In fifty brief pages, the author—a parish priest in the Diocese of Fidenza—records passages from his life, beginning with his diagnosis of Parkinson's disease and ending when he must leave his parish, no longer able to carry out his priestly duties.
Over eight years, at intervals of several months, he documents events shaped by illness, entrusting to his diary the expressions of his interior experience—human, spiritual, and above all priestly. How can he reconcile Scripture's promise that God's strength is made perfect in weakness with the concrete reality of being a useless servant? How do you make sense of the steady loss of your ministry, the irreversible erasure of meaning in everything you do?
At a priests' retreat, asked to give the opening talk, he chooses Saint Paul's words about the weak whom God chose to shame the strong. As he speaks, "the words stumble ... thought scatters ... breath fails." He cannot know how the other priests react, but certain signs seem to him "eloquent." He experiences in his own body the scandal of weakness even as he meditates on its hidden power.
The author never loses sight of lived reality. He never superimposes his own anguish—or, conversely, any false exaltation—onto what he truly feels: the refusal to accept evil "which remains evil nonetheless," the acute perception of "my nothingness. Inconsistency. Powerlessness. Bewilderment," the humiliation of barely being able to speak during the homily.
Faith "does not take away suffering, is not some kind of spiritual painkiller: suffering remains with all its weight." But the author's faith is equally real, and it generates a ceaseless search for meaning that runs through every page of the diary. "True littleness, or utter insignificance ... to be embraced positively ... demands an absolute intervention of grace."
The diary closes with this acknowledgment of human helplessness to escape alone from the prison of our mortal condition, and with the trust that the grace of Christ can accomplish all things.
A series of poems follows. One of the most moving recalls the figure of his father, killed in an air raid when the author was still a child.
"And yet no image of your death remains with me, Father, but ... your extended silence full, at table, of peace, the reassuring harbor of your knees when you came home tired from work, the wonder at small new corners of the world discovered from your bicycle's path."
The reader cannot help but connect these memories of love from the child the author once was with his own longing to learn how to surrender trustfully, like a son, to God's love.
Francesco Bertolini, 2006