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The Voices of the Days/15 - The ways of faithfulness to the word are mysterious and uncomfortable
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/06/2016
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! ... for so their fathers did to the prophets. ... Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets."

Luke 6,22;26
The natural condition of the prophet is the failure. The false prophets are the ones to be heard and followed, to respond fully to the expectations of their time. Being followed, achieving fame and honours has always been a sure sign of false prophecy - and continues to be so. True prophets, however, are always out of time, uncomfortable, obnoxious, annoying.
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They ask for and scream about the defence of the poor, the oppressed, the widows and the orphans, they struggle against idolatry; and while they do so they still live in a society where the poor are downtrodden and exploited and the idols are multiplying. In response to their complaint they encounter persecution, stoning and are often jailed and killed. Knowing and retracing the history of the prophets of yesterday and today is a great lesson on the dynamics of power, and therefore on the nature of all ideologies which, in their essence, are instruments produced by the ruling class in order to increase power and privileges.
True prophets do not like their condition of a prophet. They do not choose it, and if they could they would do something else. But - and here is the essence of this specific vocation - they cannot choose. They cannot escape, even if they try. The prophets are neither better nor worse than all the others: they are simply different. Some have even thought, and still think, that the prophets are useless if not harmful, because their words are vanitas that does not transform the world. In the end, all they do is deceive the poor and the marginalized promising a salvation that never comes. Some, many think so. But they are wrong. All the prophets can know is the misunderstanding on the part of the people, due to their "singing" a counter melody. There is also the deliberate and intentional persecution by those who understand them very well, and so fight them. The Pharaohs and Herod recognize and know the prophets, and that's why they fear them more than anything else. But there is someone who believes and loves the prophets. They are the poor, the oppressed, the humble, those pushed to the margins, the lepers. And not just because they see the hope of redemption from their unjust condition in a prophet, but because they are in the anthropological and spiritual conditions to understand their voice. The Kingdom of Heaven is just for the "poor" and those "persecuted for righteousness' sake" because in their condition they can see, understand and desire it.
The powerful, however, are very fond of the false prophets, to the point of worshipping them. They are their flatterers and devotees, because false prophecy confuses the collective consciousness and legitimates the positions of power. Yesterday and today, the market abounds with intellectuals, writers, sometimes religious people that generate theories and ideologies for the sole purpose of justifying the power of those who support them and feed them. When it is too expensive or inconvenient to eliminate the prophets directly, the powerful do so indirectly, by hiring false prophets. They behave like the plants that defend themselves from the attacks of some insects by generating odours and other substances to attract the predatory insects of those threatening them. Therefore, the main virtue of those performing some prophetic function is resilience and stamina to persevere in the condition of frustration over their words pronounced because of their vocation not being listened to. Especially when times passes slowly, persecutions have no respite, and the prophetic word should continue to be pronounced. But why does the prophet go on saying his words if he cannot see the end of injustice or the advent of a new kingdom of the poor? Certainly not because he hopes to convert the powerful. He knows very well - or learns it as he becomes an adult - that the pharaohs are inconvertible. He doesn't even hope for revolutions of the poor, because he knows that once they become powerful, the poor of today will behave exactly like those who oppressed them yesterday. Neither are they the men and women of the reform of small steps, seeking a gradual improvement on the level of what's possible, here and now. This reformist vision, which is just as important and co-essential, is that of the (good) institutions, not of the prophets. What they announce is too different from the status quo, and no marginal improvement could adequately respond to their prophecy. They are eternally dissatisfied. Because what they announce is a reign that's too righteous, a God who is too close, man who is too different. But prophecy is not to be confused with utopia, because unlike the utopian word (which is often produced to distract us from that of the prophets), the prophetic statement is always concrete. It calls people by their name; it takes specific actions and makes visible gestures using the "jars" and the "yokes" of all. It is an "already" that indicates a "not yet". For this reason the word of the prophets is always betrayed the promised land is never reached, and their existence is marked by a constant and growing feeling of certainty of failure and suffering.
To truly understand that happiness is not the most important thing in life, we must get to know the prophets. A prophet is not happy, simply because happiness does not interest him. He would not understand or know how to answer the question: "Are you happy?" He only wants to remain a "voice crying in the wilderness", without waiting or even hoping to see the desert flourished. True prophets always cry in the desert, and the much heat and thirst cannot silence their voices. And when they see some signs of spring, they wonder whether those shoots are anything but a sign that their voice has lost truth and prophecy. So why does the prophet continue to talk, to cry, to lose his health, well-being and not infrequently even his life? Simply because he cannot help to do it. He is inhabited by a mystery that he does not possess, does not know, and one that does not obey him. But if he does not give voice to that voice, he will really die. This is the sad and wonderful destiny of the prophets. The wonderful story of Jonah, the radical simplicity of his unique and paradoxical literary genre is among the most revealing of the essence of this dimension of the prophetic vocation (the dimensions of the prophetic vocation are many, and it is not easy to break them down to units). Jonah, as often happens to the prophets (Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah ...), does not respond to the call immediately. When Jonah receives the first call to prophesise in Nineveh, he escapes and embarks on a ship going in the opposite direction. After being miraculously saved from the wreck (thanks to the fish), he answers the second call of YHWH and brings his message to the big city: "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (3,4). And, as an exceptional event, the city of Nineveh and its king repent, and convert fully and immediately. Having observed this conversion, God changes his mind and does not destroy Nineveh, acting differently from what he had said through Jonah. No prophet is master of the word that he has to announce due to his call. He knows that God cannot be caged either by the prophecy that He himself puts on the lips of the prophets.
The most mysterious aspect of the story of Jonah is his disappointment and anger about God's repentance: “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, »O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.«” (4,1-3) This pain and indignation of Jonah can tell us something very important. Prophets are the great lovers of the word. Because of this, they are its custodians. Like women and mothers are experts and guardians of the body, so are prophets of the word. They live only for this, they cannot do anything else. But they are not only lovers and guardians of the words they say: they are also their great defenders. Against men, but, says Jonah, they are defenders of the word even against YHWH. Since they are not its masters, they can be - and are - its protectors. More of an artist who keeps his work, the first task of the prophet is to protect the word, even if its sender change their mind. If he didn't do so, the word he is announcing would soon get worn out and empty. The prophets can defend the word of God from God himself. The word is always a very serious matter: prophets have the task to remind everyone, even God of this, knowing that they will not be heard. If the prophets did not love the word they are announcing more than themselves, they would be false prophets, journeymen of words that they only sell and do not serve. The paradox of the end of the story of Jonah opens up to us only if we take prophecy radically seriously and don't transform it into a merely ethical or religious matter. Faithfulness to the word of God is more radical for the prophet than obedience to God himself. It is in this paradoxical obedience-faithfulness that the true prophet is truly faithful.
