When you set out on a pilgrimage, expectations crowd in—emotions, moods, questions. Will it be as beautiful as the one ten years ago, when we experienced it then, with that person? Then you set the question aside and go.
Five days of pilgrimage sweep over you like an incoming tide, and at the end you find yourself full, alive, ready to return with "the pilgrim's bag" bursting with emotions, experiences, faces, smiles, tears. It is always Fede e Luce!
This pilgrimage, in my view, can be summed up in one name: Francis.
The day we spent with Pope Francis confirmed the charism of this Pope, whom we feel is "ours" because he is small, simple, and tender.
Then Francis welcomed us in Assisi with a great and intense embrace, and there we felt like family—no more geographic differences, our separate identities marked only by the colored banners we carried.
We lived and witnessed what it means to belong to a great family that began its journey forty years ago—not an easy path, not one everyone understood, but one understood and loved with a particular gaze by Jesus.
Were there moments of tension, misunderstandings, confusion? Of course there were. It would not be Fede e Luce otherwise.
But everything was held by an invitation that brought us here from the Alps to Sicily, from Greece, Cyprus, Galilee, Switzerland, Croatia: "Courage, it is I!"
You return and the question surfaces again. "Was it better ten years ago?" No. No, it is better—much better—today. In Fede e Luce we move forward because Jesus walks with us.
Vanna Rossani, 2015