“Without good books and spiritual reading, it will be morally impossible to save our souls”.
St. Alphonsus Liguori
One of the great joys of the Catholic liturgical calendar, for me at least, is deciding on my reading selections for the major seasons of Advent and Lent. I always read some Ratzinger (his Jesus of Nazareth series works any time of year; George Weigel and Elizabeth Lev’s Roman Pilgrimage is a Lenten retreat contained within one of the most physically beautiful books I have every seen; I’ve read novels during Lent (Laurus, stands out); I’ll be reading the new Penguin Classics edition of Simon Weil’s The Need for Roots this year as well, for which I am very excited. But for the past few years I have consistently returned to Luigi Giussani during the Lenten season.
There is perhaps no better embodiment, for my money, of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council than the life and work of Father Luigi Giussani and, by extension, the Communion and Liberation movement he founded. What Giussani understood, before the council even began (he was already doing this work in the 50’s and only formalized it into what is now CL after the council) was that Christianity is, fundamentally, about the experience of a person and that the life of a Christian must be ordered toward the encounter with that person, with Christ. For Giussani, that experience changed the trajectory of his life and his entire project was born out of the confidence that the lives of others will be changed by the experience of that encounter as well. He asks, “what can reach today’s man? The impact with a person. An event that is an echo of the first event, when Jesus looked up and said, ‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, I am coming to your house.’”1 He intuited that modern people were struggling for connection, to make sense of our desires, to make sense of our suffering, and he knew that Christ was the companion for whom we sought.
Lent, therefore, is the time in which the desire for this presence is intensified. During Lent we focus all of our attention on the encounter with Christ. As such, we enter into the Lenten season, we do not merely observe it. Our whole existence is meant to experience Lent with all of our senses. Hence why we fast and abstain (the physical), as well as pray more fervently and serve more readily (the spiritual). Giussani’s emphasis on the encounter with Christ lends itself to this new seasonal focus. “Lent,” Giussani says, “is the instrument–the sacramental instrument–for fostering conversion.”2 Lent is meant to draw us deeper into the mystery of the Incarnate Son of God. A mystery is not a problem to be solved or a question to be answered, but an invitation to greater depth; an extension of the hand of God to the realm of man.
In Giussani’s writing this mystery is explored and experienced in what he calls the religious sense, “reason’s capacity to express its own profound nature in the ultimate question: it is the ‘locus’ of consciousness that a human being has regarding existence. Such an inevitable question is in every individual in the way he looks at everything.”3 For Giussani the religious sense is inherent in each human person and the way in which each person attempts to answer their questions “regarding existence” is of the utmost importance. For the Christian, Christ is the answer to that question, he is the mystery at the heart of all human desire. During Lent our religious sense is heightened, and through prayer and fasting we become more attuned to the presence of the mystery, so much so that we turn towards it; we embrace it; we are converted.
This stirring up of the religious sense or provocation of the soul (to use Giussani’s language) is why I return to him, again and again. He reminds me that I am human, I am made for more than what our bland, disenchanted, secular culture offers and I will not be satisfied with anything less. He acknowledges the messiness of the human experience, the imperfection, the muck. He also emphasizes the human longing for beauty, left behind like a wound yet to heal, and how in pursuit of beauty we find wonder; we find enchantment; we find meaning.
What I love about Giussani, as well, is that he never disregards tradition, the way that so many tend to who claim to be influenced by Vatican II. In fact, he sees the great intellectual and spiritual tradition of the Church as the source that we ought to begin with when the religious sense is aroused in us. This is what makes life in CL so appealing and why the Movement attracts people from all over the world, ranging wildly on the ideological and political spectrum. The institutional Church is not a barrier that eclipses my subjective experience. She is not an obstacle. Nor is the past something to be ashamed of or ignored and best left forgotten.
No. In fact, for Giussani, “Christianity is a solution to the religious problem, and while not the means of resolving political, social, and economic problems, the Church is the instrument of this solution.”4 The Church creates the conditions, through her sacraments, prayer, liturgical life, works of charity, etc., in which this encounter with Christ can occur, at any time in one’s life, but most keenly, perhaps, during Lent.
Giussani, Luigi. Christ, God’s Companionship with Man. Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.
“God is Mercy”. Giussani, Luigi. (from Memores Domini Lenten Retreat in Pianazze, Italy, February 16, 1975.)
Giussani, Luigi. The Religious Sense. Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997.
Giussani, Luigi. Why the Church? Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001.