A spirituality is a path of love. "In my Father's house are many rooms." There are also many roads that lead there. Within the Church, numerous paths of love have been traced by distinguished people—the saints: Francis of Assisi, with poverty; Dominic, with faith and truth; Benedict, with contemplation and peace; Thérèse of Lisieux, with her little way of trust. We speak too of the spirituality of married life, of the priesthood.
Can we speak, then, of a spirituality of Fede e Luce? Is there, within Fede e Luce, a path of love that is uniquely ours, on which we find ourselves walking together?
By listening to you, by watching how you live, I have noticed certain things that might be elements of this spirituality.
In the Church, we are among those called to the greatest respect for all human life. We are on the front lines of this daily struggle for life, day after day. We hear people say: "Children like this—they shouldn't be allowed to live." It wounds us.
God is master of life. We remember this in the Eucharistic Prayer: "You who give us life." To respect human life in all its forms means also to develop the spiritual and intellectual life, to ensure that everyone can give their utmost according to their capacity.
I hear people say: "My brother is disabled," but truthfully—who is disabled, my brother or my gaze? For God, that brother whom I call disabled is my brother wholly and completely. Above all, my gaze is the one that is disabled. For God, all his children are worthy, all are desirable; each one is unique. Only our hearts, sometimes, are closed. "Cleanse your hearts, not your kitchen vessels," Jesus said to the Pharisees. Today he says to us still: "Cleanse your gaze." The person with a disability evangelizes us, because they help us discover our own truth: what sets me apart from my disabled brother? Sooner or later, we will all be disabled—because generally we do not die in perfect health. We all will decline before the resurrection, when we receive a renewed, spiritual body.
The person with a disability invites us to discover their spiritual possibilities. People have given me photographs of little brothers and sisters with disabilities, now in heaven: Sofia, the daughter of Marie Francoise; Maria Francesca, the daughter of Mariangela; and so many others. They shine now, radiant.
Children of God in every right, they too had a unique, exceptional calling—one that each of them fulfilled on earth.
Mariangela says: "It was my daughter Maria Francesca who, through her silence, through the fragility of her body, brought us together as Fede e Luce in Italy."
These brothers and sisters, wounded in mind and body, can awaken in us—if we know how to listen and understand—new capacities for gentleness and love.
I speak to you, parents. In God's plan, this disabled child was not given to you; rather, you have been given to that child so that he or she may fulfill their eternal destiny—mysterious, bewildering, yet a destiny of love. I wonder if you grasp the reversal. When I arrived at my parish, I could not say, "They have given me these parishioners"; I was given to those people as their priest, at their service, to the point of exhaustion if necessary.
The Virgin Mary was at the service of her Son; she was given to Jesus. The proof is there on the cross, when Jesus gives her to another: "Behold, your mother!"
God has dared to entrust to these parents the task of serving this child. He could even say: "Do not worry about the future"—because at the same time he said: "Carry one another's burdens." If you separate these two messages from the Lord, there is an intolerable rupture that makes God's plan seem unreasonable.
This is why the presence of friends in the community is vital: they are there as witnesses and instruments of the Church's solidarity. It is a unique mission.
God does not belong to the world of the powerful; his kinship is with the small: "I thank you, Father, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the powerful and revealed them to the little ones." What are these things?
"Everything has been given to me by my Father; no one knows who the Son is except the Father, nor who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him." These things, hidden from the wise yet grasped intuitively by the little ones, are nothing less than the trinitarian mystery itself.
I am certain that our brothers and sisters with profound disabilities—those we consider unconscious—have a dialogue with the Father and the Spirit that surpasses our understanding.
This humility of God, at home only among the small, I almost felt it physically in our communities.
- Notes from a Fede e Luce conference by Father Marcel Gaudillère, national chaplain of Fede e Luce, France, 1990