Dear "Mom"
I'm writing you this Christmas letter because I wanted to ask for a bit of your attention and put a couple of questions to you about things that matter deeply to me—things only you can answer.
I often think that you and I, in so many ways that bind us and hold us together, stand on opposite banks of the same river. Especially when it comes to what your son has been and is to you, and what he is to me.
For me, he was an extraordinary discovery, an encounter that changed me, opened my eyes, a source of joy and hope, a true friend. For you too, it was an extraordinary discovery and an encounter that changed you. But I see in your daily life that it has been and still is, even more so now, also a source of worry and anxiety about the future—daily struggle and exhaustion.
For me, spending time with your son (which happens now and then, once every two or three weeks) fills my life. It makes me feel good not only with him, of course, but also with the world and with myself. For you, it's ordinary, it's daily. Spending time with your son is your normal. And perhaps it's precisely when he's with us that you feel a bit better, relieved, maybe even a bit at "peace" with the world.
Because of these differences, as I said, I feel I'm on the side of the river where people can choose, can help, can feel "good," while you're on the other side where people often don't choose, where they face problems every day. So two questions have been on my mind for some time—a "Why?" and a "How is it that?"—and I'd like you to answer me honestly.
Why do you always thank me, fill me with compliments, make me feel important over the smallest gesture I offer you? You even get moved (and I can see you mean it) if I happen to call and say I want to pick your son up for pizza, or—can you believe it—if I can take him with me for ten days on vacation. I keep thinking that the opportunity of this time I spend with him is for me. I'm the one who gets to do something different from running around and working and never having time. In practical terms, I don't think this time actually solves any problem for you. And yet you're always the one thanking me, filling me with "God bless you" and "If it weren't for you all..." Why?
How is it possible that you—who objectively often have a complicated, exhausting, difficult life—how is it possible that you always have words and attitudes of trust and hope toward others and toward the future? I, meanwhile, abuse fashionable phrases like "I'm stressed," "I never have time for what really matters," "But what kind of life is this?" "I don't know where we're heading." I don't have major daily problems or pain to face, but so often I can't see the future or trust. You do it so much better than I do. How is that possible?
I hope you have the desire and time to answer me. You certainly have the capacity—it's clear you can see and feel something I'm not capable of. These are two answers that feel very important to me right now, for how I see life and face the future. You'd be giving me a wonderful Christmas gift.
I'll close my Christmas letter with a thank you.
Thank you, mom, for teaching me something essential for living better. You're a mother, and it's also your job to help us understand the important things in life. You've taught me to ask for help. Maybe that's your real strength—knowing how to ask for help from others and from God. For me, it's much harder, and I hope that by continuing to be with you I'll learn to do it better.
I love you,
Filippo
Dear Sister Adalberta
Dear Sister Adalberta—among the many people I met during my journey through Angola last August, I cannot forget Scita.
I had gone to the cemetery in Luena to see the grave of Jonas Savimbi, the guerrilla leader who was killed in February the year before.
Called by Father Jo-Jò, Scita came willingly to meet us.
I couldn't count the crosses of various sizes he wore on his body.
Thanks to my priest-friend's translation, I understood that his prophetic relationship with God was exuberant, and that the oracle concerning me was auspicious.
In those few minutes, I did not dare to label my conversation partner.
I thought of the many friends I had met at Fede e Luce and of the man (the demon-possessed man) of Gerasa who, as the Gospels tell us, walked among the tombs.
After that encounter we came right to you, dear Sister Adalberta, and I spontaneously told you about him.
I remember the surprise on your face as you told me how you lived your friendship with him.
I remember how, on visits to the cemetery, you thought of him, bringing him drinking water—a trivial gesture in our world of comfort but precious for you who live daily with scarce services. At the same time, I remember your joy as you told me how Scita, so lonely and angry at everyone, despite insults and mockery, came one day to your house to give you an envelope full of mangoes.
Water and fruit are the bridge through which you are building a relationship of friendship, defying fear and prejudice. With small things and simple gestures, hearts open to communion.
Jesus, in Bethlehem, was not welcomed at the inn, but the shepherds in the night ran to see him.
His tenderness makes our hearts more vulnerable, opening them to the joy of communion.
Father Vito Palmisano, 2003
Dear Readers
We hold in our hands the latest issue of Ombre e Luci, fresh off the press—colorful, full of photographs. We realize it's precisely the photographs, together with elegant and precise design, that make our magazine a pleasure to look at, different from the rest (if we do say so ourselves).
But what's the secret to achieving this result? What should the photos in a magazine like ours be like?
Certainly: expressive, delicate, meaningful, sincere. But also: not rhetorical, not banal, not sentimental. And surely: interesting, real, powerful, joyful. It's hard to always have photos like that, isn't it? In fact, nearly impossible.
