‘The Disciples Peter and John Running to the Sepulchre on the Morning of the Resurrection’ — painted in 1898 by Swiss artist Eugène Burnand
I don’t believe in ‘life after death’; I believe in life transcending death, a rather different thing. Eternity has already begun. Death, no more than birth, is not, I don’t believe, to be taken as a definitive moment of existence — merely another line on the cosmic, eternal path.
There are few things we can name with absolute certainty as irrefutable truths. But one thing I can say is this: I did not make myself. Another is: I do not make myself now, at this moment, writing these words. This understanding changes everything I have been led by the manmade world to believe about myself and my life. Something else defines me, and my life is a walking towards this Something Else, seeking all the while to put words on every step, so that others can see the path no matter how dark it becomes. Thinking like this, thinking these things, enables me to feel loved metaphysically, as nothing else does.
Perhaps there’s something to be noted here about the necessity for some degree of clarity, specificity, for spelling things out to myself, arising from which a new sense of purpose emerges. But actually I believe I have felt this sense of being loved all of my life, though I was unaware of it until reaching my fifties. I took it for granted, perhaps, or treated the feeling of ease it gave me as a naturalistic phenomenon. I had a sense of what I choose to call ‘God’s love,’ but as an abstract, distant thing, which ‘just was’. I suppose for a long time I conflated this ‘God love’ with the love of my parents, which I assumed also to be natural and indestructible. But now my parents are dead, this continues. I feel loved, and this feeling vivifies me with an inexhaustible appetite for life and living. Modern society, of its natural impulses, fills me with trepidation, and that’s another story, but it has no chance of defeating me when I know I am loved like this. The more I become aware of the Source of my life, the more clearly I see how far the world has deviated from the path I am trying to follow. Without this sense of the love of which I speak, life would be unbearable.
This sense of being held, embraced, corresponds with some desire deep within myself, to a degree that I believe is equal and essential to maintaining my will in a condition capable of enabling me to continue. To say that I would want to continue with my life, my ‘journey’ (how I hate that word in this context!) in any event, in the absence of these understandings — for no particular reason or for a mixture of everyday reasons — seems to me dubious. It is not so much that life would be unliveable, as that the ineluctability of its pointlessness would cripple me. I think many people face this moment of wake-up in their middle years, but are deflected from its implication by the functions and hopes of parenthood. This, too, is sometimes spoken of as a form of ‘transcendence.’ Although I have been a father for 26 years, I do not believe that, in the absence of this greater sense of being embraced, the mere existence of my child taking the same path to, as ‘they’ insist, nowhere, would be enough to keep me going. Yes, love of more earthly dimensions makes life more livable, but it ultimately does so because of the idea that life is leading somewhere, and our beloved fellow-travellers are companions on that journey rather than merely distractions or consolations.
My desire for something beyond the horizon beyond the horizon beyond the horizon comes together with this sense of being infinitely loved, like the contact points in the distributor in the engine of one of the vans I helped my father take apart and reassemble on those many Sundays of my childhood. At that point of contact, a spark happens. This is the spark of my be-ing. It feels like a part of me, but I have very little to do with it. My sole involvement is in allowing myself to open up to the fact that I have a dynamism that seeks to take me someplace and that I am not able to answer the most fundamental questions about what this dynamism is, or why it drives me, or where it wants me to go. From this flows the inescapable proposition that, whatever or whoever is engineering my life, it’s certainly not me — whatever ‘me’ might even mean.
The rest is mostly imagination, but not in the sense of making things up. I don’t mean fantasy, or confabulation, or even ‘myth’ — although I understand that this is a much misunderstood word. I have to open my mind to every possibility. I have come to accept that, given the apparent absurdity of my existence according to earthly criteria, nothing is likely to surprise me. This adventure I’m on has no limits except the kind I might be prepared to impose on it left to myself.
