Città Nuova

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Rebirth requires learning /15 - By remaining, with loyalty and gentleness, within a conflict in which we find ourselves without seeking or wanting it, vocations mature.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11/11/2024 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 11/2024

Charismatic communities are also places of conflict. Much of the quality and very survival of these communities also depends on their ability to care for and manage conflicts.

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There are many forms of conflict. Even the Bible knows of several. The conflict between Cain and Abel, where vertical frustration (between Cain and God who rejected his offerings) becomes horizontal violence (towards Abel). The conflict between Joseph and his older brothers, where envy leads to the elimination of the envied. Or that between Abraham and his nephew Lot, due to the abundance of resources in a shared space that was too small, which was resolved by separation, thanks to Abraham's generosity in leaving Lot the choice of the land (Gen 13:9).

The conflict between David and Saul takes yet another form. God had chosen Saul as the first king of Israel. Then he rejected him and chose David. A real war began between the two, which saw David victorious and Saul becoming depressed and finally committing suicide. The conflict between David and Saul is the paradigm of the typical conflict that arises between someone, usually younger, who has received a genuine calling to carry out a task and finds himself faced with someone who is already carrying out the same task because of a calling received at an earlier time, and who sees the arrival of the newcomer as a threat and a dire message for his life and vocation.

This type of conflict is particularly painful for both parties, because it is a necessary clash of identities, where each believes they are (because they are) legitimately in their place.

These conflicts can only be resolved or prevented by the surrender of one of the two parties, which can take many forms – fear or weakness, or obedience to a new voice calling us elsewhere. In most cases, we fail to resolve these conflicts, or we resolve them too late and with serious mutual damage that ends up worsening us to the point of distorting and deforming our hearts. The biblical account of the war between Saul and David is therefore important because it gives us a paradigm of how these conflicts, so devastating and so common, can be handled well.

Let's take a closer look. We are in the first book of Samuel. Saul is fighting David. Warned of David's presence in the area, Saul takes three thousand soldiers and sets out in pursuit. Along the way, Saul enters a cave to relieve himself, but at the back of that same cave, David and some of his companions are hiding (Samuel 1:24). David's companions urge him to seize this opportunity of Saul's utter vulnerability (alone and with his back turned) to kill him. But David approaches Saul and, instead of striking him, “cut off a corner of Saul's robe, without his knowing it” (24:5). And he said to his companions, “May the Lord keep me from doing such a thing to my lord, the anointed of YHWH, from raising my hand against him” (24:7).

It is very beautiful, that piece of cloak in David's hand, which takes the place of the dagger. Saul is about to end his life, he knows it, and David gives him a gentle and docile end. David sees Saul's wickedness, but he respects him, calling him “my father, my lord.” And when he could kill him, he does not.

He prefers to remain in conflict rather than choose a simpler but less true solution. It is an invitation to learn to live with contradictions, to care for conflicts, to prefer a difficult non-solution that is more true to a solution that appears simpler only because it is less true.

To approach those who hurt us in silence, cutting only a corner of their cloak. Because it is also by remaining, with loyalty and meekness, within a conflict in which we find ourselves without seeking or wanting it, that vocations mature. It is these gestures of pietas that make our victories blessed, that make them something different from a power struggle.

David was chosen and consecrated king when he was still a boy. One day he became king, and he was the greatest of all. That costly and generous loyalty, learned and displayed in his conflict with Saul, made him the most beloved king, beyond his many faults and great sins. Even we, after great mistakes and infidelities, can hope to be forgiven by life, by God, by our friends, by the angel of death, if we have been able to respect an enemy, if we have not abused his vulnerability and our strength, if we have called him “father” or “friend” even when he no longer deserved it.

If we have done so at least once.

Photo credits: Photo by David Clode su Unsplash

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Rebirth requires learning /15 - By remaining, with loyalty and gentleness, within a conflict in which we find ourselves without seeking or wanting it, vocations mature.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11/11/2024 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 11/2024

Charismatic communities are also places of conflict. Much of the quality and very survival of these communities also depends on their ability to care for and manage conflicts.

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Caring for conflicts

Caring for conflicts

Rebirth requires learning /15 - By remaining, with loyalty and gentleness, within a conflict in which we find ourselves without seeking or wanting it, vocations mature. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 11/11/2024 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 11/2024 Charismatic communities are ...
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    [title] => Limits and smiles
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Rebirth requires learning /14 - It takes time and a great deal of gentleness to learn to recognize yesterday's faith and God in a faith and a God that have become so different as to be unrecognizable.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on March 20, 2025 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 10/2024

Man is a social animal, yet nothing more than social life is a source of suffering and pain. Those community places from which our greatest happiness springs – family, friendship, work, love... – are the same places where the deepest wounds are inflicted.

[fulltext] =>

Until a few decades ago, communities held together thanks to one main tool: hierarchy. Fathers, kings, priests were also instruments for resolving interpersonal conflicts, or for preventing them from emerging. Monasteries and convents held many people together thanks to the presence of superiors (the name says it all), who acted as mediators in relationships. Sr. Anna did not meet Sr. Bruna directly, but through a third party, Mother Carla, who stood above the two and prevented the meeting from being too direct and therefore dangerous. Furthermore, in monastic communities there is a rule, the great legacy of the founders, which mediates community relations together with the hierarchy. And even though life was communal, in reality the hierarchy and the rule ensured that everyone interacted with everyone else without having to “touch” anyone. Special friendships were discouraged, overly subjective spiritual paths were stigmatized, peripheral and lateral interactions were discouraged, all to preserve the order and survival of the community. Abbeys have survived for centuries partly because hierarchy and rules prevented or contained interpersonal conflicts.

In the spiritual movements that emerged in the Catholic Church in the second half of the 20th century, something similar but also very different happened. The presence of the founder in the early stages of the movements, and of his representatives at the local level, played a role very similar to that of hierarchy and rules in monastic communities. The charisma of the founder was so bright that it (almost) prevented people from “seeing” the faults and limitations of others, and their own: his light dazzled everything and everyone. Everyone looked only at the charisma and his mission, and there was neither time nor space to look around and discover the faults and limitations of others. Emotional energy was not used (and wasted) to resolve intra-community conflicts, but spent on converting and spreading the charism and the movement. And the communities grew. With the disappearance of the founders, the context changed and became more complicated. Firstly, even though the founders of these movements generally wrote a rule, the function of the rule in these new communities is not the same as in the ancient monastic communities. Instead, they are more similar to the case of St. Francis and the mendicant movements. As Giorgio Agamben taught us (Altissima povertà, Neri Pozza, 2011), what really mattered to Francis was not adherence to a rule but to a way of life (that of the Gospel). A friar who does not live like Christ is not a friar, nor is a nun a nun, even if they follow the rule perfectly. Their actions and words are inseparable from their lives.

Of course, friars and nuns also make mistakes, sin, and are inconsistent, but their actions are not protected by their fidelity to the rule. A friar who loses his way of life loses everything; no fidelity to the rule can save him. A Benedictine in crisis could save himself by clinging to the rule and the liturgy; a Franciscan in crisis has only one chance: to convert and return to his way of life. For this reason, movements are more fragile than monasteries, because no rule can perform a vicarious function of salvation. This fragility is an expression of the extreme poverty of the Gospel.

Even new movements were born as a bare form of life, because every charismatic community experience, including early monasticism and its many reforms, is born only in this way. And so, when the founder disappears, these communities find themselves very fragile because they have only personal fidelity to the charism to continue. After the founder, communities live only if everyone is faithful to the charismatic way of life; crises are not resolved either by hierarchy or by rules. One can only live if one tries to look ahead, and not beside oneself. In a living and generative community, the limits and defects I discover in others become paths to enter into their souls, to cultivate that tenderness that arises in the face of a brother's emptiness, who ends up being loved not “despite” his limits but “thanks” to them. You see a lack, you smile. And then, without delay, you look ahead and outside, to resume the race.

