The expansion of Faith and Light communities across Italian provinces is beginning to bear fruit, one year after the last national gathering in Cattolica.
The formation retreat for community leaders took place in Barcellona P.G. (Me) from May 29 to June 1, 2010, with the theme "Learn to Listen to Your Heart Again."
We answered a dream born in our small "church" beneath a sycamore tree: it called us to undertake a journey in search of treasure. Following in the footsteps of Santiago—the key character in Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist"—we set out.
Our dream was to recover what is essential to being Faith and Light in the three moments we live together as a community. Guided by the "words" of Enza Gucciardo (prayer), Lucia Casella (sharing), and Claudia Scialanga (celebration), we crossed our inner desert, just as Santiago did.
We gathered, rejoiced in finding one another, in meeting and welcoming each other, and in renewing ourselves constantly throughout the day. We shared these experiences in working groups, over meals, during breaks, while preparing skits and vigils of prayer and festivity, at Mass—even while selling books and T-shirts. The words we heard took familiar themes and presented them in new ways, awakening a deep resonance and hunger for deeper understanding. Our speakers responded generously, making themselves available for personal conversations.
At the end of this journey, where we expected to find the treasure we had sought so long, we were amazed. We discovered that the treasure had been there all along—under that sycamore where our community gathers, where we had started, now seen wrapped in the mantle of the dove, the image of the Holy Spirit.
Don Marcello Corbisiero (the province's spiritual director) and Carlo Gazzano (provincial coordinator) offered closing reflections that moved everyone present, bearing witness to the gifts we had found in this rediscovered treasure of Faith and Light.
The new provincial structure, with its smaller attendance of around fifty people, created an intimacy that larger gatherings cannot achieve. It made the days longer without becoming burdensome. It recovered the joy of relationship and friendship as the feelings that sustain the journey of every person loved by God. This retreat gave us the decisive turn that the changes announced in Cattolica in May 2009 had promised. In the year that followed, we sustained one another through the concrete work of building up the community anew, adapting to what was new, all the while working from the abundance we already possessed.
Now, how do we pass on all the grace we have received?
Mother Teresa offers a beautiful image: "be channels of current." And so?
Let each of us be a transmitter of that current! Willing, tireless, following the signs the Holy Spirit places in our hearts.
Carlo Gazzano and Lucia Spada, 2010