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A Birth!
We've had a joyful event in our community, and I wanted to share it with all of Fede e Luce through your next issue of this splendid and ever-more-vital magazine.
On April 27, 2011, at 10:45 a.m., my wife Mena and I—I'm the coordinator of the "Il Germoglio" community—received another great gift from the Lord. We became grandparents with the birth of little Raffaele, born to our daughter Imma and her husband Tanio, both of whom are part of our community too. Now our son Pasquale has become "Uncle Pasqualino"—and what joy he felt seeing the newborn for the first time. When I called home with the news, I could hear his shouts of happiness through the phone: "IT'S HERE, IT'S HERE, HE'S BORN, HE'S BORN!"—like he was at a stadium. His happiness was palpable then, and his eyes still shine with that same joy. For us, this has been an experience of indescribable joy, the kind only the Lord can give. We wish everyone could live it as fully as we have. Thank you, Lord, for what you give us day after day. And we wish little Raffaele and his new parents, Tanio and Imma, a long life together and boundless happiness in the sign of God's great love.
Lello
No Ifs or Buts
About a year ago, I heard that the northern communities—"A River of Peace"—would make a pilgrimage to Loreto in June 2011, and I was happy. But then I grew sad, because I'd overlooked something: my husband had fallen ill about a year before, and now he needed dialysis sessions twice a week at the hospital.
At first, I thought: "We'll have to skip it this year." Then: "Maybe I could go with our son Francesco."
But what a disappointment! Since 1985, the three of us had gone on every pilgrimage together—to Lourdes, to Assisi.
One morning, a dear friend from Fede e Luce came to visit. When I told her our situation, she said: "What do you mean? Why can't all three of you come to Loreto? We're bringing people with all kinds of illnesses and suffering. Why can't your husband come? Find a hospital there, and I'll drive him back and forth myself for his dialysis."
Her words and her enthusiasm gave me courage. I called the hospital in Recanati. After a thousand difficulties, they agreed to provide one dialysis session. "We don't accept tourists," the head nurse told me with satisfaction at the end of our long negotiation, "but we do accept pilgrims."
So the three of us went after all. We traveled with our dear friends from Fede e Luce and lived through those three beautiful days.
Warm greetings.
Elisa Sturlese Milan
Conte's Wheels
Marco Sandri—the Conte, as we called him—and I met almost twenty years ago one autumn. He was in his wheelchair, I was drowning in confusion, and somehow we found each other at once. We built a friendship and covered miles together—like that time at Gardaland with a band of madmen.
Marco imposed his own tempo on you: if you wanted to play music with him, you had to learn to keep time with him. His tempo was far more relaxed than the everyday frenzy most of us endure. That spacious, unhurried rhythm—not slow, but wide open—was the foundation of every deep friendship people had with him. And yet mentally he was volcanic. Ideas erupted from him like Vesuvius in its imperial age. Every time we met, he had something new to propose, new projects, new things for us to do together.
Even in his last days, he was looking forward. His gaze fixed ahead was constant in him; and that, really, is what makes a man a leader.
Marco lived through the birth of the Santa Melania community with me and was one of its cornerstones from the start. His whole family was a supporting pillar—not from any need to be prominent, but simply because the Sandris are the Sandris. Real substance. I can't think of them except as family. I'm a sometimes-unfaithful son and friend, but they were always generous with their blessings and embraces.
On my children's bed is a pillow with a pillowcase Marco painted. His colors accompany their nights and fill the backdrop of their dreams. When I think about it, all the art the Conte made had something dreamlike and luminescent—in the colors or the brushstrokes—but the kind of beautiful dreams that wake you happy.
When my father died, a dear friend of both mine and Marco's told me that my father hadn't died; in some way, he walked ahead of me, opening the path. Now, thinking back on my twenty years with the Conte, I remember all those miles we covered together, me pushing while he sat ahead on his wheels. Over these past twenty years Marco has always shown me the way—with that elusive chin of his, with eyes that spoke in entire vocabularies of glances, eyes that had legs and arms. Marco, months after his physical death, still walks ahead of me without pause. Goodbye, Conte.
Luca Dominici
Among the Pews, Like Everyone Else
Every Sunday I renew my faith and make my way to church for Mass. Here in China, of course, there's no freedom yet for foreign priests to celebrate at the altar in the normal way, so I sit in the pews with all the other faithful.
Canton is a metropolis of fifteen to twenty million people, they say. It's easy to see poor people on the streets, living on whatever charity they can gather or a kind word they can find.
So it happens that just outside my door, under the tree at the intersection with "Deer Panorama Street"—Lu Jing Lu in Chinese—there I find him: a man over eighty, who sits there summer and winter, greeting passersby whose heads are down, who avoid him as if he were worthless. But he's just poor, and unlucky in his family too. I stop, say hello, and chat with him. Sometimes I give him a few coins, which make him very happy, then I walk on to the bus station. When the bus comes, I board and start praying with my digital breviary, trying not to get so absorbed that I forget to get off at the right stop. It's a somewhat lively prayer, but full of real-life scenes that make you pray for people's needs. In less than half an hour I'm in the city. I walk a few minutes through carts, cars, market stalls, crowded shops, and a sea of people swarming everywhere. Finally I reach the cathedral doors, where we're greeted in two lines by the poor, people wounded in body and spirit—and a few clever ones too. As soon as they see me from afar, they wave happily, remembering the Christmas and Easter dinners we've shared together. In silence we look into each other's eyes, exchange a few gestures, and feel inside the hope of holding another truly exceptional Easter feast this year.
Fr. Ferdinando Cagnin