Whoever has had a task in life, while unwinding it responsibly, can sense this mysterious and paradoxical dimension of every vocation. Their most valuable and crucial moments were those when they had to protect that task and that work precisely against those who had entrusted it to them. To keep believing even when the one who had "called" them no longer spoke, or had changed his mind. It is on this tremendous and wonderful faithfulness that you play a lot of the truth of an entire existence. It is also because of this strange faithfulness that it is not easy to understand the prophets. But it is not impossible. We must at least try. And so, after having commented on Genesis, Exodus, Job, and Ecclesiastes during the recent years, next Sunday we will begin to get to know the first writer prophet, perhaps the greatest of all: Isaiah. A new journey will begin that's unpredictable now, but certainly fantastic. Together.
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    [text] => 
The Voices of the Days/15 - The ways of faithfulness to the word are mysterious and uncomfortable
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 19/06/2016
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man! ... for so their fathers did to the prophets. ... Woe to you, when all people speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets."

Luke 6,22;26
The natural condition of the prophet is the failure. The false prophets are the ones to be heard and followed, to respond fully to the expectations of their time. Being followed, achieving fame and honours has always been a sure sign of false prophecy - and continues to be so. True prophets, however, are always out of time, uncomfortable, obnoxious, annoying.
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The Voices of the Days/13 - What really matters is to keep walking, until the very end
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/06/2016
“Once married you are punished by never feeling any kind of sweetness apart from what belongs to all.” (rough translation from the Italian original)
Davide Maria Turoldo, L’Uomo (Man)
The biggest challenge in all community experience is being able to create a "we" that does not end up devouring the "I" of the individuals who have created it. Collective nouns are good and on the side of life only if they are accompanied and preceded by names and personal pronouns. The "we" without the "I" is the origin of all community pathologies and illiberal regimes, even when they arise as a promise of liberation and are clothed with the robes of salvation.
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Communities can only serve their people if they recognize that they are second, allowing the first person singular to precede the plural. When this natural order of plurals and the singulars is reversed or denied, personal paths fail, vocations wither, the community betrays itself.
The destiny of every vocation is the generation of new life, the liberation of slaves from the pharaohs, beyond the sea. But every vocation is also a great love story. Its good development over time, therefore, lies in the concrete possibility of being able to hold together the call to the liberation of the oppressed and the delicate management of narcissistic emotions present in every love affair. In the beginning there is eros. The voice comes to us, it calls us and seduces us, and we find ourselves in the dream of dreams. All around us bursts out singing and is illuminated by a new sun inside, which is truer and brighter than the one shining outside. All the feelings light up, the heart moves and is moved, we feel and touch the voice that calls us like bread, like people. It is a sublime experience and essential to start each high flight under the sun. And those who have got to know it keep looking for it all their life. But in order for the vocation to continue its good development, the maturation of eros into philia (friendship) is needed. When that happens, the first call becomes an experience of company and fraternity. We exit the central and the prevailing register of emotions and passion and we start building communities. The feelings and the falling in love do not necessarily disappear, but they are neither the only nor the first language anymore. This is a very nice period of life and it is generally very long: this is when the vocation builds new cities, it realises works and an experience of a new kind of fertility and new children takes place. To Ishmael, the son of the flesh, Isaac, the son of promise is added. Faith also changes, and from an emotional and intimate experience it becomes a great history of a people, blooming in the community. The same first love is discovered in the love of the others, and a new alliance is celebrated together. The vocation opens up and it becomes a collective event. Eros stays alive even in the age of the philia because every form of love is co-essential if we want to live it well: there is no good philia (or authentic agape) without eros. But the maturation into philia changes eros forever, it opens and humanizes it.
In vocations that do not fail along the way, philia, born from the maturation of eros, blooms in turn into agape. This is the time of full maturity, when the flowers of spring become the fruits of summer. The community that has kept the first vocation and turned it into a shared and fruitful collective adventure, now becomes the springboard towards new spiritual horizons. The community does its job of a good pedagogue and finally introduces the person into adulthood. We continue to live with and for other fellow travellers, but with an all new sense of freedom and truth. Here the liberation promised by the first call reaches a first milestone: one is freed from the very community that had been donated to us. We understand that we have been sent to a larger community of our own: that of all. It turns out that the family that welcomed us was not the last word, but only the penultimate one. That our destiny is in the land of all, that the sky above the home garden is too small to hold our call to infinity. And we take off, even when we stay in the same house. There is no truer or more radical freedom than the one gushing from agape, when it really becomes anima mundi and we get to know gratuitousness. Those who come across these agapeic souls feel the heartbeat of the whole universe, no longer limited by the boundaries of a community or a specific charisma. Their identities become radically universal, their communities always have the door open.
Not all vocations manage to reach their agape phase. Many, too many, are stuck in the previous stages. The most common outcome is stopping at the "erotic" phase. People remain within the register of feelings, emotions and romance for life. Those who never leave the first dream fall into this vocational narcissism, and they reinvent and recreate it when it disappears. Instead of reading the end of the phase of as a sign and an invitation to evolve into a different, more mature love, they remain entangled in the toils of their own feelings, in a constant search of emotionally exciting narcissistic "spiritual" experiences that are able to stimulate the senses and passions. Life becomes a continuous flying from flower to flower in search of new, fresh and intoxicating pollen. They keep looking for friendships, meetings and new communities, "consumed" and left after a very short time, as soon as nourishment is finished. Life becomes a unique, monotonous and repetitive experience of "emotional" consumption, without ever moving on to the "production" phase and the liberation of the slaves.
Emotions and feelings are only the dawn and not the noontime of a vocation. The first exclusive and satiating dialogue must become a dialogue with the people in time, a dialogue with the poor, the slaves, with all the voices of the world, with that of the birds, the sea and the stones. One voice is not enough today to express that first voice that called us yesterday. Too many people lose faith in the truth of the voice of the first meeting because they seek it in the wrong places, in the infancy of vocation, in the feelings and passions of the heart. That was only the cradle, but when you are grown up cots must serve the children, ours and those of others. Biblical faith is never individual consumption: it is always the generation of salvations not yet accomplished, for others, and sometimes for ourselves. Noah went on the ark of salvation that he had built by vocation. Moses on the other hand did not reach the promised land, he saw it only from a distance. When we receive a call we do not know if we are to save ourselves, too, or only others. But what really matters is to keep walking, until the very end Mount Nebo can be a good place to die if before we have seen our people reach salvation.
Usually these blocked vocations arrive in times of great crises, when the natural habituation to emotions boils down to cancel the ability to experience pleasure from emotional consumption. An absolute dryness of feeling settles in, which is confused with spiritual aridity, and having identified the vocation with that first and only nourishment, people feel lost. Sometimes this great drought can open a new phase and mark the beginning of spiritual life. But this happy event is rare, because those who are in these "erotic" arid phases, instead of being helped to make a radical change of register, are very often encouraged to continue their inner consumption to regain the lost emotions. And the disease becomes incurable. They do not understand that in order to move from one stage of life to another they only need to learn to die.
