A community of people with terminal AIDS, managed by the Handmaids of Charity with the help of volunteers, and a small fifteenth-century cloister are at the heart of this illuminating and precious book. It speaks to anyone engaged in the work of care—first and foremost, to all volunteers.
The fifty-sixth column is the one you cannot see at first glance in the community's cloister: it stands behind a pillar, white and solid, at an angle. It is a hidden column; it is a load-bearing column. In the cloister, which symbolizes community, union, and shared life, the white column represents the volunteer.
The volunteer is someone who, aware that beyond his own person lies a world of suffering calling to him—a world of sisters and brothers—feels a pull, born of solidarity with their pain, to go toward them. The authors write: "The volunteer is the hidden column. He simply stands beside, present in a way that respects and allows others to exist; in the cloister of 'life together' he is not visible at first glance: he is not there to take center stage, not there to draw attention and admiration, not there to say 'I,' but to bring into focus the luminous love that binds the whole together.
The volunteer is the load-bearing column.
He is there to bear—to bear the distress, the fear, the sense of worthlessness, the absence of any future—and to carry it into the movement of the cloister, which with its fullness and its emptiness casts light on the story.
The volunteer is a column.
Solid and strong, even in the face of the impossible; yet he does not make the cloister alone. His presence makes the cloister possible—and yet, surprisingly, there would be no column without the communion of the cloister."
But how does a volunteer reach this way of being, this inner maturity, this free and constructive stance toward those who need him? The authors answer: through willingness and the capacity to learn to understand the person before you, and through steady self-formation and reflection on your own work.
The book is divided into two parts. In the first, we read twelve letters to as many people whom the small community accompanied toward death. They are delicate and moving portraits—conversations that continue even after they have ended, in gratitude for the good that was present despite such devastation. Each letter, in its own way according to the person addressed, shows that an intense and skillful relationship can illumine the sick. It is a new light sometimes, utterly particular, that can lead them to be touched by the witness of those who practice "simply come first, you!"—and can draw forth from them the free gift of love. In the second part, we meet twelve volunteers in typical and common attitudes. Each of us will recognize ourselves in some of them and can easily draw from them points for reflection and self-examination, both alone and in group gatherings.
- Natalia Livi, 1984
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