The Encounter opens with music, and a conversation with Richard Cabral, Actor and former gang member in East Los Angeles, and Fr. Vincent Nagle, Missionary Priest of the Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo

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Even heaven and earth, which have existed for a million centuries, are an event: an event that still occurs as something new, since its explanation is inexhaustible. To glimpse something greater in the relationship with everything means that the relationship itself is event, and if man does not look at the world as something given, as an event, starting from the gesture of God which gives it to him now, it loses all its attraction, surprise, and moral appeal. In other words, if man does not look at the world as given, he loses the appeal to adhere to the order and the destiny of things. [...] The common denominator of all realities is the fact that man cannot ultimately explain them or give them an exhaustive definition. Therefore, an event can be defined as the emerging into experience of something that cannot be analyzed in all of its factors, something that contains a vanishing point in the direction of Mystery and something that retains the reference to an unknown [...]. So, an event indicates the contingent, the apparent, the experiential, because it is apparent, as something born from Mystery, as a ‘datum’, not in the scientific sense of ‘data’, but in the profound and original Latin meaning of the word: datum, something that is given. An event is therefore a fact that surfaces within experience and reveals the Mystery that constitutes it.
~Luigi Giussani, Generating Traces in the History of the World, 2010, McGill University Press

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