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Surpluses and misalignments/10 - By moving your arms not to fall you can learn to fly
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/11/2018
“...the richer our scheme of values, the harder it will prove to effect a harmony within it. (...) The price of harmonization seems to be impoverishment, the price of richness disharmony.”
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness
Understanding that the only heritage we really have is the present is an absolute kind of experience of human existence. That’s when we suddenly realise that the past is gone and the future is entrusted to a fragile promise because it is all a gift. But in what could and should be the hour of despair, we are reached by a brand new joy that we have never experienced in all the paradises of the past. It comes from the awareness that once we really and finally return to be poor we are breaking down the last idol: our "I".
We understand that over the years it has become huge, because it fed on the rubble of all the idols we have met and destroyed along the way. After every idolatrous battle it became bigger and stronger, our victories increased its certainty and satisfaction for having conquered and defended the true faith. Until, all of a sudden, we realize that to free ourselves from this last new and great idol, we no longer have to fight but only pronounce a docile "amen". This different joy is perhaps something similar to the gladness that will surprise us when - on another day - a loyal friend tells us: "It is over"; and there we will say our amen, and we will feel that only one story, a wonderful story, is over, but that the story, ours, is not over, because a living remnant will be saved.
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Ageing is a delicate and crucial process to manage even in communities and organisations, which is particularly evident in this historical phase of great changes. It has one crucial peculiarity, though: collective realities are not destined to the inexorable decline and death that are characteristic of human life, because they can continue to live beyond the lives of the people who make them up. It is in fact part of the moral task of those who live and govern a community or an organization to do everything possible to ensure that the life of their institutions is longer than their own, to prevent that the two "deaths" should coincide. People who by vocation find themselves in a community manage to defeat death by making their community continue to live beyond their individual death - there are many forms of true resurrection, and they are very unlikely and unexpected. This original form of "immortality" is one of the legacies promised to those who set out on a journey following a voice.
Some important challenges are concentrated around these deaths and resurrections. Think, for example, of the relationship between the elderly and the young. An ageing community has a vital need for young and middle-aged people who could regenerate it with their vital energy and providential innocence, because the joy and promise of the future of young people can cure the natural sadness and nostalgia for the past of the elderly. From this perspective, ideal-driven and spiritual communities truly resemble natural families, where the presence and proximity of grandchildren makes the ageing of grandparents joyful and meaningful - one of the great shortcomings of our Western civilization is having taken away the joy of the daily presence of grandchildren (and children) from the lives of the elderly, a great indigence of which we have not yet become fully aware.
Historical reality, on the other hand, shows us a polarisation: young organisations are full of young people and older ones are full of the elderly. Attracting young people and authentic vocations is still possible even in older communities, but it is necessary for young people to see that the elderly are interested in the future and therefore anti-nostalgic. To see them immersed in the present, preparing for tomorrow, to see them work to the end, opening the door of the school with the same passion with which they open the door of the tabernacle in church, planting at least one new tree that will provide nourishment and shade for the future. The high average age of the members is not the only thing (or the main thing, I believe) that drives young people away from many communities today, but rather the absence of hope that the present and the future may still be beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful. And when old people stop generating a future, even the few remaining young grow old inside; they live their youth years as a non-free sacrifice, and everyone's skies are darkened.
"Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" and the "your young men shall see visions" if "your old men shall dream dreams" (Joel 2:28). There is a connection between the dreams of the elderly and the prophecies of their children, because young people can prophesy in an environment enlivened by the hopeful dreams of adults and the elderly. This is true both for civil and economic life (the lack of great future-generating dreams of adults and the elderly is the first obstacle that young people encounter), and it is even more true for communities and organizations gathered around collective ideals. A dying community can rise again if at least one younger person begins to prophesy in a space inhabited by the life dreams of the elderly.
That’s where the other great theme of the patrimony and works of the communities of the great past and great heritage (schools, hospitals, land, houses...) hides, too, which is particularly urgent and delicate today, both for the religious and lay charismas.
The founders create works because this institutional generativity is often an essential component of the charisma. In generating them, they align them with the charismatic dimensions that the power of the light of the foundation phase allows them to glimpse. Every foundation of a new charismatic community is an anticipated eschaton, where prudence (which is also a virtue of the founders) is overwhelmed by the urgency of achieving in life and on earth what they see in heaven. Its works are built in the already but looking to the not yet. When the founding phase is over, those who continue the race find themselves with houses and institutions that are by their nature unsustainable, and the weight of their management often prevents them from making other "houses", from repeating and continuing the same - or even greater - miracles as the founders.
If the founders had made works in relation with the present reality, they would have been too small. These kinds of works are never "right": if they are not too great today, yesterday they would have been too little. But while the works of the foundation phase that are too great make the concrete and economic life of those who come after difficult, the ones that are too small cannot complicate the life of anyone because they simply end with those who build them, they do not become inheritance for those who come after.
We can close or sell the works that are too big, including the houses that have the signs and the smell of the miracles of the early days within their walls, and thus prepare ourselves for our death, for that of the works and the entire work. But there are also chances of life. One is that of the child who comes to us from the young womb of Hagar and takes the place of our - now withered - womb, (Genesis 16:4). Today Hagar is called alliance: pacts between ancient communities and younger communities, which can give meaning to structures that are about to die, bringing children and, with them, joy and the future back home. And then, perhaps, on another day, while we are getting older and older and less and less, repeating the same old words for years, if we continue to keep our tent open to passing guests, the announcement of a son of our withered flesh may surprise us by the new oaks of Mamre (Genesis 18:1). But before Isaac there is Ishmael, the son given to us by Hagar, a young foreigner who arrived inside our house. Perhaps today many aged communities do not see Isaac arriving because they have not previously generated Ishmael, or because they have not sensed him as a son of the same promise.
