As Faith and Light marked forty years, we asked ourselves some questions. One stood out: What drew some of us—young or adult—to become part of Faith and Light? And not just for a summer, or a summer camp, or a single year. Many of us joined as children or teenagers, and now, married with two or three children, we still maintain our commitment to the communities, as best we can.
What was the spark? Who offered the push?
As we talked among ourselves and tried to answer these questions, it seemed useful to look more closely at young people and "volunteering."
Friendship is the foundation of every Faith and Light bond. But to an outsider unfamiliar with its subtleties, what Faith and Light does is volunteering—which means: caring for people in difficult situations, without payment, freely.
So we asked ourselves: Do young people still volunteer today? Statistics suggest they do.
We sent our young friend Matteo out onto the streets of Rome to ask teenagers and young adults if they volunteered. Only a few said yes—and only occasionally, in their parish. Most said no. One didn't even know what the word meant.
While we can't generalize from this, we did get a sense of something: few young people are committed to volunteering.
That gave us an idea. To celebrate forty years of Faith and Light—and the European Year of Volunteering—instead of forty candles, we'd like to welcome forty new members into Italian Faith and Light communities.
This issue of Ombre e Luci, "Why Not Me?", is meant to spark something in a friend or acquaintance. To give them the courage to look through the window of Faith and Light and similar communities. To see what happens inside. To try. To dare. To discover who all these children, young people, and adults are—people made vulnerable by disability, yet capable of offering something profound to those running on empty, those who've lost their way, those who can no longer make sense of their lives. Yes, sometimes disappointment comes. Unexpected difficulty. But what matters is taking the risk of meeting them, and recognizing both our own limits and theirs in a reality so deeply human.
And here's the thing: it's not really about us being good, about us doing good for others, about putting our talents to work for people in need.
What matters is letting them choose us as companions on the journey—and following them. Because they know the way better than we do.
Mariangela Bertolini, 2011