Where do you start?

There is a very moving article by Fiammetta Cappellini from the Meeting at Rimini, "Is the world still remembering our tragedy?", who works for the AVSI aid organization in Haiti.  I have been following her story at ilsussidiario.net since the earthquake hit.  In each of her letters she gives insight into how to keep starting again in the face of every imaginable obstacle.  What I learn from her is not to imagine that we can solve problems in any comprehensive way, because it doesn't belong to us to do this but to Another, and that presumption only paralyzes us.   Instead, it's about taking steps and following the provocation.  In this case, a teacher and some schoolchildren took a step which gave Haitian children living in tents a chance to continue their studies.

It is difficult to land here from Haiti to a world without cracks, to Western life, and to succeed in building a speech with iron logic and meticulous explanations that people expect. I got a bit troubled, I didn't feel up to it. I still have the impression of not being able to make people understand the most important thing: that Haitians have found hope, and trust again, and that the desire for great things that is hope in tomorrow, has taken force, and has returned to life. I thought I did not find the words to tell about the long road made of small steps which has carried us from the tragedy to a window on the future.

John Waters Reports on The Meeting

The Irish Times: "Time to Revel in a Little Mystery"

"It is easy to be deceived by the content of the meeting, which on the whole appears to be a bumper accumulation of the things we deal with in our everyday culture. There are politics and science and art and music and literature and sport.

But the approach is different to conventional cultural approaches in that it opens everything out in the direction of what is unknowable. Everything that is touched upon is immediately seen to lead somewhere else, to become detached from the schemas our culture creates to accommodate knowledge that is reluctantly conceded as contingent or provisional or partial, but nonetheless claimed as a down-payment on omniscience."

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The Origin of a Cultural Initiative

Fr. Giussani wrote a brief statement describing the origin of the Meeting, just months after the very first session, in 1980.   What it is today was there from the beginning.  An excerpt:

This is the ideal that unites: it is a response to the need to live that unites people, that creates society. Friendship: a company guided toward destiny, as I always defined it with the youngsters. The perception of a situation as the absence of the ideal, and therefore a commitment, so that it would exist, so that the presence of the ideal happens.

Therefore the event of a new initiative, the generation of an adult begins, the adult starts generating. They have created a place where one encounters a subject. The presence is this: a place. The generation of an adult, which makes present one's own life beyond oneself, it is a place where one encounters a subject. A subject, a person, a humanity, who has something to say; a humanity with a message.

Meeting: An Expansion of the Heart

The theme of the 2010 Meeting, ""That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart", quoted from Camus' Caligula, started from a characteristically contemporary expression of doubt:

This sentence is part of the response of Don Giussani to a young woman who had confessed her doubt that it was all an illusion to wish for great things. His response continued like this: "Then follow it. What does it mean to follow? It means to compare all the encounters you have with what your heart tells you and when they correspond, to follow them. So, going forward you will have no fear that it is an illusion, but understand that in fact this is not an illusion. What seems an illusion, is in fact, a bias, a suspicion."

The Meeting explores a humanity which is not reduced to biological and psychological boundaries.  The participants are not in lockstep, politically, socially or otherwise.  They are open and ready for something new and great.

What was evident at one time is not obvious today: does there really exist a universality of the human? Is there something objective in the subjectivity of each of us? Can we speak of an "elementary experience" common to all men, whatever their race, history and culture?

On this an unprecedented cultural battle is being waged. It is enough to make a careful and honest observation about ourselves to realize that we have an infinite desire. This is the stature of the human heart.

Even more than a discussion about ideas, the Meeting introduces individuals who demonstrate this expansion of the heart.

The Meeting intends to document that the original nature of the heart exists and is the only resource to resist any attack against the humanity of each one. It will do so primarily through the intervention of Don Stefano Alberto, a professor of introductory theology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, which will be dedicated to the title of the Meeting; by the conference by Cardinal Scola and by an exceptional dialogue between the Metropolitan Filaret and Cardinal Erdo. Further, it will try to bring forth people for whom the "I" is not reduced and who are a testimony to a new subject who lives the reality of everything with a positive and constructive gaze.

(Rimini Meeting: "That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart", Alberto Savorana)

Meeting: Irish President Mary McAleese

Irish President Mary McAleese will address the Rimini Meeting on Sunday, August 22nd.  Journalist John Waters, who will join the panel, offers background on her political role in an article for Il Sussidiario.  

She was marginalized and repudiated by her fellow workers (some of whom have since recanted and apologized to her as President). When, later on, she acted as spokeswoman for the Catholic Bishops, she was the subject of venomous attacks which resulted in her life being threatened by unionist extremists.