Surpluses and misalignments are the ordinary and constant condition of charismatic communities and of many ideal-driven organizations (IDO-s). Like all complex realities, these too constantly live on the verge of their possibilities. The people whom they welcome and who in turn enrich them are constantly evolving. They fall asleep having reached a certain balance in the contradictions, joys and sorrows of that day, and when they wake up they have to start looking for another one again. As young people they want paradise, as adults they find themselves in many purgatories and in some hell, too, until as old people they realize that they have never left that first paradise - but to understand it they needed a lifetime, and a little more. But also communities and organizations continually create and undo their balances, and when they don't, they start to die. The life of those who follow a voice is a game that takes place between people who produce surplus and are misaligned and who live and change within collective realities that are also changing and that displace them every day. The ability to live in unbalance is therefore the first art that people and organizations must learn. They should learn to walk on the wire, like the equilibrist who does not fall as long as he continues to move. It is an uncomfortable condition, but the only vital one because it is capable of generating real novelties. Then, once we get to the other end of the wire, another crossing over another abyss awaits us; until the end, when we discover that by the force of moving our arms not to fall we have actually learned to fly.
When in the night something or someone wakes us up, some do not open their eyes and try to fall asleep again reconnecting with the dream they were having, and so they can resume their sleep and dreams. But there are other people who, if interrupted in their sleep, open their eyes, turn on the light, read a novel, begin to pray, open the window and then watch the dawn. In this series of surpluses and misalignments we have sensed that when something or a cry of pain wakes us up in the middle of the first great dream of youth we don't have to keep our eyes closed to return to the first, interrupted dream. That waking up is the time for a new dawn, for another sun that awaits us beyond the closed shutter. It is the time for the new sounds and colours of the new day; it is the time for the different and no less great dreams of adult life.
That’s where our exploration of some surpluses and misalignments of communities and the people in them ends. And, also today, the last word is of thanks: to the readers, to Avvenire and its director Marco Tarquinio, who are the company and joy of this not easy and beautiful job. From next Sunday the biblical comments will resume, this time with Ezekiel, the great prophet of the times of the exiles, and therefore of our time.
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Surpluses and misalignments/10 - By moving your arms not to fall you can learn to fly
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 04/11/2018
“...the richer our scheme of values, the harder it will prove to effect a harmony within it. (...) The price of harmonization seems to be impoverishment, the price of richness disharmony.”
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness
Understanding that the only heritage we really have is the present is an absolute kind of experience of human existence. That’s when we suddenly realise that the past is gone and the future is entrusted to a fragile promise because it is all a gift. But in what could and should be the hour of despair, we are reached by a brand new joy that we have never experienced in all the paradises of the past. It comes from the awareness that once we really and finally return to be poor we are breaking down the last idol: our "I".
We understand that over the years it has become huge, because it fed on the rubble of all the idols we have met and destroyed along the way. After every idolatrous battle it became bigger and stronger, our victories increased its certainty and satisfaction for having conquered and defended the true faith. Until, all of a sudden, we realize that to free ourselves from this last new and great idol, we no longer have to fight but only pronounce a docile "amen". This different joy is perhaps something similar to the gladness that will surprise us when - on another day - a loyal friend tells us: "It is over"; and there we will say our amen, and we will feel that only one story, a wonderful story, is over, but that the story, ours, is not over, because a living remnant will be saved.
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Surpluses and misalignments/8 - The primordial seed of every human vocation is precious
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/10/2018
“The other, the Man, is ab initio the reciprocant. At the same time, we must not forget the other side of the coin of this ability of the other to reciprocate me. This capacity, in fact, presupposes that the other person represents a "human life" just like mine, and therefore it presupposes the existence of a life of his own and not mine, with his own ego and his own exclusive world, which are not mine, which are outside and beyond me, which transcend my life".
Family, work and school are all matters of reciprocity. The care we give remains imperfect unless we sometimes experience being assisted by those we assist, and no education is effective if while doing his lesson the teacher does not learn and change with his students. The relationship between ideal-driven communities and the people who are part of them is also a matter of reciprocity, which lives on a great closeness combined with a real distance. Nothing on earth is more intimate than an encounter in the spirit between people called to the same destiny by the same voice. That’s when we see the very desires of our heart in the other, when our said and not said words come back to us multiplied and sublimated. We rejoice in the same things, and the joy increases in seeing that the other is rejoicing for the same reasons and in the same way that we are.
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This mutual indwelling ("wert thou known / To me, as thoroughly I to thee am known.": Dante, Paradise; English translation by the Rev. H. F. Cary, M. A.) is, however, a fully human and humanizing experience if it coexists with respect for a form of distance, which protects against the temptation to possess the other, to appropriate that overflow which is in its mystery. It is mainly inside this free and saved space that communion lives and feeds itself, which however grows and makes it grow until we leave the other and our heart free to veil a "not yet" that can be revealed tomorrow, but only in part.
This dynamic of closeness-and-distance, already difficult between individuals, is even more demanding in the relationships between the individual and their community. Here, in fact, it can happen that the communion between the personal and community spirits turns into an operation of substitution. Those who arrive in an ideal-driven community are fascinated and submerged by the beauty and spiritual richness they encounter there, which is much more sparkling and seductive than the little voice inside them. In fact, it appears less interesting and luminous than what they find around and outside themselves. That little dowry with which they knock on the doors of the community does not shine and cannot shine, because it is neither a pearl nor a diamond: it is, simply, a seed. But it is precisely in that tiny thing that the possibility of a good future, real innovations, surprises, reform, great trees and new fruits lies, both for the person and the community.
Therefore, those responsible should do everything possible to keep that unique and special intimacy in the person alive and fruitful, which precedes the encounter with the charisma of the community. And so to dose the transmission of the spiritual heritage and collective ideal very well, with the necessary care and chastity so as not to submerge and suffocate that small primeval seed.
