"The Tooth that nibbles at the soul” (Emily Dickinson) | Opening Event | New York Encounter 2022

The New York Encounter

The Encounter opens with poetry and music, with Matthew Cossack, baritone, Andrea Domenici, jazz pianist, Radoslawa Jasik, classical pianist, and Vaneese Thomas, singer

Our being—what the Bible calls “heart,” that is, courage, tenacity, shrewdness, effort—is a thirst for truth and happiness. There is no work, from the humble one of the housewife to the brilliant one of the designer, that can escape this reference in search of full satisfaction, of human fulfillment: thirst for truth, which starts from curiosity to delve into the mysterious enigma of search and thirst for happiness, which starts from instinct and expands to that dignified concreteness that alone saves instinct from being corrupted into a false and ephemeral breath. It is this heart that mobilizes anyone, whatever business they carry out. All life is obligated by this logic: there is no other source of energy that obliges and enables more than this one to look after the work in which one is committed, in its even more minute aspects.

Desire is like the spark that starts the engine. All human movements arise from this phenomenon, from this constitutive dynamism of the person. Desire turns on the engine of the person. And then one starts to look for a job, to look for a woman or a man, starts to look for a more comfortable chair and a more decent residence. One gets interested in why some have and some others do not have, why some are treated in a certain way and this person is not. All of this happens precisely by virtue of the enlargement, the widening, the ripening of these stimuli that one has within and the Bible globally calls "heart" - and that I would also call "reason". And, in some way, there is no reason without affection being awakened.

~ Fr. Luigi Giussani, excerpt from L'io, il potere e le opere