood before my eyes.

I was no longer an orphan but a boy surrounded by loving people. I was so happy, I kept the paper in the lining of my coat, the key to my chest, precious secrets of the soul. If I felt lonely or oppressed, I took out the cardboard, the real names of the parents I had lost.

Writing opens a hidden world. The written word has the power to kindle imagination and illuminate the self. From cardboard to writing took a long time. Everything revealed in the war years crowded in me like a dark mass. I thouhgt of the ghetto, camp, forest. The images were no less horrible than reality. To avoid images, I would run out to cut myself off from them. The method worked only partially.

The past can't easily be separated from you. In 1946 in Palestine there was a pioneering spirit to create a new Jew, to shed the dread of the past. To turn toward the present and the future. The Jewish past was a curse to escape. The experience of the past seemed something shameful to be erased. Go and uproot from the soul everything experienced from five years to plant a pastoral idea. Forget about that significant part of life. People did that with a heavy price. A person without a past, as dreadful and shameful as it may be, is handicapped without connection to parents, grandparents. Without the values instilled by ancestors, it is like being a living body without a soul.

I wrote letters to my mother at night. It was a collection of trivial details about daily life. If they reached, her, they would make her happy. I did it eagerly night after night, which connected me to the world once mine. It did not act like a magic wand. Vexing questions plagued me. Who was I? What was I doing in an agricultural training program at the edge of the desert? Could I deny the spiritual world? My mother tongue was German. I heard it ag home until age 9. I learned Lithuanian and Prussian during the war. A few German words were sufficient to write to my mother letters full of mistakes.

In the afternoon I studied the Hebrew of daily life and the Bible. A young man from an assimilated, secular home recoils against religious books. I was not familiar with the Hebrew Bible and thought it full of angels and saints. What did they mean to me? A surprise awaited me. The patriarchs of the Bible were not saints but earthly, lively. There were treasures stored in the Bible. I decided to copy a chapter every day.

The Hebrew Bible deals not only with content but with form. The whole enchanted me. Biblical prose is simple, unembellished, lacking description, almost without adjectives. Like all ancient languages, it has a severity, a hard logic without sentimentality. I didnàt know severity suited my life experience. On the suffering of ghetto, camp, forest, it is impossible to lavish words. The greater the suffering, the more important it is to use few words. Pain refuses to be shaped by a language drunk with words.

In Biblical prose not speaking is as important as speech. Outward description is an illusion. We must strive to reach the inner kernel of soul. I didnàt internalize this easily or rapidly. The attraction for the sentimental or the noisy is almost natural. Biblical prose taught me to overcome the tendency the victim to regard himself as always right. Biblical prose taught me an objectivity to the superficiality of one-sidedness. In my life experience, egocentrism lurks in every corner.

Biblical narrative has no ideal people. These are flesh and blood with weaknesses. One is a womanizer, another vengeful, one sends a man to battle to die to take his wife, another is a villain. Primo Levi, on writing of Auschwitz, also wrote in very factual, dry language without rhetorical ornament, perhaps for the same reason.

It took great effort to acquire the Hebrew language. I made it my mother tongue and language to find me to my grandparents and great-grandparents and to learn about the character and destiny of the Jews. I read and copied the Bible. It included various experiences--poetry, prophecy, law, history, philosophy. I was charmed by narrative - people emerged, earthly people, but connected with heaven. There were no saints among them. But they knew in their souls they would not be without answers.

I read the Bible with devotion but it wasn't especially religious reading. I wanted to cling to the roots of language, to the primal experience of stories. It was a great joy, after years of struggling, I wrote a short story. The content was not biblical, but there was something of the poetics of the Bible in it.

Poetry is the assertion of strong people in the world, conscious and unconscious, people with us and those who have passed away. The longings, fears, grief and despair, marvelous moments. Life raises us beyond ourselves. We feel closeness to God. The Bible story has earnestness, like prayer, enclosed within it, it opens the heart in spiritual accounting. It does not lack humor, irony, penetrating criticism, ambiguity and sarcasm. The Biblical narrative is not didactic. It deals with good and evil, obligations, devotion, love for unworldly purposes and love for its own sake without preaching or idealization.

The Biblical narrative teaches that man is dust and ashes and created in God's image, two powerful feelings that traverse the length and breadth of the Bible story. Though heroes of the Bible forget, they are created in God's image. They behave like fatalists addicted to eat, drink and be merry for they will die. Abraham has closeness to God, is intimat ewith revelations, but has moments of weakness. He claims his wife is his sister for fear Pharoah will kill him. His treatment of his wife, of Hagar, is far from splendid.

