A witness of the vitality of the charism

Bologna2We publish the English transcription (unreviewed by the speakers and therefore maintains its tone of oral communication) of the concluding meeting of the Festa di Bologna, held on the 2 June 2015, which had at its centre the presentation of I Want It All. During the meeting, Fr Stefano Alberto highlighted the link between Marta’s witness and the life of the Church today, specifically in relation to the responsibility and role of the movement of CL, ten years after the death of its founder Luigi Giussani. What emerges is an engaging picture of the task that everyone has with regards to the destiny of the world and of history. Those destinies which Marta, in the simplicity of her life, loaded on her back.

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A WITNESS OF THE VITALITY OF THE CHARISM

Giuseppe Monteduro (Beppino)

Hello everyone.

Let me introduce our guests. Fr. Stefano Alberto, professor of Theology at the Università Cattolica, here widely known as Don Pino, and Emanuele Polverelli, curator of the book I Want it All, which today we are going to present. Judging by the hour and the sun, the audience has also spread under the shade made by the trees. I thank you all for being here.

Why did we decide to conclude the festival with the presentation of this book? For a clear reason. The title of the festival is Life Is Reborn in An Encounter, and it is exactly what we will talk about today, what we have asked Don Pino and Emanuele to talk about. We asked them to tell us how through the life of Marta Bellavista, a girl from Rimini who had a brief but very intense life and whose writings are here collected, it can be said that it is worth living everything with a ‘fever for life’. Don Pino in the preface says that looking at Marta what Don Giussani called “a fever for life” springs to mind.

This for me is what the value of a witness is. A witness has a double value. Firstly, a witness is someone who tells you that what you are looking for exists, because he himself is living it. And through witnessing it he tells you that a path towards it exists. This is the greatness of the witness.

Today we want to get to know Marta through the eyes of those who knew her. Let me read what seems to me a brief summary of what you will be able to read buying the book.

“I don’t keep a diary, but I always write whenever I speak to a friend or to Don Pino. I write down everything we talked about. I have even written over the last few days…” She wrote this at a very particular time in her life…

The reason for writing everything down is not borne out of a fixation to memorize everything but out of a desire to not let go of anything that she saw happen in front of her eyes.

I never knew Marta directly, but friends that I had in university, Dado in particular, frequently spoke to me about her and their friendship with her, and they told me that she was good friends with Don Pino. So we ask Don Pino to tell us about what he saw with his own eyes and how this can be a resource for our lives.

Let us begin with Emanuele though.

We asked Emanuele to tell us about how the book came about. In the preface Don Pino says, “the birth of this slender book was not easy”. It is not clear whether the emphasis is on “slender” or “not easy”… Emanuele what is the reason behind the title and how were Marta’s writings – the emails, the notes that make up the contents of the book – chosen?

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Emanuele

Thank you. Let me begin with a premise which is actually a sort of a embarrassing confession. The same kind of embarrassment I have when I meet people who say “the book you curated is amazing”. And I tell them “I didn’t do anything” – and they don’t believe me, they think I’m speaking out of false modesty; instead it’s quite true. This is the point, at least from my point of view, of the reason behind the inception of the book.

I didn’t do anything. A Might imposed itself. A Might, an experience that is in some ways impossible to explain, but Marta gave a name to this Might, she gave a face to this experience through many people, a face which becomes more and more clear in her experience. And I found myself ever more enveloped in this movement.

I also never personally knew Marta, so let me explain how my involvement [in the project] began.

First however I would like to read how what I have communicated to you – the experience of an extraordinary might – is the substance of the reactions of those who have read the book.

Let me read a text message to you that I received a couple of weeks ago.

“This book is of an extraordinary might, the might of Jesus which enters life”. Another message of a girl who attends university here in Bologna: “Hi Emanuele! I wanted to thank you for your book on Marta. I have never recognized so much of myself in another person as much as with her, it is incredible how one like her can be such a company [for me]: [we have] the same fears, the same questions, the same intensity of desire. But most of all: the same unique response which satisfies our heart. Thank you for having been an instrument of all this.”