The principle of subsidiarity, a pillar of Christian and European humanism, also applies to the management of the individual-community relationship: what comes from the exterior, from above and from outside, is good if it helps what is intimate, close and personal (as a subsidy, or support). Much of the quality and maintenance of a vocational history depends on the subsidiary dialogue between these two intimacies, especially in the early days; on the capacity not to replace the first intimacy (which is small, naive and simple) with the second (which is great, mature and spectacular). Because that place where a free, attentive, cultivated, critical thought lives and grows is the first intimacy, because it draws on deeper layers than those nourishing the common charisma. It draws water directly from the spiritual tradition that nourishes the same community charisma, and from the traditions of the human civilizations founding both. It is nourished by the prayers of all, not only by our prayers, but the poems, novels and art of all humanity, by the love and pain of every human being and the earth.
But it is almost impossible that this substitution between the two intimacies should not take place, because it is sought and desired by the individual person first of all. The person is deeply fascinated by the new great words they find upon arriving, also because they notice that what comes to them from outside was already present within them, and that they are strengthened and exalted in the charismatic community. They know intimately what is given them from outside because while they receive it they recognize it as something that was already intimately present in them. However, when we treat that young woman as if she were coming as a spiritual tabula rasa in Franciscan matters, all we do is we kill that first intimacy in her that already contained essential chromosomes to make herself and her community become authentically Franciscan. Authentic spiritual paths do not begin but continue in a community, because they had already begun outside, in a first intimacy.
After Saul’s encounter with the Lord on the road to Damascus, he arrived at Ananias’ who baptized him and he received the Christian faith from that community. But Paul always remembered and claimed that his vocation had been earlier than his meeting with Ananias, and that voice continued to nourish him together with the one that spoke to him in his community, and every now and then it told him words he did not understand: “the gospel (...) I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:11-12). In the communities the main mechanism of spiritual discernment starts from the intimacy of the person and is accomplished in the collective intimacy that becomes the final exegete of individual words. But the reverse process is also essential, when we return to the dialogue of the first intimacy to decipher the collective words that we do not understand, and that - once understood inside and given back outside - enrich everyone. When this second move is missing, the members of the community tend to become all too similar to each other, because the place of anthropological and spiritual biodiversity, and therefore of the richness and generativity of charismas is not the second intimacy, but the first.
When human babies are born they are very similar and all seem the same in their first days, and only by growing up do they become different and assume their specific features. In spiritual births, however, the opposite happens: at the beginning we are all very different, each with a unique colour of eyes and hair; then, once we enter a community, over time we tend to become spiritually more and more similar, because the second, collective vocational intimacy grows at the expense of the first. And the intoxicating fusion of the first years gives way to common and equal words that speak less and less.
Spiritual and prophetic communities always struggle to recognize the value of the first intimacy because of the great esteem and consideration they have (and must have) for the second collective spiritual intimacy. Often they see it as the only one necessary, which incorporates and understands the first and is considered as the milk teeth of children, which must fall out in order to let the adult and permanent teeth emerge. And so not infrequently they determine, in good faith, the progressive atrophy of the first vocational place that also sustains the second one - much damage is produced by much good faith, which however does not cancel out the consequences or a lot of pain.
The more it is true for a community that it has a strong prophetic and charismatic dimension, the more naturally and spontaneously it underestimates spiritual experiences prior to arrival. This way they are forgetting that every organization, even the most genuinely charismatic one, has a continuous need for self-regeneration, and the first instrument of this is the prophecy of its people, which however must be recognized and given the space to be cultivated. The people of Israel, too, needed to be accompanied by giant prophets for centuries, even though they were already a holy and prophetic nation. Without the prophets who have continually renewed it (and that the people continued to kill) even that different community would have turned into a religious monolith without the spirit. And what would the Church have become without the thousands of prophets and saints who have called her back to her vocation and conversion a thousand times? So it happens also for every community that is already charismatic by vocation: the providential arrival of prophets who guard the two intimacies saves it and converts it every day.
The replacement of the first with the second intimacy is also the root of much malaise in ideal and spiritual communities. The repetition and reiteration of the same collective intimacy for years, which is no longer accompanied and nourished by that first deep intimate dialogue generates progressive and radical identity diseases in people. The great energy invested in learning the art of answering questions about "who are we?" progressively consumes the ability to answer the other radical question: "and me, who am I?" Anyone who knows the essentials of the spiritual universe knows well that "who am I?" is a question that has no satisfactory answer. But there is a good and a bad way of not answering this question. The first comes from the awareness that the answer changes and grows with us, and that perhaps only the angel of death will reveal it to us as he embraces us. The bad way, on the other hand, is the no-response that comes from going deep inside the heart and finding only attempts to answer it, composed with the collective words declined in the first person plural. The constant and continuous exercise of conjugation of the verbs of life in the plural has consumed the very possibility of a logos in the singular; we do not answer “no” because the question has no convincing answers, but because we have forgotten the grammatical and syntactical rules to understand the question.
However, when we manage to preserve that first intimacy (and, thanks be to God, it often happens) and defend it with all our strength from ourselves and from our community, we find a great treasure in adult life. It becomes the essential good when the second intimacy of the community withdraws - and it must withdraw - taking away with it the words, images, symbols with which we had embellished our spiritual life and our entire world. There we realize that in that land there was still a tree. We embrace it, we feed on its fruits and we enjoy its shadow. And then we discover, moved, that it is the same "tree of life" that we had seen in the Eden of the first paradise, because it grew from the tenacious custody of one of its true seeds. Under that single shadow old and new companions begin to gather, and a new story begins again.
If on the day of the great withdrawal of the waters in our land we do not find any trees, we can set out in desperate search of a good seed and entrust it to that fertile land. It will not be our tree, it will be our children’s - and perhaps that is even more beautiful.