No less common is the block at the stage of philia, which is harder to spot as illness and vocational failure, because the line between philia and agape is far more blurred than the one between eros and philia. Persons who reach the stage of philia experience fruits that resemble the ones typical of agape. When, leaving the individual eros behind, the chorus of community life is reached is we live a new kind of fertility, especially when compared with the sterility of an erotic phase prolonged beyond its natural span. This is why it is easy to be trapped by the community-philia, and not to arrive ever to the true agape phase. When we reach the age of philia, our individual identity ends up coinciding with the community identity almost inevitably. We identify with it to the point of not being able to say "I" but only "we." The arrival of the phase of agape then becomes a liberation from community philia, a great blessing which comes as a wound that can be very deep and painful. We cannot pass the age of eros and enter that of agape without crossing philia, because the agape communities is the resurrection of the philiia communities, and hence they are essential. When, in fact, personal identity has completely identified with a given group for years, to move to the new freedom of agape we go through a real death. The philia community must disappear to make way for the agape community. This disappearance brings with it all: the charisma, our personality, not infrequently even faith. This loss is total and radical, but there is no other way to reach the land of agape. The wisdom of those who accompany people during the crisis of philia is knowing how to indicate the promised land beyond the waves sweeping away everything, knowing to show a tree beyond the sea that is a lot more fruitful and lush than the dying bonsai.
Only those who have already passed the stage of philia (and that of eros) should accompany those who are still struggling in the ford. Too many rivers Jordan are never crossed because they have never been shown by the guides, or were confused with the River Nile of ancient slavery.
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The Voices of the Days/13 - What really matters is to keep walking, until the very end
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/06/2016
“Once married you are punished by never feeling any kind of sweetness apart from what belongs to all.” (rough translation from the Italian original)
Davide Maria Turoldo, L’Uomo (Man)
The biggest challenge in all community experience is being able to create a "we" that does not end up devouring the "I" of the individuals who have created it. Collective nouns are good and on the side of life only if they are accompanied and preceded by names and personal pronouns. The "we" without the "I" is the origin of all community pathologies and illiberal regimes, even when they arise as a promise of liberation and are clothed with the robes of salvation.
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The Voices of the Days/11 - Daily work is the leaven of any career or vocation
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 22/05/2016
“Indeed, the tension of existence and the spur that moves us from the deep to live it reside in the fact that every stage of life is new, and had never happened before, and is unique, and then goes for ever”. As soon as you no longer feel the spur to live life, a feeling of monotony comes that can even grow to despair "
Romano Guardini, Stages of Life
The spiritual dimension of life is real and concrete as much as the organic and psychic ones. We would never have started looking at the stars in amazement, writing a poem, honouring our dead, if in our flesh and bones we were not inhabited by an invisible breath that escapes us and loves us. Honour, sincerity, beauty and meekness and all the beatitudes are spiritual matters, since neither the blood nor the flesh can reveal them to us.
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The stages of life are also those of the spirit that grows, evolves and changes every morning and you wake up being different from the person that had lain down the night before. One of the great forms of poverty of our time is the negation of spiritual life or its reduction to biology or psychic activity. And not seeing the spirit in the flesh and the emotions, there are no more masters capable of distinguishing spiritual depression from psychological. We cannot see the diseases of the spirit and we confuse them with others that look similar. We do not treat them, and so there is too much spiritual suffering in the world that is not understood or loved.
The life of the spirit also has its stages that are different for each person, just as and more than the stages of bodily ageing. In the spiritual evolution of people there are some very important and crucial events. One of these is the so-called vocation, a not too rare fact that occurs when a voice breaks in to the spirit of a person one day and calls him by name. This is an event that is not announced, unexpected and always amazing, one that changes life forever. Sometimes these vocations take the forms and language of religion, sometimes they are expressed through other languages. We do not understand many things in life because we think that spiritual life is only a religious matter and not primarily and fundamentally an anthropological reality. There are a lot of people who feel being called inside by a voice and do not know if it is or do not want to call it God. The voice is there and calls even when we do not know where it comes from - biblical humanism is the following of a voice that is not seen and has an unpronounceable name. Only the idols have obvious names and faces, and they are mute.
Therefore, when a person goes through an authentic spiritual encounter, their journey through the stages of life is enriched and complicated. First of all, at whatever age this meeting occurs, it always generates an extraordinary experience of youth. Nothing like an adult vocation makes you young again. It is the only elixir of youth available under the sun, much more powerful and radical than falling in love or becoming grandparents. It is really feeding from the tree of life. This youthful spirit has immediate effects in the psychological dimension and sometimes in the body, too. We no longer feel the limits, melancholy and cynicism disappear, the world becomes a place to change and improve. Above all, the eyes start to shine with a typical and unmistakable light, which perhaps is the most obvious beauty of every youth, and which becomes wonderful in the young days of the spirit. In this sense, every vocation is a baptism, it is death and resurrection, it is rebirth, it is returning to the womb of another mother.
Vocation, with its typical youth is, however, particularly sensitive when it concerns people who are young also by birth. The youthfulness of the body combined with that of the spirit unleashes a powerful energy, which is capable of the biggest and craziest actions, which only a young man touched in the spirit can do. It produces unlimited generosity, infinite docility. You can and want to do everything. This combination of several types of youth, however, generates another effect, too: it stretches the historical time of youth. Those who receive a vocation in young age also receive the gift of a longer youth. The bright spell of the eyes lasts for a long time, and its brings many years in which you stay really young, evangelical children - and, in a sense, you remain a bit like children for life. It is a youth that is as much longer as the great call was stronger and the greater the natural and moral talents of the person are. This long and good natural-spiritual youth is almost always the harbinger of a long and beautiful adult life and a postponed and good old age. It is the deposit of a great future gift. It delays the arrival of adulthood, but when it comes, it can be very beautiful and very fruitful.
In fact, the ability of the future to keep the promises of a long and splendid vocational youth depends a lot on the use that those responsible for communities, organizations, movements or charismatic ideals make of the infinite generosity of the time of youth. Whoever finds themselves having responsibility and authority in respect of a person in this age of life, has a difficult and delicate role. They should absolutely cherish the charm, because unrealistic, enchanted, idealistic and inexperienced youth is a rare and precious common good. But they have to be very careful, because if spiritual childhood blocks human and psychological development, it may happen that after a long youth one day you wake up old, without ever having been adults.
And it is in this typical "educational risk" that the discourse about work fits in. The generosity and the heroism typical of these young people, often lead them to neglect or not to give value to the their previous or future studies or profession, so strong is the desire to devote themselves entirely to the new reality. And so their vocation, rather than serving and strengthening their human and work talent, often turns into a kind of profession of their own selves over time, which absorbs everything else.
It was not by chance that ora et labora was in the DNA of the first monastic experiences. Even the early Franciscans lived of their work in general. Many reforms of monastic life have been especially reforms of labour, because the ora tended to devour the labora with time. Ora helps labora, but also work helps spiritual life, because it is a spiritual and charismatic activity in itself. And those who manage to save and develop a job while living within a charismatic community knows this very well. They know if they have saved a real job, because it is very difficult to really work when a vocation develops within ideal-driven communities. They do many "little jobs" to keep themselves busy, but they rarely do actual work, with a schedule, responsibility, discipline and all the toil of work.