People I meet in a public as opposed to a personal context — other writers, journalistic colleagues when I worked in newspapers — would sometimes say to me that it is strange to find that I — ‘an intelligent man,’ they would sometimes concede — continued to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, and to hold with the idea that the Son of God might have come among us to show us how to live, and then, after dying on the cross, was raised and walked again the merely human. ‘Come on!’, they say, ‘surely that’s totally implausible?’
I would tell them that I agreed with them that, from a certain perspective, it did seem implausible. But, then, I would add, when I contemplates the fact that I had arrived here myself to a reality that was only plausible if you became deadened to its ridiculousness by the constructed world of man, the fact that the creator of the universe, or even the son of the creator of the universe, might have come here as well did not strike me as all that strange. It was my own existence that I had difficulty getting my head around — compared to that, everything else was relatively unexceptional. To be at all was the most incredible thing, compared to which nothing else could be regarded as truly improbable.
If I didn’t exist but could somehow imagine existence, I would be envious of those who possessed it. If told that there was a place somewhere in which people lived as we know humans do, I might find it hard to believe, but only because it would seem too good to be true. The idea of not believing in it because its existence and conditions were to be taken for granted would strike me, I’ve no doubt, as bizarre. Yet, here in this unbelievable existence, we find it ‘rational’ to believe that no other reality could exist, that there is no possibility that, in 50 or 100 years we might find ourselves in an even more astonishing place. It is a strange kind of reasoning — except when you allow yourself to be taken in by a bunker way of thinking, looking only at the four walls of reality as man has contrived to reconstruct it.
Whenever people say things like this to me, I ask them to imagine themselves — their non-existent selves — sitting on a meteorite spinning through space some distance from Earth. Imagine that a passing spaceman sticks his head out of his flying saucer and conveys the news that the creator of the universe, the whole shebang, has just arrived on an inspection tour of that tiny dot of a planet down there, the pale blue bubble barely visible against the expanse of the stars. Would it surprise you, in the circumstances of your life in that place and time, to hear that? I doubt it. You would think: about time someone came to check on things.
The word ‘Christ’ has scary aspects. It brings with it all kinds of unhelpful baggage: tyrannical archbishops of the past, evangelical Christians on American TV, rules, laws, leather straps, forbidding lips. Many who have cleaved faithfully to Christianity try to deny that this is so, but I don’t find such denial helpful.
I have been and remain a Christian, but what does that mean? In the first place, it means I have decided to be something, to remain something, to recommence being something — all these at different times and in different ways. I might, having emerged from different circumstances, ‘be’ something else — a Buddhist, a Hindu, an atheist — but I’m not. I’m a Christian. It’s a fact about me. I see the world through eyes fashioned by tidings of the coming of Jesus Christ, and even more of His Resurrection. I’m very happy about that, even at the level of everyday cultural understanding. I haven’t heard a word in my life about this man Jesus that caused any objection to arise in me due to anything he was or said or did when he was here. If he was no more than a philosopher or some kind of guru, I’d probably be happy enough to associate myself with him.
I believe he was an exceptional man. The witness I have received, and which I have no reason to doubt, insists that he was the Son of God. That might seem implausible if I hadn’t mastered the trick of looking periodically out of the bunker window and taking in all the other implausible things that are to be seen out there. Whatever/whoever is behind all this is pretty exceptional, and I don’t think a mere human is in a position to second-guess its potential. I’m open to finding out more.
In His earthly incarnation, Jesus stood out to an extent that we can’t fully grasp from anything that comes across in the words of the Gospels. Many people who met Him seem to have been moved by that encounter to change their lives as a result. Afterwards, they tended to say that something had changed in them. I’d like to meet someone like that, walking down the street one day. Imagine, if I were to stop writing this very moment, get up and leave the room I am working in, go out for a stroll down the road, and outside happen to bump into a man who had the kind of effect on me that Jesus had on, for example, the apostles John and Andrew when they first met him on the road. Imagine that, in the course of what brief words were exchanged between us, I was to become convinced: ‘This is He. He is here again!’ I fancy that, afterwards, very little would concern me otherwise for the rest of my days.