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Surpluses and misalignments/8 - The primordial seed of every human vocation is precious
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/10/2018
“The other, the Man, is ab initio the reciprocant. At the same time, we must not forget the other side of the coin of this ability of the other to reciprocate me. This capacity, in fact, presupposes that the other person represents a "human life" just like mine, and therefore it presupposes the existence of a life of his own and not mine, with his own ego and his own exclusive world, which are not mine, which are outside and beyond me, which transcend my life".
Family, work and school are all matters of reciprocity. The care we give remains imperfect unless we sometimes experience being assisted by those we assist, and no education is effective if while doing his lesson the teacher does not learn and change with his students. The relationship between ideal-driven communities and the people who are part of them is also a matter of reciprocity, which lives on a great closeness combined with a real distance. Nothing on earth is more intimate than an encounter in the spirit between people called to the same destiny by the same voice. That’s when we see the very desires of our heart in the other, when our said and not said words come back to us multiplied and sublimated. We rejoice in the same things, and the joy increases in seeing that the other is rejoicing for the same reasons and in the same way that we are.
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Surpluses and misalignments/6 - One sees God by looking into the eyes of men and women
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/10/2018
“With Moses we see the end of the mountaineering of sacred history, which began in reverse, downhill, with Noah who finds himself docked at the top of the Ararat with his basket boat and from there descends with the saved representatives of zoology..."
Erri De Luca, Upside Down (rough translation)
Western civilization was built around the idea of wealth and development - understood as the accumulation of things and as growth. This principle of quantity was then united with the ancestral conviction that purity and perfection are at the top and imperfection at the bottom; that the impure has to do with the earth and with the hands, and the pure with the sky. That the spirit is superior because it isn’t matter, it isn’t body. And so the types of work that touch the earth and make use of the hands are low, impure, worthless, while those that use the intellect are noble, high, spiritual, holy. This archaic vision of good life as "growing upwards" has almost penetrated the entire Bible, despite the hard struggle in which the prophets, the books of wisdom and Jesus have engaged with it. And, with the help of a spirit of Greek philosophy and Gnosticism, we found ourselves in a Middle Ages and so in a very unbiblical modernity, with treaties of mysticism that read spiritual life as a climb of the "beloved mountain", as an accumulation of mystical goods, a fight against the body and the flesh. We have therefore extended the law of upward growth also to spiritual life, imagined as an increase, an ascent and liberation from the body to fly lightly in the sky of the spirit.
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But reading spiritual life with the categories of accumulation and estrangement from the earth distances us above all from the heart of the biblical message. And it produces an interesting paradox: at a time when, thanks to the action and thought of good Christians and great Popes, we are struggling to overcome the paradigm of growth and are rediscovering the theological value of the earth and the body, in terms of the spirit we continue to reason with the same categories that we want to overcome. A dangerous and generally neglected misalignment it is. Yet Francis of Assisi began his extraordinary human-spiritual adventure by kissing a leper, and in that kiss there was, perhaps, the most revolutionary and precious message of biblical and Christian humanism. The Bible is a song about the spiritual value of creation, which invites us to find God above all down here, among people and the poor, in his favourite dwelling place. When, at the end of his radical search with no consolation, the wise Qoheleth wanted to tell us where we could find something that was not in vain "under the sun", he pointed to the most ordinary and corporal human activity: «Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink” (5:17).
And at the height of salvation history, to say the unthinkable and the impossible, the fourth gospel did not find a truer and more wonderful expression than this: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us". The logos, the word that was already God, became even more God by becoming a child, "born of a woman" like us, like everyone else. To tell us that if man's dream is to become infinite and omnipotent like God, God's dream is to become finite and powerless like man. Christmas is immense because in that infinite light of the night of Bethlehem there is the same light of the night that envelops a child who is born and by being born, brightens it up. Because if that child in the manger was a real human being (and he certainly was) then every birth is a Christmas, and the purest spiritual act that happens every day on earth is a child that comes to the light from the womb of a woman. We will never stop to understand that when the Gospels told us that the crucified one was still alive beyond death with his body - a different body, but still a body - they left us a human legacy of extraordinary value, which we have squandered in greater part. Because despite Christmas, despite the death and resurrection of Jesus, we continue to think of religion in ways and forms that still focus on pure/impure and low/high dichotomies and on the blessing associated with growth.
Therefore, a logos that became flesh and then was risen with the body contains a radical revolution even in the way we understand the spiritual journey. When one really "climbs" the Carmel Mountains, on the top one does not see more of God and heaven, but one sees more of men and earth. As time passes, religious certainties diminish, but humble knowledge about man increases. But we long for the first days of light and experience the progressive ignorance of God and the depopulation of the sacred landscape as failure and nostalgia. But actually, perhaps we are only doing what we had to do; we are simply becoming what we had to be. Because even though the images that many mystics have used are almost always peaks and mountains, in spiritual life we do not go up: we go down. Paradise is always at the beginning, in the first days of the encounter and of the call, which can also be many and they can last many years. There, in the beginning, the sky opens, there we see the angels going up and down on the ladder of paradise. But then we leave, and life becomes an exit from that first paradise, because the meaning of that open sky was to make us improve the earth of all, not to keep us up there to "consume" that splendid spiritual good. At the same time, we should be very concerned if that first heaven prevents us from loving the earth.
Mountaintops in the Bible are almost always the places of the sanctuaries of Baal and sacred prostitution, which were and are much more numerous than the Sinai type of mountains. The first summit of the Bible is Babel, and the ascent to Tabor was a preparation for the ascent-descent to the underworld of Golgotha. Walking in the spirit is a bending down to earth and not ascending to heaven. It is becoming more human and not more divine, more human beings and not more angels. To discover oneself more and more passionate about all that is alive, about the words and deeds of men and women over the years, to appreciate the ordinary beauty of things. We had left our people by distinguishing ourselves from, and sometimes criticizing or despising the "normal" life of our parents, brothers and comrades; and one day we come back, we look at them, and the desire-prayer arises within us to resemble our grandparents, parents, even the good normality of the old neighbours - because nothing is missing from life.
