Many readers, Faith and Light leaders, educators, and disability professionals have asked us to publish a special issue dedicated to the Faith and Light community.
To do so, we reached out to those who have worked in the Faith and Light movement for years—parents, priests, young people, friends—and asked them to share testimonies, reflections, and accounts. Our goal is to help our readers understand where Faith and Light is headed, what it accomplishes, and what it means today.
It's hard to grasp what Faith and Light truly is, or to see what makes it distinctive, unless you know why the movement was born thirty years ago. Many today can put a face to the word "handicapped" (now replaced by "disabled")—a term for a person with intellectual, psychological, sensory, or physical difficulties of varying severity. Few understand, though, what it means for a family to have a child with a disability.
Those who do understand know that words cannot capture the difficulty, the suffering, the distress, the impossible situation in which these families—not just parents, but siblings too—often find themselves for an entire lifetime.
Today there are more services than ever to help disabled people and their families: rehabilitation, physical therapy, home care, school and workplace integration, specialized recovery centers. Yet little help exists for parents in that most delicate dimension, the one most often avoided because it is uncomfortable and hard: the question of how to make sense of innocent suffering.
The initial shock that parents feel after a medical diagnosis can transform over time into withdrawal, rebellion, apathy, aggression—manifesting in ways that ripple through the entire family. Often these reactions prevent a disabled child from growing in a peaceful environment, as the child begins to feel guilty for troubling loved ones with his presence and needs.
Each parent reacts differently to the disappointment of not having a "normal" child. But for all—especially parents of a child with intellectual or psychological disability—the wounds run deep and rarely heal. These underlying injuries push families toward isolation, the impression of being cast out, of being different from other families because of that one different child.
Faith and Light emerged precisely to rescue families from this temptation to isolate themselves, to withdraw from "normal" life. The movement invites them to discover, gradually, that their most fragile child can become a source of solidarity and connection with others. This is why I like to call Faith and Light a "journey" of very different people—parents, disabled individuals, friends of all ages and backgrounds—who become neighbors to one another, without distinction between giver and receiver, because everyone gives and receives at the same time.
Parents, people with intellectual disabilities, friends, and sometimes a priest or seminarian gather in groups of thirty or forty to form a community of encounter.
Faith and Light in Brief
The first Faith and Light communities were born in 1971 from a pilgrimage to Lourdes initiated by Jean Vanier, Marie Hélène Mathieu, and a couple whose two children had severe disabilities.
Each Faith and Light community brings together about thirty people—young people and adults with intellectual disabilities, their parents, siblings, and friends, mostly young—who meet at least once a month for:
- a time of friendship and sharing;
- a time of celebration;
- a time of prayer and worship.
Beyond monthly meetings, community members strengthen their bonds through various activities: family visits, walks, weekends together, shared vacations, pilgrimages.
Community is a large word, and here it does not mean, as it usually does, a residential community. In Faith and Light, it means that these three groups bind themselves together in faithful friendship, expressed most fully during their times together.
An encounter is a gathering for a period of time—a few hours, a day, a weekend, or ten to fifteen days at camp—held regularly, one or two times a month, in order to:
- learn together, despite everything, to enjoy life, to celebrate, to share, to live as brothers and sisters in peace and joy, in hardship and sorrow;
- learn to know one another: who each person is, what their story is, what they do in life, how they live, and most importantly, what feelings, desires, struggles, and joys each person carries;
- learn together to know the one who holds us together: the Lord; to pray to him, to celebrate him, to receive communion at his table;
- learn to serve one another in times of need, to lift, with small gestures, the daily burden that weighs so heavily on parents; to show concretely to the disabled person that it is a joy to spend an afternoon, an outing, a day with them;
- learn to grow together, step by step, each at their own pace and according to their own abilities, leaving each person free to move forward or pause, never imposing anything.
Understanding Faith and Light
In Faith and Light language, "Young people" are those with intellectual disabilities; "Parents" or "Mom" or "Dad" are their parents; "Friends" are the other community members, mostly young adults.
It is difficult to describe briefly what a Faith and Light community is, because you can only truly understand it by living it—by experiencing a friendship that seems impossible for certain people, with all the shadows and lights such a bond carries. It is difficult to convey the shock a mother or father feels upon learning that for the rest of their child's life, he will not speak, will not walk, will not be independent, will not marry, will not—will not—will not. But it is even harder to believe that this same child, defined entirely by negation, can become for a friend a profound sign in their search for meaning, a catalyst in their own spiritual journey.
You can only truly understand it by living it—by experiencing a friendship that seems impossible for certain people, with all the shadows and lights such a bond carries.
You can only understand by participating in how some parents—once so burdened and deeply isolated in their existence—discovered that they are precious and essential to their disabled child's well-being, and that precisely because of this, they need the help of other friends, other parents, sometimes people with professional skill.
Other mothers and fathers rediscovered the joy of "being with others" as normal people. They found again the pleasure of dancing, singing, picnicking, inviting friends to their homes for meals—homes they thought no longer fit for celebration. Slowly, through the dark clouds of their existence, many parents reclaimed hope, born from the love of friends (a love sometimes tested by routine, exhaustion, and obligation). This hope drew them to search, uncertainly, for a God from whom they had turned away because the loss had been too great.
These are difficult things to describe, but they can be lived, and they demand the silence that the secret, astonished chambers of the heart require.
Faith and Light has not produced great results for everyone. A journey unfolds in small or great steps: some stop, others move forward. For some, the weight of a profoundly difficult child, family circumstances, or temperament itself makes change hard or nearly impossible. For them, we must learn to wait and remain close, knowing that true change does not come from us.
Suffering remains. It is there, present in every family, visible in every community. There is no need to speak of it; it is too evident. And sometimes, to untrained eyes, it might provoke unease and flight—unless it is surrounded by that atmosphere of "welcome" that can be created only together, confident that the poor and modest signs that awaken it are vivified by the grace promised to us: "When two or three gather together in my name, I am with you."
- Mariangela Bertolini, 2003