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The human heart’s cry in witnesses, poetry, and music, with opening remarks by Msgr. Lorenzo ALBACETE, theologian, and a staged reading by Tony HENDRA, writer and author.

Msgr. Albacete will open the 2014 New York Encounter with an initial exploration of what constitutes the person and why “the time of person has come”, followed by real-life witnesses.

“For me the important thing is to reawaken the evidence that our own life is not born from itself, it does not have itself as destiny, but it belongs to something bigger, and it is this bigger thing that constitutes us […] Something bigger constitutes us. In other words, the discovery of the paradox that I am Another. I cannot say “I” unless I say “you,” unless I say “you who make me.” And I affirm this when I try to explain what prayer is. Jesus said: The whole world is settled in the lie,” and nowadays the lie has become completely paroxysmal because the concreteness of life has been erased; but the place where the lie operates is the person. In fact, you kill yourself or you live like someone who is dead, accepting to be dead; and this is the real suicide. Therefore, it is once again in the person that the recovery, the rebirth, the revolution takes place. How does this recovery happen at the present time? This is the question we face. Externally, the only answer is that we have an encounter with a presence that is different; that we bump into a different presence; and this presence, then, can act as a reagent, as a catalyst of energies that up till now were absconding.”

(Luigi Giussani, translation from Il senso della nascita, Rizzoli)