While everyone is on vacation, dreaming of beating the stress of a life that seems increasingly less and less likely to happen (in which even desire seems to have shut down), we receive from Norway the terrible news of two terrorist attacks with about 100 fatalities. What a slap in the face for everyone! Peculiar is the fact that what has shaken everyone comes from Norway one of the most “perfect” countries in the world, exemplary in its level of social organization and honesty.
For the victims and their families, the shock is as big as the pain. Yet we can’t stop here at the shock and the pain. We can’t abandon the search to understand the nature of what disrupted the way of this perfect machine, this ideal, peaceful and tolerant society.
What got in the way? Man.
The heart of man is increasingly worn out by the continuous deceptions of a dominant power that, having eliminated God (or having reduced Him to an ideology) has managed to anesthetize man by making him believe his life depends on power itself.
This ideology (which Msgr. Luigi Giussani defined as “Chernobyl Effect”), however powerful, cannot and will not last long, because there is no power in the world that can suppress man’s heart to the point of killing it. Even if in Norway, as in every part of the developed world, those who hold power make their followers believe that if they live, it is by their grace and they should be thankful for it.
This anesthetizing maneuver that practically tries to change human DNA cannot last long, because inside each of us there’s an Icarus that can’t stand being ensnared in a cage that impedes flight.
Man, man’s heart, is made to fly.
Thus, either this demand finds its freedom, or it turns into madness. It is impossible to suppress that thirst for happiness, for love, for beauty, for truth, for justice that make up the very fibers of the human heart. One can curse these heartbeats, but not ignore them.
If the powers that be forget this truth, no matter how perfect their systems may be, and even if man himself forgets, inevitably the moment of madness arrives, the consequences we saw in Oslo.
When one hasn’t encountered the presence of Christ as a fact that answers totally to the demands of reason and of the human heart, and instead has encountered an idea or inspiration that uses Christ, it is inevitable that reason will be trumped and in its stead will follow violence and fanaticism.
How many atrocities have been committed in the name of Christ, where Christ had nothing to do with it all!
Christianity is an event that is verifiable in its profound reasonableness only inside a reality that is fully lived. Christ needs man in his entirety, and man needs Christ.
In front of this tragedy, so these brothers may not have died in vain, it is critical to take our heart seriously. Its desires are well expressed in
Man is relationship with eternity, relationship with the infinite, and if my heart doesn’t find this “You” for which it is made, there is no social system, as perfect as it may be, that will hold back the madness and all its consequences.
If God doesn’t exist or is reduced to an ideology, anything is possible; but it’s the heart itself that tells us of God’s existence! It’s the heart that cries: “I want the infinite!”
Modern power arises excluding God; it arises claiming to be God, to be that which the heart needs; and thus, it is inevitable that these tsunamis arrive, making us tremble.
Values aren’t enough for life, and much less so the pretense of being honest, as we’ve been telling ourselves (even in the Church) for decades.
We need an additional step, we need an encounter with someone for whom the heart is made to take hold of our lives again. What happened to the disciples John, Andrew, Zaccheus and Magdalene needs to happen to each of us now: a real encounter with God, that answers our hearts’ deepest desires. We need it to happen now, in the middle of summer, while everyone is laying down as featherless chickens on the beach or climbing mountains as do deer.
We need an encounter with that gaze of the Mystery made flesh, the Mystery of which our hearts are made. We need Christ’s gaze to meet ours — that gaze that renders us conscious of the fact that before madness, there is forgiveness, there’s mercy.
This is precisely what happened to me during my days as a radical priest in Italy in the ’60s and ’70s during those days when the illusion of power, in its ideological expression, was consuming my mind, convincing me Christ wasn’t enough to liberate man from folly. What continues to happen to me fills me with joy every morning.
The tragedy in Norway demands that we assume the responsibility we have as Christians for the world. Is our experience of Christ as concrete and contemporaneous as what happened to John and Andrew; or is it just a flat, repetitive discourse of values and morals, incapable of resisting the challenges of the modern world? Those who look at us these days, observing our faces — are they fascinated by the beauty of a gaze in which Christ’s tenderness is evident in our eyes?
We can respond to religious fanaticism only by showing the reasonableness of our faith in our daily life. There’s nothing more blasphemous than to define Christianity as a left wing idea or a right wing idea. Christianity is simply Christ — that is, a Man whom you can meet this very day, right now. Being Christian is not adding an adjective to the word man, but it’s the very name of man, as Giussani would say, of that level of nature in that takes consciousness of itself.
