"Like a flame lit in the heart of winter, in the first quarter of 1968 there appeared in black and white, in 28 pages, Ombres & Lumiére. Moved by the suffering of the most fragile, Marie Hélène Mathieu and her team opened a window of hope for thousands of families struck by disability and its weight: exhaustion, rejection, loneliness…" So Cyril Douillet reminds us (O&L no. 221) on the magazine's fiftieth anniversary—the one he now directs.
That flame kindled hope in Mariangela Bertolini's heart as well. She remembered: "when Chicca—her daughter with severe disability—was about ten years old… we were in an abyss that many parents know. It was silence, secret tears in the night, beside her bed. I tried to understand the mystery of her presence, the meaning of her life: grace made its way slowly, without our even noticing. After the light of Lourdes, came Faith and Light with the pilgrimage to Rome, friends who joined us. It was during that time that I found in reading Ombres & Lumiére strength, courage, and hope. I found in it what I had wanted to express for so long without being able to". Years later, Mariangela founded Ombre e Luci, the Italian magazine in that same spirit—beginning with its title. We now participate with great joy in the jubilee for fifty years of Ombres & Lumiére, our elder sister whose experience Ombre e Luci has drawn upon, broadening our horizons. This occasion for dialogue also gives us the chance to reflect on our own magazine, to deepen its purpose, to make it stronger (what do you think? We renew our invitation for you to help us improve it by answering our online questionnaire). We believe that the shared spirit of these magazines has good reason to exist today—and that it would be important for this perspective to emerge in English as well, perhaps in a European network.
In Ombres & Lumiére, Mariangela had found "a correspondence with unknown friends who offer their hearts and hands from a distance; all of us hungry to tell, to listen, and to share". You will find this issue full of correspondences: from France, from Lebanon, from Italy, from the summer… from so many people who, in different moments and from different places, tell of their window of hope in "a letter with many voices, a being together on a rocky path that—as Mariangela wrote—becomes gradually a great road full of people, where we are led and guided by Jesus". (OL 128)