The Bible shows human beings with lives and tribulations, with great questions on the purpose of our lives. It is great literature to be judged by what and by how. A true statement can sound false, banal, arrogant, garrulous if it doesn't find the correct form.

The story of the sacrifice of Isaac, what absurdity, cruelty, how can it be submitted without discussion? A short harrowing episode riddled with silence. What can the father say to the son? There is a short dialogue between them which is less revelatory than perplexing. Before the abyss our jaws are dropped. What lesson from this trial? Do everything God commands you, even if contrary to feelings of humanity. Any lesson from the episode, subject to a trial beyond comprehension, would be narrow-minded, dogmatic. Silence rather than speech characterizes it-the unsaid is greater than the said. Any confrontation with the abyss silences us. Life subjects us to trials, to many abysses. It is not easy for flesh and blood to dwell together.

Fortunate favored me. I was fated to encounter the Hebrew language. It was in books for 2000 years and the Jewish people studied and prayed it, but didn't speak it. It came to life miraculously 70-80 years ago and I am a witness of its resurrection. So many years of silence are embedded in it, in every sentence. I who came from hell needed a primordial language to speak for me. The Bible taught me to contemplate, to feel the footsteps of life and to write. To write, to live only in what is necessary. Vigilantly to find silence that surrounds the written word. It taught me, but no one can write like the Bible. There is a powerful primordial nature in every page. No human being must imitate the writing engraved in stone, but the spirit of the Bible is open to everyone who is perplexed by the riddle of humanity and our life and to all who would express this world.

The Hebrew language opened my heart and connected me to my ancestors. When I came to Israel in 1946, a lost orphan, I could not imagine that the Hebrew language, not my mother tongue, would rehabilitate my great loss.

Archbishop Paolo Pezzi in Rimini

Archbishop Paolo Pezzi of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo, newly elected to the Moscow diocese, addressed the huge crowd as one of the cielini. He recalled his own younger days of working at the meeting and setting up a stage similar to the one he was now speaking from.

He told us first that it is easy to work, to serve, to obey, as part of something bigger. Don’t tame life to make it easier. He said yes to the Mystery without being fully aware, but discovered over time the features, the face of Another. The real protagonists in history are those living a relationship with Christ.

When the Pope asked him to be the archbishop of Moscow, it was just a different task to serve the Mystery and to know whom to answer is to be free. It is to say yes to Christ just as when he was here setting up the stage. He is participating in a greater project.

We have to answer the mystery of God in the vocation of our lives, to respond constantly to the love that calls us. How can I serve the mystery or to say yes to God? We have the opportunity to remain forever young by saying yes to Christ, which is always yes to real persons and precise circumstances. These are much more than they appear as we become familiar with Christ and become certain of what is good even for those who are apparently against us. This is the ability to recognize Christ under the appearance of what is happening. We will judge persons and things in a different way. This is even to say yes to God when you’re stuck in traffic. We become more interested in finding Christ in circumstances rather than changing circumstances. This is what makes flowers grow in the most arid desert daily.

Many years ago, when he was about 13, his mother was ironing on a hot Sunday afternoon. He asked her why she was ironing when so many other mothers were at the cinema or having fun. She told him: So that I can raise you as good children according to the rule of God. Later in the movement he understood the profound answer by his mother.

Daily life is filled with arid things that are not passionate, even for a bishop, e.g. administration, bureaucracy. One can feel something like being stuck in traffic. Time elapses and it doesn’t change things. Instead, protagonism is offering, saying I offer this to you, Christ. You are the consistency of things. I don’t decide the circumstances. No matter what level you find yourself, you can always offer in any circumstance.

When the Pope appointed him as bishop of Moscow, one objection was that a foreign bishop was being appointed on Russian soil. When the objection was put to him, it was something radical. You feel foreign when you lose consciousness of Christ. Without this relation, he is foreign to myself, nothing is familiar. Familiarity with Christ makes you at home everywhere. What was asked of him was a new beginning. What does it mean to start, what is a new beginning?

