It's easy to throw a Faith and Light gathering. Harder to build a real Faith and Light community. It's easy to spend a day together, a week or two at camp, sharing friendship. It's harder to keep that spirit of brotherhood alive in the ordinary days that follow—that warmth that felt so natural, so effortless in the mountains.
It's easy to say: "I'm a friend to handicapped young people." Harder to actually be one.
And yet, if we're honest, we can't imagine life without them now. They've shown us a way forward. They've opened our eyes to how disabled we "normal" people really are—crippled by habits and vices far less visible than theirs, but far heavier in how we live with others: pettiness in our dealings, jealousy, aggression, sometimes hatred, clinging to money, mediocrity, apathy.
They've revealed to us treasures we didn't know lived in them: riches of inner life, a grasp of what truly matters, generosity, deep humility, a readiness to give.
If we look at this clearly, with eyes just slightly less nearsighted from whatever time we've spent with them, we realize with astonishment that we are the ones who need them.
Our task now is to approach them with a real hunger to learn their values—what a better life looks like, what a truer, more just world demands of us.
We can only build community with them if we are convinced—at least a small group of us, at first—and truly willing to live out the beatitudes alongside them. This means letting them guide us through the overturning of values that Christ calls us to make in our own hearts.
It will be a new kind of community, where we place first the weak whom God chooses to confound the strong—and those of us who think ourselves so clever will find in them the depth and truth of those Gospel words: "Unless you become like little children, you will not enter".
This is the hope we offer each other as we begin—with courage and joy—life in the Faith and Light groups: to deepen our friendship day by day, and slowly, slowly to move from being friends to becoming brothers and sisters, discovering together that what matters in any life at all is this: to love.
Mariangela, 1977