Don Guanella: memory as legacy
by Fabio Pallotta
It is us and not others, born just over a hundred years ago. A man and his human adventure are at the origin of our existence: Don Luigi Guanella. The dream of God and the dream of Don Guanella as a child who, having made his First Communion, lay down on the Motto del Vento in Gualdera and glimpsed his path, have embraced and the seventy-year-old perceives that his projections as a boy, as a young priest, as adults and elderly people they went towards the dreams that the Father has for this land of ours.
Don Guanella offers us an extraordinary testimony of how truly happy and fulfilled the existence of a person who strives to perceive God's plan and to follow it, whatever the cost, can be. But he follows a thread, he is obeying a relationship... And his story in "The Ways of Providence" says exactly like this: I went, I came back, I changed, but in the end I still have that thread, not I lost it. Because I let myself be attracted by God, by his plan, by his Providence. In his adventure as a founder, what brings him on the path of God? The dissatisfaction, the discontent! The crucial chapter of his life and his autobiography is his departure from Savogno.
It is the rejection of mediocrity, the horror of the void. That's why he leaves and goes. And in this horror of the void that repudiates mediocrity lies the principle of his sanctity. His first legacy seems to me to be the answer to God's call. At every step he feels that something is wrong, that he is not happy, that something is missing: "My heart would feel empty for the rest of my life!". Don Guanella in his memoirs leaves us first of all this first point: deep within us there is the nostalgia for a fullness that comes from the extreme passion that the lover feels for the beloved, expressed in dissatisfaction.
To the question: “Who is Don Guanella?” one cannot respond by stating that he is a priest who organized services for the poor... The houses founded and the poor welcomed are only a concrete point of arrival, the mouth, the fruit of a thousand circumstances: but what is the source, what inspires it basically? He is always moved by a single underlying certainty: salvation is offered by the Church, which is the only one to possess the means of redemption. Don Guanella's mission is that of the Church itself, without flaws, within the Church and for the Church. His worry is not social, to remove poverty from the streets, but he feels the pain of seeing the children of God die, without them feeling the Father's embrace. The logic is the same as his personal experience: even the poor would feel "a void for their whole lives" if they did not reach full communion with God. All Guanellian theology revolves around the idea of the Father: to be sought, to be found and to whom lead back, and by the only way which is constituted by his Son Jesus, our elder brother, who came so that no one is denied or prevented from finding their way home. If we move on to consider Don Guanella's method, an indisputable evidence in Guanellian philosophy shines before us: the via amoris always proves to be the best of the ways. It is the way of charity, what the Christian tradition, since the Pauline hymn to charity, called "excellentiorem viam" (1Cor 12,31).
And the story of Don Guanella is that of a priest caught between two fires: on the one hand the people, the poor (fleeing from countries, from faith, from traditions); on the other, the Church and the world with their slow, obsolete, inadequate pace. Don Guanella was always the man who adhered to reality with his provocations of the moment, rather than the man of planning made on the drawing board: there is a space in which Providence opens the way and anyone who opposes it or who opposes it is ridiculous. already presents with the diagrams in hand. The well-known expression: "We are all puppets of divine providence: let us be moved by it and do the good we can (SIP page 805)", is there perhaps a happier image to express freedom of movement and dependence at the same time? This is how Don Guanella appeared: a man of free action, and this is how his first collaborators appeared, "used to doing good with freedom in their own way".