This, I know, would become the pivotal moment in my life, the moment when everything would finally fall into place. This would be the moment of my life when, from everything I know, from all the witnessing I have absorbed, all the desiring I have felt, all my experience of reality — all disappointments, disasters, mistakes, sins . . . everything — I’d say: ‘Ah, so it is true’. And a great peace would descend upon me, unlike anything otherwise imaginable. This is not, I don’t believe, a measure of my naïvete, or my stupidity, but of my human need, which I cannot help and did not place inside me. I could pretend to shake this need from myself, deny it and affect a determined stride to nowhere in particular, but that wouldn’t change anything except the way I might afterwards describe and presented myself to others.
The most convincing and yet the most ignored and taken-for-granted evidence is within us: our desire. There was a time when I was not aware of this abaolute aspect of desire, or, being aware of it in the least, mistook it for a phenomenon directed at fleeting things and therefore itself a fleeting phenomenon. I certainly would not have thought of it as evidence of anything substantial or constant, never mind a basis for infinite or absolute hoping. But I have found that to see desire as a thing in itself is to know hope as a thing in itself.
I have a fairly solid intuition that I’m never going to encounter Jesus on the street corner. In theory, I suppose, it’s possible: He might come back, as He promised. But something about my experience of reality has taught me to treat this possibility with a touch of scepticism. Nor do I particularly care to talk about Him in this way, as if He was a flesh-and-blood person likely to approach me in the street at any moment and ask if there’s a dry cleaners in the vicinity.
I actually find myself unable to imagine what Jesus might be like if he suddenly re-materialised in this dimension, in the year 2022 or 2024 or 2030. I feel, on the balance of probabilities, that this isn’t going to happen. The method I apply to this is of the bunker — using the type of knowledge and intelligence I employ every day — but in this matter, uniquely, something tells me this is adequate for the purposes of predicting such matters. I treat it as other questions, while somehow knowing this is a mistake. It’s a bit like lottery tickets: I don’t expect to win, so I don’t feel any sense of missing out by virtue of not buying a scratch card. In the same way, I wouldn’t be enormously incredulous if Jesus turned up, but I don’t expect Him to. I treat my eternal destiny like this but am not thick enough to feel that this is rational.
The thing is: He’s here already, except not in the same sense as I am. Christ is not something ‘added on’ to reality — He’s the centre of it, the essence out of which it is generated. This is His role in my imagination, the heart of my thinking and feeling. This is the whole point of Christianity, as far as I can see.
Christ is real, more real than the Apple iBook on which I’m writing this. But he is not ‘real’ in the same way. The good news is that the Apple iBook is not ‘real’ either — except in a certain immediate, functional sense. It’s simply a particular combination of electrical particles that achieves a certain purpose pertaining to my bunker existence. Christ is different: He is the centre of my eternal, infinite being. He is part of my ‘I’, the greater part. He is the One with whom I have the relationship that makes me a human being. He is the One Who Makes Me. I don’t need to know that this is true for its mysterious power to work through me, but it helps if I do. I can reject it, by name or otherwise, and then my humanity begins to atrophy. But I choose not to reject it anymore because I have found that seeing things like this is the optimum outlook for the functioning of my humanity.
‘Jesus Christ’ — needless to say — is not the same kind of name as ‘John Waters.’ ‘Christ’ is not a surname. ‘Jesus’ is the name of the Mystery-made-man. ‘Christ’ is the Mystery itself, the essence that permeates everything, including me, right now. It’s important, I believe, to make the distinction: Jesus is the figure in the historical story; Christ is the One Who Makes Me.