 

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Rebirth requires learning /14 - It takes time and a great deal of gentleness to learn to recognize yesterday's faith and God in a faith and a God that have become so different as to be unrecognizable.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on March 20, 2025 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 10/2024

Man is a social animal, yet nothing more than social life is a source of suffering and pain. Those community places from which our greatest happiness springs – family, friendship, work, love... – are the same places where the deepest wounds are inflicted.

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Limits and smiles

Limits and smiles

Rebirth requires learning /14 - It takes time and a great deal of gentleness to learn to recognize yesterday's faith and God in a faith and a God that have become so different as to be unrecognizable. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on March 20, 2025 - From the magazine Città Nuova no. 1...
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    [title] => Becoming small and fragile as the charisma is being fulfilled
    [alias] => becoming-small-and-fragile-as-the-charisma-is-being-fulfilled
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Rebirth requires learning /13 - The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 21/02/2025 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.9/2024

The Bible is a composite of many things together. It is also a great map for times of crisis and community transition. I'm talking about the whole Bible, especially its prophets, who are the model for every charisma, because to understand community founders and their movements there is no better paradigm than that of the biblical prophets.

[fulltext] =>

The book of the prophet Daniel is a complex text, dominated by the dreams and interpretations that Daniel manages to find for his own dreams and those of others. In general Daniel has a great ability for the exegesis of dreams. However, there is one vision, that of the he-goat-unicorn, that Daniel is unable to decipher, despite the help he receives from Gabriel, the angel-interpreter. In fact, at the end of the vision he writes, ‘I, Daniel, was worn out. I lay exhausted for several days. [...] I was appalled by the vision; it was beyond understanding’ (Daniel 8:27). Sometimes prophets understand their visions, at other times they don't.

Unlike false prophets, true prophets are not able to interpret all the visions they receive from God, because they are not the masters of their dreams, they are not technicians with ready-made solutions for every problem. This inability of prophets to interpret certain dreams also applies to the dreams of the form of collective prophecy consisting of communities and movements born of charismas and founders: the founder is not the only prophet, the whole community shares in the prophetic gift.

In the phase of transition from the founder's generation to the next, it is frequent and normal for communities to be unable to interpret the visions, both those of yesterday and the (rarer) ones of today. Two operations become difficult: (a) to interpret today the dreams and visions that the founder had yesterday, (b) to decipher the new dreams that keep coming. This double difficulty hides much of the secret that allows movements born in the twentieth century to continue their charismatic journey today. Let's see how.

In fact, a real paradox occurs. A charisma comes to earth to realise a word, different and new, even if it is already present in the tradition. This word is announced and experienced in the first generation as the dawn of a bright day, which then continues and in some way is fulfilled only in future generations. But it often happens, if not always, that when that word begins to be truly fulfilled, the community that yesterday had understood it, when it was still an announcement, today is no longer able to interpret yesterday's prophetic ‘dream’. It becomes afraid, discouraged, it experiences collective disappointment, and is unable to understand its dream while it is being realised.

It is much easier to understand it when it is announced as a future project, but as soon as it begins to be realised in history something very similar to what Daniel experienced happens: ‘I, Daniel, was worn out. I lay exhausted for several days’, precisely because he could not understand his vision. The vision had been given to him, but it was he himself who did not understand it. Often one remains ‘worn out’ for many years, decades, until something happens, which doesn't always happen: a reform or a new light that is lit somewhere in the community.

Let's think, for example, of a charisma that came to shed new spiritual light on the abandonment of Jesus and his death. In the founding phase, when everything speaks of light and life, Jesus' abandonment on the cross is clear, fascinating and luminous. The founder and all the members of his community understand the heart of the charisma, that is, that ‘God is there where he isn’t there’, that there is light in the darkness, that the Risen One is already in the Crucified One, that there is a mysterious but true value in diminishing, in becoming little. Then the decades pass, the founder dies, the community shrinks, they become less powerful, less strong, smaller, more fragile, and that reality announced yesterday in the light of dawn begins to fade.

In reality, if we were able to interpret the dream correctly, we would have to say that the charisma is finally being fulfilled just as we are becoming small and fragile, but what was fascinating when it was first announced, now, in its fulfilment, is no longer understood and is only frightening. One cannot see the dawn within the dusk, because that collective body that is finally getting to embody its own charisma cannot look at itself from outside and from afar, which is the only vision that would allow it to truly understand what is happening.

This is the time when we must return to the Bible, to its prophets, and use their essential maps to take a look at the real story that is being written, from outside and from above. To continue the race.

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Rebirth requires learning /13 - The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 21/02/2025 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.9/2024

The Bible is a composite of many things together. It is also a great map for times of crisis and community transition. I'm talking about the whole Bible, especially its prophets, who are the model for every charisma, because to understand community founders and their movements there is no better paradigm than that of the biblical prophets.

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Becoming small and fragile as the charisma is being fulfilled

Becoming small and fragile as the charisma is being fulfilled

Rebirth requires learning /13 - The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 21/02/2025 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.9/2024 The Bible is a composite of many things together. It ...
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    [title] => The age of charismatic amphibians
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Rebirth requires learning/12- The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second.

by Luigino Bruni

Article published in no. 8/2024 of Città Nuova on 4 January 2025

Max Weber, perhaps the greatest sociologist ever, theorised at the beginning of the 20th century about the relationship between charismatic leadership and bureaucratic leadership, i.e. the ‘government (kratos) of offices (bureau)’. His thesis was very straightforward: if and when a movement born of a charismatic founder becomes, e.g. upon the founder's death, an institution and thus a bureaucratic organisation, the charisma dies to give birth to the institution.

[fulltext] =>

For Weber, when a charismatic movement becomes an organisation, the institutional phase begins. In other words, there is no charismatic institution possible: you can either have a charisma without an institution or an institution without a charisma. Weber's theory is radical and has been the subject of various modifications and mitigations over the last hundred years, nonetheless it remains a great idea with which to reason, even for the world of religious charismas in the Church and outside it, where the discourses are more complicated.

First of all, even if we take Weber's theory seriously, we cannot say that in a contemporary institution today born from a charisma of yesterday, there is no longer any trace of the founder's original charisma in its organisational life, statute, governance, lifestyle, narrative capital or identity. All this remains, and the charisma continues to be visible in some way in the life of the organisation, or at least it can be.

But - and this is where the decisive point lies - when a community passes from the first generation of the founder to the second and (later) generation of the organisation, the nature of that community changes with this passage. And it changes in some important and often crucial aspects. In particular, the main instrument for attracting and selecting new members for the movement (and for retaining the ‘old’ ones) changes. In the first, charismatic phase, in fact, people, especially young people, were attracted by the charisma personified by the figure of the founder. People entered the community because they were enchanted by the prophecy of the charisma and the prophet, they were fascinated and attracted by the charismatic spiritual ideal in itself, without any need for anything else. Because, when a charismatic community begins, the prophetic force of the founder(s) is so great that it arouses so-called pure vocations, that is, people who do not enter a community to perform a job, a task or to achieve goals, but only because they have a - somewhat extraordinary - experience of total identification between the individual and the collective spirit, they discover they already belong to that charisma before getting to know it. In the second, organisational phase, on the other hand, new members are attracted by the message, the purpose, the goals, the values, if they are explicit and interesting, and this is not always the case. It is not easy, in fact, for a charisma of yesterday to be translated into an understandable and attractive message today, not least because the same adult members that have lived the founding experience are the ones struggling to find motivation in the new institutional phase, where many live like fish out of water, even when they become amphibians in order to survive. Objectives, values, goals, important and often good things, but external to the charisma itself, do not selectmore vocations, that is, people willing to spend their entire lives, because vocations are only generated by the ideal in itself and by its absolute and infinite nature. Instead, in the institutional phase, adherents, sympathisers, employees of the structure and supporters are attracted, who approach for one or another of the institution's objectives.