Spiritual life makes us bless our lives, walk the streets gratefully, being always amazed to be immersed in "things" and among people who live and love us. To value the infinite beauty of the world, to love it to the point of feeling the pain of having to leave it one day. A bad (and worst) kind of sign is, however, to praise the sky and curse the earth, to defend God and condemn people, to feel surrounded by an ocean of evil where the only good oasis is us. It is the descent to earth that tells us that that piece of heaven we saw on that day long ago was neither hallucination nor fiction: it was only the beautiful dowry of the wedding. Every vocation is a word that becomes flesh, an emigrant who leaves heaven for the earth. In the Bible many prophets began their mission with the sky open and a voice calling them by the name. They began in paradise and ended their journey by touching the hell of the world's pain. Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Paul, Jeremiah and Moses were called in an epiphany of light and words. Then, after leaving paradise, they came down and began their vocational story in search of man. They came down from the dialogue with the voice of Sinai and learned to dialogue with men. They freed slaves and crossed the sea. It is below the mountain that the prophets spoke their most divine-human words. Inside the cisterns, in exile, amidst beatings and persecutions, in the inarticulate cry of the cross.
Isaiah began his mission with the open sky, with angels, words and visions. But when he reached the peak of the maturation of his vocation (ch. 21), he became aware of being a "watchman of the night" who carried out his mission by listening to the men and women who approached him asking: 'watchman, what time of the night?” without knowing the answer. We begin by thinking of offering answers to the questions of others about God, and one day we realize that we are as ignorant as everyone else, but we can offer and receive human companionship. Spiritual journey is a passage from the many discussions about God to the very few words that stop at the threshold. But we don't know, no one tells us and we fight against the misalignments we see growing and the famines of words, because we don't realize that while the words about God are less and less, those about life and men are more and more. Sometimes we forget how to pray to God, but we learn to pray to man. The main and perhaps only sign that spiritual life is flourishing and bearing fruits is to become more capable of humanity (in the - very biblical - metaphor of the tree, the fruits are born on the death of flowers and their colours). An expert in spiritual life is someone who knows how to speak of people's lives above all (of the loves and pains of the human condition) and who speaks very little about God, because he or she has intuited the mystery therein or in order to cure the many religious words spoken daily by those who know God only from "hear-say", and therefore do not know man, either.
During the journey, the intimate dialogues with the voice of the first days are reduced until sometimes they even disappear, because they take the form of the potter's clay, of a jug, of a belt, of a yoke to carry through the streets of the city. The light and the sight of God at the beginning were essential to understand one's place in the world and to start out on the journey. Then there is the light and the view of the earth, and nothing is missing. The first and last gift of a vocation is a different and more human vision of the earth, life and people. We always leave for heaven. But the journey gets blocked if one day we do not understand that the only possibility for us to see God again after the first days lies in the eyes of men and women, the only true image of God available on earth. And so, just when it seems to us that we have failed our task because that face of God we have been looking for appeared more and more distant, we realize that in all those years spent looking into the eyes of men and women we have learned to know God, without knowing it.
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Surpluses and misalignments/6 - One sees God by looking into the eyes of men and women
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/10/2018
“With Moses we see the end of the mountaineering of sacred history, which began in reverse, downhill, with Noah who finds himself docked at the top of the Ararat with his basket boat and from there descends with the saved representatives of zoology..."
Erri De Luca, Upside Down (rough translation)
Western civilization was built around the idea of wealth and development - understood as the accumulation of things and as growth. This principle of quantity was then united with the ancestral conviction that purity and perfection are at the top and imperfection at the bottom; that the impure has to do with the earth and with the hands, and the pure with the sky. That the spirit is superior because it isn’t matter, it isn’t body. And so the types of work that touch the earth and make use of the hands are low, impure, worthless, while those that use the intellect are noble, high, spiritual, holy. This archaic vision of good life as "growing upwards" has almost penetrated the entire Bible, despite the hard struggle in which the prophets, the books of wisdom and Jesus have engaged with it. And, with the help of a spirit of Greek philosophy and Gnosticism, we found ourselves in a Middle Ages and so in a very unbiblical modernity, with treaties of mysticism that read spiritual life as a climb of the "beloved mountain", as an accumulation of mystical goods, a fight against the body and the flesh. We have therefore extended the law of upward growth also to spiritual life, imagined as an increase, an ascent and liberation from the body to fly lightly in the sky of the spirit.
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Surpluses and misalignments/4 - Follow the naked voice, docile to the hand covering the eyes
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/09/2018
“The Master said, »At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.«”
Confucius Quotes
Ideal and spiritual communities can hope to become authentic places of human blossoming if they manage to walk on the brink of their own disintegration. When, on the other hand, the fear of the possibility of one's own end becomes too strong and prevails, the life of the members withers due to a serious lack of air and sky. Only the ridges of the high altitudes allow the view of landscapes that are wide enough to (almost) satisfy the desire for infinity that pushes people with a "vocation" to offer their lives to communities to which they entrust essential pieces of their freedom and interiority. But as soon as the caravan loses altitude in search of safe bivouacs where to fix the tents, the places and horizons immediately become too narrow: we just have to dismantle the camp quickly and resume climbing. On the ridges there is a risk of slipping and falling, but it’s only from there that you can touch the sky. Many communities have become extinct simply because they tried to make their people really live (and, sometimes, a sprout reappears rising again from the broken trunk); others have survived because they have never begun to live daring a full life. Christianity was born out of the disintegration of its first community. Jesus saved his own because he did not "save" them by bringing them to safe and well-guarded places. He slipped into the underworld, and it was from there, in the amazement of all, that he began his resurrection.
