"Should I go? Will I be in the way? Will they think me presumptuous?" I wondered as I headed to a gathering of mothers and their handicapped children I'd never met before, organized in Rome by Fede e Luce. Even after I arrived, the unease didn't fade. I watched the eyes of those mothers studying me; it seemed they were asking: "Why are you here? What do you think you can do for us?" I looked at the small legs of a child trapped in a wheelchair and thought of my own children's legs, always moving. And I was ashamed.
Then the Mass began—and the Gospel. Zacchaeus, small and curious in his tree. Jesus calls to him, goes to his house. Zacchaeus's life changes; he is saved. The priest explained: every child, every adult, "different" from the others is Jesus's favorite, the one Jesus seeks out. I sat with that. I too am Zacchaeus—small in ideas, small in love. And the tree is the tree of fear, selfishness, excuses: what can I do? I'm not capable. Let's stay up here and watch. But Jesus says: "What are you doing up there? Come down and enter into life with me."
Then I understood why I was there, why I had to be there. Because if I call myself Christian, I carry as a mark of my identity this: to stand among those who suffer, among those who pay the price though innocent, among those whom a so-called Christian society pushes to the margins, rejects, doesn't even try to understand.
And those children are not only the children of their mothers and fathers. They are our children too. We share responsibility for their fate as much as their parents do. And if we cannot find them a rightful place, a life worth living, we can only be ashamed before them—not hiding, but suffering alongside their parents in that shame.
I am here for my own healthy children too. Because if I cannot make room for them as well, if they do not come to understand and act accordingly, then they will be the sick ones forever.
- M.T.M., 1990