If you think about the way you think, it may strike you as like a dialogue. You’re lying in bed, or walking around, or driving your car, or sitting drinking a coffee in a café, and your mind is operating — sometimes with words, sometimes without words — but either way, always, like a conversation. With whom? It’s as if there’s another present, another listening. And this person, entity, being, is there always. There is this relationship that is in me, and has always been in me. For years I paid no attention to it. I imagined I was just ‘thinking.’ Everybody does it — yes? But maybe there’s no such thing as ‘just thinking.’ Whatever made us think there might be?
Still, there is more to be reckoned with. Even if I have arrived at the possibility that there is a ‘you’ who lives within me, how do I make what appears to be the considerable leap to calling this ‘you’ by the name of ‘Christ’? When I speak of ‘the presence’ of Christ, what do I hope to make visible that is not some sentimental construct, propelled by an insistent moralism? Or perhaps it’s a moralism propelled by sentimentality? Can I speak truly, really, about such things and not think myself into madness, let alone avoid being thought already mad by others? If I say that Christ is the name of the embrace that holds me, what do I mean? I could call it by another name. I could make up a name. I could trawl through the world’s religions to find something sufficiently trendy or esoteric to shield me against the abuse that tends to follow any identification with the core faith that has sustained Europe for nearly two millennia. Nevertheless, I formulate those words — naming Christ as the embrace that I feel myself enveloped in. I do so with some hesitation, because I know that this will be received by many ears as a literal, substantialist statement, to be caricatured and dismissed, and above all misunderstood.
Christ can be made into a figure of the bunker by sentimentalising Him and focusing on a literal understanding of his 33 years on Earth. The story of His earthly life is important — vital — but it is not The Thing Itself. As far as I am able to see, it occurred only to help us to understand what was at stake, what things mean, how correctly to place ourselves before reality. To experience the Gospels, we need to be ‘in’ them and yet not; walking with Jesus in Gethsemane, yet knowing that this walk is now, for me. To be a Christian in the present is to be conscious that time dissolves in the contemplation of Christ, that I am here now in April 2022, drawing on those happenings of 2,000 years ago, but these moments are but one moment.
My desire is, from a certain viewpoint, selfish. I want to quell the grief that wells up in me at contemplating the possibility that the bunker might be the most reliable witness to the meaning of reality. I want to erase finally the sadness I intuit to derive from my state of being exiled from someplace that I dread to think does not exist. And if none of this is true, I want nothing but to explode my life in a blitz of distraction and amnesia. These thoughts pull me in opposing directions: now, into the bunker and then out into the wilderness of the Mystery, unable to fathom either reality or how they are related, if they are.
It might be useful in this context to reflect on the betrayal of Judas in terms not of silver coins but of the desire that was brought out in him, which his freedom enabled him to misuse. Paradoxically, it was the hope that Christ introduced into his heart that caused him to act as he did. He thought he could have Christ and disown him also. We too experience this struggle. Just like Judas, we can encounter the Hope that Christ offered and still reject it because of the prospect of a more immediate and instinct-affirming satisfaction. Such ruminations are interesting, and in their way helpful, but they do not take us to the meaning of the Gospels’ central proposal.
When I was a child, I had at Easter time an acute sense of the contemporaneity of what the Passion story relates. From the moment of awakening on Holy Thursday, to the moment of sleep on Easter Sunday night, I remained aware — without necessarily reaching the point of conscious acknowledgement — that the events of that ‘first’ Easter were happening ‘again.’ Except that there was no ‘again’ — they were still happening, because time and space did not exist in the way that, for those other 362 days, I allowed myself to become persuaded of. Easter brought me to a place and a time where Jesus was as real — living, ‘dead’ and living again — as He had ever been. Even now, at 3pm on a Good Friday, the world grows dark all around my head. In ways beyond metaphor, the clouds gather and the sun shrivels away. The death of the Saviour asserts itself upon me as the consciousness of a real event and I will experience the horror all over again.