Another brief message addressed to Elena and Giorgio, Marta’s parents, on behalf of Pierpaolo Pari, Zizzo, one of the first members of the community in Rimini, the community which Marta came from.

“Thank you, Elena e Giorgio, for the gift that you have given us all of allowing us to encounter the thoughts, feelings, desires…, in other words passages of Marta’s life. It wasn’t an ordinary read, but an ‘invasion’ of wonder, I was fascinated by her joy, by her desire for a true life”.

All this to show you how what strikes those who read the book is “something else”, a sort of exceptional event. I was particularly struck by the first message, by Giovanna, because she calls this exceptional event with a name, “the power of Jesus which enters life”. Because this is what it all boils down to.

What I have said so far has not only been the substance for which the book was written but also the method with which it was written, [written] with sacrifice and not without effort. The expression “the birth of this slender book was not easy” used by Don Pino is accurate…and I too in the afterword, mention the difficulty of the editing process.

Again, I want to pause on the reactions of the book, because I think it is worth – without emphasizing or romanticizing them – observing them in the simplicity and spontaneity with which they arrived. 

Giorgio Paolucci, journalist of Avvenire, wrote a beautiful article on I Want it All, published precisely on Easter Sunday. He had been contacted by Itaca, as had all the press, but he wanted in all seriousness to physically have the text in hand and read it thoroughly – which is something that seldom occurs, unfortunately. Giorgio was serious about the book and he was very struck by it, so much so that not only did he publish it on Easter day, a day of special publication for a newspaper that considers itself the Catholic daily, but before that he sent us an nervous message … “I hope I haven’t betrayed anything of Marta’s life”. After reading his article a young person from Padova writes me “are you the curator of the book? Make presentations, make the extraordinary story of this girl known”. This is what he wrote to me after the reading the article, we spoke again after his reading of the book, and he was so provoked as to contact a local press agency.

In sum, a human intensity which strikes everyone. Which strikes the youngest of the young. In the site which I structured to promote knowledge of the book I collected some witnesses which were not able to make the final draft (others will follow in the coming days). Among these was a testimonial of a very dear friend of Marta, Silvia. The visitors of the site are selective and while service communications obtain a couple of hundred clicks, her very beautiful and intense testimonial reached 9,000 views in two days. I met Silvia and I told her “so many people read what you wrote” and she exclaimed “oh my!” because there is a sort of shyness or modesty, a very strong discretion on behalf of Marta’s friends of Marta when talking about her. But she [Silvia] presses on saying “you have no idea what’s happening because of this book”. She tells me about a student of hers who read it multiple times around Easter and told her how it had accompanied her over this last period of time, and most of all about how a friend, who teaches religion, proposed it in class and a student, after having read it, wanted to buy and read Don Giussani’s books, often quoted by Marta as her habitual reading and great point of reference, and after a couple of weeks confesses that she “would like to understand what school of community is” (of which Marta continuously talks about); she takes part and the eventually goes to the Easter Triduum with the young people from Gioventù Studentesca, the same experience that Marta lived. There is something that imposes itself, which strikes in a direct and immediate manner.

And now I come to explain how the book came about.

I didn’t know Marta and I didn’t know, although maybe I’d seen him once or twice, Giorgio, her father. I get a phone call during the summer when I was up to my neck with things to do. Precisely one of those moments when you think to yourself, “I really shouldn’t have accepted all these jobs, I’ll never manage to finish all of them…I thought I would manage…! I should have said no to someone”. In a moment like that, Giorgio calls me to propose another job to me, and a delicate one at that…I accepted after having hesitated a little, but I promptly said yes during that phone call. As I wrote in the afterword, the reason I said yes, apart from Giorgio’s insistence, was that during a national meeting of teachers in La Thuile, I had met one of Marta’s friends from Rimini, Silvia (the one I spoke about). We didn’t talk about her [Marta], but she had received news about the worsening of her conditions – it was September of 2010 and Marta would pass away in October -, and Silvia requested to say a rosary addressing don Claudio Parma, also from Rimini and present at La Thuile. There was about a dozen of us. I was very struck by these young people, the people from Rimini present plus some friends of Marta’s from university. At this rosary there was certainly a contrite atmosphere, mournful, sorrowful but inexplicably serene. The memory of this mixture, or rather unity, of elements left a clear impression in my mind. A unity that I found in her writings. Not only, at that meeting I had had lunch with some of Marta’s friends and there was something very interesting between them. This is why I said yes to Giorgio’s insistence…in the end, our deadlines were not pressurizing, we gave ourselves about a year…then it took us much longer.