At the root of this error, which is serious and common in the formation of young vocations, there is an aristocratic and gnostic vision which considers "spiritual" activities greater than those of work, as if a liturgy or Mass were always and by nature more moral activities and more worthy of an hour of simply working - a thesis sometimes supported by "creative" exegeses of the Gospel story of Martha and Mary. And so it is not surprising that one of the most common, although much undervalued, crises of adult religious life depends on the failure of the development of the work dimension in youth. Because you see work as a necessary evil that takes valuable time from to the only good "work" of the mission. And even when a trade (for example, teaching or curing) is inherent and intrinsic in the mission, it is even more important that the work dimension should be distinct, looked after and cared for, and never used instrumentally for the purpose of the mission, and therefore in a misrepresented way. Only a loved and respected job can be left one day, when life itself calls us elsewhere. We always get "attached" to work which is done poorly, when it becomes a "servant" or "master." However, if work is seen and recognized for what it really is, you leave it with the same painful dignity with which you leave your free child to follow the path that you had not thought of for him.  
Therefore, to work is true laity, in other words, it is an expression of being simply men and women. Work is the ability to feel and hear the heartbeat of your city, your time, your real people.
It is not always possible to really work in life. But we must live this non-work as poverty, not as a privilege or election. Suffering for not having become workers, and sometimes finding ourselves healed inside thanks to this suffering. A community leader who has really worked or suffered for not having been able to work will ensure that young people who arrive in the communities following a vocation can receive the gift of doing a real job well. Maybe for a few years, for a short time, but a real job, not "little jobs".
One day as I was leaving from Mass, I saw a worker who repaired a fault of the sewers. While thanking him for his work, in that beautiful gratitude I felt the same taste of the Eucharist (eu-charis) again. When we separate the altar bread from the work that generated it, we break the bridge between the temple and the city, and our religions do not save anyone. The bread and wine may become the sacrament of death and resurrection because they were already dead and resurrected when they became food and drink thanks to our work. But when the Eucharist loses contact with gratitude for real work, we do not understand it anymore, bread is not multiplied, the crowds are not feed. A society that no longer sees work does not have the anthropological and spiritual categories to see and understand the mystery of the Eucharist, either. Those who know the hard work and the beauty of the work that transforms the grapes and flour into wine and bread can understand the value of donating them on the altar. The Eucharist is an authentically human and social event as long as it remains the fruit of the earth, the vines and the work of man. And if passing between the stages of life we have lost our sense of the Eucharist, we can find it again by re-learning to work. Our daily work is the leaven of every bread.
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    [metadesc] => Il nostro tempo tende a  non riconoscere l’esistenza della vita spirituale, e quindi non capisce le sue tipiche gioie, e non sa curare le sue malattie. Il lavoro è altissima attività spirituale, se è vero lavoro. Quando da giovani si riceve una vocazione non è facile lavorare veramente. Ma il lavoro ci aiuta anche a intuire qualcosa del mistero dell’Eucaristia.
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    [text] => 
The Voices of the Days/11 - Daily work is the leaven of any career or vocation
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 22/05/2016
“Indeed, the tension of existence and the spur that moves us from the deep to live it reside in the fact that every stage of life is new, and had never happened before, and is unique, and then goes for ever”. As soon as you no longer feel the spur to live life, a feeling of monotony comes that can even grow to despair "
Romano Guardini, Stages of Life
The spiritual dimension of life is real and concrete as much as the organic and psychic ones. We would never have started looking at the stars in amazement, writing a poem, honouring our dead, if in our flesh and bones we were not inhabited by an invisible breath that escapes us and loves us. Honour, sincerity, beauty and meekness and all the beatitudes are spiritual matters, since neither the blood nor the flesh can reveal them to us.
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The Voices of the Days/9 - The temptation to "conform" and the antidote of "haecceity"
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/05/2016
“What needs to be there in the heart, in education is that love of life should never fail our children. ... And what is a human being's vocation but the highest expression of his love of life?”
Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
Every vocation is a radical experience of beauty; it is first and foremost a wonderful encounter. Those who have got to know this beauty continue to long for it for life. It is a meeting that happens only once, but it is so strong and radical that it changes us forever. At that time the person makes the most sublime human experience: they understand who they really are, which is something beautiful and great. They feel a tabernacle for the infinite, tiny but immense.
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For this reason, these vocations and these 'promises' are irrevocable. You can get out of a convent or stop painting for too much pain, but you can never quit the beauty before, because, simply, that vocation is us, it is the most lively and true part of us. On that day one gets the impression that the whole world was created only for us, for me. Some people go through a special experience as children, during childhood: they have the impression of being inside a movie, a cartoon, a play, where their parents, friends, teachers and the people around them are interpreting a script, written completely and only for their happiness. When the day of the calling comes the experience of childhood is relived: we can feel it, and we are sure that everything around us was created as a gift for us, for me. That everything, inside and out, is a unique, immense, wondrous spectacle of loving beauty, infallible and obvious. The quality of a life and its fruits entirely depend on this meeting. Almost everything is at stake there. These epiphanies of beauty are particularly strong and pure in artistic and religious vocations, but it is the same experience repeated in various forms in authentic work and scientific vocations as well, or in that decisive meeting with the one who will become our wife or our husband.
It is a call to embark on a mission, a task, a destiny, to take our rightful place in the world. It is moving out of the house and towards the promised land, to build an ark of salvation, for the liberation of slaves, even if just one.
But if the vocation is us, it grows with us; it takes the talent of our character, our work, our life, simply. And when the call takes place inside the community, the relationship between our vocation, that of others with whom we live, and the institution in which it is born and grows becomes decisive. And that's where you risk a lot, almost everything, for/of the flowering of a vocation. Many wilt or get spent because at some point the individual-community dynamic breaks down, for the mismanagement of the distance that is created between the development of the individual's own vocation and that of the community over time. This widening gap is inevitable, because every vocation is unique and unrepeatable, and therefore its forms and its times of development can never coincide with the forms and the ways of the community, because when they coincide the development of the person and the community stops. It is in the discard pile, among the slits, in non-alignments where life is generated and regenerated. Therefore, the block of the flowering of the vocation does not depend from this distance, which is very good, but from its exercise. It is here that the worst mistakes are usually made.
By far the most common mistake is committed by the leaders of the community, when facing the discomfort and the difficulty of managing the estrangement between the forms and ways in which the individual lives their vocation and the 'normal' ones, they think that they can eliminate discomfort and difficulty simply by asking the person to conform to the times and ways of the community, losing what constituted its original note. This way they lose sight of what the medieval philosophers called haecceity, i.e. that dimension of life to which a daisy I am seeing now is this daisy, and not just a daisy. This is what makes me see Giovanna, not only the Franciscan nun, who she also is. People are concrete, never abstract, and the most concrete dimension of all existence is their vocation. Sp the first wrong abstraction is the very idea of ​​community. They forget that communities are made of people who are all different, and they estimate a kind of an average that becomes a most abstract form of 'we' against which they measure the deviations and errors of the routes of individual concrete persons. It is a very common and very dangerous operation, because in the name of an abstract common good concrete persons are suppressed and put out. And maybe you also can build people who coincide with the average - it's a pity that in the process of transformation exactly the best part of the person is lost and often that of the community, too.