This is the so-called ‘NGOnisation’ of movements, which change in nature, and from prophecy they turn into works, and can do many good things, however different ones from what they did before. This is the fate of many current communities born in the 1900s by charismatic founders. It is not always a bad fate. So does the charisma-prophecy have no more chance in the phases following the first? It may if the organisation succeeds in generating reformers who will be able to re-launch new charismatic and prophetic phases in different places and in various forms. And the reformers will be many, not all consistent with each other.

After the founders, the great trees of yesterday can continue the prophetic experience if they become forests. Otherwise, they must organise themselves to become an institution, to start reasoning like institutions, using the instruments of institutions (incentives, for example) that will bear different fruit, perhaps even good fruits but different ones. The evolution of charismas into institutions is in part inevitable, but in part it depends on the choices, talents and courage of their governments and individuals.

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Rebirth requires learning/12- The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second.

by Luigino Bruni

Article published in no. 8/2024 of Città Nuova on 4 January 2025

Max Weber, perhaps the greatest sociologist ever, theorised at the beginning of the 20th century about the relationship between charismatic leadership and bureaucratic leadership, i.e. the ‘government (kratos) of offices (bureau)’. His thesis was very straightforward: if and when a movement born of a charismatic founder becomes, e.g. upon the founder's death, an institution and thus a bureaucratic organisation, the charisma dies to give birth to the institution.

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The age of charismatic amphibians

The age of charismatic amphibians

Rebirth requires learning/12- The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second. by Luigino Bruni Article published in no. 8/2024 of Città Nuova on 4 January 2025 Max Weber, perhaps the greatest sociologist ever, theorised ...
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    [title] => Let us resurrect desires
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Rebirth requires learning/11 - One must return to living everyday life with passion in order to regain possession of one's inclinations and freedom.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 07/12/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.7/2024

Desire has become a word of our time. And it is understandable, because it is a word before life. It always is, but in a special and different way when desire takes place within a vocation and a spiritual community, when one is dealing with people who dedicate their lives to great ideals. In these experiences, the first gift that someone who begins a spiritual journey makes is the gift of their own desires. They freely choose to invest everything in the new Promise. They do not experience their response as sacrifice, or, even less, as loss.

[fulltext] =>

In renouncing individual projects and desires, they see only an infinite possibility to blossom differently in a new Eden. Thus, today's new desire, which appears infinite, absorbs within itself all the other desires of yesterday, until one day it becomes the only desire to be kept. And so, the community's desire sacrifices the desires of the people in it. Our and the world's other stories and narratives lose their fascination and interest, we stop desiring them because they seem too small and trivial to us. The biodiversity of feelings, words, desires, interests, stories and of life is dramatically reduced, they are no longer interesting to us. We all desire the same Thing, and there is nothing else we want. We only desire the things that the new community desires and tells us we should desire. The community's desire becomes the only good, recommended desire.

In this process of giving away desires and wishes, which can last for decades, we initially have the impression that we are expanding our freedom, and this is what usually the case is. But then, paradoxically, as time passes, freedom begins to go less. Human communities born of ideals take the gift of individual desires and immolate it on the altar of community desire. The place of sacrificed individual desires is taken by the one collective desire. Why does this happen? Because charismatic intuitions know or sense that if people's desires remain free, they carry with them the risk of the end of the community, which can only live if it is desired most by its members and desired in the same ways and forms. The recording in writing of detailed rules and statutes is often also the unconscious manifestation of this need to control and direct the desires of present and future members. And so they forget that to keep human things alive there is no other guarantee than freedom-without-guarantees.

This process becomes decisive in generational transitions after the founders. The crises that manifest themselves in these passages are in fact an expression of the crisis of the desires donated and sacrificed by the members. Members of communities enter into crisis because they can no longer desire yesterday's Ideal, which is too attached to the physical persons of the founders. People accustomed to desiring only those things defined as desirable by the community, find their desire muscle atrophied. They no longer desire anything, and do not know how to live and write desirable stories. Hence the collective apathy of eros, of life, which is found especially in those people who had been most generous and pure. It is the time of anger and disappointment, of the desire to erase and forget the great collective and unique desire of yesterday, which is now perceived as deception and illusion.

What to do when going through these very painful and difficult phases? In such cases we must avoid mistaking cure for disease, which occurs when we invite people who are dull and apathetic enough to desire the same things again as always, presenting today's famine of desires as guilt. In reality, all that is needed is to resurrect desires. How? A good way is to start again (or begin) to listen to the daily stories of the families of our friends and colleagues, their ordinary stories of work, toil, love; to listen to the poor not in order to help them but because they really matter to us. To learn again to desire our work, to set a table, to take care of a plant. To long for the scent of the meadows, the light of the stars, the colour of the eyes of those who speak to us, the dog that wags its tail and cheers us on. To stop thinking about realities that we longed for yesterday but today no longer tell us much, including religious and spiritual realities. To return to the earth, to life, to friends, to nature, to the sea, to the wind. There we can learn the craft of living over again, and from there new desires, including collective ones, can be reborn. Desires as great again as those of the early days, perhaps just more adult and purified ones. Rising again requires learning.

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Rebirth requires learning/11 - One must return to living everyday life with passion in order to regain possession of one's inclinations and freedom.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 07/12/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.7/2024

Desire has become a word of our time. And it is understandable, because it is a word before life. It always is, but in a special and different way when desire takes place within a vocation and a spiritual community, when one is dealing with people who dedicate their lives to great ideals. In these experiences, the first gift that someone who begins a spiritual journey makes is the gift of their own desires. They freely choose to invest everything in the new Promise. They do not experience their response as sacrifice, or, even less, as loss.

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Let us resurrect desires

Let us resurrect desires

Rebirth requires learning/11 - One must return to living everyday life with passion in order to regain possession of one's inclinations and freedom. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 07/12/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n.7/2024 Desire has become a word of our time. And i...
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    [title] => The beauty of vocations reaching adulthood
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Rebirth requires learning/10 - The carefree attitude and vitality of youth, even within movements and charismas, must grow and evolve into spiritual maturity. It is not an automatic process, nor is it simple.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11 November 2024 - Issue no. 6/2024

Becoming an adult is always a complicated process with an uncertain outcome. However, having had a great spiritual and ideal experience as a young person further increases the complication and uncertainty.

[fulltext] =>

Youth is the marvellous age for everyone; it is the time of infinite energies that make us begin impossible journeys. It is the time when everything seems possible, the constraints of reality are only challenges, and cautionary advice from adults can only be annoying and is (rightly) returned to the sender. It is the season of absolute gratuitousness, of marvellous dreams, of great generosity that goes so far as to make us give our whole lives to a person, even to God.

When a strong spiritual experience and identity is grafted onto natural youth, as happens when you encounter a charisma in which you totally recognise yourself, youth explodes and all its natural virtues and gifts are amplified. Generosity becomes absolute, ‘forever’ becomes the only language you understand and the only one with which you want to speak about yourself and life in general. You give everything because you want to give everything, because you cannot but give everything, all that you possess and what you do not yet have.

For this reason, there are few things on earth more beautiful and sublime than a young person, a young person who encounters a vocation and responds with a ‘yes’ that becomes a donation of one's whole life. Young people are illuminated by a different and very clear light; their eyes take on another type of brilliance and become even more beautiful than the beautiful eyes of all young people. When you are young, you totally identify yourself with the life of that charisma and the community, that's all you want. This total identification, however, is not experienced as a limitation of your own personality, but as its empowerment and full development. We see a new and beautiful sea in front of us, and we just want to ‘get shipwrecked’ gently into it.