Therefore it was a question of responding to something that had simply imposed itself on us.

Yet it was not a simple affair to let ourselves be guided by this.

We met, we decided the structure of the text and it was clear that we needed to use the relationships that Marta had built as a starting point, which were pivotal for her. So I began to involve the young people, her friends, to interview them one after the other during the course of a whole year.

The initial idea was to link Marta’s writings with the witnesses of the young people, which were added to by interviews with the family, with Professor Rovetta and especially by Don Pino. Don Pino was one of the first to be involved, in a brief encounter in the Meeting of Rimini; twenty essential minutes which allowed the outline of the work to be cleared up. The first thing that Don Pino told me was “If this is to be done, if this is to be carried out, let’s avoid any sentimentalism because Marta was all but sentimental. Very often these books which speak about experiences and exceptional lives, and that deserve to be dealt with get caught in sentimentalism. And this was the initial guideline which determined the first stages.

During the writing process, following the structure I mentioned, the risk of “explaining” Marta’s life still prevailed.

It must be said, moreover, that this work was carried out within a continuous relationship with family and friends, exchanging drafts to one other and assessing together. In this sense meeting Francesco, Marta’s closest friends, was critical. The encounter with Francesco, today Fr. Francesco, was… quite an event. I was all worried I wouldn’t get to meet him…Francesco is a member of the Saint Charles Borromeo Fraternity, [an order of] missionary priests and he was in Canada at the time of his correspondence with Marta. I wondered where he would be at that time. Giorgio had received news that he was in Rome and I was preoccupied about organizing a trip to meet him there, I write him an email, to which he doesn’t reply; then he phones me while I was on holidays in Val di Zoldo and after a 15-minute phone call, as we were deciding whether to use the Rimini Meeting as an opportunity to meet up, or whether to meet him in Rome before the Meeting, we discover that he was only 10 minutes away from me in the valley next to where I was. That same evening we had a beer together and I had the chance to acquire a precious interview, gathering a wealth of elements which represented another decisive step towards the completion of the text.

In the encounter with him a concept emerged with more clarity, which became a constant trait of all the encounters with Marta’s university friends, including Don Pino and Professor Rovetta. The first thing that everyone said to me was (I quote using Lucia’s words), “look, we can tell you everything, explain everything… but…” and here I quote Francesco “for me, for us, talking about Marta is like…” and he was silent for a moment, so I said anticipating his words (it was clear to me after having already met some of them) “is like entering a holy place”. “Yes, that’s what it’s like. So I ask you to have total discretion, absolute respect. The same respect that all of us will show you.”

I had to try and figure out what this respect was deep down, what this discretion was, and I still need to understand it more in some way, but what is clear is that Marta is passed away, the course of life which she lived remains an open and deep question. There was a meeting of students from Rimini with Fr. Francesco in which a girl asked, “why didn’t God save her a second time?” (Marta was sick, she was inexplicably cured, then she became sick again two years later and died). Francesco’s response was fantastic, he said, “just as you don’t know the reason, I don’t either. Marta however certainly knows, because in Paradise all of this will be clear. I will also find out in Paradise. But right now I don’t know. But I prefer having Someone to ask, [Someone] with whom to be angry with, rather than having a clear answer, which leaves me ultimately alone. Thanks to Marta I learned to be in a relationship with [that] Someone”.

These relationships were what guided the work.

