Readings: Is 58:9b-14; Ps 85; Lk 5:27-32.
«And he left everything, rose up and followed him». We could have heard these words many times. But we never manage to shake off a sense of vertigo. Why leave everything, in such a bold way? What would Jesus have said to that little man, what gesture, what look, led him to make that decision in so few seconds? Many details, which would satisfy our curiosity only superficially, escape us. The Gospels are notes meant to support the fragility of memory, not the report of an inspector. The heart of the matter, however, is clear: the meaning of life is revealed to us in a few seconds, in a quick decision like a “yes, I do.” Time later adds reasons and feelings to a total and radical decision, but this impulse remains necessary. Leaving everything does not mean leaving for the moment what you were doing, leaving unfinished the work of that morning, the papers and the accounts, but leaving everything. Everything.
Everything, because life is vocation, life is a response to a good design that someone wiser than you has conceived for you. Life is fulfilled only when it is a “yes”, a response to the love of Christ, whatever its length: eighty years, twenty-three like Marcos, or a few hours, like Gonzalo. The value of life is not measured by its duration, because infinite value means value a priori. You are worth something because you are loved, not because of the worldly success of what you do, or its quantity or duration.
Don Giussani, in a text written at the end of the 1950s – he had just brought to life the experience of Gioventù Studentesca, what would later become Comunione e Liberazione – expresses the meaning of life as vocation in this way: «God has called me from nothing. Among the billions of possible beings, He has chosen me and called me. My life is constituted by that call. My life continues because He continues to call me, preventing me from falling back into the silence of the nothingness from which I was drawn. My life is a Voice that calls me, the powerful Voice of Him to whom everything that exists is owed»1.
Without a doubt he had in mind the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. In class Don Giussani used this poem to explain vocation: There is a voice in my life / That I notice at the point where it dies; / Tired voice, lost voice, / With the tremor of the heartbeat: / Voice that comes longing, / That clings to the poor breast / To say so many and so many things… 2.
There is a voice in my life. Whether we want it or not, whether we listen or not, whether we are dazed or attentive, distracted or tired, there is an initiative that comes before our own. For this reason Don Giussani concludes, in a lapidary tone: «My life is a compelling response to that Voice that is calling me»3. Shaped by the criteria of the world, every time we hear “compelling” we immediately think of something negative. But God gives concepts their authentic meaning: for Him, obligation is not constraint but rather the opposite: the exaltation of my freedom and its fulfilment. God can only point to what is best, what makes us grow. He would never think of asking us for something that answers our desire only in part, or that is decidedly against our happiness. God thinks in terms of the whole. A compelling response does not mean that He deprives you of your opinion, talents or inclinations (we well know how precious our freedom is in His eyes!), but that it is compelling because it determines the path God has chosen for you, and no other. He could have chosen many forms… and yet He proposes one of them to you. A compelling response because if I reject it, I will not be happy. Vocation is a compelling response because no one knows better than God how to bring to fulfilment what you are and desire, even if the form is not the one you would choose, and the circumstances are not those you had in mind. I say this because sometimes, after accepting the Lord’s proposal, we are scandalised by the most prosaic consequences of this yes. Small doubts cloud the initial enthusiasm, until we think we have made a mistake, or that God has made one. For the sake of comfort, we come to justify many things… On the other hand, vocation lived with simplicity and radicalness opens the horizon, exalts and amplifies – as that beautiful expression of the liturgy says – what, out of modesty, “prayer would not dare to ask”.
Now we understand in depth what the Gospel recounts in a very brief way. «And he left everything, rose up and followed him». A fraction of a second, without blinking. Life is decided like this, in something the world would call thoughtless and reckless. But for the Christian, children of a good Father and not of our own strength, that yes is the necessary, compelling condition for growth. What Jesus proposed to Levi two thousand years ago happens to each of us; it happened to Marcos, and today we give thanks to God because we see it fulfilled in him. In his flesh, in what he has given us, not because he was better than us, but because he let himself be invaded by this yes, by the vocation.
In vocation the desire of man and the proposal of God meet. The promise of totality, of full happiness, glimpses itself in the concrete flesh of small or great decisions, people and circumstances, all of which become factors of a single vocation, that is, of the desire that Christ has to enter my life and shape it as He had conceived it in eternity. But for this He needs my cooperation.
With this Mass we make manifest another very important aspect: our presence is the demonstration that the yes to vocation is fruitful. Many people are here who have not had personal contact with Marcos and who, nevertheless, have come this morning, drawn by his yes. Because it is not true that those who have left us live only in our memory, as one sometimes hears said at funerals: those who have left us live above all in the yes to vocation and in the yes to the present that they taught us to love. If this were not so, life would be useless, without reason to be. And if this morning there is a people here, it is because Marcos’s yes is the same yes that we too can pronounce.
I think especially of Itziar and Paco, and of their desire for fatherhood, which God has fulfilled in an unexpected and no less true way. As we all sense, when God thinks of the vocation of children – and please note, I am not referring to the vocation to religious life, but to life as vocation, to what each person, in a singular way, is called to be and to accomplish in history – the vocation of a child represents a qualitative leap in the vocation of the parents, a deepening that is nothing other than the unfolding of what God had already thought from the beginning: a design of good. Now your open home, the vocation to welcome that your family is living, makes you more and more the parents of Marcos every day, because you are parents of what the Lord is raising up in the Church through Marcos, and what God is raising up… is us. I hope that in a few years’ time someone, forced to write some notes about our life full of contradictions, may be able to say the same of our relationship with Christ: «They, leaving everything, rose up and followed him».
1. L. Giussani, Vida como vocación, en Llevar la esperanza. Primeros escritos, Encuentro 1998, 175.
2. G. Pascoli, La voce en Canti di Castelvecchio, Milán 1968.
3. Vida como vocación, 175.
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