The doorbell rings and it is Marcuccia, an elderly lady with a face marked, excavated, by time, who begins to speak a language that I have difficulty understanding but that then I recognize to not be so distant from my native dialect.
I’m in a small town outside of Cassino, seated at a beautiful table of friends in the back of an old restored farmhouse. Currently, two families live here who desire to share time and space to help one another to live out their vocation.
The conversation with Marcuccia becomes lively. She recounts the latest happenings in the area, those of her family, those of her neighbors. In short, you sense that she is very attentive to everything and everyone, as if everything somehow belongs to her or at least has something to do with her life.This is the opposite of what happens in most neighborhoods or buildings in the world. Anything that does not touch me personally, perhaps depriving me of something, is of no concern to me, as long as my quiet autonomy, otherwise known as freedom, is preserved.
This summer, on our customary visit to the families of the seminarians, I found myself in New York. As it was my first time there, I was fascinated by the river of life that inhabits those streets, whose corners always contain something to discover or someone to meet. At the same time, I was struck by the palpable indifference you could sense in people towards everyone and everything. Each person goes on their own way, crossing the streams of people who are invisible or at least taken for granted. Perhaps because by now so many people, even while being in a certain place, are actually absent, pushed by the desire to be elsewhere and helped by technological means that trick them into thinking they can do it.
“I want everything,” St. Therese used to say. How can you be in a certain place without “losing” all of the rest? How can one experience the whole within a choice that is particular and therefore limited?
During the dialogue with Marcuccia, I was moved spontaneously to ask how she knows everything about the people in the village. One person tells me that “she walks the beat, not in the village but on this road. She was born in this very farmhouse and has lived here for 83 years, riding her bicycle up and down the road. Her husband, whom she describes as elderly (!), is 93 years old.”
Sometimes we struggle to find what we seek, wandering, materially or spiritually, from one place to another. Instead, “to find water, it is more useful to dig a well a hundred meters deep than a hundred wells a meter deep,” as an elderly monk once said.
“To find water, it is more useful to dig a well a hundred meters deep than a hundred wells a meter deep”
Life is a journey, and each step is made up of precise circumstances. We must have the courage and humility to stand, to search in the depths of the present, wherever we are and in the conditions we are given, without giving in to the temptation to imagine nonexistent worlds.
“Man’s path to truth and his destiny is not at the mercy of what he thinks, or what others think, or the society in which he lives. It is objective: it is not a matter of imagining, but of following,” says Giussani in The Sense of God and Modern Man.
In one of his latest books, Fr. Mauro Lepori writes that what makes the instant into a prison “is the lack of a center of one’s own space, a thing you love to the point that concentrating on it expands your heart.” Love for Christ, begged for in every instant, allows our heart to expand, as Psalm 119 states: “You enlarge my heart,” to the point of embracing the whole world. In an early work of his, Giussani wrote: “We must think of the entire world; we must be concerned with Christianity in Africa and Asia and not just keep ourselves busy with the disobedience and the lack of each day. If one has within themselves the sense of the world, then they can manage to be in a cage for their entire life with the grandiose serenity of a cloistered nun.”
That is why during the trip to the United States I found profound truth in a phrase I read at the Marian shrine in Washington, D.C. They were the words of Frederic Baraga, a Slovenian missionary who lived there, who said, “All I want is to be where God wants me to be.” Whether that is to always be on the road or to spend my life on a small road in a small town.