The first draft was organized into themes, because the idea was to tidy up and underline certain main points. 400 was the number of the writings gathered by Giorgio and his family, scattered writings which were put into order and organized – they were writings of any kind (emails, notes on paper, diary pages, letters)- with the utmost patience. In the multitude of these writings, many of them ordinary, many of great depth, others very personal and linked to specific situations, the idea was to extract key concepts from her experience. But to proceed along those lines was the equivalent to killing Marta, analyzing and dissecting her. Therefore, I returned to the texts, using the interviews constantly, even if reductive, and giving a chronological structure to the work, multiplying the number of texts. But even the little amount that was explained seemed a downfall…so I gave up on that. Here I must thank Francesco for the frankness he had with me: he said “Listen, I’m sorry but I’m just not sure. Marta does not emerge [from these pages]”. I thank him because in this frankness we could both put ourselves in front of something ‘different’, different from what could have been, from what could have come out of the task. It was a decisive turning point meeting him in via Boccea in Roma, at the Fraternity of Saint Charles and meeting Professor Rovetta where we had the last skimming session, approving a collection of writings. That was the moment in which what you have in your hands [the finished product] came to life, the texts with an extensive biographical note to give the coordinates of her life but that gave the texts the chance to speak for themselves, leaving aside what might or mightn’t be understood, leaving aside many details, even if mentionable. This choice was a huge sacrifice, because what was left out (many of Marta’s texts, interviews) is beautiful. It is beautiful. However, it tempted the reader towards an explanation of what can’t be explained. We would have fallen in the trap of trying to “explain”, like in the example of the girl’s question, what can’t be explained, what instead should simply be taken and accepted. Therefore, this was a great preoccupation during the whole process of this work and I think what came out as a result is something very original. The witnesses of this are the readers of the book that I meet. The last [reader] is the wife of a colleague who didn’t say much in particular but the look on her face spoke a thousand words. While she thanked me I said to her also, “I didn’t do anything, I only stayed still in front of that initial impression, and I tried to keep it alive”.

Without that initial imposition, it is clear that the availability to correct others would have come with difficulty – whilst being necessary for the sake of the book’s success – , which meant correcting the points of view of Giorgio and the family, of Francesco and of all the other friends. The family would have preferred including more texts, because beautiful aspects of Marta’s life were given expression in many passages. Francesco and the other friends wanted to pause on the essential, on passages that in a direct and efficient manner expressed episodes of her life, without the need of describing everything.

If this had not been ‘imposed’ on us not even the book would have come about, in my opinion.

I conclude by saying that for me the most interesting question within this whole circumstance is having learned a little bit more that life is responding to Another. I say this without understanding it completely, with having experienced only a tiny piece of it compared to what emerges in the book and that Marta has witnessed to us.

I am very grateful to Giorgio for this phone call and very grateful to all the friends for their availability in this work, because it has meant taking another step in this incredible adventure…Francesco, to the student youth group of CL, said “if you discover that behind this table, behind these things, these people, there is Someone, this changes everything in life”.

So there…we are walking along this path and this is the incredible experience that Marta lived.

 

Beppino

Thank you, Emanuele. The facts and names that Emanuele mentioned are the same facts and names you will find in the book, they’re some of Marta’s friends. Emanuele says, “the whole situation raised a lot of curiosity and the aim is to make the story known to everyone”. Don Pino I ask you to tell us about your friendship with Marta and to help us understand the judgement that she had on life, a judgement that can be for all of us.

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Don Pino

Thank you. A small premise. I quote two passages of the introduction of the Fraternity Exercises of Communion and Liberation of Fr Julián Carrón.

“In light of the Resurrection we can look at everything…Immersed in the great Mystery.” An example comes to mind looking at all of you. Many of you, the wisest of you, try to get into the shade; and that’s fine. This is inevitable. If I was there too I would do the same. But going into the shade means to not have the sun in your face. There is someone who lives accepting to be totally illuminated [by the sun]. They don’t look for the shade like all of us would, even if staying under the sun causes you to sweat, to toil, to feel the heat of the sun. “Immersed in the great Mystery”.

