Eleven years ago, a young couple from Casale Monferrato with three young children, tied to the Movement Operazione Mato Grosso, decided to leave the apartment where they had been living to go to a small farm just outside the city and so to offer to young people a place where they could work in nature and sustain, with the proceeds, missions. Today, they have five children and a boatload of friends -from other children to adults who are already aged- who every day pass through the farm to carry on this work.
Through a university student of our parish, I became aware of this reality and I immediately thought that it would be beautiful to bring our high school kids to work a bit with them.
And so we began to go, in groups of about a dozen kids, once a month. We leave Saturday after lunch, we work in the afternoon, have an evening of games, songs, and stories, we work again on Sunday morning and, after lunch, we go back to Turin.
We have split and stacked wood, tilled the soil, painted rooms, taken down drywall and studs to remodel a kitchen, decorated some vases of little strawberry plants to gift to kids…
On the last evening, I asked the kids what beautiful things they had discovered in coming to the farm and what difficulties they had experienced…
Young people need to feel that what they do serves a purpose and is useful.
One girl said that she had been very frustrated to not be able to cut the firewood since she was not strong enough. In a world where everyone needs to be perfect, often we are able to hide our limits. When face to face with nature, however, there’s not much we can do. The piece of wood can be more resistant than the strength of your arms.
Another boy told me that it had been beautiful to feel that he was taken care of by the older boys who were teaching him to work. Having mentors who worked with him, who waited for him, had made him feel wanted and precious for someone.
Another girl said that she had discovered the meaning of mission: giving to receive. Love, energy, and time given fill us up. Therefore, working for others, while you help them, you also discover that you are useful, you have a purpose and you are happier.
Young people need to feel that what they do serves a purpose and is useful. How many times we hear them say: “It’s useless!”. They seek meaning, a goal, a purpose for which to use their time, energy, and lives.
But above all, they are looking for someone who will look at them with esteem. The first time that we arrived at the farm with these “city kids”, someone immediately put an axe in their hands and brought them to split wood, without worrying too much about their capacity to handle the tool. There was no suspicion, doubt or apprehension, but a gaze full of trust and encouragement.
Only if they receive this gaze of love, young people will manage to not fear being imperfect. “You are precious in my eyes,” God says in a verse from the Prophet Isaiah. Not for what you are able to do but for that which you are. It is this gaze that we receive in confession: and therefore, is there a name that is more on the money than this – “Mercy” – for this farm?