That's why with this Christmas letter, we on the editorial team want to say "THANK YOU WITH ALL OUR HEARTS TO OUR WONDERFUL PHOTOGRAPHERS." We think of Barbara, Lorenzo, Nanni—who so often gave us their photos. Without your help, the magazine wouldn't be the same. But thanks also to Bice, Rita, Valentina, Marta, Father Vito, and so many others whose names escape us today, who over the years have sent us beautiful images. And thanks to the "unknown artists" too—those whose photos were unfortunately published without the photographer's name due to some oversight or mistake on our part. We apologize again.
Merry Christmas to all of you photographers and readers, with one recommendation: don't miss the chance these festive days to take some memorable shots.
The Editorial Team, 2003
Dearest Friends at Ombre e Luci
Today is the last Sunday of October. You've asked me for a testimony, and it's an occasion for me to "see" the selfishness of my husband Maurizio and myself toward our son—toward our sons, really, because it's not just Andrea who is fragile, but Luca too is a "special kind of kid" as the only and older brother of a boy with a handicap. Deep down, I've always thought I was living a great misfortune or an enormous, inexplicable injustice. After twenty-six years, I'm beginning to see that the real darkness is inside my own heart: I truly don't know how to think of or give to another person except insofar as it gratifies and fulfills me. So my reactions are always different, but they always end the same way—with endless discontent, or anxiety, or anguish and anger toward everyone. At first, it was more instinctive to get angry at others (society, relatives, friends, the parish—those who don't love you or understand you in the right way or at the right time). Then I direct my more or less expressed aggression at my sweet "travel companion," my husband. I know he's like all living beings, but his limits, combined with mine, give me a sense of oceanic helplessness that I desperately want to escape. And then there are my relationships with the Church, with the parish that, thanks to Andrea, I've attended for thirteen years, with Father Fabio. At first, I thought bitterly and legalistically: the church MUST WELCOME THE WEAK; it will resolve and put right all of Andrea's problems and also, especially, those of his parents. And so here too—how many recriminations, disappointed expectations, repressed anger. What a burden it is to keep attending the celebrations. Fortunately, Father Fabio has the gift of announcing God's Love through his homilies, which are never moralistic or repetitive. And he has the capacity to share his experience as a brother-sinner, urging us not to lose heart because God "knows what we're made of."
I notice that the parish community on Sunday, together with the Hope that your "Ombre e Luci" has infused in me drop by drop, as if through an IV, for twenty years, have accompanied me through the ups and downs of my daily life (searching for a balance to love my cross not out of duty or resignation, but by free choice based on love and God's help). They have helped me look around and discover a "lighthouse" of light and love: Jean Vanier.
In 1996, intrigued by a review of his book "Every Person Is Sacred," I bought it not knowing it would be a foundational book for my life and that later I would gift many copies, especially to enter into "communion" with people I loved.
I began reading it eagerly, alternating between tears, amazement, and disbelief. Yes, I was profoundly struck by the fact that for the first time I saw printed a thought new to me: the deep awareness that every living being is important because he or she is loved by God with the same Love and in the same way.
Usually, we live with a child who is different in a constant seesaw between "overprotective compassion" and "desire for rejection" masked behind impossible goals or objectives that only cause painful frustration. When I saw it written that it's hard not to "feel superior," that we have an inexhaustible bottom of presumption toward our disabled siblings, I was deeply moved. But I didn't CHANGE AUTOMATICALLY!
I discovered his story and his apparently chance vocation, and I chose Jean Vanier as my "spiritual guide."
Thank you, Jean, for having the courage to enter an entirely new life, more adventurous than your previous one as a naval officer. Thank you too for describing this experience of Life and Love through a journey that you don't hesitate to call difficult and full of pitfalls, because it requires patience, trust, competence, and above all Faith in God's help.
It's extraordinarily difficult to summarize effectively this announcement that became lived reality for him starting in 1964, through the founding of so many family homes—the Arches. But what's world-shaking for a perfectionist mother like me is to know that it was translated into lived reality, the announcement that every living being is sacred because loved profoundly by God. Jean Vanier's word.
With affection and gratitude, Merry Christmas to all, especially to those who easily lose heart, like myself.
Silvana, 2003
Dear Parents
We wish Christmas were always a time of "good news" for everyone. We at Ombre e Luci have a small but important piece of good news to share with you.
Over recent years, as always, our editorial team has sought out new initiatives for disabled youth, contacted them, gathered information, and in most cases visited them so we could write about them. One thing is certain: family homes large and small, day centers, social cooperatives of type B, farms, and various initiatives that allow disabled adults to work are spreading throughout our country—though not uniformly across all regions. And one thing struck us in particular. Often it was a mother or a father, one or two couples of parents to whom others soon were added, who took the initiative. On page 28 you'll find listed the initiatives begun by parents for disabled youth that we've come to know over the years. Organized into associations within a few years, they saw a new family home or craft workshop, a small restaurant or large farm, weekend hospitality centers and other ventures come to life.