The temptation-error to forget haecceity is very common, because communities have the tools to achieve this conformation in their repertoire. Constitutions, statutes, regulations, decisions and resolutions of the governing councils also aim to maintain the unity of the community over time, and to allow the government of a body without dispersing and falling apart in the many different interpretations and often in the disagreements of the various members. But there is another thing that wise governments know very well: that the actual exercise of this power must be very rare, because a vocation reduced to compliance almost always ends up losing its splendour and its freedom, its most sublime beauty.
When, however, the individual paths - which are by their nature lateral and tangential - are discouraged and repressed, the myth of Procrustes is revived who amputated the legs of his 'guests' that were too tall to fit in his bed and stretched the ones who were too short. Procrustean communities use regulations, statutes and the words of the founders as materials to build a one-size bed, in which they force everybody to enter, disrespectful of the different vocational measures of individuals. The crucial aspect that makes this reductionist process very common and in some ways almost inevitable is the role played by the single person. It is those who have received a vocation that begin to numb their own soul to make it fall into the only measure of the 'average bed' of the community, and then to make real voluntary self-amputation to cut the difference between their own, real vocational measure and the one requested by the community. The most precious and very rare wisdom of those responsible for vocational communities is therefore in preventing these self-destructive processes, even when they come from the same people who, especially in the early years, derive a certain comfort from the adjustment to the average culture. We are all truly accountable to a vocation, especially when we are still young, if we help it not to lose its own surplus, if we cultivate and care for our own uniqueness; because when we don't encourage and maybe even fight vocational haecceity, vocations do not keep their promise of beauty over time and go bad. The dawns do not become noon, the springs never see the season of ripe fruits.
A virtuous community-organization is rather similar to a skilled artisan who builds the 'bed' so that it conforms to the real person: people with their variety of vocations are the ones that make communities fruitful. They are difficult to manage - just like life or children are. They are gorgeous - just like life or children are. Only people, in their mystery, contain the active ingredient of the evolution of the community and the fulfilment of their charisma. The Procrustean syndrome eventually amputates the future of all. The fate of these sad communities is in fact enrolled in the epilogue of the same myth: Procrustes was captured and killed by the same condemnation with which he had afflicted his victims.
At other times a vocation is blocked by a wrong way of relating to the past, to the first beauty. The purpose of that first meeting was the revelation of our place in the world (and as the word says, every re-velation is an act of unveiling a new covering at the same time). The fatigue of those who keep a vocation within themselves lies in the ability to resist the longing in the absence of the first beauty, to be able to resist turning back in search of the origin. At night we dream of that long-ago meeting, we go back to the place where it happened many times, we look at the photos and read the letters and diaries of the early days. But nothing happens, the miracle does not come back, because it cannot return. Until one day we begin to understand in a gentle way that that ancient beauty is not behind us, but - quite simply - it is in front of and around us. It is not the return of Ulysses, it is the setting out of Abraham.
Sometimes this new, charming and perfectly free phase of life begins with the discovery of the beauty of nature. We had lived in the country for fifty years, and one day we discover the flowers. We watch them and finally we see them inside. We see the same beauty that once enchanted us and lit us. In a thistle bud we see all the beauty of the universe, and we recognize that first beauty which has never disappeared from our land.
Finally, there is a great hope: this journey of the new beauty can happen even inside Procrustean communities, even when we lost a lot of the overflow. As long as a little remained of it, maybe just the memory of the first entirety. And, like plants, from that little rest that's still alive we can start to bloom again. 
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    [metadesc] => La terra è piena di vocazioni, sono una esperienza antropologica primaria. Sono un incontro con una bellezza grande, che lascia una eterna nostalgia. Il processo più difficile e delicato è la gestione del rapporto tra l’unicità di ogni vocazione e lo sviluppo e i tempi delle comunità, che spesso diventano comunità-Procuste, che riducono la ricchezza delle singole persone in una unica misura.
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    [text] => 
The Voices of the Days/9 - The temptation to "conform" and the antidote of "haecceity"
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 08/05/2016
“What needs to be there in the heart, in education is that love of life should never fail our children. ... And what is a human being's vocation but the highest expression of his love of life?”
Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
Every vocation is a radical experience of beauty; it is first and foremost a wonderful encounter. Those who have got to know this beauty continue to long for it for life. It is a meeting that happens only once, but it is so strong and radical that it changes us forever. At that time the person makes the most sublime human experience: they understand who they really are, which is something beautiful and great. They feel a tabernacle for the infinite, tiny but immense.
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The Voices of the Days/7 - The seductive, crossless gospels of the false reformers
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/04/2016
"Serious and terrible mistake it was, the invention of the crosses.”
The Gospel of Thomas 
The processes of change in ideal-driven organizations and charismatic communities are particularly complex and delicate because, unlike in many economic or bureaucratic organizations where change is planned and guided towards the objectives set by the owners, in ideal based organisations reform is actually a march into the unknown.
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When the self-styled reformer is a false prophet, he presents himself as the bearer of certainty about change, as someone who knows what the good is that awaits the community at the end of the path advocated, wanted and promoted by him. Like an angel who is the bearer of only and all light.
One of the elements that make it complex and difficult to overcome the moments of crisis in ideal-driven and charismatic communities is the appearance of false reformers. If, in fact, the community is not alive anymore, to the point of not even feeling the need for reform, neither good nor bad "prophets" are born into it. If the community is alive, the good and the bad prophets tend to appear simultaneously, and the more lively and fruitful the original charisma still is, the more prophets emerge. The abundance of false prophets is also a way to tell the charismatic vitality of a community. And the more light there is in the charisma, the more frequent, subtle and dangerous Gnostic heresies are. The early churches were full of apostles and false prophets. Therefore we must not make the mistake of thinking that positive phases only produce good prophets and those of crisis only bad ones, because historical reality shows the exact opposite to be the case. After all, it was the same spiritual fertility of early Christianity to generate Paul of Tarsus and Simon Magus.
The historical and concrete forms assumed by false prophecies are many. In ideal-driven and / or charismatic communities, the most subtle and pernicious false prophecies and false reforms are those that have recourse to the register of light. They are variations on and updates of the ancient Gnostic heresy, because they present themselves as an offer of new light and different knowledge. Gnosticism, in its rich and varied expressions, was the main ideological enemy of the Christianity of the first centuries. Penetrated in many communities, it could have decreed the death of Christianity if it had not been fought hard and eventually defeated thanks to the action of the best prophets and theologians - from Irenaeus to Augustine.
Spiritual and ideal-connected experiences are naturally and radically exposed to Gnostic seduction, because of them being essentially experiences of light and intelligence. Those who follow an ideal or a charisma are attracted by the new light and the different words (logos).
They discover the gift of new eyes that show new horizons, new heaven, new beauties, and with a bright intelligence that opens a different understanding of the world and things.
It should not be surprising, therefore, that in these communities the Gnostic phase arrives readily. It threatens especially those with the brightest and most spiritual charismas, because it is also a disease of these which develops as a form of neurosis: their most brilliant part gets ill. Spiritual experiences remain authentic and generate good life until they keep their connection with history, while they remain incarnate and therefore limited experiences, partial and intertwined with darkness. As long as the spirit remains in the flesh and the one follows the laws and the rhythms of the other. Many charismatic experiences are lost upon their birth because the spirit becomes disembodied and evaporates in search of perfection without any shade. For these reasons, Gnostic phases also accompany the historical existence of the founders, and if communities survive beyond the life of their founders it is because these temptations have not had the upper hand - many communities born from genuine charismas got spent after a few years because their founders were eventually seduced and devoured by Gnostic neurosis.
