It’s Easter (Alleluia!), and I’m at home working on songs I haven’t worked on for a long time. My lyrics and musical sketches are in notebooks which also hold notes and writings about other things (since any strict method of organization for me is simply that, and never any help to getting real work done). Anyhow, I ran across the notes I took at a lecture given by Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, a good friend of Msgr. Luigi Giussani, the “founder” of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. These notes seem very fitting to post on Easter Sunday. (They are somewhat edited to make them intelligible.) I apologize for the fact that they are quite fragmentary.
Perhaps the most honest thing I can say when I am feeling lost and confused about life and questioning whether my faith is of any worth at all is, “Lord, to whom [else] shall I go? You and your Church are the only thing that have ever given me any hope and any sense of lasting meaning, even if I am struggling to see that now.” (cf. John 6:68)
What we need is an education of the heart to live, confronting the actual desires of our humanity.
Why do we find ourselves living as if to say “I am willing to pay the price to settle for something less”?
If you crush the desires of your heart, Christ can never answer them. You can verify this by engaging your experience.
Allow yourself 5 minutes of unrestricted hope [!] and see what happens.
“Don’t be an idiot” and not follow a desire once awakened.
[The follwing was his recommendation regarding the book by Giussani he was promoting, but it applies to anything which is proposed to us as true and meaningful for our lives.] Does it correspond to my experience? Is it so? Is it the case? (Not, “do I like it?” Going to a shoestore and finding a good pair of shoes is not a “subjective” experience or merely a question of “Do I like it?”. My experience of life, honestly engaged, is an “objective” measure of the truth of things, just as a pair of shoes is either good or bad for my feet. A proposal of what the meaning of my life is is either good or bad, and I can judge this by experience.)