A new beginning is not detachment from the past. Even if I conquer the whole world for the most just and beautiful cause, if I lose myself, if I didn’t have a place to go back, it is futile. He feels even more pressing the question how to answer God. Like Peter, Lord, I do not understand, but where can I go? This is an ingenious, profoundly human answer. Faith is an answer to the question of existence, to discover him as the constant answer to my humanity. This is a position of stupor, of the current event of Christ, the flavor of adventure, of life and mission.

He learned to appreciate that in brotherhood his vocation is completed. This is the awareness of a belonging to God that continues. When we don’t know who we belong to, we can’t touch dailyness. Then the day is a blackmail of things to do.

The Gospel of Mark says that the twelve were called to “be with him”, and to be sent daily in Christ. Otherwise living is calculation, rigidity, tiring, with a constant concern for everything. The struggle and vigilance is necessary to not give in to mundane logic.

Cardinal Ratzinger spoke of the loss of Christian identity, so that we don’t bring the reality of faith. The superiority of faith no longer emerges. So whenever there is a meeting there are the usual questions of celibacy, female priesthood. The Church continues to deal with itself. For many, mission is still something to justify, considered like a manhunt. Proselytism begins where mission ends.

Enthusiasm for Christ: I don’t propose myself but Someone Else. For the West mission means announcements, communication, gestures. For the East, mission is the transfiguration of our person with communion with Christ which draws the world to its center, learned from Giussani and others who make Christ fascinating.

After the CL meeting with the Pope last year, the archbishop wrote a letter to the Pope, grateful for how God had reached him through the Holy Father. And he offered himself to go anywhere he would be sent. What he most wants is the life of the other person, drawing people to the miracle of Communion, and this is the opposite of a solitary struggle. This is the preciseness of obedience, bending to circumstances rather than pursuing a project. This is a dramatic moment in the history of Russia.

The mission is to expand the mystery of God that makes me. In the mystery of Christ, everything consists in Him. As Solovyev wrote, what we have most dear in Christianity is Christ himself. Christ encompasses all, his wisdom and goodness. God is not extraneous. If we remove mission, what remains? Nothing. Man is his vocation, passion for the glory of Christ. The mission comes from love of Christ.

The love shown by Christ is yearning. The revelation of Christ removes all other yearning. We no longer live for ourselves but for a true communion toward which all work tends.

Michael O'Brien at Meeting 2008

Michael O'Brien at Meeting 2008, originally uploaded by *clairity*.

I had to fight my way into the first conference at the Meeting 2008 at Rimini by name-dropping (Letizia Bardazzi, remember that!), so instead of standing at the back, I landed a second-row center seat! The hall was already filled with hundreds of people waiting to meet Michael O'Brien, the Canadian author of Father Elijah (which has been translated into eight languages) and some half-dozen more titles published by Ignatius Press.

The unassuming father of eight didn't come to speak about his books, however, but instead addressed the subject of fatherhood and particularly of God our Father, and of his silence which is total presence to us with an immense love.

O'Brien quoted from then Cardinal Ratzinger's address in Palermo in 2000 who offered an urgent message on fatherhood.

Human fatherhood gives us an anticipation of what God is. But when human fatherhood does not exist, when it is experienced only as a biological phenomenon without its human or spiritual dimensions, all statements about God the Father are empty. That is why the crisis of fatherhood we are living in today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity.

Ratzinger then reflected on the name of God, because God is a Person and has a Name. In the Apocalypse, God's antagonist, the Anti-Christ, is a Beast. He has no name, but a number. In the concentration camps of World War II, faces and names were erased. People were transformed into numbers. This is the spirit of the anti-Christ, to make man a component of the meta-machine, to be reduced only to a function. The anti-Christ makes war on mankind.

In our days, Cardinal Ratzinger warned, we must not forget the monstrosities of history which occur when we adopt the same mentality. The world of the machine becomes normal. The machine imposes the same law as the concentration camp when men are interpreted by a computer, translated into numbers.

God our Father has a name. He calls each of us by name. He is a person who looks at us and sees another person. The true story of man is that we are sons and daughters, and we can never be things. To be a thing is the working definition of materialism, of a soft totalitarianism.

This is homo-sino-deo, man without God, autonomous man. Some have never known a Father, are orphaned, or think they never had a Father. The problem is multidimensional: social, psychological, spiritual.

O'Brien went on to relate three personal stories from his experience as a father which I won't transcribe because too much would be lost without his own delivery. The impression left was of a strong man of faith who encouraged us to trust in God's paternal love for each of us and to accept the sacrifice united to the cross that love needs to expand the heart.