But it is in the phase right after foundation that the Gnostic temptation becomes almost obligatory and always decisive. Facing the end of the era of true "miracles" and "resurrections" that had been the normal way of life of the community's founding phase, some people start to think they can recreate the early wonders with certain techniques and spiritual drugs. They do like athletes who, no longer able to repeat their first record, instead of changing their training and working hard, fall into the trap of doping. Gnosticism is a form of spiritual doping which promises the performance of youth without work and effort, and if it is not decisively countered it infects the whole community very quickly.
It is, in fact, on this suffering and frustration over not being able to repeat the first charismatic performance, on the unconquerable nostalgia for the signs and the climate of earlier times where the Gnostic plant easily takes root. Instead of starting from the core of the first message, necessarily made of flesh and spirit, the Gnostic reformer performs a twofold task: reconstructing a partial and disembodied image of the original charisma and adding secret revelations of which - he says - he has come into possession through private experiences or special communications, and which are adorned by the spectacular and pseudo-mystic elements and techniques that supposedly allow for a deeper access to the ideal and spiritual message. The Gnostic type of reform is therefore accompanied by the promise of special mystical experiences that are accessible only to those few who have been introduced to the secrets and mysteries, around which it establishes a messianic power and its main promise. These are always elitist, non-transparent experiences that are and never popular and never on the side of the poor. The devaluation of concrete experience and the body then creates almost inevitably an ethical exception, which allows for enlightened carnal acts and actions that are harmful to others, but legitimate and necessary for the inhabitants of this new "colour" kingdom.
They are Baroque constructs, they are colourful, worlds populated by many fantastic beings and "truths" that do not appear in the first, original message. And the followers of these false prophets soon take the looks and attitudes of the initiated; they undergo an aesthetic change also in the expression of their eyes and facial features, and separate from the not (yet) illuminated people as the new "saints".
When the charisma is alive and healthy it is very easy to identify false prophets who are moved by personal material interests or are intent schismatics; however, the false prophets of light and intelligence are much more difficult to recognize and call by name, because they use the same symbolic repertoire and the same words that had founded the community one day and attracted many people to it. They are devouring wolves disguised as meek lambs, and sometimes as the good shepherd. The severe crises of ideal-driven communities are always crises of light and intelligence. For this reason the choice of heresies of light and intelligence is particularly abundant, especially and exactly during the most serious crises. And for the same reason many times false prophets are not recognized, they are successful, and they kill communities.
A fundamental job to manage deep crises and major reforms is, therefore, being able to recognize the Gnostic symptoms since they appear as renewal and salvation. It is a rather difficult job, because the Gnostic reformer, unlike other false prophets, uses truths and words that are actually present in the original, genuine charisma, and builds his speech up using parts and phrases from the speeches of the founder. From the beginning the intelligence of the snake has manifested itself in history in words and discourses similar to and more seductive than those of Elohim. The Gnostic chromosomes are in the DNA of the genuine charisma, because the gnosis builds salvation combining some foundational elements of the genome in a different way. It deletes the ordinary, normal or gray ones, as well as the mestizos, and reassembles only the brightest part of the original genetic material, creating a body that has all the features present in the first body. And so the Gnostic reform appears tremendously charming and bright: as the elixir of eternal youth, as the tree of life, like a picture of us when we were twenty years old that magically takes life.
The Gnostic reform proposals are therefore presented as days where it is always noon, and in the name of this light without shadow they refuse the dark dimension, which is only so because it is true, and of the limit. Incarnation, imperfection and sin become cursed words, condemned as the scandal to be overcome in order to create the new era of full maturity which is about to begin. This is the proposal of an eschaton in reverse: while the authentic spiritual experiences live an imperfect already and point to a not yet which is never reached in full, the gnosis will present itself as a perfected already, the completion of an imperfect already have. Gnostic reformers are always brighter than the founders, because they lack the shadow of true reality. Only the body can cast a shadow when it gets in contact with sunlight.
In these false reforms death is absent from the scene of their fake passions. They are "gospels" without the Calvary and the cross, the stone does not roll and the tomb is just a comfortable bedroom. These are very bad takes on the mourning of life. They reject life in order not to get their feet dirty on the only pathway possible for humans under the sun. Resurrections without crucifixes do not save anyone. They are ghosts that drift apart from the wounded flesh of others and from the victims, and imprison people inside cages of psychic and emotional consumerism. The Gnostic false prophets are revealed by the absence of the marks of the nails on their bodies and the bodies of those that they touch and embrace.
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    [metadesc] => Le eresie gnostiche sono quelle più subdole e pericolose nelle comunità ideali e carismatiche. Si presentano come riforma della sola luce e senza ombra, e sono segnate dall’ "intelligenza del serpente". Ma, se impariamo a discernere i segni, possono essere riconosciute e combattute.
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The Voices of the Days/7 - The seductive, crossless gospels of the false reformers
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 17/04/2016
"Serious and terrible mistake it was, the invention of the crosses.”
The Gospel of Thomas 
The processes of change in ideal-driven organizations and charismatic communities are particularly complex and delicate because, unlike in many economic or bureaucratic organizations where change is planned and guided towards the objectives set by the owners, in ideal based organisations reform is actually a march into the unknown.
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The Voices of the Days/5 - The work of a reformer is a humble and miraculous craft
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 03/04/2016
"A community is never founded once and for all. The first founder cannot be the one and only point of reference. Society's needs change; communities evolve; their members grow. They need to be constantly 're-founded'. The founding myth remains but the form in which it is embodied is called to change. It is here that the presence of wise 're-formers' is required. They are capable of advancing, maintaining and deepening the founding myth, pruning and reshaping what seemed essential in the early years but was not really."
Jean Vanier, The Founding Myth
The stories of communities, organizations and movements that have been able to live beyond the era of the founders tend to present some constant features: they usually have had reformers and have been able to tell new stories alongside those of the founding era.
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Reformers make space for a charisma that's foundational for the community to stay alive and fruitful and to return to the original charismatic questions, changing the answers given to them. When the reformers don't appear, or are ostracized and not recognized, charismatic ideals and experiences inevitably decline due to the lack of grip on the present, and, consequently, because of a radical shortage of young people and 'vocations' due to the inability to translate the first message and the first experience. Its most involved and motivated members experience a deep moral and spiritual crisis: in a first phase they suffer for the lack of young people and new vocations, then they become indifferent and in the end they even feel some joy, because their disappointment leads them not to wish anyone to repeat their same sad existential experience. Therefore this crisis manifests itself as a no-good way of aging, leading to read life as decadence and decline. When and if these symptoms emerge in the concrete charismatic communities, it is clear that there is an urgent need for reform.
