1. Angelo's Mother Speaks
Why do we fight for this? Because we have to fight. We fight for the wellbeing of these children. I don't hide anything. Let people see. Let them see! Why should I hide what is mine, what God has given me?
I know a sister of Mary—I asked her: "But why so many crosses for me? I've done nothing wrong!"
She said: "Because God wills it."
Then I said: "For heaven's sake, I wish God wouldn't think of me at all!"
The sister laughed so hard.
It's hard to find an institution that treats them well.
Why don't I lock him away? Because the institutions for boys are just awful...
If I knew the other kids would give him some joy, that he wouldn't lack affection, I would send him. I got angry once when he hurt himself.
If institutions actually helped children improve... But children like mine are always stuck in a wheelchair.
But I feel it—what they need is love. Schools don't give them that.
Send him to school? What school can a child like this attend? It's impossible. The other children stop learning because they're watching him.
This is the life Angelo and I live. This is our life—what else can I do? We could be so much happier if my child were well. But you have to live this life to understand the suffering, because you can't grasp it any other way.
Only someone who's been through it knows the pain.
Often a husband and wife face it together. They take up the cross and make it lighter between them.
But for me, I have to fight alone—for him and for his father. That's the daily life: trying to smile, because if you're always crying, it's over. So you have to laugh.
There are moments of crisis. But I try to hold on. I felt like the sorrowful Mother because I already carried the cross of my daughter, but always with a smile on my lips. I didn't know then that something worse was coming.
Angelo is so good. My God, you have to protect him. There are moments when I can't even say a prayer. I look for God and find nothing, nothing.
The doctors? They give me no understanding. They could do nothing for Angelo.
God will never give me the joy of seeing him walk. They told me he'll never walk. I always say to him: "Poor mama's boy." But why do I say it that way?
It's a word I say with joy.
I see the other children play, walk... He could have given me at least something for him.
I ask God for one grace: before he takes me, he must take this one and that one... and then I'll die even happier.
My other children? They love them. We're all together—that's the most beautiful thing I can say.
I have my sorrows, but I have children who give me great satisfaction.
On one side, pain; on the other, happiness.
The pension I get because he's a minor—that pays for my daughter's institution.
2. A Priest's Testimony
Do you remember Angelo, from our first meeting at school two years ago? You were lying on your mat and I was sitting on the ground beside you. Even in that position I was still taller than you, but you wouldn't have it. Better than any words, your whole being seemed to tell me: "Have courage! Come down a little more."
It's not easy to descend when you've grown accustomed to seeing things upside down. I hesitated to follow you and so many others along the path of the Beatitudes, afraid I might go in the wrong direction... or go too far in the right one.
Then last summer you took care of me for two weeks at Alfedena. You had so much work to do!
While I dressed you, fed you, rocked you, you kept telling me: "Have courage! Come down a little more!"
Your fragility in my hands asked me to let go of every protection I had built up. My systems and my prejudices couldn't withstand your vulnerability and your smile.
Angelo, I met a boy from Marseille the other day who also asks me to make myself small. I wonder if you'll ever meet? His name is Ghislain.
Louis Sankalé, 1979
3. Maria
Like every woman awaiting a child, I too hoped and prayed that the creature I carried with such longing and love would be healthy and beautiful.
I was happy to become a mother and imagined with great emotion the moment she would call me by that sweet name.
I dreamed she would be a beautiful girl with a gentle nature. When Maria was born, I was overjoyed because my dream had come true—but my happiness lasted only a few moments, because then our shared Calvary began, both physical and spiritual.
During her first week of life—or rather, of agony—I prayed so hard that God would let her live, and I promised to love her more than my own life. God answered my prayer, and miraculously my little girl began to improve.
When she finally left the hospital and I could hold her in my arms for the first time, the doctors told me she would suffer irreversible consequences, but in my heart I hoped they were wrong.
Unfortunately, as time passed, I understood that the doctors were right, and my hope of hearing her call me "mama" was in vain.
Little by little I learned to understand her through her smile, her big blue eyes, which speak to me in a language that never ends.
I sense through her expression that my daughter needs so much love—not just mine—and that a simple caress is enough to make her happy.
I tried, as much as I could, to give her and to live myself a normal life, so my little one could meet and know other people.