    [fulltext] => 
In ideal-driven communities something similar happens to what we live with our sons and daughters. In the morning we secretly watch them put their ties or blouses on in front of the mirror. We are proud of their beauty and goodness, and happy to let them go, and they never cease to amaze us when we see them return every night. Because we know that one day they won't come back, but if we really let them go, we can hope that in another day they really will. Families and communities die when the fear of the possible non-return of those close to us takes away the joy of seeing them leave in the morning, reducing the pride felt about their beauty to the point of perverting it in jealousy. To try to stay in the high and luminous trajectories, a decisive operation is the custody of the difference between the ideal community and the ideal of the community. In other words, everything should be done so that the person who arrives because of a call does not identify the ideals that attract them and seduce them with the community itself and with its practices. However, it is all too common for ideal-driven communities and organizations (IDO-s) to present themselves as the perfect incarnation of the ideals that inspire and animate them. That’s because the temptation of the community to present itself to its members as the ideal to live and follow is too strong. Also because the ideal-community identification is very much appreciated by both people and the community, especially in the early stages - but it is at the very beginning that we should act in a persistent direction and contrary to the "natural" one.
So it happens that instead of marking and maintaining the surplus of the ideal of the community over its practices, the IDO-s operationalize their "charisma" in a set of actions, rites, liturgies, individual and collective rules. We are all convinced, and all of us in good faith, that the rules, regulations and practices are the perfect certified copy of the ideal; that the way, the only sure way to make the encounter with the voice calling us yesterday concrete today is to follow those rules and practices, sine glossa. The founders and communities make this perfect translation because they believe that without the operationalisation of ideals their community will have no future. They gradually eliminate the surplus of the ideal over the community, and so without wanting or knowing it, they actually prevent the charisma from continuing to work new things in the future, because novelty flourishes only from the wounds/embrasures of the surplus-discards between ideals and their historical translation - the unintended effects are always the decisive ones in collective experiences. When this surplus is gone, the free and infinite spirit becomes a technique. The "what is it?” - that is, the exclamation of the heart that comes every time we come across the manna (man hu: what is it?) in the desert of a spiritual event of salvation - becomes: "how does it work?", "how do I realise it?", "how do I put it into practice?”. The first encounter that generated the desire to know who and what that marvellous voice was progressively turns into a repertoire of good practices and rules to follow in order to remain "faithful". Also because communities cannot be born without some translation of the charisma into practice, but this translation itself risks silencing the charisma that generated them. A paradoxical tension, which is vital and always decisive.
All this is very well known to Biblical Humanism. The Bible has done almost everything possible to distinguish YHWH from the Law and the word of the prophets who spoke in his name (without always succeeding). But if the Bible had lost this overflow of God over its words, it would have used the word as a string to trap God, reducing him to an idol (every idolatry, even the "secular" ones, is a double string: men who bind the divinity and the divinity that, once transformed into an idol, binds its worshippers-glamorizers). The words of Scripture can generate other true words because they are the sacrament of a reality the mystery of which they do not know. Biblical humanism has succeeded in saving this surplus thanks to the prophets. Similarly to them, the founders of charismatic communities are called to be the first guardians of the surplus of the charisma over the words of the charisma. But when ideals come to coincide with the whole of the community practices, the free interior space is progressively reduced in individuals. And the first desire to know what and who the mystery we had encountered was gradually becomes a simple profession.
All this has very concrete and sometimes dramatic existential consequences. Many members of IDO-s go into deep crisis when they realize that although they are surrounded by practices and words that only and always talk about spirituality and ideality, in fact they no longer know what inner life and spirituality really is. And it is not uncommon for people who started out in them as youth with a great thirst for spirituality to discover themselves impoverished as adults - in precisely what should have represented their distinctive trait and the ideal of their lives. They can no longer say true and wise words to anyone, not even to themselves. When someone meets them, they find themselves in front of a profession, of technical answers without the specific competence in the spirit that only the practice of freedom can generate in an inhabited heart. They find that what they possess is an ideal that has become ethical and practical, that no longer speaks of spirituality, or life, or God. The cancellation of surpluses between the God of the community and the community because it was presented as the perfect incarnation of that God cancelled the inner and most secret space where the inner life is cultivated and nourished. And after talking about spirituality for many years, they suddenly find themselves in a neo-atheistic condition. They feel that they have only used techniques, they have remained on the surface of true inner life for a lack of freedom and breath. Because once the words of the community are extinguished, they can no longer speak to God, or of God, or to their own hearts - a dramatic discovery, which often produces infinite anger and pain, but which can sometimes become a great blessing if a resurrection begins in that hell. Still others, and these are the saddest and most common cases, continue to live until the end, identifying themselves with the profession without ever realizing that they have lost contact with the spirituality that once attracted them.
Communities live and make people live well if they help their people never to lose the dialogue about "who are you?”. If they leave them free spaces for the soul and life to fill (never completely) with personalized dialogues that feed the questions and reduce the simple and equal answers for all. Because the real voices calling us know only the "you" of the second person singular: collective nouns do not work for these very serious things. They only work if they free themselves from the practices and the Law to allow everyone the freedom to know and follow the spirit that speaks to everyone in a different language. Community practices are only good if they coexist with individual ones, born of different words whispered by the same ideal-charisma, every day, to everyone, in an essential biodiversity. But all this is extremely dangerous and therefore very rare. Always there is the fear that the best people and the ones most attracted by the peaks slip from the ridge; that they become so free that they do not come back home in the evening, that they sleep in mountain huts to venture on new solitary climbs of the mountains of youth at dawn. And so, almost always, communities fill all inner spaces, they crowd the landscape, and find themselves with people who are less alive and fruitful but safer and more aligned - who feel great as young people, but bad as adults and old people.