At the stage of the foundation, charismas generate more seeds than just those that manage to flourish in the first season: there are some intended to sprout in the subsequent ones, when the first seeds will have become old. The full potential of a charisma is greater than what can be manifested in the times of the foundation. There are deep veins that do not surface right away: despite being connected to the same source they are intended to emerge during droughts or after earthquakes. The concrete forms of poverty, loved and embraced by the Church during her two millennia, have been much more than those loved and embraced by Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples. The poor of Mother Teresa, Francesca Cabrini, Don Oreste Benzi and Hans Frei are not those who lived in Pilate’s Palestine: these new charismas have done "greater things" for poverty in the name of Jesus Christ than Jesus himself or his historical community. A similar process is repeated for each individual charisma, which in the course of its development uncovers dimensions that did not emerge during the historical life of the founder. The founder creates the community-movement through a process of discovering the charisma, which is revealed gradually, and during the community's entire existence. The more difficult part is to realize, in an already established community, that this progressive discovery of the charisma continues even after the first foundation, and when this process is stopped or interrupted it is the first charisma that becomes sterile.
Sometimes it is the historical Francis who understands that the church to rebuild is not the church of San Damiano; at other times it is the living spirit of Francis between the Franciscans that understands and does it. It is a Francis after Francis to complete the foundation of Francis and Bernard. However, when the foundation process is stuck with the first generation because it is considered complete and final with the death of the founder, it prevents the charisma from maturing and being revealed to the full and from illuminating and explaining the facts and events of the founding generation, too. Just as we do it at home, when we place some apples placed among the kiwis to make them mature. In a mysterious but real inter-temporal kind of solidarity, the Francis that lives on after himself serves the first Francis, too. We would know less of his charisma without Bonaventure or Bernardino of Siena. The first beneficiaries with the courage of the reformers are the founders themselves, since they can say new and sometimes different things thanks to those who freed them from the limitations of their historical time. Reformers make the rocks roll away from the 'tombs' of their founders. They are 'resurrected' from their graves. True reforms are not only the actualization of the charisma: they are a continuation of the first foundation, with different but no less wonderful fruits and miracles. The second 'miracles' are essential for unlocking the first ones.
Once deemed so precious, why are then reforms rare and always very painful? 
The first charismatic groups, in order to survive in the time in which they were born (all societies have a tendency to kill the prophets that could save them) had to carry out a sort of hybridization between new and old in order to prevent the old from rejecting and choking the new. So, around the first good shrubs, the first generation naturally develops an ancillary vegetation to protect new seedlings, which allows them to flourish in the shade of other, more robust and weatherproof plants. This way, charismatic intuitions are surrounded by an entire subsidiary bush; they are covered with infrastructure, languages, written and unwritten rules, sometimes self-produced and sometimes inherited from tradition or the specific historical context. At a certain point this hybridization - which is a different process and one that is parallel to the ideological production that accompanies the development of an ideal that we have already discussed on these pages - becomes a straitjacket, which blocks growth and shuts down the future. The reforms come to slow down and, in the happiest cases, break the initial coating which has gradually become a straitjacket, the protective shield that has turned into a rigid steel armour.
The extreme difficulty of the operation of liberation is found in the difficulty of recognizing the straitjacket of the 'person' who wears it. In the biggest and richest charismatic communities, hybridization between old and new has been profound and lasted for many years, and so pieces of armour got into the flesh, and the skin has grown over parts of the armour. The first place that encloses the intermingling of old and new is the very rule written by the founder and left to his heirs, where items of novelty and coating coexist, without the founder himself being aware of it, or perhaps in a small part only.
Reforms, then, are painful because by removing the armour a few shreds of skin are also taken off. This is where the almost invincible tendency comes from whereby communities reject the very reformers of whom they would have a vital need. The natural and necessary need to protect and save the charisma ends up blocking the attempts at reform. In the name of its own purity the charisma gets condemned to sterility. Purity becomes unfruitful purism, for not having had enough charismatic courage to snatch a few flaps of skin, creating a wound through which the only salvation would have passed.
Every translation is also a betrayal, and the fear of betrayal should not prevent the success of the translation. Because without translation, the beautiful poems of the charismas are incomprehensible to those who would listen to them, but speak and understand a different language.
There are many experiences and charismatic ideals that today would still be alive and / or fruitful if they had been able to generate a reform from the pain of a wound. 
Reforms succeed way too infrequently because the true reformers are suffocated or because false prophets are followed - or both. Also because wise reformers and false prophets are very much alike, even too much. And the reformers that are too easy to spot are almost always false reformers. The first criterion for recognizing a reformer is the fact that he does not present himself to the community as such. We should always be wary of the reformers who attribute this title to themselves and introduce themselves as 'reformers by vocation' to the people. The first art of reformers is that of the craftsman: they collect the stones of yesterday, sometimes even the rubble, and with these they build a new San Damiano with humility and hope: it may be smaller than the old church, however, in its humble silence you can listen to the first voice, and sometimes learn to pray again.
When the reforms are successful, communities live an authentic resurrection, and then a Pentecost. All the different languages are understood among each other, and you find yourself with new stories to tell. Reforms are also a new evangelization, the gift of good stories to be told to others and to each other amongst us. The first foundational stories are complemented by new ones that make us live and sing the first ones again. A crisis is always a shortage of stories that are capable of con-moving us inside and together. Reforms re-populate communities and the world with new stories: with the dead who rise again, the blind who see, water turned to wine or the poor who become citizens of another kingdom.
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    [text] => 
The Voices of the Days/5 - The work of a reformer is a humble and miraculous craft
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 03/04/2016
"A community is never founded once and for all. The first founder cannot be the one and only point of reference. Society's needs change; communities evolve; their members grow. They need to be constantly 're-founded'. The founding myth remains but the form in which it is embodied is called to change. It is here that the presence of wise 're-formers' is required. They are capable of advancing, maintaining and deepening the founding myth, pruning and reshaping what seemed essential in the early years but was not really."
Jean Vanier, The Founding Myth
The stories of communities, organizations and movements that have been able to live beyond the era of the founders tend to present some constant features: they usually have had reformers and have been able to tell new stories alongside those of the founding era.
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The Voices of the Days/3 - Charismas are the founding force of vulnerable but re-generable communities
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/03/2016
“The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the sense of ambiguity. When he limits himself to accepting ambiguity, it is called equivocation. But among the great it becomes a theme; it contributes to establishing certainties rather than menacing them." 
M. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy
Much more than interest, ideals are the force that pushes the world forward. Sometimes we are the ones that generate them in the brightest part of our soul. At other times we are 'called' by the ideals of others: one day we find out that they were already living inside us, just waiting to be lit up.
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And so we begin the most sublime and generative types of adventures. In many cases, the greatest and most innovative ideals capable of generating a community are born of a person with a gift or a special charisma that can lead to collective experiences - at times very important ones, capable of transforming their own environment and their own time. Here the ideal is deeply intertwined with the personality of the 'founder'. It takes the founder's flesh, it grows and feeds off the founder's talents and character traits. This intertwining of the charisma and personality of the founders is the source and strength of 'charismatic communities'. But there comes a time when, in order to continue its development without getting blocked, the community must begin a long and complex process of distinguishing the 'pearl' from the 'field' that has kept it, to separate the personality of the founder from the 'personality' of the charisma. In fact, if the charisma coincides with the talent of the person who embodies and announces it, it does not have the strength to go beyond the very person. However, when the charisma is rather excessive in relation to the person, and hence it creates communities and movements, this surplus becomes the source that feeds the community after its founder, precisely because it is bigger than him / her.
