Wrapping up the Encounter through great movie scenes, with Deniz Demirer, filmmaker, and concluding remarks by Maurizio Maniscalco, Encounter president
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The Christian event is an encounter with a human reality that channels the evidence of a correspondence between the divine—which has stooped to enter our lives—and what we are. This encounter opens my eyes to myself, spurs an unveiling of me, shows that is corresponds to what I am: it makes me see what I am, what I want, because it makes me understand that what it brings is just what I want, that it corresponds to what I am. It is as if it were saying: "Look at what you are and then tell me if it is not true that I correspond: it is only because you do not know yourself that you are able to think that I do not correspond to you and that you are liable to prefer something else as the meaning of your "I." In a sequence of his film Andrej Rublev Tarkovskij has one of his characters say: "You know it well: you can’t manage a thing; you’re tired; you can’t go on. And all at once you meet the gaze of someone in the crowd —a human gaze—and it’s as if you had drawn near to a hidden divine presence. And everything suddenly becomes simpler." The Christian event manifests itself, reveals itself in the encounter with the superficiality, the shallowness and the apparent inconsistency of a face in the crowd: a face like all the others yet so different from the others that, on encountering it, it seems that all things are simplified. You see it for an instant and as you walk away you carry the impact of that gaze within you, as if to say: "I would like to see that face again."
~Luigi Giussani, Notes from a talk with university students, 1992
