I believe Milan was a turning point for Faith and Light—not only because of the friends we met, but because we began to see more clearly what we are trying to live: to see ourselves, and each other, truly.
If it's hard to bring the night to account, isn't this the very path we must walk toward growth?
1. Our weakness laid bare.
Recent events have exposed once again how powerless we are. The small are crushed by the indifference of the powerful.
We have watched violence overcome peace, watched death strike down the defenseless and the fighter alike on the street. No one understands this path the world is taking. No one can explain it. And the world finds itself helpless before a evil no one knows how to grasp.
We who are touched in a particular way by senseless suffering, by the absurdity of death without meaning—we feel this even more acutely. Everything we hoped for is destroyed. All our plans centered on someone we awaited have scattered like dust.
And society, preoccupied with the struggles of the powerful and deaf to the silence of the weak, has shattered our faith in its capacity to truly welcome us.
2. Yet our weakness becomes strength.
Being unheard is only part of our weakness. But beneath this unheeded cry lives something deeper—the truest expression of our weakness itself: we cannot pursue what the world chases. Our weakness lies in this wound that keeps us from following the powerful. We are wounded. And we see our wound.
But if the small cannot follow the great, is it not because what the great pursue tastes hollow? Money, science—these seem to lose their grip near some of our lives. And does not the greatness of the powerful risk being empty? That greatness which carries war in its wake, and with war, the senselessness of evil. This is why the world, for all its force and violence, can never find its own way out. Only "smallness" is the path to peace for us all.
Can our weakness be transformed into strength? Do we perhaps hold the secret of peace?
Something that happened during our journey showed me this. We were few when we arrived in Milan. Yet in the very moment we were celebrating our meeting in joy, just steps away from us, violence was killing a man. This struck me like a light: at the moment death bore its fruit among those who believed themselves powerful, life was doing its work among those who knew themselves small. Beyond death, life carried its message of tenderness and love.
3. Where does our strength lie?
My eyes wide open, transfixed, I was afraid. I saw only what could crush me. Fear paralyzed me, and I found no way out. I raged against the "impersonal" I could never touch—a rebellion that exhausted my last reserves of strength, until finally I chose escape before the obvious defeat of an unequal struggle.
I fell into the night of powerlessness, where solitude becomes friend and familiar, and the one who wanted to be my companion becomes a stranger—or worse, an enemy.
I had to dare to cry out. I had to refuse, and bring the night itself to account.
It was not right that solitude be my only companion. It was not right that the fruit of my body be only a shadow of a human being. It was not right that violence crush peace.
Where is the one who can answer me? My cry demanded a response. To accuse the night was still to believe that someone could hear. It was my last appeal to the Other.
As parched earth thirsts for rain, so I thirsted for encounter. As the desert blooms at the smallest dew, so I learned to let myself be drawn by the smallest breath of life, of light, of love.
I had fought against the impersonal: society, evil, war, violence with no face. Then I met the eyes of one who carried that weight. Everything took on a human face. Everything could then grow.
The night remains the night. But this night is no longer without stars. The star, my new companion, became hope and certainty of day—and yet remained the one with whom I could straighten my struggle.
My star is you (and so many others) whom I met on an Easter morning.
You told me, after a long night of pain: "My life is too hard to bear. The day takes too long to come."
It was then, in that first dialogue where we met without strength, that we discovered the strength that both of us lacked: the strength of having found each other. Together we could take one step. Then another.
We let ourselves be drawn to each other. And so we began to walk.
4. Meeting the other = receiving the gift of life as it is
In the morning, when I wake up thinking I have caught the beautiful white rabbit I pursued all night, I discover with disappointment that it was only a dream.
How many times, lost in waking dreams, I chase illusions that vanish into nothing. I blame the past to explain the present. I project wonderful ideals into the future. I flow like water, never meeting what is here now.
But who will let me live in the present? Who will give me the strength to receive the gift of life with all its contradictions, all its brokenness? Who will show me that beyond what is shattered, there is a gift to receive—today?
But who are you—my "today"?
- This heart vibrant with love and that heart full of hate, which is only a cry to be loved
- These eyes bright with joy and those eyes weeping in solitude, which are only a cry for encounter
- These hands open to my friend's and those fists clenched, those arms with no hands, which are only a cry to have them
- This mouth that kisses and that mouth that curses, which is only a thirst for love—and that mouth condemned to silence, which is only a hunger for words
- Bodies full of life and bodies inert, which are only a cry toward life itself
All that lives beneath the appearance of wreckage—this we want to welcome and reveal as a flower of hope, something only love can see and know.
O my "today"! I hear your voice, but how far away! Teach me to let myself be drawn.
5. Welcoming is not enough—we must help life grow
I can already hear the protests: "I've done everything and nothing has changed! I've walked the world and feel I've been deceived. You don't understand. Leave me alone. Why keep walking?"
Every morning we wake to the same sorrows. The outward reality hasn't changed at all: He will still be there, asking "carry me on your shoulders!" Always so wounded. Always speaking in that impenetrable way. Always so far away. Nothing has changed!
But what if we looked elsewhere? Where we no longer look! Where, because we accept our "burden," we allow him to smile, to take a step, to speak a new word after days and weeks of effort.
Where hearts meet. Where the place is found in which a blade of grass is strengthened, and the great oak too.
6. The experience of hope
This song to that breath of life not suffocated—I know it does not spring forth on its own. Every morning it requires a "yes," said again, in spite of everything.
This "yes" is an answer each of us has been giving since the day we cried out and saw the light.
From that moment we have always been in dialogue, responding to a call.
Is there perhaps Someone who never stops calling us?
This Someone toward whom we walk, hoping against hope for the day when His voice becomes silence?
This Someone—is He called "Love"?
Or perhaps "Forgiveness"?
You, "Love," who are nothing but "for-giveness." Beyond the crash of all the walls that crumble, we would hear the murmur of sap rising through the blade of grass.
Robert, 1977