Every year, the provincial coordinators, their deputies, and the board of Faith and Light gather for the national assembly. These meetings typically run three days with a packed schedule: reviewing and approving budgets, sharing updates from the communities, hearing from the editors of Ombre e Luci, planning next year's events. Yet despite all there is to do, people arrive with hearts full of emotion at the thought of seeing each other again after a year or more. This time we met in Torreglia, a small village near Padua that hosted us for four days. Beyond the regular assembly, we also held training for vice-coordinators and some of the young people.
The training program was designed to strengthen the movement's sense of identity and the roles of responsibility within it—something even more necessary after the hard trials the pandemic brought. The team of Carlo Gazzano, Angela Grassi, Gianni Guerra, Daniela Guglietta, Paola Medri, and Simone Minoni developed three sessions of reflection, each centered on one of the three siblings from Bethany in Luke's Gospel: Mary, who represents listening; Martha, the symbol of action; and Lazarus, awareness of our own wounds.
An opening exercise in dramatic positioning—imagining ourselves alongside one of these three Gospel figures—invited everyone to open their hearts, to understand themselves better, and to discover their own particular gifts and strengths. Each of us has unique aptitudes and affinities. When we use them in the wrong direction, they bring suffering not only to ourselves but to the entire community. Other brief, lively scenes drawn from the life of our communities introduced a series of small group workshops for conversation and sharing. Once these got going, they were hard to wrap up!
Walking from group to group, you could see how the lived experience of those participating was finally being shared: some faces showed sadness over conflicts never resolved, or communities that seemed to have lost their enthusiasm for gathering; others showed optimism that solutions could be found, and people remembered the beauty of a simple house at Faith and Light. Those workshops were giving shape to the training and returning to participants the truth about roles in Faith and Light—they are not merely positions in a pyramid of responsibility, but rather hubs of mutual exchange and accompaniment among all the communities.
It was no accident that the vice-coordinator role was chosen as the focus for this training, since it is the unique position that bridges the provincial coordinator and the community coordinators. Angela Grassi, international vice-coordinator and team member, said she was thrilled to see how "both a sense of duty and a sense of gift emerged among the participants; it was clear, too, from the improvised skits performed at the end of each group—created on the spot and so direct expressions of what had been shared in the workshops."
The various discussion and sharing workshops were hard to wrap up once they started. Some faces showed sadness over unresolved conflicts; others showed optimism about finding solutions.
Nor was it coincidental that we invited young people, given that generational renewal remains a pressing issue in Faith and Light communities. In the eyes of Francesca, Maria, Nicolò, Daniela, Mariagrazia, Leonardo, Marta, Flavia, and Luna shines initiative and a desire to act. It was important to invite them both to hear their needs—above all, their sense that the younger generation receives too little trust—and to make them part of this mutual accompaniment and growth.
Our hope is that these days of exchange will bear fruit over time and space, reaching even those who could not be here—with special trust placed in our young friends, who, in inviting others from outside to "come and see" Faith and Light, may carry the greatest responsibility of all.