The first thing we saw arriving at Carro after years apart—interrupted by the occasional phone call, a Christmas card we'd been waiting for, and countless thoughts that never turned into actions because of laziness, busyness, and finally the difficulty of grasping that slippery, complicated thing we call meaning—the first thing we saw was enough to erase every distance: a photo of the community with our family. Ivana wasn't in it, because she was the one taking it; she wasn't there and yet she was, hidden but present. Matteo, Mimmo, Maria, and Francesca were there (Anna hadn't been born yet). There was us with Dario, so blonde then, and Irene, so tiny in a way she isn't anymore.
We'd had that photo taped to our refrigerator for years. Now it reappeared, of all places, at the celebration for Carro's twentieth anniversary. In that moment, it was as though all our failures at telling the people we love how much we love them came rushing back to us.
The twentieth-anniversary celebration felt like a jubilee to us—one in which the Father's mercy and the grace of seeing so many people again were poured out without measure. Filippo was there, bound to us by a tenderness beyond words. You see it in their eyes and feel it in your heart when you arrive at Carro: everyone who has passed through those doors over the years—whether they drew a salary or volunteered, whether they were guests or residents, whether they kept the books or cooked the meals—everyone who in any way sustains this community, everyone whose names we no longer know because years pass and people move on as Providence wills, they all give without stinginess and without calculation. Don Benedetto was right: we were beautiful that afternoon. God's love made us beautiful. But, fortunately, not foolish!
So, as happens whenever Faith and Light families gather—families with a wounded son or daughter—an unspoken question hung in the air: will Carro endure for another twenty years? Fifty? A hundred? Will there be enough money, enough energy, enough charisms spent to keep this crucible alive, where they try to fuse the "cold" of efficiency with the "warmth" of affection? We think so. We think it with the same smile you wear when you read a poem you love and can't explain why.
Vito Giannulo, 2010
===FINE===