Other Groups
I've just finished reading «Ombre e Luci» (no. 55), and once again I admire the careful seriousness and clarity with which you tackle even the most difficult subjects.
Just before Christmas, I had the joy of a festive gathering with the FEDE E LUCE group in Abano: truly large and vibrant, full of fresh initiatives and people of every age. I thank the Lord for it! And I would like to say—and I do say it—that other groups could take root in other cities and dioceses as well. Only one other exists in Conselve.
Monsignor Franco Costa
A Subscription for a Friend
Dear friends of «Ombre e Luci», I'm writing in response to your letter of October 25, 1996, and also to explain my silence.
I have long appreciated your magazine and have tried, in the circles I moved through, to share it and point out its merits. What you call in your letter your «struggle for a change in how people think about disabled persons» remains, even now, my commitment too. What has changed is my personal situation and my work. For years I've been away from my home, losing the reference points of the past, and above all my work for this cause is no longer as a volunteer but as a professional. And, I must say, the emotional weight is far heavier now. The reality of human suffering is so close to me that I often feel saturated by it. That's why I've stepped back from what you offer—though, regardless of my circumstances, I continue to see it as genuinely valuable and rich. So I'm sending a check to give a year's subscription to a disabled friend as a gift.
Dr. Salvatore Russo
A Gift for Living
I'd like to share this prayer by a Spanish priest with all the readers of OMBRE E LUCI. His name is Atilano Alaiz, and it comes from his book «Friendship, a Gift for Living». Paoline Editions - L. 12,000. I'm sending you this information because I loved it so much, and I want to recommend it to everyone who, like me, believes in true friendship... the kind that, in the wise words of an old German proverb, «does not freeze in winter».
Marzia
Thank you, God the potter,
for you created friendship and shaped it with the warmth of your hands. Thank you for placing the gentle presence of friends beside me. They stand with me to hold back my joys and my sorrows.
They clasp my five fingers in their hands—empty of abundance, full of need.
Together with my friends, you arrive, disguised as a wanderer, as a dreamer, as a man in pain.
Their eyelids applaud my successes and close before my sins. Their voice calms my tears and sweetens my failings.
Without them you depart as if you had never come; time stops its hands, mothers lose their hearts, flowers lose their colors.
Thank you, God,
for the kiss and the letter; for the embrace and presence; for the secret and the trust. (...)
Atilano Alaiz