There are people who remain in this charismatic youth for many years, well beyond the time of biological and psychological youth. Lengthening the time of youth is inherent to vocations, and in a certain sense it lasts a lifetime: you can easily recognise someone who received a vocation as a young person also by a different timbre of the soul that lasts until old age, which will allow them to call the angel of death by name.

It is not difficult, then, to understand why that mysterious and imprecise process called ‘becoming an adult’ is particularly complex for young people with true vocations. Indeed, on the one hand, when the providential and necessary crisis of maturity arrives, it is not easy to understand that the form that spiritual life took during youth and is now ending was only the shell of the chrysalis, which must be shed if one is to take flight.

It is during this transition-metamorphosis phase of the caterpillar into a butterfly that so many people with genuine vocations go astray. The forms of this bewilderment are many. The first, and the most obvious, is that of those who identify spiritual life (God, faith) with the caterpillar; and thus, faced with the crisis and death of the faith of youth, they become convinced that faith and God were merely the illusions of a naive youth. The first faith dies and with it everything dies. These are those who, in order to become adults, lose their faith and vocation.

Then there are those who have the opposite experience, albeit generated by the same error of identifying spiritual life with its first form. These people one day sense that something important is about to end and die, and they are terrified by the prospect of losing the only treasure of their life forever, of losing the best part of themselves; and blocked by this panic they deny themselves the possibility of growing. Thus, in order not to lose their vocation and faith, they never become adults. I believe that in religious communities there are more people of the latter than of the former type. They do not leave the communities and institutions they entered as young people, they continue to live the life they have always lived, but in a certain sense they leave their lives behind, because, without knowing it or wanting to, they interrupt the process of their human flourishing and therefore of their freedom.

However, there is also a third outcome, which is always possible: becoming adults by saving the vocation of youth. These are authentic rebirths-resurrections that are still rare in communities and movements, because they require the capacity-gift to persist in the silence of the ‘holy Saturday’, and because it takes time and much meekness to learn to recognise yesterday's faith and God in a faith and God that have become so different to the point of being unrecognisable. Much adult faith takes the form of the question why?, and yesterday's easy answers become only difficult questions, shouted together with the poor and the victims of the earth.

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Rebirth requires learning/10 - The carefree attitude and vitality of youth, even within movements and charismas, must grow and evolve into spiritual maturity. It is not an automatic process, nor is it simple.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11 November 2024 - Issue no. 6/2024

Becoming an adult is always a complicated process with an uncertain outcome. However, having had a great spiritual and ideal experience as a young person further increases the complication and uncertainty.

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The beauty of vocations reaching adulthood

The beauty of vocations reaching adulthood

Rebirth requires learning/10 - The carefree attitude and vitality of youth, even within movements and charismas, must grow and evolve into spiritual maturity. It is not an automatic process, nor is it simple. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 11 November 2024 - Issue no. 6/2024 Becomin...
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    [title] => Beware the seduction of the golden calf!
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Rebirth requires learning/9 – Charismatic communities make sense as long as the gospel takes on a different tone and guise from the other ‘flowers’ in the garden of the Church and humanity

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 03/10/2024 – from the Città Nuova magazine, n. 5/2024

The biblical episode of the golden calf on the slopes of Mount Sinai also has something important to say to charismatic communities in the phase following the death of the founders. Its main message concerns the reduction of the complexity of the original charisma into something more manageable, simple and ordinary. The YHWH-God who had revealed himself to Moses could not be seen, could not be touched, he was not there to satisfy the senses, only the prophets could hear him: ‘there was only a voicee’ (Deut 4:12). All other peoples had simple gods, statues that everyone saw and understood. The God of Israel was different, abstract, the highest: the people could not stay at that height and made the calf, a visible and simple god, a fertility god (a bull), so as to become a people like any other. Moses was away, and in his absence the people reduced YHWH to a calf.

[fulltext] =>

In charismatic and ideal communities, after the founder - ‘Moses’ - dies or is away, there is a strong fascination to re-dimension and normalise the first promise, to transform the original charisma into something understandable by all and by the community itself. In fact, a charismatic movement is born around a true spiritual and social innovation. This novelty is something obvious to the founder and the first generation, no one questions it: the absolute novelty inherent in it is what attracts and converts people. And so, when a charisma arrives, along with it comes criticism, whether explicit or implicit, deriving from many pre-existing religious practices and ideas, which the new movement feels it must change and abandon, as part of its prophetic mission.

The next generation, however, always experiences great difficulty in keeping faith with that innovation, which starts looking difficult, distant, and too different from what everyone else is doing. And so at this stage a typical tendency-temptation emerges: to return to those practices, experiences, traditional activities that the charismatic community wanted to overcome at the beginning. One struggles to remain in the novelty of the charisma, which now appears abstract, distant, impracticable because it is too elevated and demanding; and so instead of working to understand the reasons for the difficulties that have emerged in putting the charisma into practice, one gradually returns to those ancient forms that the charisma had intentionally wanted to overcome. The charismatic novelties seem infeasible, naive, childish, and what the Church and society had been doing for centuries will be imitated again, which, in turn appear to be novelties to the members of the community, and are even presented as the therapy to overcome the crisis. Someone starts saying: The gospel is enough - why complicate it with all the complexity of a complicated spirituality?!’A thesis that sounds perfect, but which would lead to the end of charismatic communities that make sense as long as the gospel takes on a different tone and guise from the other ‘flowers’ in the garden of the Church and humanity.  

But that's not all. To understand this, let us go back to the biblical episode of the calf. There is a very important detail there, contained in the name that the Israelites give to the calf: the name is YHWH, that is, the special identity of their different God: ‘Aaron (...) built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, »Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord«’ (i.e. YHWH; Exodus 32:4-5). What does this mean? The name in the Bible tells the profound nature of a reality. To call the golden calf by the name of YHWH means to replace God, to substitute him with a god that is simpler because it is trivial. As long as we are clear about the distinction between God and the golden calf, if we start worshipping the idol out of frailty, we can always convert and return home. But starting from the day we call the calf by the name of YHWH, we will no longer return home because there is no home to return to: the cathedral has now become public housing. The most serious damage is therefore to erase the distance between charisma and its surrogates, until they coincide.

Generally, these transformations are loved and applauded by communities in post-founder times, because in a phase that is almost always one of disorientation, fatigue, pessimism, declining desire, spiritual depression and collective sloth, any new activity is seen as preferable to immobility - and it is. The future of charismatic movements, however, lies in being able to prevent community praxis from becoming something very, very different from the specific praxis of its charisma, because if it does, it is no longer able to attract vocations and young people, and will perish. Everything evolves, even in the life of the spirit, but not all evolutions are capable of a good future. Becoming aware of this is already the beginning of the cure.

Credits foto: © Jed Villejo su Unsplash

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Rebirth requires learning/9 – Charismatic communities make sense as long as the gospel takes on a different tone and guise from the other ‘flowers’ in the garden of the Church and humanity

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 03/10/2024 – from the Città Nuova magazine, n. 5/2024

The biblical episode of the golden calf on the slopes of Mount Sinai also has something important to say to charismatic communities in the phase following the death of the founders. Its main message concerns the reduction of the complexity of the original charisma into something more manageable, simple and ordinary. The YHWH-God who had revealed himself to Moses could not be seen, could not be touched, he was not there to satisfy the senses, only the prophets could hear him: ‘there was only a voicee’ (Deut 4:12). All other peoples had simple gods, statues that everyone saw and understood. The God of Israel was different, abstract, the highest: the people could not stay at that height and made the calf, a visible and simple god, a fertility god (a bull), so as to become a people like any other. Moses was away, and in his absence the people reduced YHWH to a calf.

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Beware the seduction of the golden calf!

Beware the seduction of the golden calf!