Naturally, they found it essential to connect with public institutions, obtain recognition and subsidies—but that came later. The first steps, they took courageously on their own.
What is coming to pass—and we say it with joy—is what knowledgeable people close to these issues, for family reasons as well, were already saying years ago. Celebrated writers like our own Clara Sereni, or the distant Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe, repeated it in their most passionate writings. They wrote that no one cares as deeply about the needs of these particular children as their parents do. No one knows them as thoroughly from birth, and no one is more motivated in the search for suitable solutions for their lives and work. Civil society must step in—if it's to be worthy of the name—to help those with particular difficulties. But it must do so in connection with the family's guidance, which for its part has the duty to clearly indicate the needs and requirements for the child's growth and the development of his or her potential.
These pioneer parents had to step out of the tunnel of private grief to find the will and strength to come together, to lift their heads and look around to see how to begin. They had to abandon illusions and impossible projects to discover, together with others, what was truly right and good for their children. They had to learn that solidarity for another's child, fighting and struggling and working for others, became genuine enrichment for their own child.
This special child grows, and his or her presence in society gains weight and meaning also through the courageous commitment of those who love them most.
Merry Christmas to all from
Tea Cabras, 2003
Dear Francesca
Dear Francesca, I can't and won't try to console you, because I know well that no matter how close I try to be, I'm not really in your shoes. I just want to try to reflect with you on what's happening and what you told me the other day.
You say that, beyond the scientific terminology doctors use, the fact is that "Emanuele" will have a lot of problems: he won't walk, he won't speak, he won't grow like other children. That's true. But the same thing could be said this way: Emanuele does things—and will do them—like other children, but in his own time and in his own way.
Other mothers look for entertainment and sports in their free time for themselves and their children. You, in your free time, will take Emanuele to therapies, appointments, hospital visits, etc.
It's certainly not a pleasant sport or hobby. But how much might those activities help you and Emanuele live with your problems, learn to face them, and—why not—overcome them? Think for a moment of the progress that medicine, rehabilitation, and psychology have made over the last few decades.
You're "desperate" because hope is just an illusion that then crashes into a horrible reality that hurts even more. In one sense you're right, because it can be useful to prepare for the worst.
But you know better than I do that all of human life is made of hope: from the moment you leave your house in the morning until the moment you go to bed at night. Sometimes we don't realize it, but hope keeps us alive. And for those who believe in Jesus, hope and certainty of true happiness right now and for eternity change the quality of life for the better, even in difficulty.
I know you don't want to hear about God right now. You're fighting him hard. You'll read this when you've had a good cry. (It's not bad to fight with God, as long as you keep talking to him.)
When you're ready, you'll see how His presence in the small, the innocent, the simple, is alive more than ever. They are Love in its purest form. And "Emanuele" means God is with us! You know very well that His protection, His nearness, His consolation will never fail them. They will never lack what is ESSENTIAL. He and His Mother wanted to experience our pain, our anguish, our worries with us. They are the only ones who can understand you completely and truly help you. Try to trust. Let's not worry about what will be, about how our future will be. Our Father watches over us and PROVIDES. Enjoy the love and tenderness of that wonderful child who is your son. He has you. He believes in you; he sees only you. A profound mystery of love binds you and your child. Today he's far luckier than all those abandoned, violated, starving children the world is unfortunately full of.
I realize I'm doing what I usually do—talking too much. In the end, I can only offer you some of my time, my mind, and my heart, as a friend usually does. I'm not in your shoes; I don't have your problems. Maybe I shouldn't have written all of this. Maybe I should have written only this: I love you.
Take care,
Martina
Dear Readers
Many of you will surely remember the article that appeared after the 2001 Pilgrimage to Lourdes about the "Madman of the 30 Registrations" (Fr. Klaus Sarbach). Well, among those 30 were my brother Matteo and I—Matteo is a ten-year-old boy with Down syndrome.
Let me introduce myself. I'm Barbara, I'm twenty-three, and I joined Fede e Luce, in the Fatima-Milano community, after that fantastic experience.
After two years on this path, so many people have entered my life, changing me deeply and helping me grow.
During this time I'm discovering better the figure of parents and meeting with them, listening to their experiences, the burdens and joys they carry in their hearts—it has left me speechless many times.
From all these encounters was born the poem below, which I'd like to dedicate to these teachers of hope and fidelity who are the parents of disabled youth.
With heartfelt thanks,
Barbara
Why
But it's life
that gives the greatest joy
and within it hides/ sorrows without end.
And you can't change anything,
accept, / close your eyes,
abandon your fears,
let love enter/ and hope.
And the strength of friendship will sustain your steps
and perhaps will give back to you
the desire to live, to fight
and to dream...
again...