These processes are mostly inevitable and tend to happen in every community’s life. Including families, where after the early days of falling in love dominated by "who are you?", we soon move on to "how does it work? But, as we know very well, families don't work anymore if the questions don't come back every now and then: "Who are you?", "Who am I?", "What have we become?". Moses, the man who spoke to YHWH "mouth to mouth", never saw the face of God. He knew and recognized his voice, but not his face. Once, once only, at the height of a wonderful dialogue with the voice, Moses asked for the impossible: “Show me your glory!”. YHWH answered him, “I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen” (33:21-23). Communities must learn to be docile under the hand of their own ideals covering their eyes. To be content with the naked voice. To know that in those very rare times when the hand is removed they can only see the back. The practices, the rules, the objects of the community "cult" are only copies of the back of the ideal seen in some very special moment of light. But the face, the intimacy and the light of the eyes remain and must remain mystery and desire, and, above all, must not be confused with the back. When Mary Magdalene, in tears, met the Risen One, she did not recognize his face: she recognized a voice calling her by name.
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Surpluses and misalignments/4 - Follow the naked voice, docile to the hand covering the eyes
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 23/09/2018
“The Master said, »At fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of Heaven. At sixty, I heard them with docile ear. At seventy, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.«”
Confucius Quotes
Ideal and spiritual communities can hope to become authentic places of human blossoming if they manage to walk on the brink of their own disintegration. When, on the other hand, the fear of the possibility of one's own end becomes too strong and prevails, the life of the members withers due to a serious lack of air and sky. Only the ridges of the high altitudes allow the view of landscapes that are wide enough to (almost) satisfy the desire for infinity that pushes people with a "vocation" to offer their lives to communities to which they entrust essential pieces of their freedom and interiority. But as soon as the caravan loses altitude in search of safe bivouacs where to fix the tents, the places and horizons immediately become too narrow: we just have to dismantle the camp quickly and resume climbing. On the ridges there is a risk of slipping and falling, but it’s only from there that you can touch the sky. Many communities have become extinct simply because they tried to make their people really live (and, sometimes, a sprout reappears rising again from the broken trunk); others have survived because they have never begun to live daring a full life. Christianity was born out of the disintegration of its first community. Jesus saved his own because he did not "save" them by bringing them to safe and well-guarded places. He slipped into the underworld, and it was from there, in the amazement of all, that he began his resurrection.
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Surpluses and misalignments/2 - Go, get infected and renew the alliance
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/09/2018
“Coi vecchi nostri canti che sai, voci di cose piccole e care, t’addormiremo, vecchio; e potrai ricominciare.
E quando il mare, nella tua sera, mesto nell’ombra manda il suo grido, sciogliere ancora potrai la nera nave dal lido.
Vedrai le terre de’ tuoi ricordi, del tuo patire dolce e remoto”
Giovanni Pascoli Il ritorno
At the heart of each person there is a mystery that is revealed, and only in part, during the whole of life, not infrequently in its last part. Even people with many talents, even those who are truly brilliant, find themselves in a state of partial and imperfect knowledge of their own "charisma", their untapped potential, their self-deception and past and present illusions. Therefore, when a person encounters a voice that calls them and their life undergoes a radical turn, if they respond and begin to walk they do not and cannot know what the development of that encounter will bring, what its fruits, pains and great surprises will be. In a marriage, in an artistic or religious vocation, the wonderful part is the unknown and infinite potential. We do not know what we will become, what the other we tie ourselves to will become, what our relationship will become. What God will become.
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Because in every pact and in every promise the most valuable 'yes' is not the one said to our present and past and those of the other, but the one pronounced, in the now and reciprocally, to their and our future. That’s where the beauty and tragedy of these pacts lie. We live with someone who continually reveals themselves to be different from the person we married; we grow up in a community that is gradually moving away from the one we entered. And day by day as we try to get to know and recognize the person next to us, we also strive to reconcile ourselves with the person we are becoming – and whom we often don't like. The crisis of a relationship is a plural misalignment of multiple dimensions where we do not know if it is the novelty of the other or our own that we no longer like - often it is both. Many families keep functioning because human beings have a great resilience to change, especially to the fundamental changes of "you", "I" and "we".
In the spiritual and ideal realm, however, we are generally never sufficiently prepared for the experience (that we sometimes know in the abstract, having read about it in a book) that even the God and/or the ideal we have chosen will change, and it will change a lot, at least as much as we will and, almost always, more than we will. Also for this reason, the ways, the forms and times in which a response to a vocation develops over time are very different from each other, creating a growing diversity.
All organizations have a hard time managing diversity among human beings. Every worker is unique, at any moment they live their own phase in relation to the one that the organization is going through, they cross the many ages of life, suffer traumas and illnesses. However, the organization cannot stay in tune with the life phases of each person, and the show must go on. Theory and practice, however, are showing that various organizational innovations try to calibrate employment contracts on the individuals’ needs, from young mothers to those who want to earn a degree while working, up to the mature worker who prefers to dedicate more time and energy to their interests and passions, giving up a portion of their salary. Businesses where people live and grow well have understood that workers have different ways of dedicating themselves to the organization, and that the creation of places outside the company where relationships and affectivity can be cultivated improves the overall quality of women and men, producing a more creative and free working environment, too. When, on the other hand, contractual flexibility is low, or when companies use incentives so they don’t have to let people free, but capture them with the seduction of money and power, the quality of life worsens inside and outside the company.
In the world of ideal-driven organizations (IDO-s), the management of anthropological peculiarities and the life phases of individual members is even more complex, especially for those people who have a strong, identity-shaping relationship with the institution, as happens in religious communities and spiritual movements (but not only in these). An IDO is much more (and, in other ways, much less) than an enterprise. The type of membership, for example, of a Franciscan brother or a Salesian sister in their own community is way too different from a company employment contract, or from the commitment of a volunteer to an association. Personalized contracts do not apply here, nor do incentives increase their "productivity". This discourse is valid not only in the case of people entirely consecrated for a cause, but whenever the membership in a community or movement is, essentially, a matter of vocation - because, let us not forget, a vocation is a universal anthropological experience, covering a much wider area than just the religious sphere.
