Culture & Religion

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

Alberto Savorana

sabato 21 agosto 2010

The 2009 Meeting gave form to the title that was chosen for the XXXth session: "Knowledge is always an event." Almost 800,000 people participated in a fact that was an opportunity to see that knowledge always arises from an encounter and to show that the security of their identity, generated by faith, amplifies the desire to open up to the world. The more we are ourselves, the more we are interested in the others; this is why religious, cultural, social, economic and political figures came to Rimini and found themselves well there.

And this is exactly what turned the noses up of who cannot explain why "the audience applauds everybody at the Meeting: Tremonti and Draghi, Tony Blair and Bersani, Passera and Tronchetti Provera, the devil and holy water and of course Andreotti." According to a widespread mentality, in fact, one who believes is by nature closed and divisive. Instead, "those who pass through those gates are `inclusive'" (E. Scalfari, la Repubblica, August 30, 2009).

In continuity with the previous session, the 2010 Meeting intends to look at the nature of man, what the Bible calls the "heart", a synthesis of reason and affection. This is the meaning of the title: "That nature which pushes us to desire great things is the heart." 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. "

For this reason, the title sounds like a challenge to the cultural and social context in which we find ourselves: the era of post-modernity, in fact, tends to deny this original structure, reducing man to a biological phenomenon, and even when it speaks of "reason", identifies it with a superstructure defined exclusively from the biological aspect.

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The first factor of human experience to be sacrificed at the altar of the "a priori" is the desire, the spark that starts the human engine in its relationship to reality, and therefore freedom is expelled, if, in fact, man is determined by his chemical and biological antecedents, sociological and psychological, with each act ultimately constrained by blind fate.

An intelligence which so reduced lacks what Pasternak, in his Doctor Zhivago, calls "the gift of chance, the force that, with unexpected discoveries, violates the sterile harmony of the predictable". Only this unexpected occurrence can challenge reason and set freedom in motion.

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. The great Leopardi identifies this with "infinite desires, very high visions, immense thoughts" and describes it in these lines: "Eternal mystery of our being. [...] How is it that human nature, so utterly frail and wretched, of dust and shadow, is able to reach so high?" Dante's Ulysses returns to this appeal: "You were not formed to live the life of brutes, but to pursue virtue and high knowledge."

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.

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The new book of the University Equipe of Communion and Liberation, which will be presented Aug. 28 at the conclusion of the Meeting, from its title shows a connection with the content of the week in Rimini: The "I" is reborn by an encounter. Giussani says that, in fact, "it is hard to be human today [...] because power has altered the simplicity of our nature, our original openness [...] For this there must be poverty of the heart or poverty of the spirit: the unconquerable affirmation of the desires of which we are originally made (the need for truth, for happiness, for justice and for love)."

Through a variety of events--conferences, exhibitions and shows--the 2010 Meeting intends to show the relevance of the Christian proposition to the situation of contemporary man, that is each one of us: "The person finds himself through a living encounter, that is, a presence that strikes us and leaves us with an attraction [...] that is to say, that leads to the fact that our heart, with that which it is made of, with the needs that constitute it, is there, exists. This presence tells us, "There exists that which your heart is made for; look, for example, it exists in me."