Gabe was baptized Catholic as a child; when he got to Taiwan, he wanted to forget his past in America. I met him a year ago at a dinner celebrating the birthday of David, a young man from Colombia who belongs to Communion and Liberation and moved to Taiwan for his studies. And so the idea was born to start a School of Community -a personal and communal work of reflection based on a text of Fr. Giussani- in English to Gave and the other foreigners I met that evening, who recently had passed from Protestantism and atheism to Catholicism. Many of them remain amazed by the thought of Fr. Giussani and in these months, they are discovering the home that the Lord prepared for them.
Cary is originally from Texas and became fascinated immediately with the Religious Sense: “When he speaks of reason, Fr. Giussani helps me to understand my own journey, the change that I have lived personally from a positivist reason, closed to the Mystery, to the openness that I need to recuperate every morning in order to get out of bed.” His wife Yinzhen follows him, struck by the change in her husband. “For me too,” she confided, “it is a good thing to be with these friends who sustain us”
After the meeting, I asked her what happened: “God happened,” she responded.
Tyler too, like Cary, felt completely described by the text of the School of Community. “Giussani helped me to understand my story,” he says. And he sums it up as follows: “Born in a devout Protestant family, in the heart of the United States, I then had an atheist rejection of it all in my years of college and then a desperate search for a meaning that could give reason to everything that I desired.” He too was welcomed this past year into the Church, and at School of Community he understood the importance of living the experience of “I am You who make me.” “When I was an atheist, I would convince myself that the sense of my person consisted in following new goals, a new car or something new to accomplish. I think I have been culpable of all of the types of reduction of reason just like Fr. Giussani describes them: but I am grateful for this place that reminds me that the essential thing is to depend.”
Adam, an Englishman baptized Anglican, was welcomed this year in the Taiwanese church and says that he was convinced above all by the reasonableness of the faith: “I was persuaded by the history of the Church and by the insistence on reason: then, by the happy and charitable faces of a family that welcomed me in a moment of need.”
It is the same charity that surprised Tia when she arrived at School of Community: “Here, everyone is welcomed and can be themselves,” she affirms. She, an American Protestant but not practicing, began to come thanks to her boyfriend, Gabge. The first months she never said a word. Then, all of a sudden, during a School of Community, she responded to someone new: “Giussani speaks to everyone, even to a non-believer, because she speaks to man about man and shows us a path toward the Mystery.” After the meeting, I asked her what happened: “God happened,” she responded. These months of silent openness to the Mystery, together with these friends, brought her to ask to be received into the Catholic Church, which happened this past year at Easter.
It will be the third time in the past few months that we find ourselves officiating in church with these new friends. The first two were for the baptism of the children of Tyler and Adam, born just a few weeks apart. They asked each other to be the godparents of their children and all of us from the School of Community were present.
Thinking back to this year together, I am grateful to God for these friends who remind me that everyone is looking for the Church, the home that one can find close to them and that has teh horizon of the entire world. Besides the core group, almost every week there is someone new invited. According to the judgment of David, “Here we don’t just gather to read a book of Fr. Giussani; here, we propose a Christian life to share everything.”
