There is only one reason that beginning again helps us to not lose gusto for the journey – because the beginning always contains the criterion of everything. The beginning is a gift, a preference, just as the beginning of life is an unmerited gift, it is the greatest sign of the relationship with Him who wanted us.
- Davide Prosperi

You can notice a lot happening on the forest floor if you open your eyes. I recently left my glasses on the side of a trail in the woods while on retreat at Christ’s Peace House of Prayer in Easton, Kansas. After Morning Prayer, I took off walking, thinking and praying as I went. I paused along the trail as I noticed flowers and leaves and things. When I did, I set down my little stack of books and, apparently, my glasses. I had to backtrack to look for them, and the attentiveness that this quest required of me was intense. I did find them, but it took a while. They weren’t where I thought they would be, so I had to keep looking.

As I backtracked, my sandaled feet became muddy and wet from the trail. I got tangled in a few webs that spiders wove in the night. I noticed brilliant green moss covering downed forest timber; I saw tiny mushroom families, standing up at attention; I saw Kansas daisies, symmetric with their cheerful yellow petals. I chuckled at two young deer with their poised, flexed muscles, stopping to stare down this human who had happened upon them.

In these minutes of attentiveness, in my quest to locate the glasses, I experienced wonder: an invitation to remember that all of creation is even now being created. Including me. That I am made by Another: I am “You-who-make-me.” This experience was a gift, almost like beginning again.

School of Community is like this backtrack quest. The work I am invited to do demands attention to my life. Its preparation asks me to backtrack — to notice, “what happened?” — and then to compare what happened, the experience of my life, to the needs of my heart, the longing for truth, for beauty, for goodness, justice, love. I notice where it corresponds, and where it doesn’t. And then I make a judgment: I come to a thought, a synthesis, about the experience of my life.

As Fr. Giussani insists in Chapter Nine of The Religious Sense, “the essential characteristic of the human being is a self-transparency – self-awareness – and an awareness of the whole horizon of reality.” Even though my awareness is so often narrow and partial, School of Community invites me toward a fullness in which I live reality intensely, in relation to every experience.

I am a family doctor. Most days I care for people in an outpatient clinic. In each of about fifteen encounters per day, where people check in, have their vital signs measured, and then visit with me in the safe space of an exam room, I have the chance to remember that I am called, and to live this work through the awareness of my ultimate desires. If I can have this posture of attention and awareness, something happens that is more than the ordinary experience of a clinic visit.

If I am attentive to my ultimate desires — my desire for my patient to know himself or herself as a beloved child of the Father; my desire to be used by God in what is really his work, not mine — if that is my posture with which I open the door and begin the visit, something extraordinary happens. The crucial action in those minutes is no longer whether I make a razor-sharp diagnosis, choose a precise curing remedy, manage and balance her diabetes or his congestive heart failure without error. The most important action now is whether I have, in the moment’s face-to-face encounter with my patient, united myself to God in the work to which He has called me. If I do it, I know it because of the peace that is given in the moment.

Each School of Community is about remembering that I am called, sent, to go on the mission of working on and discovering myself. The fruit of this work is realized little by little and is a work in progress. It looks like a softer, more sympathetic gaze on my marriage, my children, my parents, my patients. School of Community calls me to attentiveness and sincerity, the path of life and the path of freedom. School of Community is most of all a prayer. I come to School of Community because I need to renew my adherence to the Lord, over and over again.

Kerry, Atchison, KS