It is difficult to understand what Faith and Light is, to grasp its originality if you don’t know why this movement was born. Many, today, know how to put a face to the word “handicapped”, a term that designates a person with more or less serious difficulties (physical, sensorial, intellectual or psychological). Few, however, know what the presence of a disabled child or sister or brother means in a family.
Who knows, knows that words cannot express the difficulty, suffering, discomfort, and the complex situation these families find themselves living, often for life. There are, today more than ever, many services that help people with disabilities and their families: rehabilitation, physiotherapy, home services, integration into school, work, special centers…
However there is still little help to parents in that most delicate aspect and most subject to being evaded (precisely because it is inconvenient and difficult): I mean that state of mind in which those who want an answer to pain find themselves innocent.
The initial dismay of the parents after the doctors’ verdict can, over time, turn into withdrawal, rebellion, apathy, aggression, in more or less serious forms, which have repercussions on the whole family and which, often, prevent the handicapped child from growing up in serene climate, precisely because they feel guilty for having upset their loved ones.
The reaction of the disappointment of not having a “normal” child is different for every parent, but in everyone, especially in parents of children with mental or psychological handicaps, it causes wounds that are difficult to heal. It is precisely these underlying wounds that lead the family to isolation, to the impression of being marginalized, to feeling different from other families precisely because of that different child.
Faith and Light was created with the aim of saving families from this temptation to isolate themselves, to cut themselves off from “normal” life to discover, on the contrary, that their different child can be a source of solidarity and union with others.
This is why I like to call Faith and Light a “journey” of very different people (parents,people with disabilities, friends of all ages and from all walks of life) who become close to each other, without distinction between those who give and who receives, because everyone gives and receives together.
Parents, people with mental disabilities, friends, when possible a priest or a seminarian, get together in groups of 30/40 to form a meeting community.
Community is a big word and here it is not, as it usually is, a community of life. A Faith and Light means that these three components form bonds of faithful friendship which are expressed precisely during the meeting.
The meeting means meeting for a while ( a few hours, a day, a weekend, 10/15 days (in campsite), regularly (once or twice a month),
- To learn together, despite everything, to enjoy life, celebrate,share, to fraternize in peace and joy, in hardship and pain;
- To learn together to know each other: who you are,what story each has behind you, what you do in life, how you live and, above all, what each one’s feelings, desires, difficulties and joys are;
- To learn together to know who keeps us united, the Lord, to pray to him, celebrate him, and to communicate at his table;
- To learn together to be helpful to each other in time of need or even just to relieve parents from the daily rhythm that is so heavy in certain cases. Or to concretely demonstrate to the disabled person that it is nice to be with them for an afternoon, a exit, an accompaniment;
- To learn to grow together
Their different child can be a source of solidarity and union with others step by step, each with his own pace and possibilities, leaving everyone the freedom to advance or stop, without imposing anything. It is difficult to express briefly what a “Faith and Light Community” is because it is only by participating in it that it is possible to experience a friendship that seems closed to certain people, with the faith and lights that this bond brings with it. It is difficult to express the shock that a father or mother feels when they know that for the rest of their life their child will not speak, walk, go to school, not be able to marry, not…not… but it is even more difficult to believe that precisely their son, so completely negative, can become for some friends the positive sign in their search for the meaning of life, in his journey of conversion.
It is difficult to imagine that in community meetings, some mothers and fathers- previously so tried and marginalized in the depths of their existence- have discovered that they are precious and indispensable for the wellbeing of their handicapped child, and that, precisely by being such, they have discovered of needing the help of others: friends, other parents, competent people…
Other mothers and fathers have rediscovered the joy of “being with others” like normal people: they have rediscovered the joy of dancing, singing, picnics, of being invited to lunch in their homes which they no longer thought were suitable for “having parties”.
And so, step by step, many parents, through the dark clouds of their existence, have welcomed back the hope born from the love of friends, love at times, put to the test (routine, tiredness, commitments…); hope that pushed them to grope for that God from whom they had separated themselves because they were too tired because he was dearest to them.
Things that are difficult to tell, but which can be experienced and which require that silence that the secret and amazed area of the heart requires.
Not for everyone Faith and Light has given great results. A journey is made in small or large steps; there are those who stop and those who run forward. For some, the burden of a child that is too difficult, the family situation or the character itself, are such that change becomes difficult or almost impossible. For them, we need to know how to wait and continue to be close, Knowing that real change does not come from us. The suffering remains, it is there, present in every family, clearly visible in every community. There is no need to talk about it as it is obvious and, at times, scandalous if looked at by inexperienced eyes. And it could cause discomfort and flight if it were not surrounded by that atmosphere of “welcome” that can only be created together, certain that the poor and modest gestures and signs that arouse it are enlivened by the grace that has been promised to us: “when two or three you will be together in my name, I will be with you.”
– Mariangela Bertolini, 1990
Translation from Italian to English by Jenna DePasquale on the initiative of the “Italian 251: Composition & Conversation II” course taught by Nives Valli using the Service-Learning pedagogical approach at John Felice Rome Center della Loyola University Chicago.
