I'm sitting on the terrace of the Miravalle, a mountain restaurant where I've come for an aperitivo with my husband. I'm on vacation in a small Dolomite village; the name "Miravalle" itself invites me to contemplate the beauty before me: sky, mountains, clouds, hay, flowers, children's voices, and silence.
Then, all at once, huge white clouds darken against a clear sky. The sun and sky vanish. Rain that had barely begun falls heavily now, and the valley turns black.
It happens this way in our lives too. Carefree, calm, at peace—suddenly our hearts fill with darkness that becomes tears we can barely hold back, tears that seem endless: the diagnosis of your child's disability, a grave illness, a death, an unexpected loss.
I head toward home and already in the distance the mountain peaks turn rosy as the clouds thin and clear sky reappears.
This happens in our lives as well. When we've lost hope, worn down by suffering, exhausted by failure and tragedy—both our own and the world's—we lose the space to welcome the good around us. We stare so hard at one dark spot that it obscures everything else. Have our sorrows and sacrifices destroyed our hunger for new things, for beauty we've never known, until we can no longer see them?
Perhaps now is the moment to open the eyes of our soul again. To look with wonder at all the beauty and goodness happening in us and around us, each day, each hour.
This is what happened to us while preparing this issue.
A child psychiatrist in public services, someone with the humanity to enter the lives of a family shattered by a troubled child, designs and creates that "unhoped-for home" to welcome him—and becomes so much the family's friend that she describes them with both delicate and unflinching realism.
A widowed mother who for thirty years has lived an almost solitary heroism beside her difficult son, searching desperately for his future, sees her unspeakable efforts suddenly rewarded: the young man now lives peacefully in a group home.
Young people, long locked in their autistic cocoons, thought incapable of independent thought, silent and mysterious, begin to communicate through computers, sharing their feelings and desires in ways that move and disarm those who have always known them.
A small, humble Albanian nun becomes known to the whole world: more celebrated and more powerful than the mighty through that Love which led her to welcome and care for the poorest and most abandoned of mankind—in a few years, she gathers six thousand sisters around her.
The Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel Prize winner in literature and father of an autistic son, tells us about his child and his wife's devotion, with observations we thought belonged only to our own homes.
These are the occasions for wonder that OMBRE E LUCI offers its readers at this start of the year—hoping we can find together, in our difficult daily lives, many small and great moments to astonish us and call forth our gratitude.
— Mariangela Bertolini, 1998
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