A few months ago, I was teaching a lesson in a school in the outskirts of Bogotá. “Would you rather have a dog or a friend?”. I asked this question at the end of the period to a boy who was claiming that it was better to not have to trust anyone. I thought it was a rhetorical question. The boy responded: “I’d rather have the dog, obviously.” I then threw the question out to the whole class. And then I repeated the question to the other classes in the periods that followed. Only a few responded: “A friend.” I was left speechless.
The Movement of Communion and Liberation has always fascinated me for the education it gives to a sense of friendship. Friendship has always been, for us children of Fr. Giussani, a sacred element in our life: we were educated to live it as a sign of the strength that unites us to the Lord and makes our own bond eternal. Something capable of bolstering every human frailty. Something beyond all else. Something that lasts forever. And these students were actively losing all of this.
Our task is to safeguard the friendships that He calls forth
In the following days, the question remained: “Why do they not desire friendship? What is the reason?”. However, no kind of sociological analysis was able to truly respond to this provocation. I was looking for a deeper response. Then, over the next few days, I realized that this resistance to friendship was not only something in my students. It was present, even if less explicitly, in me and in the other persons of the community: there were moments in which the temptation came to pull back in relationship with the others, in which one’s idea or own thoughts became more important than welcoming the other with one’s heart. And paraphrasing the phrase I asked my students, I began to ask myself: “In this particular circumstance, would you rather have your idea or a friend, a brother?”. I discovered how deeply in each of us lies this resistance to communion and friendship in Christ.
Then it happened that the Lord granted me two experiences in which I found the peace I was looking for because He showed me how His hand was stronger than our rebellion. One of them was Ash Wednesday. The entire world needs to see how beautiful Ash Wednesday is in Bogotá! A people who go around the streets with the cross of ashes on their foreheads. The churches are full. We priests hear confession from morning until evening. But the most beautiful fact was to encounter in the confessional persons who had not received the sacrament for years. I want to relate just a bit of what I heard that day: “Father, today I am confessing because I felt within myself that the Lord was calling me here.” “I was walking by and saw the church and I felt that a force was pushing me to go to confession.” It was for me a caress of the Lord to be a witness of His strength. He continues to attract persons to Himself.
The second moment was during the following week. Every Wednesday in these years we meet in our house with a group of friends from the parish to organize the activities for kids on Saturdays. Beginning a few weeks ago, we also began with a few adults who follow the group for teenagers. Now, these two dinners happen together. While we were praying all together, before splitting up into two tables, I thought about how beautiful it was to gather together with the awareness that we are all called together. These were faces of friends who three years ago were unknown to me and I asked myself: “How have we become such good friends?” and I began to intuit that these are His things, that He decides and accomplishes them. Our task is to safeguard the friendships that He calls forth so that they continue to go beyond all else. This, in the end, is what fascinates us. And who knows: maybe one day, that student of mine will be amazed that he used to prefer a dog to a friend.
