There is a part of ourselves that only we know...
...and that we cannot possibly reveal to others. Maria's heart is in turmoil. She wants to cry out against the anguish she has carried since learning that her child will never be what she dreamed. The doctor was kind, but he couldn't quite be clear. She understood anyway.
It has happened before, in moments more or less difficult. She prefers silence. How could she make others grasp what she feels? They would try to comfort her, distract her, tell her of similar cases, offer advice, urge her to be strong. She knows all this. It isn't what she needs. She wants someone to stand beside her without speaking; someone who can listen in silence to the tumult in her heart; someone who understands that the deeper the pain, the less it can be named; that what she is living through is bound to her own history, her character, her weakness, her will to live, her hunger for tenderness, her fears...
Maria knows, like another Mary, that it is better to say nothing and to "treasure all these things in her heart."
There is a part of ourselves that only others can see
Maria and Carlo grew closer after Giuseppe was born. There had been difficult moments between them—tension, quarrels, endless arguments. Then, slowly, they poured themselves into Giuseppe. They live for him, for him alone. Nothing else matters. They have resolved to do everything possible to keep him well. And they succeed, in part, and others admire their dedication. Yet they do not see their own mistakes—inevitable as they are.
Others see them. "They spoil him too much." "They're always hovering." "They expect too much." "They think he's the only one who needs help."
Could there be no one with the courage to explain gently to these parents that they are going wrong?
Someone has tried. But Carlo and Maria do not think for a moment that the others might be right. They believe they are taking the right and proper course, and that others have nothing to say that they do not already know better.
We all know each other, we and the others, but...
Marta, Elisabetta, Fabio, and Luca are having dinner at Franco's. They have been friends for years. They work, they study, and much of their free time they give to a volunteer group serving people with disabilities—friends now, as they see them. The conversation began before dinner and grows more heated: how far can they truly be "real friends" with each other, with the parents, with the young people they serve?
Lately a strong tension has grown. "Everything seems to have changed," Elisabetta says. "I don't feel right anymore, not like before. We can't just blame it on R.'s mother, who is never satisfied with what we do...or say it's our exhaustion...or the priest's lack of help...or put it all on the group leader..."
Fabio is the quietest among them. He speaks little but observes much. He tries to say what he thinks: "It's true. We know each other so well that we forget we're all changing. We think we know everything about each other, but we forget that Carlo isn't 'always cheerful and strong,' that Marta carries new burdens she won't speak of, that Eugenia now lives without the husband who helped her so much. Reality has shifted for each of us, inside each of us. But the labels we've stuck on ourselves and the prejudices we carry are never true."
They fall silent. Fabio is right. In our relationships with others, there is always work to do—searching, checking, deepening—to move toward that union and harmony we seek. But we will never reach it completely.
And finally, there are things in us that neither we nor others know
Events happen—often sudden, sometimes prepared but unrecognized—that leave us lost, struck down, so much so that we hardly dare speak the names of those caught in them: a crushing depression; the sudden collapse of a "model" marriage; the suicide of a girl who seemed "completely normal"; the abandonment of a newborn; a young woman assaulted...
We stand frozen. What answers about meaning, about truth, can we offer to the thousand "whys" that torment us unto anguish?
* * *
We can only bow our heads. The life of every human being—every man and woman, every age, every condition—holds within itself a mystery that we are given only to recognize, not to unveil. A mystery to contemplate as an integral part of every creature, and though it remains mystery, it too is a truth that only its Creator knows, and to whom alone it must be entrusted.