A pilgrimage is a concrete gesture—a way of showing our desire to move forward together on a path of faith, hope, and love.
To invite someone on a pilgrimage might seem audacious.
The word itself, so rarely used these days, calls to mind an old-fashioned public display, something that no longer suits us. And yet a pilgrimage is an important event.
To go on pilgrimage, we must leave our country, our city, our home, our small familiar habits.
We answer a call that pushes us outside ourselves to meet the Other.
Our response is genuine only insofar as it demands a change of heart.
A pilgrimage engages us personally. This is why, as we set out, we feel in ourselves a mixture of enthusiasm and unease.
In Faith and Light, we discover another dimension of pilgrimage: we receive a special light from the fact that our brothers and sisters who are handicapped in intellect hold the first place among us. In a world where words often fail, a pilgrimage becomes a gesture that speaks.
Handicapped in body and mind, handicapped in reasoning or behavior—we are all brothers and sisters.
In the mountains, when the path grows difficult, you follow a guide and trust in her experience. The guide leads the way simply, without speaking, without comment. And the others follow, breathing hard, crying out, stopping to catch their breath.
So at the head of our journey, we will place the smallest among us—those who, in the spirit of Faith and Light, are chosen to "lead us forward," those with whom we have chosen to set out, not for whom.
Those whom the world, in its judgment, often considers insignificant, despises, deems useless or "cursed," will be our guides. The Gospel tells us that the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.
Through their silence, their stillness, their peculiar ways of expression, through their unguarded gestures, their simple reasoning, their gaze full of tenderness, their smile brimming with trust, and the simplicity of their hearts—they will open for us the path of the Gospel lived and the Beatitudes.
Mariangela Bertolini