Rebirth requires learning/9 – Charismatic communities make sense as long as the gospel takes on a different tone and guise from the other ‘flowers’ in the garden of the Church and humanity by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 03/10/2024 – from the Città Nuova magazine, n. 5/2024 The bibli...
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Rebirth requires learning/8 - The four tendencies that members of a religious community or movement can have after the death of the founder.

by Luigino Bruni

Article published in the 4/2024 issue of Città Nuova on 07/09/2024 

When a community or spiritual movement passes from the first generation of founders to the next, this decisive passage takes various forms in the people who are part of it. In general, there are (at least) four main tendencies that are present in different degrees in people, and sometimes even in the same person.

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The first tendency is the one found mainly in those we can call the diehards. It is the tendency that leads the person to live after the death of the founders exactly as they lived before, as if nothing important had happened. The same lifestyle, the same spiritual readings, the same commitments, the same language. This continuity has positive dimensions, too (seriousness, for example), mixed with some other, more problematic ones. They see the external impact of what they do diminishing, they feel a growing physical and spiritual fatigue, but they go on like they did yesterday. They are like that friend of mine who, faced with the increase in the price of petrol, said: ‘Nothing changes for me: I always put in 20 euros worth of it’. Usually, when this tendency prevails, it brings with it a certain nostalgia for the past, the praise of times gone by, the idea that all the troubles of the present depend on having lost the purity of the early days. It is a very understandable tendency, but one that should not be encouraged.

The second tendency is what we might call delusion. It is typical in those who at some point have convinced themselves that the foundation phase was a long self-deception, a collective and individual delusion played out in perfect good faith by all, which kept them in a spiritual and psychological type of adolescence or childhood for too long. Some people who find themselves in this second tendency also develop feelings of anger and rebellion, especially if they have invested heavily in the first season of community. The anger is towards themselves and sometimes also towards the community. It is a delusion that, however, is preferred to illusion and can thus become a true spiritual rebirth into a new maturity.

Then there is the third tendency towards spiritual depression, a kind of individual and collective sloth, made up of a lack of desire and eros. This is the most dangerous tendency, and its symptoms (cosmic pessimism, cynicism, criticism of anyone who does anything constructive...) must be identified immediately. Those who cultivate this tendency do not experience delusion beyond the illusion, also because they have neither the energy nor the will to do much self-analysis. They simply experience a gradual decline in the joy of doing things as before, they believe less and less in what they do, and no longer announce anything to anyone. They attribute the decline in desire to advancing age, to times that have changed, to young people not being what they once were. When this trend takes hold in communities, people withdraw to private life, and find themselves in a similar condition to that of the two disciples of Emmaus before the ‘unknown traveller’ joined them.

Finally, there is also a fourth, good trend, which is different and very important. It is hope. This is triggered in those who, faced with the same difficulties that everyone else sees, and well aware that in the community some dimensions have really changed and life is harder, instead of cultivating the three previous tendencies (which they see well in themselves and around them) try to engage in new projects, to use their creativity in search of new narrative codes, and together with others give life to collective processes of change. They do this in the simplicity of everyday life: they do not wait for the big moment, but make the small moments they have big. Hope, this hope, has nothing to do with a new self-delusion or naivety. It is born when one day, after perhaps having experienced all three tendencies, one realises that rebirth requires learning, that one can choose to be born again, that a resurrection is possible at 30, 60, 90 years of age. It may not be the great resurrection of everyone and the whole movement, but it can be your resurrection and that of the people you live with. And then you set off, with a few friends, for a new promised land. People who choose to cultivate this tendency are recognisable by a particular kind of meekness and typical delicate beauty. They attract us and, even if we have already been dominated by the other three tendencies, we feel involved in their rebirth. It is in the hearts of these people of hope that the future is sprouting: the third traveller has already joined them on the road to Emmaus.

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Rebirth requires learning/8 - The four tendencies that members of a religious community or movement can have after the death of the founder.

by Luigino Bruni

Article published in the 4/2024 issue of Città Nuova on 07/09/2024 

When a community or spiritual movement passes from the first generation of founders to the next, this decisive passage takes various forms in the people who are part of it. In general, there are (at least) four main tendencies that are present in different degrees in people, and sometimes even in the same person.

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The era of new hope

The era of new hope

Rebirth requires learning/8 - The four tendencies that members of a religious community or movement can have after the death of the founder. by Luigino Bruni Article published in the 4/2024 issue of Città Nuova on 07/09/2024  When a community or spiritual movement passes from the firs...
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Rebirth requires learning/7 - A decisive and fundamental time for the resurrection of a charismatic community.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 12/08/2024 - from the Città Nuova magazine n. 3/2024

Charismatic communities manage to continue living after the death of the founder (which is also the mystical death of the first body) if a true resurrection comes along.

[fulltext] =>

But resurrections are not contracts, they are not assurances. They are all gratuitous, they surprise us, they cannot be planned, they are not written into company objectives, and they do not enter into the business plan. They can, however, be desired, expected, hoped for, prayed for, and above all, resurrections should not be cancelled or made impossible by the search for fake resurrections, that is, by the reanimation of corpses. In the history of the Church, the resurrection came, completely as a free gift, because, above all, the apostles and disciples first believed that Jesus had really died on the cross.

They were not convinced by the Gnostic sects who said that it was Simon of Cyrene who had died on the cross. For those Gnostic Christians it was impossible to accept that the Son of God had really died; that death was too human to be also divine. And so by denying death they also denied the resurrection, because only those who really die can really rise again.

When the first phase of the foundation of a community ends, usually with the death of the founder, the first essential collective act to be done is to recognise and accept the reality of that death. Not to believe in the Gnostic tendencies that manifest themselves in many ways, but which all push towards the past, memory, fantasy, and move away from the present, history, the flesh, and therefore the future. Then, once death is accepted, one must inhabit the Sabbath, that time between the Friday of Golgotha and the dawn of the Resurrection. The Sabbath is the time of waiting, the time for the aromas to honour the dead body, which is really, truly dead. It is the time of Mary Magdalene and the other women, the disciples who do not yet know about the resurrection but, out of faithfulness, go to the tomb.

It is the time of mourning, a decisive and fundamental time for the resurrection of a charismatic community. Mourning is essential not so much to celebrate death, but to tell ourselves that we must continue to live beyond that death: it is a celebration of life. In civilisations, mourning was the first means of avoiding the greatest harm after death: to die with the dead (Ernesto de Martino). Therefore mourning, if lived well and ‘processed’, allows communities to keep hope up beyond the trauma of a death. It is the collective language to say: life is greater, we believe that despite the great pain of absence we will have a future, we want our children and grandchildren to still have the promised land.

Collective mourning lived well therefore produces fruits of life in the community, the ability to innovate, to take risks, and above all drives away the fear of ruining the legacy left by the founders. A type of mourning that is not or poorly elaborated instead leads communities to live in fear that today's children will destroy yesterday's patrimony (where ‘munus’, or gift of the fathers is part of the word), that the community identity will be lost, that the purity of the charisma and of the ideals will be contaminated. If a community is terrified that among its sons there is an Oedipus who will kill his father, it unwittingly ends up killing Isaac too, who is instead the son of the promise. The terror of the possible betrayal of the origin is a typical sign of a failed case of mourning.

Another great sign of mourning that has been badly lived or never even begun is the absence of joy, which manifests itself in collective sadness. It is a form of communal lethargy that prevents one from launching new great projects and criticising anyone who thinks of them, with the typical cynicism of those who no longer believe in the future.

Instead, for the great gift of a true resurrection to happen, there is a need to intone the ‘funeral song’ of yesterday, and then immediately join the biblical prophets in stating: ‘A story is over, and it is indeed over, but our story is not over: for a faithful remnant will continue it’. When dealing with charismas, the really important stories to be told are the new ones of today, which will also make people understand and ‘remember’ in spirit (not only in videos and texts) the stories of yesterday.

These are authentic spiritual operations, all grace, which are all the more difficult the greater and more extraordinary the first founding experience was. The most difficult cases of mourning to process are those of people we loved dearly and wished would die after us.