The other sentence is of Don Giussani who quotes Fr Carrón in the introduction of the exercises, on page 12, when he speaks about the continuous recovery of a child’s intelligence in order to look at things in a true way.

“We call ‘faith’ the human intelligence that, remaining in the poverty of its original nature [like an empty amphora in the morning] it is entirely filled by something else, because in and of itself it is empty, like open arms that have yet to embrace the person for whom they are waiting.”

This sentence describes Marta’s person, but it describes the possibility that all of us have. Marta was well aware of this twofold possibility. She describes [this] with great awareness in a passage on page 51 of the book: “During the day… I realise I have two possibilities: I either live a close, constant dialogue with a Person who loves me so much He is willing to die for me, or I live alone with myself, and you know, I can’t say that I have never lived like that, but I assure you that it doesn’t take very long of me being by myself to realise I don’t like it; on the contrary, if you’re alone, life is not fun, you end up saying ‘if, but, yet, maybe’, which are all reubbish and useless excuses for not being in front of Jesus as men, because it takes courage to stay there and not run away … I can offer everything to a Father who loves me, even my pain, my fatigue, which reached incredible levels today: I fell asleep on the bus. I offer him everything because He bears it with me, that way I’m not afraid.”

My encounter with Marta did not happen in 2002 straight away, when she started as a first year in Cattolica, for a simple reason. In contrast to many communities who welcome their first years and even lovingly seek them out at the GS vacations or the Czestochowa pilgrimage (many of the ex-high school students who live the experience of CL go on this well-known pilgrimage in Poland after finishing their last year of school Ed. note) and who start to hatch them like chickens, in Cattolica, following the tradition of Don Giussani the impact is not with the community but with reality, with one’s studies. So there seems to be a ‘slower’ beginning. Everything exploded, as is normal, under the pressure of circumstances such as her relationship with her professors, her classmates, with her study, with the new method of approach to her subjects; everything exploded towards the end of the academic year, at the beginning of the summer, when Marta came, as she reminds us in the book, to talk to me.

I remember distinctly two things.

Firstly, I remember a person who struggled to accept herself, to love herself.

Secondly, a great ‘fever for life’. She wanted to live everything, understand her studies, her new friendships, nothing seemed to be enough. Rarely I have found a person of such a human intensity, from her love for food, her love for dancing, her love for beauty…if you read this book carefully there are very beautiful descriptions of landscapes…a sunset, a sunrise with her father and mother, a description of the image of a bridge that the sun created in the sea, the joy in front of a view of snow from her hospital bedroom…

Let me tell you of an episode that doesn’t directly concern Marta, during the very important – for her and for the community of students in Cattolica – Summer of 2003, but [which concerns] four friends, all students of Literature: Francesco, Francesco from san Remo, Matteo and Stefano. I remember a dinner I had with them during the summer vacation. I told them, “you see, you are friends but you don’t clearly know the reason that keeps you together. You have therefore wasted a year. You have a choice in front of you: either you make your friendship the place of an Other’s protagonism, or your time in university will be fruitless and your lives even more so.” I was quite harsh with them, as often happens. So, nothing happened for a few months, then the question exploded. Note that one is the dean of a seminary, one is the director of a school in Uganda – the Luigi Giussani High School -, the other two teach…what was the catalyst? The friendship between Marta and Francesco. There, that’s where I simply saw the force of a humanity which lets itself – as Giussani says “remaining in poverty of its original nature, [like an empty amphora in the morning]” – become totally filled by Another. This is the secret and the deepest root of everything.

Marta’s great adventure, which is well described in the book, explains what happens to life when one remains in the poverty of its original nature, like an amphora empty at the source, and lets itself become filled by Another.

