After thirty years? After all we have traveled together, where must we go? What steps is the Lord calling us toward? How is this "family" of Faith and Light called to grow while remaining faithful to its vocation?
First, I believe the Lord asks us to look with joy and gratitude on the path we have walked and to read our present moment—which for some of us and for parts of our communities is a season of "maturity"—without fear or sorrow.
We must not forget something crucial: the Spirit of the Lord who inspired and sustained the birth of Faith and Light is present now, urging us forward, calling us to continue the journey, guiding and illuminating us so that we might find new confidence and new energy.
I believe that for our older communities, the Lord is asking us to live peacefully in this season, even when our numbers have grown small and our strength has diminished. This means accepting with serenity that some of what we once did may no longer be possible. Perhaps this grants us more time to talk, to meet, to confide in one another—and this too is celebration, the joy of encounter, true communion.
In some cases, it might be wise to ask whether we should join our strength together—as sometimes happens when aging parents move in with their children's families during difficult times or old age. So too for us: we might strengthen weaker communities by joining them with stronger ones, or bring together communities that possess different gifts and resources. As our young friends have so often taught us, fragility supports fragility.
Yet this must also be a time for new momentum, which the Spirit is already showing us. Just as a child in a family sometimes leaves home to start a new one, so I believe this is our moment to set out—with a little courage—to form new communities of Faith and Light, especially by drawing on the contacts already in place or the work already begun by others who look with interest and sympathy on our journey and on the spirituality of Faith and Light.
It is true that in the thirty years since our founding, society's awareness of disability has grown, and there is now greater attention and more opportunity for integration for those who are different, foreign, or simply struggling. Yet it is also true that Faith and Light has its own particular mission and a special vocation that the Lord has entrusted to the Church and to today's world—to be a sign of God's care and tenderness toward the small and the last:
"God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Cor 1:27).
There are many ways and many reasons to light a lamp. Ours springs from communion and a desire to share, and we wish neither to solve social problems nor do we have the capacity to do so. We are not an agency offering services, but friends, brothers and sisters walking together each day, each offering our own weakness and our own small gifts.
Independent Communities Born in the Spirit of Faith and Light
These are group homes, residential communities, small workshops—already existing or in preparation—born from the will and creativity of parents or friends of Faith and Light who joined their strength with that of other parents, friends, professionals, local authorities, and church leaders.
I believe this is also the meaning of those new seeds the Lord is showing us, and an invitation to recognize others already taking root, so we can help them grow. But these signs of new life are also a strong call for all of us to plant seeds entirely new, wherever the Lord grants us the grace and strength to see the opportunity and possibility.
I also believe that the future of Faith and Light here in Italy and perhaps beyond our borders depends on our ability to live well in the present—without hiding from our struggles or difficulties, and without forgetting the gifts we have received and the steps we have taken. To build this future together requires the passion and commitment of all of us, knowing that it is the Lord who shows us the way and gives us the strength to continue the journey to which he himself has called us.
— Don Marco, 2003