The past is capable of generating a future if it is interpreted as a seed, as something alive that, because it is alive, must die in order to bear much fruit tomorrow.

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Rebirth requires learning/7 - A decisive and fundamental time for the resurrection of a charismatic community.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 12/08/2024 - from the Città Nuova magazine n. 3/2024

Charismatic communities manage to continue living after the death of the founder (which is also the mystical death of the first body) if a true resurrection comes along.

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The time of mourning

The time of mourning

Rebirth requires learning/7 - A decisive and fundamental time for the resurrection of a charismatic community. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 12/08/2024 - from the Città Nuova magazine n. 3/2024 Charismatic communities manage to continue living after the death of the founder ...
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    [title] => Prophecy lives only in the present
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Rebirth requires learning/6 - Communities and movements, between the words of the founders and the voice of the new prophets

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11/07/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, no. 2/2024

In spiritual communities and charismatic movements (i.e. arising from a charisma, whether religious or secular), the form taken up by the exercise of one's history, of memory and remembering is important. The most precious and difficult discernment does not concern negative episodes or small words from the past: the crucial art is knowing how to use the true words, the founding episodes of a community's history, including the great words of the founders and the first beloved and venerated witnesses.

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In this essential exercise, too, a passage from the Gospel of Luke comes to our aid: «Woe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them. ...they killed the prophets, and you build their tombs.» (Lk 11:47-48). Jesus’ contemporaries had begun to celebrate and honour the prophets of the past, those who had founded the faith of the people, rediscovering and building up their tombs, which were transformed into authentic shrines and became destinations of popular pilgrimages. For some, this new prophetic devotion could be interpreted as a sign of a new season of appreciation and listening to the word of the prophets, a true conversion: «They killed them; you build».

And instead, here too, Jesus surprises us and unmasks a reality that shows itself opposite to what it appears like - the Gospel is a succession of unveiled realities that show themselves opposite to those that seem obvious to all. And he tells us that celebrating the prophets of the past by honouring their tombs and their memory may contain nothing new: the prophets of the present (including himself and the Baptist) continued to be persecuted and killed while the people were worshipping the tombs of yesterday's prophets.

Honouring the prophets (saints or founders) of yesterday is therefore not a credible sign of a community listening to and esteeming its prophets of today, too. On the contrary, the history of Christian, spiritual and ideal-driven communities often shows exactly the opposite tendency: the more the saints of the past are venerated, the less the prophets of the present are listened to, who, not infrequently, are discredited and persecuted precisely in the name of devotion to the great ones of the past.

Charismatic communities have a continual vital need for prophecy, which is certainly expressed in keeping the founder's charisma alive and present in its entirety, but it is also expressed in recognising, encouraging and not fighting the prophecy present in those people that the Spirit continually sends to the communities, especially in the generations following that of the first founders.

A charismatic community does not live today simply by remembering yesterday's prophecy, nor only by updating yesterday's charisma for today. All of this is necessary, but it is not sufficient for a community that wants to keep itself alive and life-giving and thus to continue to attract new vocations and young people. The sufficient condition is listening to present prophecy, which presupposes that the people of today who by gift and task incorporate a prophetic dimension are neither rejected nor discouraged, but welcomed and valued.

A charisma is not a diamond that made an appearance on earth once and for all and must only be kept in a glass case so that it can continue to shine. A charisma is a seed that continues to give its flowers and fruit in every season - charismas always require a declination in the present time. Jesus has remained alive in the Church not only because he is treasured and venerated, not only because of his real presence in the community, but because the Spirit has sent many charismas to the Church over the centuries.

But recognising today's prophets is not at all easy, because the real prophets are generally neither recognised nor heard. Instead, communities love false prophets because, as ‘prophets by profession’ they specialise in telling the leaders and the average sensibility of the community only what they like to hear in order to reinforce illusions and self-deceptions (that are very common in times of crisis).

The passage from Luke tells us something more, too: that today's prophets are silenced and marginalised just as the celebration of yesterday's prophets grows. A concrete way of doing this is to use the words of the founders or great men and women of the past to silence the true prophetic words of today, thinking, often in good faith, that the new prophecy that is expressed in today's community competes with, diminishes or even fights the prophecy of yesterday's founders. And so texts, oral testimonies, and yesterday's moral lessons are used to counter today's words and moral lessons that would be, instead, the only real cure for the crisis that the community is experiencing.

Photo credits: Fauxels’ images from Pexels

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Rebirth requires learning/6 - Communities and movements, between the words of the founders and the voice of the new prophets

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 11/07/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, no. 2/2024

In spiritual communities and charismatic movements (i.e. arising from a charisma, whether religious or secular), the form taken up by the exercise of one's history, of memory and remembering is important. The most precious and difficult discernment does not concern negative episodes or small words from the past: the crucial art is knowing how to use the true words, the founding episodes of a community's history, including the great words of the founders and the first beloved and venerated witnesses.

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Prophecy lives only in the present

Prophecy lives only in the present

Rebirth requires learning/6 - Communities and movements, between the words of the founders and the voice of the new prophets by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 11/07/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, no. 2/2024 In spiritual communities and charismatic movements (i.e. arising from a ...
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Rebirth requires learning/5. Over the years many things change, even within religious communities and spiritual movements. Looking back is not always the right way to overcome the crises of the new times.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 13/06/2024 - From the Città Nuova Magazine n° 1/2024

In the life of spiritual communities and movements, thinking up the right relationship to the past plays a decisive role, especially in times of great change, and therefore crisis, when it is not at all obvious how to ensure that the charisma continues its course, and what forms it will take so that the continuation is good, one that brings development and life.

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In the book of Genesis we read the episode of Lot's wife (Gen 19:26) who became a pillar of salt because she looked back, which is also taken up in the Gospel of Luke (Lk 17:31-32). Looking back was a fatal error committed by that woman, an error that can also be repeated in spiritual and charismatic communities. It consists in looking into the past for the diagnosis and therapy of a present crisis, thinking that the solution can be found by going back to the origin. Many times the past is a useful and necessary resource: in ordinary crises, when what happened yesterday, and then repeated itself many times, creates patterns and laws that help understand what is happening in the present. This is the true meaning of the phrase: history is the teacher of life.

But when times change actually and quickly, when the change of time is qualitative (kairos), because one is faced with a truly unprecedented phase - such as the death of the founder -, the past is not only of little use, but can easily become ballast and a bad advisor for understanding the present and imagining a good future. If, in fact, in the decisive moments of changing epochs one looks backwards, the sad outcome that befell Lot's wife is common and highly probable.

Such cases are easily found in situations that are well known and studied in economic history. If, for example, at the end of the 19th century the inventors of the automobile had asked their fellow citizens what they needed for their transport, they would have answered: a faster carriage. No analysis of yesterday's market could reveal the need for a car, simply because no such thing had existed before. When, in times of great change, one looks into the past, one finds carriages, not cars.

Turning back to communities, the founders leave their communities carriages, often beautiful carriages that are ahead of their time, but - and here is the point - the communities live in the time of cars. And when, in the crisis, you decide to look back in search of solutions, you find manuals for carriage construction, horse maintenance, wheels, shock absorbers; all things that were very useful for building and maintaining carriages yesterday, but useless for creating cars today and tomorrow.

In the time of crisis that comes after the passage from the founder's generation to the next one, in the natural confusion that one experiences, the most common mistake is to think that salvation is to be found by searching and finding in the past to find the resources for that “radicality” of life that is no longer there to be seen, for that total faithfulness to the charisma that today appears clouded. Therefore, much energy is invested in studying the roots well, in training new members with the materials of yesterday presented as the only and the best cure for today's crisis.