Nevertheless, by sheer force of personality, McAleese emerged as a thoughtful and courageous voice, unafraid to speak up about her origins, her faith or her sense of an Ireland ungoverned by ideological prescriptions. A keen student of philosophy, history and politics, her public interventions were characterized most of all by her engagingly conversational style, by which she succeeded in saying quite complex, and sometimes quite rigorous things without conveying any sense of intellectual detachment.

In addition to all this, she was a clear-minded and unapologetic Catholic who took her faith seriously and saw no reason to compartmentalize it outside or alongside her public persona. Her work with the Catholic bishops had mainly been in the context of a forum established to address the matter of the continuing conflict that had blighted her home place for many years. She was, naturally, dismissed by opponents as “conservative” and “traditionalist”, but when the arguments started she left them all for dead.

Meeting: Flannery O'Connor Exhibit

 

 

Flannery O’ Connor

The infinite measure of the limit

22 August 2010 - 28 August 2010

Meeting: Michael Fitzgerald on the Courage of Flannery O'Connor

This coming week at the Meeting at Rimini, there will be an Anglo-American exhibit on the American fiction writer Flannery O'Connor (see also Traces 12:7).  Screenwriter Michael Fitzgerald accepted an invitation to give a presentation on O'Connor.  Fitzgerald, the son of O'Connor's close friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, persuaded director John Huston to produce the 1979 film Wise Blood, based on O'Connor's novel.  He wrote the screenplay together with his brother and raised the funding for the low-budget production. 

Fitzgerald is presenting on O'Connor's courage in living with lupus, the inherited illness which crippled her and took her life at age 39.  In an interview with Martino Cervo, he described her ironic outlook with the story that when she was six years old she taught a chicken to walk backwards.  Referring to the film, he said, "I was there with the chicken. I was just there to help, but it was the highlight of my life.  Everything that has happened since then has been an anti-climax."  He said:

The illness was the central event of her life.  At twenty years old, right after returning home after a stay with us, she had her first attack.  After that, it always accompanied her.  But the limitation on her talent was a springboard for her freedom.  There is one episode that explains better than anything else what I mean.  In the last moments of her life, at 39 years old, she sent a letter to my parents describing the food at the hospital:  she wrote of a terrible "stew that smelled like Kleenex".  She was dying...

 She would have deflected or laughed at the idea of being considered a great writer, which in fact happened.  She would have been horrified at the idea of promoting a particular artistic conception.  She was a great Catholic writer, her Catholicism and her sense of the absolute were completely at the center of everything she wrote.  And this is exactly what shocked the literary world, without them knowing it.  For example, there is no doubt about her influence on a giant like Cormac McCarthy.

The Dimensions of the Human Heart

The 31st session of the Meeting for Friendship Amongst Peoples in Rimini, which drew 800,000 visitors last year, begins on Sunday.  The subject is the human heart.  In an introduction to the topic the challenge is set forth, to break out of the prescribed mold.

We are immersed in a culture that tends to erase “man’s humanity,” the “want and emptiness … the chief sign of the grandeur and nobility of human nature” expressed by Leopardi in his Thoughts, and risk affirming a purely materialistic conception of life. The provocation in this year’s title, instead, affirms the opposite. The human being’s nature is first of all the heart, which expresses itself as desire for great things. The driving force of all human action is this aspiration to something great, the need for something infinite. The human being is relationship with the infinite. This striving is the unmistakeable feature of the human, the spark of every action, from work to family, from scientific research to politics, from art to provision for daily needs.

Journalist John Waters has a wry piece in Traces (12:7) exploring the problem of the heart in anticipation of the Meeting.  We think of the heart as the nemesis of the thinking person, or a "scapegoat", as it gets carried away and messes up the plan.  In fact:  "The mind has effected a coup in which the heart is retained for operational and symbolic purposes, but stripped of all authority concerning decision-making."  There is no way out without acknowledging that the autonomous model does not account for that "something [that] remains unexplained".  There is this "irrationality.  The heart, the font of the desire that follows me from the beyond whence I came, speaks to me every moment of what this `I' really seeks, really wants, really is."

Rimini Meeting August 22-28

Rimini Meeting 2010

"That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart."

The Meeting Program 2010

The Program 2010 has just come out: you can find all the Meetings, Focus, Texts & Contexts, Shows and Sport.

From 22nd to the 28th August 2010 - in Rimini Fiera

Click here to read the program