To See You More Clearly/ To Follow You More Nearly

To "be" in the world involves a blend of passivity and action: We bring our history and our yearnings (past and future) to the present moment, which we accept but read (interpret).  I was reminded of this recently at a restaurant when one of us three looked around and asked, "Where is the pepper?"  I looked and saw the familiar glass and silver-topped salt shaker but could not find any pepper.  It took the third of us to say, "Oh, it is a pepper mill," as he pulled the tall wooden mill out of the condiment tray in the center of the table.  Looking for a pepper shaker, I couldn't see a pepper mill.

So what we look for is pretty important, isn't it?  What we discover is what we choose to uncover.  The man looking for his lost coin only under the streetlamp may be disappointed.  That's why Giussani stresses the need for openness, and a breaking open of our predilections.  The image he uses is the little child, who approaches the world with an attitude of curiosity. Since what we experience "out there" is mixed with what is "in here," it isn't difficult to see why Giussani observes that:

"reality is made transparent in experience.  What we are, the nature of our heart, is made evident in our relationship with reality. . ." 

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who Lives in Me," p. 54.  In other words, we discover ourselves in the world's disclosure. "[T]he heart [what I desire] is implicated in what it experiences." Ibid.  The world doesn't appear unless I allow it to address me.  Giussani says (quoting Reinhold Niebuhr), "I will never find an answer to a question I do not ask."  Our fundamental desires (our questions and search for meaning) thus are significant to the degree that they match rather than turn away from the signs appearing in reality. "People rarely learn what they believe they already know." Ibid. p. 29, quoting Barbara Ward.

One's desire, then, is crucial, since one only recognizes what comports to one's desire.  Giussani's basic message is that we need to open the channel of our desire through active purification of our "heart" so we can experience what is truly and nobly desirable for man as man, namely, the Divine, whose divine-human form is the person of Jesus Christ.  Following an inferior (infernal) way does not satisfy, for it isn't consonant with the innate nobility of human desire.

This way of thinking, the human being as in essence exstasis, self-transcending, is as old as human thinking.  "The ultimate end of the motion of all being is the 'attainment of a divine likeness'." St. Thomas Aquinas (quoted in Rbt. Spaemann, "Human Nature," at p. 16.  This truth about man and nature, the desire to transcend itself, was recognized by Aristotle. Methexis (participation in the eternal and divine) is the end toward which all things strive. Ibid.

Our job as human beings then is to desire more nobly, i.e. to desire the good, true and beautiful, lamps of the transcendent realm that light the path to the Primum Mobile and the Empyrean, in Dante's words in the Divine Comedy.  Dante follows Giussani (and vice versa) in encouraging a "way of purgation" so that our channels of desire run clearly and fully toward that which truly and fully satisfies.

The path to that divine likeness, the path out of the "dark wood in the middle of our lives," then, is an active via of purification of desire, so that we learn to want to see truly, to live freely, through the heart.  The via, the way, the exodus, to Truth and Life is shown to us by Jesus, who is that way, truth and life.  So that when we travel this way we meet Christ's loving gaze, and recognize who we truly are.