“Obviously if Jesus is real, then you have to give Him everything, you’ve got to become a nun!”. I had just arrived in Turin to study, in September of 2014, and I uttered this phrase almost without thinking before my new roommates, while I was shaking out the tablecloth after lunch. With a bit of embarrassment, I hoped that they hadn’t heard. The truth is that I had just begun to unwrap a great gift.
I grew up in Vasto, in Abruzzo, between a game of basketball and a walk on the beach. I received the faith from my parents and the belonging to the Movement of Communion and Liberation. Heaven certainly had to be beautiful like the summer vacations in the mountains with the community. In middle school, after an evening under the stars with my friends, I intuitied the promise that CL would have been my home forever, that I would have been happy there. But during my teenage years, which were rather frenetic and restless, the Movement lost all of its appeal for me. My passion for sports brought me to the Salesians, the anchor through which the Lord kept me in His vicinity. However, a bitter delusion remained in me. After the evenings with friends from high school, before the sea, I would ask God: “Where are You? What happened to the promise of joy that You made me?”. In the storm or in the silence of the night, the same response kept coming back to me: “Where are you?”.
On the threshold of university, I was certain of just a few things: I was not going to study something in the sciences and I was not going to be involved in the life of CL. My older brother convinced me to transfer to Turin to study Engineering, and, what’s more, to live in an apartment with eight girls of the Movement. I consider this bizarre choice the plot twist that allowed God to take back control of me.
I found a house with the door wide open
While I was packing my bags for Turin, five priests were getting ready to move to the same city: a house of the Fraternity of St. Charles was arriving in the parish of Santa Giulia in the same days that I was beginning my studies at the Polytechnical university. My roommates, curious about the arrival of the priests, began to invite them to dinner; and so I too, little my little, began to draw closer to their house. I found a house with the door wide open, occupied all day by young people and children. A house in which I could arrive at any hour, without notice, only to say hi or to seek relief for some weight I was carrying inside. Those priests were there for me, for us, and they were happy. And the friends of CLU around me were also happy.
In the eyes of the world, my arrival in Turin was a great failure: Engineering was not my path and I began studying Design. I had, however, opened the great gift: the promise of God was true.
When my friend Giorgio left for the seminary of the St. Charles, I thought that I would also want to belong to this family, to be a missionary of Christ. But in reality, I had already thought of it years before, when as a sixteen year old, all of a sudden, it seemed urgent to me to discover my place in the world. Before the people I would meet, I would ask: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. One evening, in the oratory, one of our educators announced that she was leaving for a volunteer experience in Togo. “That’s it: I will be a missionary!,” I said to myself and I ran to the priest who was leading us. I knew that the only reason that you can give something is that you have received everything, and I knew that this had also happened to me.
When some of those friendly sisters dressed in blue began to appear for the summer camps in Turin, in the mission of the priests, I happily assented to this life that God was suggesting to me. I intuited that it was really He who was indicating it to me since I would never have been able to imagine it. Now, after the years spent with the Missionary Sisters, what else could I do if not give everything again to the Lord?