Remaining in the poverty of one’s original nature, means to remain loyal to one’s own humanity, to remain loyal to one’s own desires, to remain loyal to one’s own struggles. Something very close to Giussani in Marta was the fact that she was able to give the correct name to things, even if surrounded by people who struggled. Toil, toil; pain, pain; joy, joy; preference, preference…Someone said – Emanuele did not say it, but I say it because this was a very close friend of mine – after reading the great intensity and affection which is expressed between her and Francesco, “can we really write these things? Will people think ill of them?” So be it, let them think ill of them, because to think ill of such a pure, deep and generative relationship is proof that we can stay in the shade instead of being in the sun. It’s a more comfortable choice, but [in this way] one cannot see the frank, open, deep and captivating contours that only the full light of noon lends on things.

So Marta called things by name and she would say it, “I’m tired, I’m sad”, or “I would like to go and understand that thing over there”…someone who says “I’m interested in the Madonna of Guadalupe, I’m going to Mexico”. Fortunately she found a great professor, Professor Rovetta, who backed her up. She had never flown before… – go and read the episode of the flight! – she arrives, she goes to see the Madonna, she collects her information, she immerses herself in the local community and in the contradictions of the metropolis of Mexico City. Or the curiosity for people who were very different to her, the understanding of being a generative instrument of this Other, from which day after day she let herself be filled. That’s how, in six people, Francesco, Matteo, Francesco, Marta, Lucia and Stefano kept this community of students in Cattolica of 700 people together. The characteristic of this phenomenon was the radicalness of their desire: I want it all. Because, sorry, the possibility of our lives is the following: either settling for less, – and there are people at twenty years of age that I have met who are already old inside, they know everything, they don’t feel the need to learn anything, desires exist insofar as they are controlled, instead of being suggestions in a journey towards the infinite – either settle for less, or take this “I want it all” seriously.

The other question is to accept that this everything is not our measure but a relationship with another person. Here you might remember the mistake, Carrón calls it shifting – it will sum up the whole of the first lesson of the exercises -: man says to God, I will give you everything. When Christ then takes everything, man has the temptation to let go, to hide, he complains…but then he accepts.

This is the greatness of our lives.

Let’s ask ourselves first of all, because this is how we can learn from Marta – in our lives “I will give you everything” is the verification of the best part of our person, our ability to love -, but when He takes everything, do we stay in the shade or do we stay in the sun? Marta stayed in the sun. The sun illuminates and consumes.

Two points…

If you read the book, Marta’s life is a witness to the contemporaneousness of the charism. We are talking about a person who never met Giussani, we are talking about a generation of university students that never met Giussani. When Marta talks about Christ she speaks of a real presence which opens (as the prayer she always used to recite every day says) “a wound that will not heal until heaven”. Do the test, when we talk amongst ourselves or with friends older than us, but also with those who are very young or very old, the great difference, and you can tell, is if there is an open wound or not. The wound of which Péguy speaks through which Christ’s grace can pass, Christ’s life. She allowed her life to be opened by this wound. Because this openness – always a bit painful, or very painful – is what lets the circumstance to become Christ at work, Christ who generates. She generated the community from a hospital bed the last year, she looked after the children from her school by offering her illness. It was natural for her to live the difficult condition of often painful treatment, which unfortunately revealed to be useless, as her contribution to the history of the world, to the history of the Church.

What has she got to say to us, what did Marta say to me?

This extraordinary familiarity with Christ is not reserved to a lucky few. [This familiarity] is not something to be looked at from a distance, in the shade, but it is the substance of life itself.

And this is where the second question emerges: a friendship which is demanding.

I rarely saw a person like this. I am surrounded by many friends, most of them good-natured, where the substance of their friendship is to cheer themselves up, to prove each other right, to agree with each other, to cushion from the impact of life. When you meet a friendship which instead is demanding, urgent, invasive, in other words uncomfortable, you understand that destiny and life are something serious.

Marta helped me to understand something, and I speak especially to those who belong to the movement of CL, that is fundamental. It’s what Giussani discovered enthusiastically in the observation of Professor Lobkowicz, the dean of my German university, who said “for you, friendship is a virtue”, in other words a road towards one’s destiny. This has to do with the contemporaneousness of Christ, because a real friend isn’t someone who says you’re right, or who consoles you, but someone who says – and tells you this everyday … like Marta used to with her friends, sometimes in an unbearable (according to them) but relentless way… -: “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”

There are certain strange fils rouges, strange “threads” that run throughout our lives. Understanding the matter that I saw with my own eyes, benefiting from it undeservedly, – she calls me, I am a little bit embarrassed, I am often a father to her, but actually it’s her who has introduced me more deeply into this dynamic.

