​​I cannot say that I had a complete awareness of the reasons why I decided to go to the North America Assembly this year. Actually, I think I could only say that I had about a 2.5% awareness of the reasons. I felt more like I was mysteriously called. The reasons drawing me there were at the edge of my self-awareness, but not yet brought into the light of consciousness.

A series of fortunate circumstances made it easier financially to go, since I did not have to pay for my plane ticket. I went as I was — fearful, anxious, worried, preoccupied with always analyzing and measuring everything. In everyday life, I spend an enormous amount of time and energy analyzing and measuring everything (every single thing) I say, do, or think. My mind never stops. It’s like a meat grinder — anything that goes into it becomes new material for more analysis, thoughts, and measuring. To make things worse, the North American assembly was a completely new experience for me, where I knew almost nobody. I wasn’t sure what would happen and what was planned. The result of this fact was only more worry piled up on top of anxiety. However, within the first couple of hours of arriving in Estes Park, I could sense that something was happening in me — a sort of tectonic shift. I can say this now after a few weeks since I returned home, but while I was there I could not yet properly describe it or give it a name. During his introduction on Saturday evening, Fr. Michael mentioned that an assembly was planned for Sunday morning (at the end of our days together). At the limits of my consciousness, strangely, an awareness made its appearance: “I will be out there on Sunday and I’ll be talking about something that has happened here.” Of course, at that point, this was a very confused, foggy awareness. In fact, I did not pay any attention to it. Only in hindsight can I tell that it was a sign of the tectonic shift that was already happening, just like an earthquake, that develops first in the depths, and only later comes all the way up to the surface.

As the days progressed in Estes Park, I was constantly presented with facts that I could not wrap my mind around. The people I met there were showing a gratuitous and unconditional regard for me that one would not expect in people whom I had just met for the first time. Our interactions could not be reduced to power dynamics, politics, merits, or failures. They were totally gratuitous. More than once, in front of what I was seeing and experiencing, a very specific question kept jumping into my head: “What is this place?!” This question surprised me because I know this place. I’ve been in the Movement for 25 years! I’ve read Giussani extensively, I know how CL works, I know all the good and all the bad that the movement has done to me over the years. Yet, I was there asking myself: “What is this place?!” I was experiencing something immeasurable, something that my mind could not grasp and could not control. I had to concede at some point that that weekend was something greater than anything that I could have conceived or planned for.

This surprise gave me a great sense of freedom. Mysteriously experiencing something that cannot be measured was the way for the Mystery to shatter the steel cage of my mental dynamics, to show me what freedom can really be like. To experience these, I did not have to do anything — any figuring things out, any conceiving, any elaborating, any analyzing. All I had to do was remain there and look — nothing else.

I spent hours awake in bed on our last night there, lying in bed with my eyes wide open, trying to give a name to all these experiences. The following morning, it seemed that my new awareness was already getting fogged over. People are people, reality is reality, and I am myself, and it seemed that everything that I had experienced was already disappearing. What proved to be necessary was poverty of spirit and, again, looking. When I listened to and followed the songs at the beginning of the assembly on Sunday morning, I was brought back to the awareness that had attracted me so deeply the night before. In other words, it was by looking again while it was operating in front of me that I was able to repossess the judgment that I had reached, which is that He is gratuitously giving Himself to me, and instead of measuring and concerning myself with how or why, I simply need to look and see in order to discover His gratuity.

Having received this amazing gift at the assembly in Estes Park, I soon experienced the fear of losing everything. Many questions started swarming in my head, for example, “How am I going to keep all of this?”, “What do I need to do so that I don’t lose it?” Giussani says in The Religious Sense that fear only comes after a gift has been received. We’re afraid of losing something only because we received it first. This brought me back to how everything really started — as an unexpected gift, as something powerful enough to challenge my deeply ingrained tendency never to get out of my head.

Now that I am back home, back in the normal swing of things, in the routine that I’ve gone through many, many, many days, I find myself again going back to the beginning in memory. During the synthesis at the end of the assembly on Sunday, Fr. Michael called memory “the guardian of experience.” I thought back to what Giussani talks about after Mary received the visit from Gabriel. At some point, the angel had gone away, and Mary was left with this amazing announcement, with his amazing fact that rocked her world. And, according to Giussani, what did she do? She remembered, she cherished in her memory the greatness of what had happened. It’s a similar dynamic to how my days have been unfolding after the assembly in Estes Park. When I pray morning prayer, I go back to the amazing fact of perceiving His gratuity that rocked my world at the assembly. This helps me to stop from trying to possess it, to reduce it to plans or outcomes or my own merit.

At the North America Assembly I was able to better understand what Giussani calls “the factual density” of Christianity. A fact is something that comes into your horizon and doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t keep quiet, and in this way, puts everything back in its place. The gift I received was to experience Christ as an actual fact, operating concretely in my existence in a way that was perfectly tailored to me. Before embarking on the trip I knew, in the depths of my heart, that I needed liberation, I knew I could experience a deep dizziness that was never going away. But I couldn’t do anything about it — I could not get it to budge by one millimeter. What was needed was the intervention of Something much greater and much more powerful than me. Now when I think or say “Christ,” I know a little bit better, I understand a little bit more concretely who He is.

Martino, Greenville, SC