It can be instructive to delve into the life of Jesus, immersing myself in this episode, that parable. Whenever I hear almost any detail of the story, I’m astonished by it anew. It strikes me as a story that nobody could make up. But if I allow my thinking about faith to be drawn excessively into the tableaux of the Gospels, ignoring the possibility of transportation to the present moment, I risk creating a dissonance with reality as I experience it now. If the Gospels are merely history, even factual history, they are insufficient to feed me now.
Jesus Christ is for me a man. Not ‘was’ – is. I think of Him as a man who ‘is,’ because that’s the way I find it easiest to think of Him. But I know, as I say, that He is not a man I will meet in my local café, wearing a face mask — a man who will introduce himself as Jesus. I am immensely more likely to meet Him in an encounter with another human person, just as I would aspire to the idea that another person could meet Him in me. But it’s possible to confuse this issue of contemporaneity with the historical Jesus known to Peter and Andrew and John. Christ did not ‘come’ from anywhere. He was here already. The fact that He manifested as a man at a particular point should not cause us to forget that He was — is — with us always. His ‘entry into history’ changed things, but only in the human consciousness of history. Jesus, to the extent that we can speak separately of His earthly manifestation, was not some alien life-form who arrived on earth like a time traveller.
It is a mistake, I believe, to become fixated on the whys and wherefores of His earthly existence, although the story of this is vital to achieving certain understandings about why He chose to be incarnated. The factuality or otherwise of any detail is not the most salient aspect. Did it happen as the Gospels say? Might He, one day, return again as a man, like He said He would? I don’t believe these questions matter in themselves. What’s important is that He exists as both a presence and an element of the subjectivity of those who have been touched by Him, which for all practical purposes is to say ‘touched through an encounter with another human being.’
This Christ allows me to go into this reality without any props, without any antidotes, without syringes, pills, bottles, bottles of pills, or any other kind of crutch. I walk out and, because I can walk with Him into that reality, I walk more decisively towards the horizon — which now becomes more resonant for his detected presence — content that I have found this the ultimate verification of my life and its meaning. This is what works when nothing else works. This is the only thing that really, truly works — this accompaniment, relationship, companionship.
It was the work of the Italian priest Father Luigi Giussani who first drew my attention to the most electric moment in the life of Mary Magdalen, the first human being to encounter Jesus as he emerged from the tomb after the Resurrection. Here we see a perfect context in which the historical narrative works off the contemporaneous dimension of Christ. Mary stands for each of us, in the brokenness and neediness we embody. Each one of us who seeks to access this ultimate possibility of human longing needs to revisit these moments, not for the sake of history, but for the sake of a resonance with our own hearts, our own yearning, to enter into what it was that Mary experienced at that moment, to be there with her, so that we can see what she felt and know what it means for us.
That first Easter morning, she went weeping to the tomb, discovered that the body of Jesus was gone, and found two angels, one at the head and one at the foot of where the body had been laid. One of them said to her: ‘Why are you weeping?’ She replied: ‘They have taken my Lord and I don’t know where they laid him.’
And then? ‘Then she turned and He was there and she didn’t know Him at first until he said: “Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?” She thought it was the gardener, and asked where he had taken the body. Then Jesus said: “Mary!” And she replied: “Master!”’
If this is true, should anything else matter? Anything at all? If it happened to me, how would I feel? What, then, if it is possible for it to happen in a different way — not literally, but in a moment of consciousness, a moment of the living imagination, a moment of self-awareness?
This is the moment when we can feel the joy that is possible for the human heart. It was not simply a sentimental joy or a joy simply born of surprise: ‘Oh I thought he was dead and now he isn’t.’ Neither was it: ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, the Son of Man has risen from the dead, hallelujah! Fear no more!’ No, it was: ‘He’s my friend! This being who has impressed me beyond anything, who has brought to life in me that which I didn’t even know existed, he is not gone after all!’ In this moment we gather, with Mary, that there may be far more to reality than we have ever imagined.
And this is what it means to be a Christian: to know this feeling is possible, to know it is accessible between us through the dialogue of our hearts. It is not alien. It is not something that strikes us as strange. This goodness, intensity, exceptionality — it is still with us. It is not an idle rumour of some random passing encounter. It is the moment that lies at the very heart of our human longing.