This happens naturally because in times of great uncertainty and serious disorientation, in fact, the only available resource at hand seems to be the past. And so we are under the illusion that the fact of having only one resource makes this single resource also a good resource. One goes in search of the founder's words, episodes and cautionary tales of yesterday, one also tries to explain their lost authentic interpretation, pursuing the illusion that those texts are the means to be reborn today. Thus one takes those wonderful old carriage manuals and those colourful drawings of beautiful carriages, and perhaps even manages, in some places, to build a few more good carriages, but in the meantime, faster and faster cars are whizzing past us.

However, in such times of transition, a good strategy should imagine and attempt two operations. The first is a work on charisma, understanding - to remain within the metaphor - that the gift received through the founder is not tied to the construction of carriages but to transport; and therefore understanding that the charisma that was expressed in the construction of carriages yesterday can also produce cars (perhaps even electric ones) today. And next, leaving yesterday's instruction manuals behind and using the spirit of charisma to write new manuals for the construction of new means of transport. And finally getting to work with the same enthusiasm as in the early days.

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Rebirth requires learning/5. Over the years many things change, even within religious communities and spiritual movements. Looking back is not always the right way to overcome the crises of the new times.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 13/06/2024 - From the Città Nuova Magazine n° 1/2024

In the life of spiritual communities and movements, thinking up the right relationship to the past plays a decisive role, especially in times of great change, and therefore crisis, when it is not at all obvious how to ensure that the charisma continues its course, and what forms it will take so that the continuation is good, one that brings development and life.

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Times of Passage

Times of Passage

Rebirth requires learning/5. Over the years many things change, even within religious communities and spiritual movements. Looking back is not always the right way to overcome the crises of the new times. by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 13/06/2024 - From the Città Nuova Magazi...
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Rebirth requires learning/4 - How to keep charismatic communities alive and fresh in the generation following that of the founders

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 30/04/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 12/2023

Communities live within a dynamic tension between the “inside” and the “outside”. Without a certain collective intimacy made up of dense, strong and warm relationships, you cannot create any community. Therefore, the centripetal force that pulls everyone towards a single spirit is essential to generate true community life. These strong, intimate relationships are cherished by community members. They generate a typical and great joy: as we say ‘we’, we hear our truest name resounding, and as we say ‘I’, everything speaks to us of ‘we’, to the point of (almost) no longer being able to distinguish the individual soul from the collective spirit.

This typical relational good is the first nourishment of communities. It is in this intimacy, completely individual and completely collective, that the secret, the beauty, as well as the criticality of community life are found, especially when communities attract and cultivate vocations, that is, when they are composed of people called by name by the charisma of the community, which they feel are the best and truest part of their own selves. The subject's identification with the group becomes a spiritual game of mirrors, a mutual and generalised empathy, and individuals generally perceive no compulsion to feel the same feelings as everyone else – that’s the ‘il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare’ (‘shipwrecking is sweet to me in this sea,’ quoting Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi - the tr.) of the community.

[fulltext] =>

Inevitably, this internal dynamic creates boundaries, borders and demarcation zones between inside and outside, in order to guard this precious intimacy. The intense internal life then, over the years, also creates a common language, a way of life, a way of praying and celebrating, winks and gestures that make it immediately recognisable from the outside who is part of that particular group. Those who are inside do not realise that they are changing day by day, but to those who are outside it appears very clear and is also viewed with some concern. For if, after the first phase, communities do not lower their drawbridges and make entry (and exit) much more porous and easy, they begin to decay through loss of biodiversity and air.

In this regard, an episode from the Gospel of Luke may be interesting: ‘»Master,« said John, »we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.« »Do not stop him,« Jesus said, »for whoever is not against you is for you.« (Lk 9:49-50). Jesus' companions behave like many members of a community towards people outside the “magic circle” who act as if they were inside. There are many ways in which these dynamics are expressed.

One of these is regarding those people who, after spending time with the community, feel a second vocation, leave it and start their own new community. Especially at the beginning, these people of a “second vocation” use very similar, if not identical, language and spiritual categories to those they learnt and lived in their original, first community. This similarity sometimes appears excessive to the old companions, they think it is disturbing, similar to plagiarism, and they complain about the lack of recognition of the first source, and so their reaction can turn into outright hostility. This is a common and understandable mistake, but one that must be fought as a temptation.

Another typical phenomenon is the arrival in the community of people with their own talents and charismas that are in part different from those of the founder, who nevertheless feel themselves to be authentic children of that charisma. This is the experience of St Paul who, although he did not know the Lord, felt himself to be an apostle just like the twelve. And just as Paul did not have an easy life with Peter, James and the other apostles, so the new Pauls do not have an easy life in charismatic communities, where they are often opposed by members, who are forgetting, perhaps in good faith, that salvation and a good future depend greatly on the presence of these external-internal reformers.

In the generation following that of the founders, the spiritual “border management” of the community becomes fundamental and vital. Everything must be done to ensure that yesterday's community is enlivened and challenged by new arrivals, who are sometimes very different from the first generation members’ profile, but who work the same miracles “in the name” of the charisma. Among those who work in the same name there will undoubtedly be false prophets and even opportunists, which is an inevitable risk because a community that did not also generate false prophets would not have enough life force to generate any true prophets.

When, on the other hand, the fear of losing the identity and the purity of the charisma prevails (a typical “Gnostic” temptation), communities wither, grow old, and the joy of living disappears from them, which, together with the presence of young people are the two “sacraments” of communities capable of a future.

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Rebirth requires learning/4 - How to keep charismatic communities alive and fresh in the generation following that of the founders

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 30/04/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 12/2023

Communities live within a dynamic tension between the “inside” and the “outside”. Without a certain collective intimacy made up of dense, strong and warm relationships, you cannot create any community. Therefore, the centripetal force that pulls everyone towards a single spirit is essential to generate true community life. These strong, intimate relationships are cherished by community members. They generate a typical and great joy: as we say ‘we’, we hear our truest name resounding, and as we say ‘I’, everything speaks to us of ‘we’, to the point of (almost) no longer being able to distinguish the individual soul from the collective spirit.

This typical relational good is the first nourishment of communities. It is in this intimacy, completely individual and completely collective, that the secret, the beauty, as well as the criticality of community life are found, especially when communities attract and cultivate vocations, that is, when they are composed of people called by name by the charisma of the community, which they feel are the best and truest part of their own selves. The subject's identification with the group becomes a spiritual game of mirrors, a mutual and generalised empathy, and individuals generally perceive no compulsion to feel the same feelings as everyone else – that’s the ‘il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare’ (‘shipwrecking is sweet to me in this sea,’ quoting Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi - the tr.) of the community.

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Charismas: border management

Charismas: border management

Rebirth requires learning/4 - How to keep charismatic communities alive and fresh in the generation following that of the founders by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 30/04/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 12/2023 Communities live within a dynamic tension between the “inside” an...
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    [title] => The essential courage to change
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Rebirth requires learning/3 - What does the Gospel metaphor of the new wine tell us today? In new times it is necessary to have the courage to intone the funeral song, to give thanks for the past and then to have more faith in the present and the future: to believe more in the children of today than in the fathers of yesterday. Courage is needed to change almost everything so as not to lose everything.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 12/03/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 11/2023

Communities struggle to understand when one world has ended and a new one has begun. There are many reasons for this collective fatigue, and they are generally little studied, especially in the context of communities of a religious and spiritual nature, where the various levels of problems (economic, organisational, charismatic...) are intertwined and mixed up.

[fulltext] =>

A well-known passage from the Gospel of Luke can inspire us on some of the risks and errors: in fact, the Bible is also a valuable map for finding one's way through the high and impervious passages. Here it is: ‘He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”’ (Luke 5:36-38).

The wineskins and the wine in them are excellent parables for understanding the collective realities born of a charisma. These live of a spirit that generated them, which we can call ‘charisma’, and also of structures, practices, organisations, norms, statutes born to preserve, guard and care for the charisma itself: the wineskins. In the context of the Gospel, the wineskins were the Mosaic Law and its institutions, while the wine was the spirit, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. Something had happened, the vineyard of YHWH had produced a new wine, and yesterday's wineskins had to be changed. The wineskins were not wrong or bad: they were simply unfit to contain a new wine, and if the containers were not changed soon, the contents would also be lost.

