1.2- “Docibilitas”, fundamental personal condition

If it is grace, it is necessary to have a responsive attitude (as always in regard to grace), a pertinent disposition, humble, sharp, flexible, receptive, enterprising, or “docibilitas” ³, since it is not for nothing that people say “you learn by making mistakes’. That attitude ought to be the object of attention in early formation and fruit of it. Moreover, it is in some way the meeting point between initial and ongoing formation around which our whole topic turns and which, de facto, makes the continuation of formation possible for a person’s entire life. Because it is what makes us free to let ourselves be touched-educated by life, by others, by every existential situation and to learn from life and from experience (a thing not at all to be taken for granted); docibilitas which is not only docilitas, because it is that intelligence of the spirit that implies some precise factors other than a  “docile”, obedient and slightly passive acceptance, and that is:

-                                                                    the full active and responsible involvement of the person, primary protagonist of the educational process;

-                                                                    a fundamentally positive attitude towards reality: of reconciliation and gratitude toward one’s own story and trust toward others,  because, actually, life and others have formed me. My formation is not an autonomous act, no one has made himself;

-                                                                    an interior freedom and intelligent desire to let himself be instructed by any fragment of truth and beauty around himself, enjoying that which is true and beautiful;

-                                                                    a capacity of relationship and otherness, of fruitful, active and passive interaction with objective reality, other and diverse from the ego, to the extent of letting himself be formed by it.

These attitudes place the subject in condition of “learning to learn”, or of living in a constant state of formation for all of his existence. This constant interior state of freedom to learn in life and from life is the point of arrival of initial formation; and precisely at that point initial formation “opens” to ongoing formation and is joined with it.