Can this be real for me? Can it have any purchase on my heart or my head after 2,000 years in which the truth of what happened, or didn’t happen, may have been distorted, amended, edited, enhanced or reinvented?
Yes. Why? Because I am able to be there, with Mary, as it happens. Time and space collapse and we are there together. I am at the opening of the sepulchre as she turns and sees Him. No, I am not with Mary. I am alone in Mary’s place. I turn and see Him. He says, ‘Who are you looking for?’ Then he says my name: ‘John.’ I say, ‘Lord!’
To be a Christian is not merely to believe that the coming of Christ is the most important event in history, but to have changed one’s sense of history from the idea of a linear unfolding to an understanding of a process in which time and space converge on the single moment of the Resurrection. It is a feat of the imagination — the reimagining of something that is more real than anything else. In the end, once we have factored in everything, this is not a metaphor or fable intended to adorn moralistic homilies for Good Friday or Christmas Eve. It is the truest thing that ever was or will be.
Christianity is real for me because it provides me with a window to look out from the bunker and see something that immediately strikes me as far greater than anything I have encountered here inside. Nothing I have encountered in this man-constructed reality has come close to satisfying my desire, except for what has reached my ears about this man Jesus and His shocking promises, who came and seemed to embody all of the goodness that is possible for mankind.
Some Christians try to make this easy, a matter of words and declarations. They have ‘found’ Christ; Christ ‘loves’; Christ ‘saves.’ Yes, but this is not a Hollywood movie. To rush with words into the arms of Christ would be self-defeating, a foreclosing on the necessary feat of imagination. Because of its fear of the Mystery, because of the reductions it applies to every ‘religious’ idea that threatens its hegemony on our imaginations, the bunker has rendered Christ as fable, sentimental idea and moral policeman. This is a crime against Christ, but an even greater crime against humankind. I do not want to rush into an embrace with this person called Jesus out of a desire for a melodramatic ‘reconciliation.’ This, I suspect, would result in jubilation from those who already consider themselves members of the club, but I do not really feel I belong to any club. I have a sense that blurting out my longing to belong might give me an immediate feeling of satisfaction, but would not ring true for me, and so might lead me back towards self-suspicion. Even here, there is someone within me, with me, watching me, refusing to allow me to sell myself short, which here would amount to selling the Truth short.
If we try to answer the question of our existence and simply use a word like ‘Christ’ as an add-on panacea, then we are doomed to miss the point. This is the wrong approach because what we have without what Christ represents is not something to be ‘added-on’ to: it is nothing, or next to nothing, a life without point. We humans are walking question-marks, and this is the question we consantly, in our very being, ask: What makes me? If we think that we can answer this question by just lifting the nearest answer from the nearest peg, we are mistaken. If we think to add a little icing to our lives, a cherry on top, by finding and extravagantly embracing someone called Jesus, we are no less deluded than if we had ignored the question altogether.
Who, then, is this Jesus? An idea? Yes, an idea. An idea not of a perfect man, but an ordinary man who understood perfectly what it was like to be human. He came into history, the story goes, to show us how what hope might look like. But He was also God, the Being out of which I am generated.
I believe there is an urgent necessity for Christians to be more clear about what Christ offers the world. What is the relevance of the Christian story? Is it a morality tale, or a mythic fable to inspire us? No, it comes down to the man at its centre. Why is the story of the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus so vital for us? Is it a contrivance to make us feel guilty? No. Is it a reminder we need to fear Him? No. The point surely is that it shows us the trajectory of a life lived according to the most truthful understanding of reality. What do we mean when we say that Christ died for us? In what sense does his death help us? It seems to me that His death was necessary not as an act of sacrifice to appease an angry Father God, but to alert us to two fundamental realities, each as important to our total understanding as the other: the bunker and the Mystery beyond.