The metaphor of the new wine can mean many different things today.

When a charisma arrives on earth, it is a brand new wine, the fruit of a vine never seen before, albeit the fruit of grafting vines from the same great vineyard of the Church and humanity. At the beginning everyone understands that this new wine needs new wineskins: and so the community creates institutions, statutes, norms and new languages that are capable of containing and preserving that novelty. In the 13th century no Franciscan monk thought of living the spirit of Francis by remaining in the beautiful Benedictine abbeys: something new was born, the convents appeared and a new rule was written to contain that novelty. Likewise, to write the Italian Constitution after Fascism no one thought of re-adapting the Statuto Albertino (the constitution granted by King Charles Albert of Sardinia to the Kingdom of Sardinia on 4 March 1848 which later became the constitution of the unified Kingdom of Italy and remained in force, with changes, until 1948 - the tr.).

It is a much more difficult case to understand when it happens in the history of a community that the wineskins need to be renewed because there is a new wine. It is difficult to understand because the vine is now there, and many think that the wineskins will last forever, that there will be no new wine any more. The death of the founder is usually one of these moments, when the wine becomes new again and the wineskins grow old.

The decisive problem arises from the fact that the wineskins that need to be changed are those made by the founder. And so the structures, practices, rules, words, statutes and constitutions have become very important and cherished over the years. They are now inheritance, they are patrimony (i.e. patres-munus: gift of the fathers), they are a beautiful part of the furnishings and richness of the community house, to the point of loving the wineskins almost more than the wine. But if you grow fond of yesterday's wineskins, communities grow old along with their barrels, because they believe more in the containers than in the wine, and soon they will witness, inert, the decomposition of the wineskins and the wine.

There is another detail at the end of Luke's parable: ‘And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, “The old is better.”’ (5:39). Many liked the old wine better, and do not want the new: and the problems start growing. Others, furthermore, sought compromises and tried to combine the old and the new by putting a patch of new cloth over an old garment. No: in new times it is necessary to have the courage to intone the funeral song, to give thanks for the past and then to have more faith in the present and the future: to believe more in the children of today than in the fathers of yesterday.

There is a day when the wineskins that have contained the spirit of the charisma for “a thousand years” suddenly become obsolete, because a watch duty in the night lasted longer than a thousand years. The vine of the charisma has not changed, only the new wine of a new vintage has arrived, in the same vineyard and vines as yesterday. And here one needs the courage to change almost everything in order not to lose everything.

Credits foto: © Makalu su Pixabay

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Rebirth requires learning/3 - What does the Gospel metaphor of the new wine tell us today? In new times it is necessary to have the courage to intone the funeral song, to give thanks for the past and then to have more faith in the present and the future: to believe more in the children of today than in the fathers of yesterday. Courage is needed to change almost everything so as not to lose everything.

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 12/03/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine n. 11/2023

Communities struggle to understand when one world has ended and a new one has begun. There are many reasons for this collective fatigue, and they are generally little studied, especially in the context of communities of a religious and spiritual nature, where the various levels of problems (economic, organisational, charismatic...) are intertwined and mixed up.

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The essential courage to change

The essential courage to change

Rebirth requires learning/3 - What does the Gospel metaphor of the new wine tell us today? In new times it is necessary to have the courage to intone the funeral song, to give thanks for the past and then to have more faith in the present and the future: to believe more in the children of today than...
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Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023

We recently commemorated sixty years since Martin Luther King's great prophetic speech, I Have a Dream, delivered in Washington on 28 August 1963. Looking back on that speech, there was one passage that struck me: “This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”. He was very critical of gradualism, of the deeply ingrained idea that big changes cannot happen immediately because the great complexity of the reality to be changed requires a gradual process and a policy of small steps. Gradualism receives much consensus because it emphasises a true value, that of inclusion, of the need to involve the various players who have a role in the creation of problems and thus also in their solution. Hence the great processes of grass root consultation, questionnaires, and the many commissions to ensure the synodality of the entire process of change.

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I do not want to claim that the gradualist method should never be adopted or that it is always wrong. The question is a different one: why was Martin Luther King so opposed to gradualism? Because, quite simply, in those who invoked the politics of small steps he saw an alibi for continuing to postpone urgent and obvious reforms and changes (apartheid, for example), and because it acted as a ‘tranquilliser’ of conscience for those in power. Appealing to a value, even if it was a valid one in itself, only became a justification for the status quo - those who oppose a necessary process almost always do so in the name of some good reason.

Not all changes happen in small steps. In physics, water turns from liquid to solid in an instant. Revolutions do not happen gradually either, because certain processes explode when a critical threshold is passed. Today, for example, those who continue to advocate gradualist policy in the area of climate change and ecological transition (the very word transition incorporates the idea of small steps) almost always use this fine word to slow down a change that was ever so urgent already twenty years ago. The inclusion of all governments and various economic stakeholders is an essential part of the environmental problem; it is the prime cause of why we are watching motionlessly as the climate declines rapidly and inexorably. When the ship is sinking, or when a house is burning, no one thinks of calling together an assembly to decide what to do through complex procedures: there would have to be a captain to take responsibility for the choices and to make those choices. The world does not have a captain (and that is just as well) and in fact we are sinking; but this ‘captain’ can and must emerge from below, from the world's population, from civil processes that can lead to quick and effective decisions to replace the lack of ‘captains’ - and let's just hope they are peaceful and non-violent.

But what is astonishing is that gradualism takes hold even in ideal driven communities and movements which do have ‘captains’, where there is a government that could and should take urgent decisions. And instead, all too often, even in these, when faced with general and serious crises that would require rapid change, the gradualist method is preferred, and with it the creation of commissions that will one day report on the needs that have emerged with the (somewhat naive) hope that in the end a synthesis will be made of all the information that will have been gathered. And so the years pass, and the governments with them, the disease worsens, and while the doctors are discussing what to do, the patient is nearing death.

Furthermore, a typical error of these gradualist methods concerns economics. The economic aspects are the first to emerge during a crisis, but they are the last to be addressed, because the economy is an indicator of much broader and deeper phenomena than just the economy. Economic indicators are the red light in a car that signals an engine failure: it tells you to fix the engine and after that, once it is repaired, the light will go out on its own. Instead, they start fixing the economy first without understanding the structural illnesses that generated the economic crisis, and the more they fix the economy, the more the illness grows in the depths.

The quality of a government in times of crisis depends a lot on the ability of those in charge to sense, by instinct, where the problems are in the ‘engine’, and to start from there. They will receive criticism, accusations of authoritarianism, but perhaps they will save the body that is suffering.

Credits foto: © Unseen Histories su Unsplash

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Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives

by Luigino Bruni

published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023

We recently commemorated sixty years since Martin Luther King's great prophetic speech, I Have a Dream, delivered in Washington on 28 August 1963. Looking back on that speech, there was one passage that struck me: “This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism”. He was very critical of gradualism, of the deeply ingrained idea that big changes cannot happen immediately because the great complexity of the reality to be changed requires a gradual process and a policy of small steps. Gradualism receives much consensus because it emphasises a true value, that of inclusion, of the need to involve the various players who have a role in the creation of problems and thus also in their solution. Hence the great processes of grass root consultation, questionnaires, and the many commissions to ensure the synodality of the entire process of change.

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Against gradualism

Against gradualism

Rebirth requires learning/2 - Big changes do not always happen in small steps; and the need to proceed step by step must not become an obstacle to taking urgent initiatives by Luigino Bruni published in Città Nuova on 24/01/2024 - From the Città Nuova magazine, n. 10/2023 We recently comme...