In these cases, belonging to an IDO almost inevitably tends to become an exclusive kind of belonging, by the choice of the person and the institution. And that’s where the more passionate reasoning begins.
A Benedictine brother alternates prayer with work, but when he stops working he doesn't really "leave" work to return "home". His return to the community is not like that of Francesca, mother of a family, who also leaves the office to return home. They are two substantially different "houses", because while Francesca passes from one sphere of her life (the enterprise) to another (family), governed by distinct principles and sometimes in tension with each other, Father Bernardino actually remains in the same identity-forming environment after he finishes work in the pharmacy of the monastery.
And so if Francesca goes through some difficult moments at work - those moments that we all experience when, for various reasons, the enthusiasm for the mission of the enterprise is very low, and we go to work just because we can't afford not to go there... -, returning home she meets her children, her friends, then she goes to sing in a choir, she dwells in some places that are very different from her work. In these very different places Francesca can be compensated for the frustrations of the office, she can let off steam, recharge, take refuge; she can walk in gardens enjoying different flowers and air than in the company. This means, among other things, that companies "consume" precious capital that they do not pay for (family, friends, associations .....), but that make their workers able to work and sometimes even be creative and happy (a sense of taxes can be found here).
Just like Francesca, Father Bernardino has moments when he has no desire to go down and sell herbal teas and spirits, he also experiences being in a bad mood and having conflicts with his colleagues in the shop. But when he returns home he finds himself living with companions who are very similar (if not identical) to the monks with whom he works. But, and these are the most complex and interesting cases, sometimes Father Bernardino not only doesn't want to go to the pharmacy, he doesn't even want to go back to lunch and dinner in the community. He would also need a place where he could get compensated not only for the tensions at work but for the tensions in his community and his whole life. Unlike Francesca, Father Bernardino, however, may not have "compensating spaces" where he can, in a natural and healthy way, take care of the misalignments he senses in that specific phase of his life.
Sometimes he manages to stay in church to seek an intimate dialogue with God, who remains a large compensation space when the others have been exhausted, or if they have never existed. But, as we know, in some moments, generally the decisive ones, if you need some air that’s different from the only one breathed in inside that community, even the voice of God ends up being enveloped by that same consumed air, and it no longer speaks. In strong charismatic experiences, when one gets misaligned from the community it is very difficult if not impossible to manage not to feel a misalignment with God, too. Crises would be too simple, and therefore not very interesting, if, together with the relationship with the community, the relationship with God that that community has taught us to know, love and recognize were not also in crisis.
The most common and serious crises therefore arise from a syndrome of encirclement, because every place is nothing more than a variant of the same single place. And, not infrequently, leaving the community appears to be the only way to be able to breathe again and not die.
In reality, these situations that are so common are the manifestation of something much more radical and important. Adult life inside an identity-creating community in which we entered in the age of the wonderful providential ignorance of young people, almost always takes the form of leaving the first community, even when you remain in exactly the same room and in the same canteen as always.
To understand this statement, which may seem paradoxical or excessive, it is necessary to look carefully at the nature of the relationship between a vocation and the community in which the person is necessarily born, grows and matures. The community, every community, even of the most free and open type, carries out the function of a pedagogue (St. Paul). There comes a day when those who have received a vocation feel the urgent need to greet and thank their pedagogue for finally managing to live as adults, that is, to leave the first community to become something different that neither they themselves nor anyone knows yet. Sometimes you leave by staying, at other times you leave by leaving. But you always have to leave if you want to return. You can leave for good (even if you stay in the same house) and never come back. But you can also return: many do, and save us every day by coming back to our homes, when perhaps we no longer hope for it.
These departures and these returns generally take the form of exile. Exile in Babylon was a decisive stage in the history of salvation. That forced exit from the Holy City of David, the destruction of the only temple of the true God was the time when Israel also made an extraordinary leap in her spiritual experience. The people of Israel understood, in their flesh and without having wished or sought for it, that it is possible to pray to God without the temple, that he remains the true God even if he has become a defeated God. That we remain in the community of the covenant even when we leave the promised land. They got to know another great culture and other gods; they were infected by other narratives, some beautiful ones among them, too. Without the exile, without that contagion, we now would not have some splendid biblical books, we would not have inherited the verses on the "suffering servant of YHWH". The Bible tells us that it is possible to return from exiles, and that from that remnant that returns a child can be born in a manger one day.
You can live well as an adult in the same place of your youth if community life becomes an experience of returning.
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    [metadesc] => In experiences where community tends to coincide with life, you can live well as an adult if you are able to leave first and then come back.Luigino Bruni on IDO-s (ideal-driven organisations).
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Surpluses and misalignments/2 - Go, get infected and renew the alliance
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/09/2018
“Coi vecchi nostri canti che sai, voci di cose piccole e care, t’addormiremo, vecchio; e potrai ricominciare.
E quando il mare, nella tua sera, mesto nell’ombra manda il suo grido, sciogliere ancora potrai la nera nave dal lido.
Vedrai le terre de’ tuoi ricordi, del tuo patire dolce e remoto”
Giovanni Pascoli Il ritorno
At the heart of each person there is a mystery that is revealed, and only in part, during the whole of life, not infrequently in its last part. Even people with many talents, even those who are truly brilliant, find themselves in a state of partial and imperfect knowledge of their own "charisma", their untapped potential, their self-deception and past and present illusions. Therefore, when a person encounters a voice that calls them and their life undergoes a radical turn, if they respond and begin to walk they do not and cannot know what the development of that encounter will bring, what its fruits, pains and great surprises will be. In a marriage, in an artistic or religious vocation, the wonderful part is the unknown and infinite potential. We do not know what we will become, what the other we tie ourselves to will become, what our relationship will become. What God will become.
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