How can we understand the contemporaneity of Christ so that we cannot construct any alibi to avoid it? It is tempting, confronted by such a question, to affect preoccupation with bunker matters. I acknowledge it: In a certain mindset, there is something about the question that makes me uneasy, makes me shrink from trying to answer it. If you spring it on me, I will recoil in embarrassment. But I know that, regardless of whatever prejudices the question provokes me, I must sooner or later delve into its essence and try to answer it.
There is here a beautiful paradox, which somehow ‘explains’ how scepticism happens. The scepticism we feel is not really a rational rejection of what we have been told about Christ, but a failure to be moved in the present, a refusal to leave the bunker and face the Mystery. The reason we don’t believe in the stories of Jesus we have inherited is that the process of conversion is not happening for us now. Time is not collapsing as it needs to.
‘Conversion’ in the modern context means to become aware of the bunker and to become astonished again by my presence inside it, to become conscious that, even in the bunker, I can be aware of the miracle of my own existence. And once I can become present to this sensibility, I have already started to reverse the problematic condition in myself. The key is to find ways to make the bunker visible to myself and to others, to allow us to see its structure and consequences, and how it has come to dominate our lives — and, then, to reintroduce us together, in the language of everyday reality, to the infinity that waits outside.
Father Giussani gave us the method of making this journey back from the bunker, in The Religious Sense , Chapter 10: ‘First of all to make myself understood, I will stir your imagination. Picture yourself being born, coming out of your mother’s womb at the age you are now, at this very moment in terms of your development and consciousness. What would be the first, absolutely your initial reaction? If I were to open my eyes for the first time in this instant, emerging from my mother’s womb, I would be overpowered by the wonder and awe of things as a presence. I would be bowled over and amazed by the stupefying repercussion of a presence which is expressed in current language by the word “thing” Things! That’s “something!” “Thing,” which is a concrete and if you please banal version of the word “being.” Being: not as some abstract entity, but as presence, a presence which I do not myself make, which I find. A presence which imposes itself upon me. He who does not believe in God is inexcusable, says St. Paul in his letter to the Romans (Rom. 1:19-21), because that person must deny this original phenomenon, this original experience of the “other.” A baby lives this experience without being aware of it, because he is not yet completely conscious. But the adult who does not live it or does not consciously perceive it is less than a baby. That person is atrophied.’
Giussani laid bare how the nightmare of unreason was created in our culture, how we were presented with an impression of ourselves and our reality and our future that is simply not reasonable. And he showed us, too, how we had been conditioned to take it for granted, to assume it to be obvious. He took us by the hand through the whole Christian story. With John and Andrew we went to meet Jesus on the road. And then he showed us how the only adequate thing that this world had ever seen, dreamed of or imagined as a correspondence for the infinite desire that defines us is at the heart of this story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the only thing that answered our intuition, our longing, our certainty as children, as we lay there waiting, dependent, aware, more wise that we would ever be again, in our astonishment and wondering, more knowing about reality than the wisest men in the bunkered world.
The Religious Sense is the most astonishing of books. It is not really about what we call ‘religion,’ but about reality. It demonstrates that there is no division between reality and the truly religious. If we are human and live in reality then we satisfy the necessary criteria of being ‘religious.’ How we describe ourselves doesn’t matter. I am religious even if I hate the word. I can’t change it. I am created; I am dependent; I am mortal. And only in discovering myself in this context can I find peace in this world. There is only one way of proceeding.
Giussani changed nothing of the essentials of Christianity, but merely burnished them up again, cleaning away the patina of corrosion that had accumulated over centuries. He presented Christianity again in a stripped-down form, scraping back to the original impulses and understandings. But he also gave us maps of the cultures in which we live, which bombard us with false versions of ourselves, which tell us that scepticism is a reasonable response, that pessimism is natural, that despair is intelligent. Giussani showed us how we can reawaken our reason, right now, in any moment of need or confusion, in spite of the bunker and all its delusions.