All great charismas are greater than the charismatic person. The identification of this surplus, and so this 'gap' between the charisma and the person containing it, is the fundamental operation to which all followers of a charismatic community are called. Community, however, looks like a rather sophisticated collective work because it requires the ability to understand that at the root of that specific community there wasn't only an ideal-charisma: there was also its ideology.
Every ideology has its own life cycle. Its birth takes place very early on. It begins with the idealization of some key figures in the community, the founder(s) or other people who have special talents or gifts. It then goes on from the ideal announced by the leader to the idealization of his/her person, so that they gradually begins to lose touch with their own limits, errors, the typical shadows of the human condition of all the others. Around the leader a myth and a mythology are created, and they make the person gradually more and more different and unique, with a kind of ethical and spiritual infallibility. As a result, the circle of the people who work and interact with leaders gradually decreases, and the relationship of these few becomes increasingly asymmetric. Meeting or talking with the leader becomes a rare event, a ritual and mythical occasion. And the initial fraternity is pushed more and more to the background.
This is how the paradox is verified: those who have received a charisma of fraternity and announce it often find themselves in the objective condition of not being able to live in the community that they themselves have created. The first victim of ideology is in fact the original community’s fraternity. In the first, genuine and pure phase of ideals, fraternity is often the fundamental principle that involves everyone, including the founders and those who have prominent roles or responsibilities. When the community grows in size, some of these figures gradually take leave from the game of fraternity and equality, and are wrapped in an exceptional status, which is almost never limited to the founder alone but includes his entire entourage. The stronger and the more exceptional the charismatic qualities of the founders are the more likely and powerful the crisis of that fraternity and solidarity that once gave rise to the communities becomes. Communities founded by leaders with little spiritual talent are generally not very innovative, but they tend to remain more fraternal. Those that were born from great spiritual talents attract many more vocations but are much faster to produce ideologies that unhinge the original fraternity.
The second phase of ideology, which is a natural and logical follow-up to the first phase of the idealization of the founder, is the coincidence that is created between the charisma embodied and announced by the founder and his/her person. Since there is always a necessary and special relationship between a charisma and the person who embodies it, it is very difficult for the founders of charismatic communities, and especially their followers, to be able to distinguish the proposed ideal from the ideological idealization of charismatic people. The exceeding of the experience of the ideal over the charismatic person is composed by the charisma and the ideology. But in the foundation phase, the strength of the leader's personality covers out the ideology, which actually often becomes an essential element for the growth and development of the first generation of the community - the ideology is developed and empowered not only by the founder, but the community, too. The non-intentionality and good faith of the founders and their followers then makes the whole process even more complicated. However, when you switch from first to second and subsequent generations, it becomes essential to identify and distinguish the original charisma of the ideology that they have produced. If this delicate surgical operation is not attempted or if it is not successful, the ideology blocks the future development of the charisma, and often declares its end.
The crises of ideal-driven communities are produced by ideology, not by the ideal, and therefore can only be overcome by the elimination of ideology. But ideology acts primarily by making us unable to see it because it clothes itself in the ideal.
For this reason ideologies hate crises and deny them in a radical manner for a long time, until it becomes too obvious (and when it is usually too late to attempt a cure). A crucial mark of ideology is in fact the exclusion of the very possibility of crisis or decline from the horizon of future events. Everything is bathed in light, but much of this overall brightness is only the artificial light of ideology (true reality is always ambivalent). So when of the ideology of charisma sends the charisma in crisis in the second or third generation, the community does not have the categories to see, read, understand and overcome the crisis.
Therefore, the first step to overcoming this crisis would be in acknowledging that it is not the original message of the community (the charisma) that is in crisis but the ideology that grew from it. Identifying the ideological nature of the crisis, however, is very difficult, because the ideological creation is intrinsic to the foundation phase, and extends to some choices, words and attitudes of the very founders. The cure from the crisis would require a freedom of interpretation of the charisma and its ideology but it is precisely what the ideology has eliminated by its own development. Many charismatic communities seize to exist simply because of this. They could have been saved if they had tried, grabbing a scalpel, to penetrate into the living flesh, trying to remove the ideology to save the charisma.
And that's where different scenarios open up, of which the history of religions and ideal-driven movements is full. These scenarios are reminiscent of some dimensions present in the paradigms of two great Christological 'heresies' of the first centuries of Christianity: Monophysitism and Pelagianism.
The 'Monophysite' scenario (it recognizes only the divine nature, denying the human one) is the simplest and most common: as people are unwilling or unable to admit the human and therefore ideological dimension in the person of the founder, they make no distinction between the original ideal and its ideology, and everything becomes charisma. And so all the words, all actions, all the episodes of the historical figure of the charismatic leader have the same foundational weight and the same nature. The ideology remains unseen, and the disease becomes incurable because it grows without being noticed.
The other scenario is very reminiscent of Pelagianism, which was the great theological enemy of Saint Augustine. The spirit of Pelagius makes a new appearance when part of the community begins to think that they can 'save themselves alone', imagining an exit from the crisis unleashed by the historical figure of the founder and their original charisma. They seem to glimpse a salvation but without a 'saviour'. Facing the discomfort that arises from the inability to rid the charisma of its ideology, the crisis is interpreted as a crisis of the charisma and so that of the figure of the founder (not of their ideology). It is put aside, or used as a vague and distant ethical and symbolic reference, losing touch with the concrete and historical person. In these cases, the community / movement can also stay alive, but it becomes something substantially different from the first community.
The communities, however, that have managed to grow over time without falling into the new version of either of these two 'heresies', entered confidently in the heart of the historical experience of the foundation, the founder and their myth, taking all the risks that such a delicate operation entails. They wanted to do it because at some point, often for the intervention of authentic 'reformers', they realized that there was no other scenario if they wanted to stay alive.
Ideal-driven and charismatic communities stay alive over time if their every generation has the courage to try and revive the ideal from the ashes of its ideology. But first they have to be able to see it, understand it, accept it, love it, and request it to die.
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    [metadesc] => Gli ideali crescono assieme alle nostre ideologie. Le crisi delle comunità carismatiche dipendono dal non capire la natura ideologica. Per riuscire a superarle occorre evitare le eresie monofisita e pelagiana.
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    [text] => 
The Voices of the Days/3 - Charismas are the founding force of vulnerable but re-generable communities
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 13/03/2016
“The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the sense of ambiguity. When he limits himself to accepting ambiguity, it is called equivocation. But among the great it becomes a theme; it contributes to establishing certainties rather than menacing them." 
M. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy
Much more than interest, ideals are the force that pushes the world forward. Sometimes we are the ones that generate them in the brightest part of our soul. At other times we are 'called' by the ideals of others: one day we find out that they were already living inside us, just waiting to be lit up.
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