But sometimes the weight of the cross grows heavy, and the soul cries out to God for help, and he always hears our cry.
I saw his help when he brought me to the Faith and Light community, where each person carries the sorrows and burdens of the others, drawing strength and courage from the open Heart of Jesus.
I found that in this age of materialism and violence, goodness still dwells in the hearts of so many people, especially young people who give so much love to these children, marked by the Cross of Christ. All of this gave me back my faith in God and in people, and most of all gave me the strength to keep living.
Anna Maria Zampardi, 1979
4. For Me, Listening Is What Matters
I don't always know what M., S., and Osa are trying to tell me with their eyes or their gestures, but because of that I feel more attentive to "listening" to them. Listening to them is what matters to me—it means standing beside them, letting them guide me without dragging along all my own world, without expecting them to fit into it. I feel that when I'm with them like this, simply, we can create a thread connecting our worlds, a thread that lets us share something of each other.
It's clear that some of these people make friendship easy—we find joy and pleasure together, discover common interests that unite us in a game, a song, a little task. With others, often this is impossible. But even when their eyes seem absent, seem to offer nothing—I'm certain that with each one a "dialogue" can be born, one of the most beautiful dialogues, if only we're careful to listen.
It often happens that I spend an afternoon with these friends and fail to listen to them—this happens when I come to them full of my own thoughts, caught up in myself and my own world. And that's how it goes in our relationships with everyone: it's hard to grasp what someone else truly needs when you're expecting them to be the way you want them to be, denying their uniqueness and making your own self universal.
These friends teach us something great: to accept the other as they are and to meet them emptied of our own world, ready to welcome them. I think that's the most important lesson that comes from our most fragile friends, from those who most shake our expectations. But let's not forget that the exchange of gifts must be mutual. I think we must keep building our friendship, deepening it so that our group becomes truly a family where each person gives their gift and is welcomed with joy for who they are. It seems to me we must walk little by little beyond our small circle, perhaps toward L'Arche.
Anna Cece
5. David Is a Very Good Child
David was born premature by six months, weighing exactly 1,150 grams. Fifteen days after birth, he had a respiratory crisis and fought death all through the night.
It's hard to describe our joy when we learned he would live, and our despair three months later when we learned he was blind.
They gave me the news when I was alone—I had been going to the hospital every day to try to nurse him.
The doctor had me sit down and told me David couldn't see, and that maybe someday an operation might restore his vision. I remember driving home like a sleepwalker and crying all day, and my husband cried with me.
The next day, once the shock wore off, I went back to the hospital with my husband to get more details from the doctors, hoping deep down they might tell us something less grave. Instead they said the blindness might have come from an infection I'd had during pregnancy, and for a while I carried guilt inside me. But later an eye doctor explained that the main cause was probably too much oxygen given during the crisis, which damaged his eyes, and he said it wasn't the first case like it.
We brought David home and began check-ups every few months. The child was growing well, but during one visit a doctor noticed his little arm and leg were tight, and then another disaster fell when the neurologist confirmed he was spastic.
He wasn't even two years old when I started taking him to a clinic for spastic children for therapy, hoping it would help him get better.
I took him three times a week and did therapy at home four times a day, but inside I felt guilt for not being able to give birth to a healthy child, and I withdrew more and more into myself, and this happened to my husband too.
In that time we hardly left the house, but fortunately I had help from my in-laws throughout, since my parents don't live in Rome. They made me feel less alone in my grief. Then came another stroke of luck, though at first I didn't see it that way—after David I was terrified of having another child. The birth of Elisabetta brought us back some peace and joy.
Meanwhile every hope of recovering his sight faded, and we discovered he heard little and didn't speak. Despite specialist visits, even the doctors couldn't figure out how much he could hear. We even tried a hearing aid but it was useless.
Other mothers who lived through what I did will understand me better, will understand this inner emptiness I felt, which is really despair.
I remember the words: "Ma'am, your son will never see."
And yet, each time, after that first moment of pain, hope returned.
I clung to the idea that in the future medical science with all its progress might do something for David, because after all hope is always the last to die and it helps us keep going.
Now David is almost two years old, and these have been difficult years. There are moments when I want to run away from all this trouble, but they only last an instant. One look at David, seeing him so helpless and needing care, and it passes. I pray to God to give me the strength to go on and to keep my health.
