Integrity

Religious Sense: Chapter 1

Background:  Before I dive into the review of The Religious Sense, it makes some sense to set the stage.  As I mentioned in my first post, Fr. Giussani is tracing out a long path.  This first book of his Trilogy focuses on the human experience.  Fr. Giussani is convinced, much in the same way that St. Augustine suggests in his famous line, "Lord, our hearts are restless until they rest in you," that our very humanity points the way to Christ.  So in this work, Fr. Giussani focuses on what it is to be human and a recovery of a full sense of what is meant by reason (far broader than modern reductions to that which can be shown with the methods of science).  In that way, until we reach the point of the Incarnation (something which will come when we look at At The Origin of the Christian Claim), the question of God will be approached in a very natural way.  It may feel weird for a time, to speak of "Mystery", "Another", "the Infinite", but its purpose, again, is to recognize what is revealed by human experience -- and at this stage, prior to Revelation, particularly the event of the Incarnation and the encounter with Christ.  So with that, let's look at Chapter 1.

The Need For Realism:  In the first chapter of The Religious Sense, Fr. Giussani's emphasis is on the need for realism.  Starting with a quote from the Nobel winner Alexis Carrel -- who said, in reference to science, that "few observations and much discussion are conducive to error:  much observation and little discussion to the truth" -- Fr. Giussani argues that any serious inquiry into something requires realism:

"By realism I refer to the urgent necessity not to give a more important role to a scheme already in our minds, but rather to cultivate an entire, passionate, insistent ability to observe the real event, the fact."

This emphasis of the inquiry on observing the fact is further highlighted in a distinction that Fr. Giussani makes between knowing and thinking, inspired by a quotation of St. Augustine.  For he says:

Religious Sense: Introduction

From time to time, I participate in the comments section of Scot McKnight's blog, Jesus Creed.    I know for a fact that a good number of you find your way to Integrity from Scot's site.  The reason that I like participating at Scot's site is that, while it is part of the protestant "emergen[t][/][ing] movement" conversation, it is the most open of the EC blogs that I have seen to truly exploring the questions that movement is supposedly considering.  It's one of the few spots in the EC conversation that doesn't spend all of its time talking about, basically, a handful of recent U.S. protestant pastors and their pop-theology books.  It takes tradition and history with a degree of seriousness that is lacking in a lot of places.

That's not to say it's all a bed of roses.  There's a certain way in which the participants at Jesus Creed are willing to open the door to tradition but they've left the chain on.  They are willing to pluck what they like, but not risk what they have.  It's understandable.  We all do that in areas of our lives.  But it can lead to obstacles.  And that's how I felt in a recent conversation when I emphasized that the method of looking at the question may have been responsible for why the answer eludes them.

The request was put to me to explain more about how I approach the question and what I meant by method.  So this post begins an examination of The Religious Sense, At The Origin of the Christian Claim and Why The Church?  -- the trilogy of works of Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation movement.   What does that have to do with my approach to the question?  Well, for starters, anyone who has read this blog in the past 2 years knows that I have become involved with CL.  I think one of the things that attracts me so much to CL is it is the articulation of much of my experience in my own faith journey.  Second, I truly think CL tries to give life to the basic expression of our Catholic faith, nothing more.  In that way, while not everyone may want or be called to the life of the CL community that has developed, I think what the charism helps spotlight again about the faith can be appreciated and absorbed by all.

But most of all, I think Fr. Giussani's approach helps restore the universal accessibility of the faith.  All too often, any conversation on the matter of faith begins in the middle, with some question of high theology.  And everyone engages the question, often in a mechanical way, applying their predispositions and established ideologies.  To honor Tradition must be to downplay the Scriptures, goes one.  Particularly, when Tradition illuminates a meaning of the Scriptures that I would prefer not to be.  To that, Fr. Giussani asks us to not race ahead so fast.  Don't set what you have been given to the side.  (The notion that one can free oneself completely of one's culture and predisposition is a false one.)  But he says, let's first look at us.  Our experience of humanity.  Do not be afraid to examine that experience.  It stands to instruct.  And then move forward from there.  Christ did not come to call us out of our humanity.  We are more man because of Him.  And, finally, Christ didn't offer the apostles one thing and the rest of us something less.  The Church continues His Presence throughout time.

Several things appeal to me about that approach.  First, some common ground can be found.  Not just between Catholics and Protestants, or Christians and other religious people, but us all.  Second, I think it helps us remain open to what is before us, to face reality and not some comfortable, but ultimately reduction or false image, of reality.  And it helps us to remember Him and why we follow Him, versus the moralism, ideology or utilitarianism that can sometimes seep into our approach to Christianity.

For a while, I have thought that the EC would appreciate what Fr. Giussani has to say and might find his words of some help.  But rather than waiting for someone else to discover him, I'll take up the task and do a chapter by chapter review (for as long as I can keep up the motivation!) of Giussani's works.  The first one is The Religious Sense, which focuses on our human experience.  Next time I will post on the first chapter.

