This article is part of the Focus: Adults with Severe Handicaps, Some Testimonies
Do you remember Maurizio, waking long before the rest of us? The sun was barely rising, its rays filtering through the branches. I see you crawling, searching for those spots of light, finding pleasure in letting them wash over you. What were you looking for? What lives inside you that I could never understand? That secret will remain yours alone.
And you, Massimo—when we prepared together for your first Communion, you greeted my visits with cries of joy and received my words about Jesus in a silence that offered no reply. Will you one day reveal to me your encounter with the One I still search for? So that I might learn from you how to hear his voice?
With certain young people, I have always found myself unprepared and astonished. Who hasn't? Facing sudden anger or silence that offers no exchange? Where does this particular helplessness come from when we meet those with profound disabilities? We are so powerless before the force of a freedom that cannot make us understand its needs.
From my first encounters, I learned that understanding must come before everything else. I had to become a student and learn each person's language.
With Alessandro, I learned that two fingers rubbed together meant he was asking what we would do next. I had to understand and answer, to give him peace. It was equally important to quickly grasp Roberto's wishes—a few spoonfuls of sugar in water that was too bland could mean the difference between finishing lunch with dry feet or not.
No less important was understanding Nico's smallest gestures. Lying on his cushion, he felt left out of the manual work and believed himself abandoned.
It took a long time to begin to understand one another, and to hope against hope in our capacity to communicate, to open ourselves to life, to receive everything the other person offers, to experience wonder.
In this capacity for wonder, we are all on equal ground—our blockages mixed together with an infinite longing for tenderness.
Because of our inner closures and bewildering events, we are all vulnerable to despair. For this reason, I cannot believe that one person is more prone to joy than another.
Joy will always be an effort to open ourselves to the other, an effort to open ourselves to hope beyond despair, an effort to open ourselves to tenderness—but only if, despite everything, I can still believe once more in grace. I know no person, handicapped or not, who is free from the pull toward despair. Yet together, we can learn to receive, one more time, the light of day.
I wanted to live with each of my handicapped brothers encounters in which each of us hopes in the other. I also believe that every meeting—with Roberto, Nico, Maurizio, Massimo—is heavy with hope. Hope that cannot be put into words, yet is shown by our whole being, even if the first gesture of an encounter is a fist to the face, a reminder of a hope once betrayed.
But what a powerful experience it was when, after a day in the field, I realized I could use them to fulfill myself, both humanly and spiritually. It seems there is a difficult threshold to cross: that of complete and freely given gift, where consciously I refuse to dominate the other, to use him for my own fulfillment.
We do not cross this threshold once and for all. Every time I doubt what I am living—whether at the level of human life or of faith, every time I feel depressed—I must make an effort toward freely given gift.
Yet this danger of using others is merely the reverse side of true existence, in which we cannot live without the comfort of tenderness that is shared in friendship faithful through every trial, and the offered hope of the call of Jesus, the Christ.
Thank you all: thank you, Maurizio, you who lay on the grass that morning at dawn and became for me a living word coming to illuminate the words of the apostle Paul: "The whole creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… to enter into the freedom of glory."
Robert Michit, 1979