People come to summer camp for all sorts of reasons: a friend's invitation, curiosity, the desire to be useful, the inability to say a firm no.
But it is always Jesus who offers us this unusual vacation alongside the wounded person—wounded in mind, certainly, but also in heart. Why? What does the Lord ask of us?
Jesus asks us, above all, to listen. He has placed beside us his simplest friends precisely so they might speak of Him with simplicity to our thick skulls.
"I entrust them to you, my friends," He must have said to them, "I trust you can get through to these stubborn ones: I have tried with words and with gestures. You try with silence."
And camp is a place and a time of silence. Silence from our commitments, from hurry, from all the things we think we have to do. Especially silence from ourselves, the voice that runs endlessly through our heads without our noticing: "I am intelligent, athletic, likeable, capable."
Camp is also "a place and a time of silence. Silence from our commitments, from 'all the things I have to do'!"
Camp is also "a place and a time of silence. Silence from our commitments, from 'all the things I have to do'!"We are silenced because we cannot show off our cleverness to someone who cannot hear us, our strength to someone who does not walk, our charming smile to someone who cannot see it.
Our pace slows to match a wheelchair, a spoon of food.
At last, we have been made quiet. "God, what silence. I do not have the courage to speak: my words are foolish, my talk is empty. What should I do?" This is the moment to listen, because in silence other sounds bloom: the joy of living from a wheelchair, the happiness that lights the eyes of someone who cannot express it in words, the dignified solitude of someone locked in a world of silence and darkness.
"Lord, how poor I am. How much it costs me to give a sincere smile, to offer faithful friendship. How hard it is for me to accept that things go differently than I want them to.
These brothers and sisters are fragile, but I am so small before them."
Yet the wounded person is not jealous of their own superiority. They come toward us first, take our hand, seek our friendship, just as Jesus does. They entrust us with their needs—those very needs that often make them "different"—but more than that, they offer us their heart with trust: it may come all at once in an "I love you" and a great embrace, or gradually in a thousand small moments. And it is gradually, amid struggles over spoons of food and middle-of-the-night wake-ups, that our own heart opens too to the warmth of simple love.
"Thank you, Lord, for showing me these things. Now I see that these friends of mine can heal my wounds: they can teach me to trust, not to long to be intelligent, athletic, or likeable so that others will accept me.
They can teach me your love."
- Alberto Petri, 1989