"My little one, the universe belongs to God." Viola sings, and her eyes—until this moment dry and stunned—fill with tears. A river in flood, silent and unstoppable. Viola sings because she has no choice, because My Little One is a song that has always been part of her life. Part of her life; part of Giorgia's, the songwriter's daughter ("The very day Dad wrote the words to My Little One, he sang them to me so I could hear the melody. I was barely six years old and I learned to hum it right away, fell in love with it instantly. I remember that day perfectly... I think back to Assisi, under the shed, watching so many people read the same words on their lips—words from a song born that way, in the quiet of an unassuming night, just to say a father's love for his special child"); part of the lives of hundreds of friends, young people, parents, siblings, and priests who have sung it again and again over the years at Faith and Light gatherings—in circles, at small homes, on retreats, at Mass, in meetings.
But this time is different. Terribly different. Because this time Viola and, with her, the packed church of Santa Chiara in Rome are singing My Little One at Stefano's funeral. At the Captain's funeral. It is heartbreaking, Viola thinks. It is heartbreaking and unfair: why must we sing this song—the song of joy, of gentleness, of love, of friendship, of poetry—for his death, this song that accompanied so many circles gathered with Stefano, so many retreats lived together? "Because this is the most beautiful and most important lesson Stefano left us," she answers herself. The lesson that in life there are no boundaries: Faith and Light is not a part of your time, an activity in your weeks, a parenthesis in your journey. When it enters your very being, Faith and Light becomes your time, your weeks, your journey: this is what Stefano told us by living it—through his gestures, his smiles, his moments of anger, his embraces, his posture always slightly bent toward us, all of us so small beside him. My Little One is for joy and for sorrow; just as Daniele's drawings are—drawings that Viola loved in so many field retreat booklets and now finds again on the cover of the booklet for Stefo's funeral.
Viola goes on crying. But she goes on singing too.
—by Giulia Galeotti, 2015
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