Faithfulness, responsibility, and generosity. These three words, I believe, hold the deepest meaning of my friendship with people who are disabled. A friendship that began twenty-two years ago with Fede e Luce's arrival in my life, one that has endured through the years and remains present today—woven into my family and work, even though I no longer attend Fede e Luce itself.
The importance of faithfulness in relationships, the willingness to take on responsibility, and the desire to live and witness generosity—these are three lessons I've received and that I humbly try to live out in the choices I make, whether large or small.
But trying to recount specific episodes or particular moments of this friendship is nearly impossible. It's like trying to separate a single wave from the sea. This whole experience is part of me, part of who I am, and to extract individual moments feels sterile—or worse, like an exercise in self-regard. Yet I'll take the risk, because I hope my testimony might help others discover the same richness.
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My first real call to adulthood came through people who are disabled—the call to serve. I chose to perform my civil service as a conscientious objector at the Chicco community in Ciampino (1989). Today, at my workplace, I see conscientious objectors come and go, and neither they nor those around them notice much impact from their time there. They spend their hours at the café or studying for university. I often think back to those days, those months lived with such intensity—twenty-four hours a day, rest days often sacrificed, almost no free time. I regard that period as one of the most important and formative of my life.
Then came marriage (1993). Like everyone else, the preparation for marriage was the most beautiful time emotionally. My wife Cristiana and I tried to make our wedding celebration reflect who we are. Like everyone, we invited our friends—the only real difference being that a notably high percentage of our friends have always been disabled. At the time it all seemed natural and completely normal to me. What strikes me now, years later, is that some people who attended our wedding still remember it as a particularly special celebration.
Of this I am certain: in our marriage, those three words matter tremendously—faithfulness, generosity, responsibility. These are the ingredients that hold a couple together, that transform it into a family, that become the ingredients of love itself. My disabled friends taught me to understand and cherish these values.
Then came work. While I was in university, there was a difficult moment when I feared I'd end up as a yuppie in some multinational corporation—one of those places where you smile to people's faces and stab them in the back. The very opposite of what Fabio, Giorgio, Pablo, and so many others had taught me. Then luck struck. A chance came to work in social enterprise, using the education I was completing for things I genuinely loved and believed in.
Everyone is touched and changed
For about seven years, until 1999, I worked to promote and develop social cooperatives—many of them dedicated to services for people with disabilities or their employment. One thing struck me deeply during those years: I encountered countless cooperatives, associations, and people working with and supporting people with disabilities in so many different ways, in different places, with different approaches. Some were rooted in Christian conviction, others in firmly anticlerical thinking, others purely professional. Yet every single person I met was touched profoundly, and in remarkably similar ways, by their encounter with these young people. And all of them lived out, in their own diverse ways, the same values of faithfulness, responsibility, and generosity. It was as though you couldn't consciously engage with the world of disability without being deeply touched and changed by it.
In my daily family life, there are at least two ways this bond remains present. First, the desire and effort—given the demands of our new life—to continue our volunteer work in similar causes, now with the Carro community. And the memory of the trust that parents of so many young people placed in us, letting their children go to camp with us, with a freedom and faith that we now try to make our own as parents. Second, there is the effort to welcome—to practice welcome among ourselves, with friends, with everyone who asks for help. This openness to friendship and welcome is not always easy, but what little we manage to do comes from remembering how long and how deeply we ourselves were welcomed, heard, and forgiven by our small, great friends.
Now that I'm an adult living and working
As an adult, I am always being asked to take on responsibility—as a father, as a husband, at work. I am certain that the simplicity and ease with which I now accept each responsibility come from that same responsibility the young people asked of me for so many years—toward them, toward their fragility, toward their disabilities.
As an adult, I live and work in a society where emotional and professional relationships rest less and less on faithfulness. Everything is relative, and even faithfulness is treated as a relative value, easily trampled at the slightest difficulty. My disabled friends show me what real faithfulness looks like. When they see me again after years, at a gathering or celebration, they greet me with the same affection as one, two, or ten years before. There are no shadows in their faithfulness—only the desire to care for each other always, to forgive, to trust one another in an authentic bond. So the daily effort I make to put my relationships with others first, at work and in my personal life, no matter what—I know this comes from the faithfulness I have always received as a gift from people who are disabled.
Without measuring out affection, time, or action
The same is true of generosity—that desire not always to do things for some predetermined gain, but for the joy of surprising people, of letting them receive our gestures as simple expressions of affection. Now that I'm an adult, surrounded by calculation, material interest, and sterile thinking, I firmly claim the beauty of giving thought and precious moments of our time to relationships that exist for their own sake—free and faithful.
This too is a gift from people with disabilities: their inability to measure the quantity of affection, time, or energy devoted to a relationship. Love, affection, friendship—they come only through the gift of oneself, without reserve.
In closing, I often return to something I once heard Jean Vanier say—that people with disabilities are truly instruments of peace in the world. I, who struggle so hard to be that in my daily life, draw my strength from the teaching I received from them, from the people with disabilities I was fortunate to meet and whose friend I am honored to be.
- Antonio Mazzarotto, 2001