This article is part of the Special Issue Fede e Luce: anatomy of a community of encounter.
Who is the other
The other is you for me, and I for you. It is every person. It is the one who is put on display and the one who is hidden. The other is not the one who attracts me, but the one I encounter and who saves me, because he awakens in me listening and trust.
At Fede e Luce we encounter:
A. Mentally handicapped persons
When it comes to encounter, Giorgio does not have the handicaps of most "normal" people. I see him again, shouting with joy, tugging at the sleeve of the Bishop of Loreto who struggles to follow him in his slalom between the pilgrims' tables.
I speak of Giorgio, but I could speak of Thierry, of Michèle, of Raymond, of Annick...
The mistake we make when we speak of persons wounded in their intelligence is to speak of them in the plural, calling them "the handicapped," while they are persons, and every person is unique.
When I thought about what I had to say today, I left this page blank until the last minute. How do you find words that express a face, a smile, a wound, a silence? And then, in the end, is it necessary? Is it not enough to embrace, to smile, to be silent?
Many of you will remember the evening when we were meeting at Rue Serret. It had been growing dark without our noticing. All at once it became necessary for Jean Pierre to get up and turn on the light so that we could better see what we were doing, and could better see one another.....
To see the beauty of the other, we too easily ask him to change and to be someone else. But we do not think to open our own eyes.
We must not be afraid to open them..... Perhaps a caress from Christophe may end in a punch, at lunchtime Paul will run off shouting that he is not hungry, Eric will have a preference for fragile objects..... But violence and flight express the same question: "Do you truly love me?"
To hear the cry of the other, we always wait for him to speak more loudly, but we never think to speak more softly ourselves.
B. The parents
Families are also present at Fede e Luce, each with its own story and its own secret.
I remember a father who — without saying anything to anyone — came to make his first communion in the same place where his son, two years before, had made his during a Fede e Luce camp.
I still hear the voice of Gianluca's mother, her hand resting on the coffin in which her son's body lay, murmuring: "May I say that I am proud to have had a son like him?"
I think of that young couple who ran after me as I was leaving at the end of a retreat: "Father, we would like to show you a photograph of our daughter..."
I carry in my ears cries and silences that I will never forget.
Before speaking of the lesson in hope I received from parents, I ought to evoke their suffering. But I do not feel authorized to speak in their place of their wounded fatherhood and motherhood. I prefer that they themselves say what their discovery of their child's handicap was like, what loneliness they experienced, then, in the deepest part of themselves, and in the life they were often forced to lead.
It is a loneliness that is often dramatic. At times it lasts entire years. To know its consequences one would have had to experience it. It is difficult to put an end to this loneliness and many parents end up resigning themselves to it to such a degree that it seems impossible to them that things could change.
There is the fear of new disappointments, the lack of trust, the reserve in the face of the other, the aggressiveness that drives away, the too many sufferings endured alone in the face of the silence and, at times, the complete abandonment of "others."
In these conditions the encounter is a delicate moment, especially at the beginning: to invite someone to a celebration, to a Mass, to a Fede e Luce gathering, presupposes that one has already become acquainted, that one has had the time to say: "Come... Try... I will take care of your son... I will stay with you... I will come and pick you up...".
And this is possible only if, on their part, the parents have allowed a current of trust to filter through, if they have accepted taking the step "to see" whether what we have, poorly, tried to explain to them, is true.
If this step is taken, the parents in turn become bearers of hope toward friends and toward other parents.
Last June, the Fede e Luce groups of Marseille gathered for an entire day. In the afternoon we celebrated Mass. Some parents, who had come for the first time, had remained at the back of the chapel: "Our son is disruptive..." A mother invited them to come closer: she remembered how she herself had been welcomed a few months before, and she knew that at Fede e Luce no one "disturbs" anyone.
C. The friends
The friends are above all young people, but friendship has no age. Sometimes an entire family comes. Often among the friends there are persons affected by a physical handicap.
Not charitable souls, nor Sunday educators, the friends are not benefactors who sacrifice themselves for the "handicapped" either, while the parents, sitting with their arms folded, repeat among themselves: "What fine young people!"
At the beginning the friends perhaps came "to help." And then, immediately, they discovered that they needed to be helped. They know that it is in giving that one receives.
At the end of a gathering Michèle said to me: "It is extraordinary." She was exhausted from following Didier, who had been running all day. But she will return without batting an eyelid the next time, to live something "real" that neither she nor I will ever be able to explain.
Because to encounter the other is also to learn with him, little by little, what fidelity is. If I come to Fede e Luce only when "I feel like it," to fulfill myself, to find a friend again or to fill my free time, I risk very soon not coming any more. A resit examination, a simple change of home will be enough to make all those people who were beginning to trust me disappear completely from my horizon, with all the disappointments that entails.
The important thing is to be "real." Fidelity is made of a mutual respect for the other, with his demands and his needs of the moment.
The encounter becomes a source of life for everyone only on the day when I discover the deep call that the poor person carries within himself, and on the day when I discover that he can heal me of my egoism and my fear.
"FRIEND, why do you come? — Because it is you, because it is I! WHOM DO YOU SEEK? — US!"
D. The pastor (if possible a priest)
Humble witness of a hope against all hope, he helps us to believe in the other beyond all that might make us doubt him. At Fede e Luce, the priest is neither a person in charge, nor a vase of flowers! He is a priest.
I have known groups in which the person in charge could not say a word without turning to the priest to find out what he thought of it; I have known others where, on the contrary, the only thing the priest was permitted to do was to say "Alleluia" before wishing everyone Bon appétit.
Between these two extreme cases, it falls to each community and to each priest to discover his own place.
Servant of the greatness of the other, the priest bears testimony in the community to the love of Jesus the Priest.
A man of listening, he lets himself be evangelized by "them."
Read the next article in the special issue: 4. Community life – Building "community": the 3 pillars of Fede e Luce
Luis Sankalé, 1980