Different Ways of Using It
From the Edith Stein Institute, a private association of the faithful for formation in human sciences within consecrated life and ecclesial educational communities, we received this: "We have seen how incorporating formative elements into our work—self-knowledge, reflection on our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with the Lord, gradual deepening—drawn also from your magazine, can help people on sabbatical leave move toward renewed motivation in their already-made commitments, overcoming the difficult periods in their consecrated lives".
I Steal the Energy
I discovered Shadows and Light by chance—though I stopped believing in coincidence long ago in my own life.
Every time I read it, and reread it, I feel I'm in dialogue with those who collide with reality, for better and for worse. None of us escape that reality, only those who pretend or force themselves to.
My mother once said: "Evil—sickness, that is—is evil, not good. We must face it in light of faith, which can help us see how, where the struggle against evil is hardest, goodness builds a scaffold, a support for growth".
There it is: love, solidarity, help—they build that scaffold, they step forward and breathe through the pages of Shadows and Light, through the people, families, and communities around it, whom I actually do NOT know!
There is sharing, stories of people, useful columns, chronicles of ordinary days, book reviews, reflections. Our magazine holds all of this, and it gives me daily food for thought—like a small landmark I arrive at or depart from.
It's like talking with a friend about everyday life in all its dimensions, sharing joys and progress but also diving deeper, each time, into the problems that surround us and touch us directly.
Often I find explicit answers; often I find unspoken questions in the texts. I steal the energy they transmit and make it my own—I always need it. And I try to learn how to relate to people made fragile. This and so much more Shadows and Light gives me.
Francesca
Does Faith Sustain Us or Numb Us Through Life's Trials?
Prompted and intrigued by the review in issue No. 104 of Shadows and Light, I read Sophie Chevillard Lutz's book in one sitting: The Strength of a Fragile Life: The Story of a Girl Who Was Never Meant to Be Born.
The birth of a disabled child inevitably draws from parents the anguished cry: "Why? Why us? What did we do wrong?" Questions that can lead to rebellion and rejection of God, held responsible for the child's condition—and then prayer and religious practice fall away (though isn't that too a kind of "religious" choice?). Or, as happened with Sophie, the shattering, painful experience of a daughter so profoundly disabled can draw a mother closer still to God, seeking meaning in her own life and in her child's. "The mystery" of Philippine, as Sophie calls it, her total helplessness and fragility, brought the mother's heart into encounter with the heart of the crucified Christ:
"My faith centers on the crucified Jesus... I believe in a God who suffers, who dies before his mother, in total helplessness. I am not alone. God is not far from me." She understands that God, in Jesus, "did not come to take away suffering or explain it, but to assume it and fill it with his presence".
"Philippine," Sophie writes, "makes me choose Jesus again as the one most necessary to help me find meaning in what I live with her. Jesus is God who takes on my condition and empties himself for me, for all of us".
A faith that simplifies everything, then? Isn't there a risk of making faith into an anesthetic? Sophie is well aware that faith does not mean thinking faith solves problems or opens the door to miracles. We must not "spiritualize" faith, she insists. Faith does not remove her daughter's suffering and anguish, made more acute by the difficulty of understanding her; it does not spare her sleepless nights and countless dark hours, nor does it erase the fears that arise from the new challenges her daughter's condition poses. But it gives her the certainty that God is near, that his love and fidelity do not fail. "To believe," she says, "means to find God where I never would have thought he could be"—in her small one, in the concrete work of caring for her, with no escape. With great wisdom she writes: "We must not stop believing in God's almightiness, which can defeat evil, and at the same time recognize the necessity of passing through suffering to know the passage, the Passover of Jesus, the mystery of his self-emptying before the joy of victory".
This mother's great faith is truly a light and a testimony for us all.
Fr. Carlo Vecchiato
My Brother Ernesto
I want to tell you about my brother Ernesto. He's 34 years old. He talks loud—I hear him when he's in his room singing and playing with numbers, cutting up old newspapers (only the old ones, or it bothers me, because I'm protective of my things and my precious friendships, because I trust them a lot even though we don't see each other much). My brother is likeable. He's autistic, but I say that's not true. He's a boy like everyone else. I get along with him fine, though not often, because I don't have the patience to be with him, only when I shave him—then he's calm and not a soul stirs. At his job at r.i.r.e.i. he does lots of things and earns respect on the job. He loves his coworkers and the guys he's in contact with. He goes to a park in Rome and sweeps the ground. I get jealous if he's treated badly, because I'm not patient and I get angry fast at the bad ones.
Goodbye from Giovanni Grossi
They Believed
I write to you with one more experience that squeezes my heart: my father died. When someone we love leaves us, we can only feel profound sorrow. In such moments a knot tightens in our throat, drawing us near to Mary's anguish beneath the cross, that Saturday that must have seemed endless, filled with doubt...waiting to understand what Jesus had announced so many times: "I will rise".
That trust Mary held in her heart had touched my father deeply, and perhaps for this reason, in his last years, every day he would turn on the television and join a program that helped him pray the rosary. [...]
We do not know well what resurrection is, but we know that the faith and hope that the risen Jesus placed in the hearts of the apostles, and which has reached us to this day, continues to save us from the fears that "the end" and "endings" of life can inspire in us. All men and women, rich or poor, scientists or unlettered, absolutely all of us must face this challenge, this temptation or final test that gives meaning to all of life. What does it profit to gain the whole world if we lose the meaning of life, that life we have known in Jesus and in the saints as eternal? Yes, that very "life" which Mary, the apostles, and the first generation of Christians saw in the risen Jesus. They believed. Not even persecution could turn them from that experience, which they passed on to us, saying: "That which we have heard, that which we have seen with our own eyes, that which we have beheld and that which our hands have touched...of this we bear witness and we proclaim to you the eternal life" (1 John 1)
Passover, as we know, means "passage," and it reminds us of the saving "passage" through the Red Sea and the "passage" of Jesus from our life into that of children of God. There is nothing more worthy of being remembered and celebrated than this event!
Fr. Fernando Cagnin Huiling (China)