One last thought:  from time to time, I will make reference to the encounter of St. Andrew and St. John with Christ (John 1:35-42).  It was a favorite of Fr. Giussani's and I think I have come to understand why.  In it, he sees encapsulated the Christian experience.  So read it over and reflect on it.

Okay, one additional thought:  Be patient and compare everything against your own experience.  I am going to take my time working through the material because it is quite dense.  And so it will be quite a while before the posts are expressly about Christ and some of you may be frustrated with the journey.  Well, if mankind had to wait however long it was for the Incarnation, I think you can endure the ride for a couple weeks as we follow the path Fr. Giussani has set us out on as our guide.  Most of all, though, by going slow I think we will be more likely to ask ourselves whether we recognize the truth of what is being said in our own lives.  To read all of these summaries to have a sense of what Fr. Giussani  teaches is one thing; but to read them as a help to examining your own life is much better.

The Importance Of Experience

This past Saturday, our local CL community had its first assembly of 2007.  For those not familiar, an assembly is simply a gathering of the local community for the purpose of continuing the work of our schools of community, but done as a gesture of our unity.

This assembly was important for many reasons.  But chiefly, it was due to the fact that CL has re-proposed to all of us the importance of experience to the Christian journey.  Our new book for SofC is The Journey To Truth Is An Experience.  Picking up on that theme, the assembly asked us to consider seriously three statements:

"The Christian proposal addresses the person directly, and in this individual's particular present situation it invites him to verify it with all the instruments of a fully human experience." (Why the Church, page 234, second paragraph)

"And what is the method that allows us to live life as a path to certainty? Experience." (Fr. Carron's lesson at the National Diaconia)

"Hence, to meet Christ we must formulate our human problem seriously. First, we must open ourselves to ourselves. In other words, we must be acutely aware of our experiences and look on the humanity within us with sympathy; we must take into consideration who we really are. To take into consideration means to take seriously what we experience, everything we experience, to discover every aspect, to seek the complete meaning." (The Journey to Truth is an Experience, page 54, second and third paragraph)

The last quote comes from the first part of The Journey To Truth Is An Experience, where Fr. Giussani  takes a look at the question of why the apostles followed Christ when they understood so little of Him.  He argues that they did so because He became the center of their affection because in Him they found their whole human experience understood and clarified.  From there, Fr. Giussani concludes that to meet Christ we must first be ready to take our experiences seriously.  In fact, this method, is critical to the charism of CL.

But what is meant by experience?  It is certainly something more than feeling.  I decided to do some investigation and happened across this wonderful article by Fr. Giussani, written to explain to the future Pope Paul VI exactly why Fr. Giussani saw experience as so crucial to the Christian experience.  In this article, Fr. Giussani explains:

• experience means to live what causes me to grow.
• experience connotes the fact of becoming aware of one’s growth, in two basic aspects: the capacity to comprehend and the capacity to love
• experience is not the doing or the setting up of relationships with reality in a mechanical way.  What characterizes experience is our understanding something, discovering its meaning.  This is done by discovering its link to everything else.
• the connection that binds something to everything else is an objective one. Therefore, true experience involves saying yes to a situation that attracts us; it means appropriating what is being said to us. It is composed of making things our own, but in such a way that we proceed within their objective meaning, which is the Word of an Other.
• True experience mobilizes and increases our capacity to accept and to love.
• nature is the locus of experience
• nature weaves an organized, multi-leveled fabric that awakens the need for unity immanent in each one of us.
• This fundamental need finds a correspondence in our affirmation of God, for God is precisely the unitary meaning which nature’s objective and organic structure calls the human consciousness to recognize
• The role of Christ and the prophets in history was to announce with absolute clarity that God is the ultimate implication of human experience
• His very coming constitutes the physical presence of the ultimate meaning of history

From all that Fr. Giussani summarizes:

• An encounter with an objective fact which has an origin independent of the person having the experience. The existential reality of this fact or event is a community that can be documented, like every reality which is fully human. This community has an authority expressed through a human voice in judgments and directives, constituting criteria and meaning
• The ability to properly perceive the meaning of that encounter. The value of the fact which we encounter transcends our power to understand so much so that an act of God is required for an adequate understanding. The same gesture by which God makes His presence known to humanity in the Christian event also enhances a person’s potential for knowledge, raising him up to the exceptional reality to which God attracts him. We call this the grace of faith.
• An awareness of the correspondence between the meaning of the fact that we encounter and the meaning of our own existence, between the reality of Christ and the Church and the reality of our own person, between the encounter and our own destiny. It is the awareness of this correspondence that brings about the growth of the self, an essential component of experience.

I post all of that, not because I think it is instantly clear, but in the hopes that you might mull it over.  Experience is the key to dicovering the truth of the faith within my life, as something not abstract, but real and valuable.  Is is the key that transforms for St. Andrew the Baptist's claim, "Behold the Lamb of God,"  into "We have found the Messiah!".  All too often I think Catholics make the mistake of thinking that experience is just subjectivism or sentimentalism and thus something that is at odds with the truth.  And, when we think that, we make the error of teaching the faith as an abstraction, a collection of dogmas, that in truth have little connection to my life and thus don't actually pervade my life.  Don't actually help me live.