It's hard to accept this because you marry full of illusions, thinking we'll have beautiful healthy children, and then you face this tragedy. You always think these things happen to other people, and other people make you feel different, and that bothers me.
I've run into friends on the street who ignored David as if he didn't exist, or at the beach a pregnant woman turned her back so she wouldn't see him, or in the countryside where I spend summers—when I go out with David, people stop talking and stare at us like we're from another planet. It hurts me, and I don't know if they do it out of tact or indifference, yet they're people I know.
"David is a very good child." He never cries and is very affectionate because he recognizes people. We try to surround him with the love of all of us and to make him happy.
But I'm far from being at peace. I ask myself why God allows these things. Yet now I know there aren't only indifferent people toward these children (though there are many), and I've discovered there are also those who try to help us, who give their time and affection to our children, who make me feel less alone and who bring me closer to people facing the same struggles I do.
Rosa Maria Stafforti, 1979
6. The Path They Show Us
Perhaps the experience of Faith and Light is so profound, so "paradoxical," that a heart that has drunk from the living water of the smallest cannot turn away from this source, knowing it is a fountain of life.
Perhaps the experience of Faith and Light is so nourishing that eyes that have seen the gaze of the smallest cannot look away from that gaze, which is the gaze of God Crucified and Savior.
Perhaps—and surely—because we cannot follow Jesus Christ except by remaining faithful to the revelation of an innocent, God's Son, him, the Innocent One, crucified and risen, so that becoming like him light might spring forth from our darkness... Is this not the path that Maria Francesca, Vincenzo, Noris show us?
To the extent that we let ourselves be taken by the Holy Spirit, by Maria Francesca, Sabina, Massimo... we will be open to serving others.
Pierre Debergé, 1979
7. The Stone the Builders Rejected (Mt. 21:42)
Who are you, little brother, with your gaze constantly in motion, your mind that doesn't grasp the same images mine does, your speech that can't reach my ears?
What does your presence mean to me? Why am I so at ease with you, as with an older brother, a playmate, a study partner, a workmate?
Often thoughts like these pass through my mind and heart, when we sit in silence side by side, when I hold you in my arms. I hold you willingly and ask myself anxiously—how would I do it if you were my child? Would I be able to accept your suffering and mine, the misunderstanding and the frustration, the daily routine that stretches on for years? Why does suffering exist? Why does it strike you and all who love you?
I don't know, and I can't and shouldn't guess at what I'm not. But I believe my task as your friend before you and your parents is to bear witness to the value—despite everything—of your life; to help you and them believe in you; to tell you and them that you matter to me, because you teach those who choose to follow you so many essential things that transform us.
In you I contemplate Mystery. And I learn to live and accept, animated by a meaning I can't fully grasp—but that perhaps is simple and clear—the dark parts of life.
These are the small troubles of every day, but also and especially the events that hurt most, those that force us to turn our plans and projects upside down.
With you I know and believe in Silence.
It's a silence that stirs the soul to meditate, to open the heart, to love and be loved. It's a silence that asks for love by giving it first, in the form of trust, surrender, gentleness.
It's a silence that speaks to me of listening... Listening to your unspoken needs; listening to the most intimate part of myself, something I'd often rather not hear.
It's a silence that tastes of offering, of prayer.
With you I learn simple teamwork, true brotherhood.
You let yourself be dressed by one person and then another without complaint, you pass from hand to hand without a sound. To please us you accept being fed from the wrong side...
How often in my day—at school, at work, at home—do I act like that? How often for someone else's joy am I willing to sacrifice a little of my comfort?
Your friendship pushes me to look at myself differently; to see the people around me—all of them—beyond my first instinctive reaction, as brothers and sisters with rights and needs. And to make an effort to be in communion with them, to meet them on their own ground.
By working so hard to look past appearances and understand your language (yet to me you've always been you, and I never thought of you as different, because then you'd sink into anonymity and lose your power), something strange happens: I find myself pulled into something much harder: looking past appearances, trying to understand the language of every person I meet each day. Thinking that they too have something to give and teach me before I'm the one learning from them.
It's tasting, thanks to you, the beauty of this discovery.
Maria Grazia Pennisi, 1979