At a certain point in the life of Fede e Luce, we realized that alongside the life of our groups and the activities of our meetings, a new form of relationship was quietly taking shape among us—something altogether different in nature.
As friendships deepened within the communities, various people found it natural to seek each other out during the week too, after school or work, to spend a few hours together the way friends do: sharing a meal with a family or at a restaurant, going to the cinema, gathering around Scripture, spending time in prayer. All of this happened spontaneously, without planning, as people felt moved to do.
Read also: A Meeting of a Fede e Luce Community
Between one official meeting and another, community leaders worked to nurture and sustain this emerging form of life.
Thus was born the "fourth moment" of Fede e Luce—a term we use to distinguish it from the other three moments (celebration, prayer, and sharing) that make up our community meetings. By "fourth moment" we mean all the relationships and activities that develop among group members outside these traditional gatherings. It includes, for example, the custom of a family inviting the whole group to a celebration. Or everyone going to the cinema together on Christmas Eve. Or a few people meeting up to play cards. Or organizing a series of evening prayers, each time in a different home. The fourth moment also encompasses the futsal tournament among Rome's different Fede e Luce communities—where everyone can play, and which has proven both formative and genuinely joyful.
The fourth moment in Fede e Luce represents an aspect of community life that is precious precisely because it exists at the boundary between the life of the group and the individual life of each person.
On one hand, it completes and enriches the life of our different communities, unfolding within them and bearing the same marks of enthusiasm and care, the simple desire to be together and the commitment to deepen the bond.
As friendships grow within the community, people seek each other out during the week to spend time together
On the other hand, it represents something that, while born from the group and the personal connections the group makes possible, unfolds outside the community itself. It consists of friendships that have their own life, resting on the encounter between two or more people and their desire to deepen it. Even though these friendships are born at Fede e Luce, even though they involve people with intellectual disabilities, they belong to those bonds that, by their very nature, rest on the deepest part of who we are—bonds that cannot be organized or predicted, and which are therefore among the most precious things in human life. Here Fede e Luce steps back, because we are speaking of a relationship between people who "choose" each other beyond any organizational structure.The fourth moment should be cultivated and multiplied in every group because, though it grows at the margins of our Fede e Luce communities, it testifies most clearly that the seed Fede e Luce has planted has borne fruit.
- F.S.B., 1990
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