I say all this because these six young people that are now around the world, one in paradise, one in Africa, two in Bergamo, three in Milan – … very normal people – lived in their daily lives the same question that Giussani (take note) maintained as fundamental for the conserving of the charism. When they asked him, I won’t say who, not right now, “but why Giussani…are you seriously saying that the Spanish will guide the movement?” – it happened in a small assembly between responsibles, the Italian “responsibles of the responsibles”, he very calmly responded, “of course. You don’t believe me, but do you know what the difference between you and them is? He was talking about Prades, Carron, Garcia…. “You have the preoccupation – he said this twenty years ago – of who has understood the best, of who the best interpreter of the charism is, – [on the other hand] there are people who haven’t let go after twenty years; and I say all not to make things more complicated – and I can tell you are not friends between you; in fact as soon as someone is not around you speak about them behind their back”. (Giussani was brutal…Marta was like that; she called a spade a spade… it stung like a spurt of boiling water from tortellini pot!) “They, the Spanish, are friends. Why? Because the substance of their friendship is a help in following me, in other words, Christ”. 

I want to say that the very human, daily, ordinary situation of a girl who liked dancing, who loved her fantastic cuisine from Romagna, who loved the sea, the jokes – she was a fantastic frizzista (comedian) her and Anna made sketches that would leave you in stitches – a normal girl like many sitting here today…and yet the circumstances of this person – I say it with discretion because those of you who have true friends, and I hope that each one of you can say yes, at least a couple, those friends that can fish you out from the worst situation possible…there is a point of reserve, silence, a reserve because that is where the Mystery is, and a true friend is someone who respects this silence. One of the most striking of Marta’s writings, that she wrote, she sang, she spoke of and joked about was this silence. A true friend, Don Giuss always said, is someone with whom you could always be in silence with, like John and Andrew on their return that afternoon at 4pm.

This human circumstance weaves itself mysteriously into the circumstance of which we are protagonists, of the circumstance through which the charism remains alive in our lives. It remains alive, blazing, demanding and at the same time calming, calming like a child who raises its arms, an empty amphora at the source, and feels two strong hands that hold it tightly and bring its face to their mother and father’s face. Marta’s life faithfully accepted Don Giussani’s invitation to the letter, “I wish you to never be satisfied”. This is what I wish for myself; what I wish for you. For if we read this book the most spontaneous thing that comes to mind is “if this was possible for her, why couldn’t it be possible for me?”.

There is a problem in the meeting that we have had. We cannot avoid admitting this to ourselves. Our desire is to have it all. The problem, the most serious of all, is not to avoid making mistakes. If we think about it, all of our mistakes are desires that have gone mad. The real mistake is to settle for less. The grace of God, his preference, his mercy continues to give us people who, more with their lives than with their words, tell us “don’t settle, no matter what you’re going through, no matter what happened, no matter what you might fear, whatever the disappointment, don’t settle for less.” Giussani said it to us in a peremptory way in the video of the exercises and this sentence burns inside me: “If there is something in your life that you must change, change it”.

Thank you!

Beppino

Thank you, Don Pino. I conclude by picking up on something that was said…it wouldn’t be right to reduce anything that has been said, but because of the place in which we are in I want to underline the following: Marta, along with her five friends, had this desire to become a generative instrument through them for the world. I think that we also feel the same responsibility, especially in a place like this. The festival is not a routine, it happens every year to communicate the existence of a place in which we can live. I go home, after this meeting, with the question “how can I be a generative instrument for the world?” You can buy the book here…over there where the shade was and is now under the sun…

 

Don Pino

The sun always comes around! Take note!  This is the Christian event! Even for those who stay in the shade, the sun always comes around. Immersed in the great Mystery.

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