Emerging from the bunker isn’t something that happens once for all future time. It’s not something I grasp by reading something, following a method and retaining an understanding of what’s happened for the rest of my life. I emerge, but the bunker swallows me again. I emerge again, the same thing happens. Every moment my freedom from the bunker is threatened by the encroachment of the bunker culture, and every moment I must be awakened again to see, to open my eyes. Open my eyes. Open my eyes. Conversion is a constantly recurring process, because the bunker always threatens to steal us back from it.
Giussani has given us the map to go back every moment when we feel lost. In that scintillating paragraph, ‘Picture yourself being born . . . ’ — perhaps the most radical exposition of the Christian method that has ever been written — Giussani directs me/you/us to the point of origin within ourselves, inviting us to return to that point of beginning so that we can see again without the fog of human hubris in our eyes, to reactivate the condition of wonder which is the optimally functional disposition towards reality and become vivified by the wonder of seeing the world as it is — to see that there is nothing more astonishing than the fact of being here.
To read that paragraph, to recall its essence at any time, in any place, is to be awakened again to the core meaning of existence in this reality and to begin again the process of understanding the implications of what might be true. Giussani, understanding that mission to inhabit reality in its absolutely paradoxical nature, gave us permission to take with us to this moment all of the tools we use now for apprehending reality — all the true instruments of our reason: our experience, intelligence, emotions, intuitions, experiences — all to be brought along as we go back to the very moment of beginning. Out I come into the world, into this room. What might I conclude from this initial impact with reality? What is my response when I look at this box I find myself in — at the colors, movement, beings, light that I see before me? All this in front of me — what is this? Who are these beings? Who, indeed, is this ‘being’ who apprehends? Who am ‘I’? Who made me? Me? What is this me? Do I, because I think, become the originator of myself? My hands — where do they come from?
I didn’t make myself.
I make nothing.
And then to wheel around and to look at the culture. How did this culture persuade me that this existence was banal, that my hands were banal, that I could take everything for granted and expect anything but despair to engulf me? How did this culture persuade me that not much was possible? How did this culture persuade me that I was moving towards an abyss? How did this culture persuade me of the inevitability of pessimism, of the validity of scepticism, of unhope, despair, that my destination was a hole in the ground?
This we have lost: the astonishment at what is, what we are. We need to learn anew to switch over, at any moment in the constructed ‘reality’ of man, to eject ourselves from the bunker and find this astonishment again, to understand what the bunker is doing to us, and to glimpse what the bunker contrives to suppress.
The challenge to reason in our time is not to ‘prove’ the existence of God, but to dismantle the scaffolding of false logic which has insinuated itself between us and the truth about ourselves.
‘Conversion’ means understanding that the beginning is always now. This is the moment it is all about, just as the next moment will be all it will be all about when it comes, and the next one after that, and the next one after that, and on to infinity. Conversion means: connecting with the truth of my being and its resonance in reality. Without such a conversion — and regardless of how much we may assert our beliefs or piety, no matter how Gospel-greedy we affect to being — we contribute to building what Charles Péguy called a ‘world after Jesus’: a superficial, distracted world in which the human heart is not truly engaged by the deeper meaning of reality. Unless everything that happens is seen as an invitation to the Mystery, we are living in a bogus reality, a world thrown together in which we have thrown away everything worthwhile that has been given to us, most of all ourselves.
In such a world, there could not possibly be an ultimate meaning, and therefore no ideal to which we could commit ourselves, because our thoughts would be saturated with a certainty of the falseness of all ideals. In such a world, we would have nothing to aspire to, because the nature of aspiration is love, and we would have reduced the concept of love so much that what was left of it could not satisfy us. True love is an infinite quantity corresponding to the love of God that has stretched itself over our nothingness. Conversion allows the true love to enter into our brokenness and possess us. These words seem true to me now, more than anything I have ever heard.
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Author John Waters
