During the summer, certain seminarians are invited to spend two or three weeks in different works of charity. Simone and I were sent to “L’Imprevisto” (meaning, “The Unexpected”), a therapeutic community in Pesaro that takes care of young people with drug addictions. The house is inhabited by twenty guys from sixteen years old to thirty. We were asked to simply live with them, working and sharing in their daily life.
The thing that strikes you when you arrive at “L’imprevisto” is the beauty of the place. The structure is tended to by some of the residents who spend the day taking care of the gardens, cleaning the buildings, doing laundry and cooking in turns. The hours of daily work are broken up by, besides meals, two assemblies in which the whole community participates. In these meetings, the young people are invited to judge their work and their relationship with the others. For us, it was beautiful to see how their desires were the same as ours. At times, they were able to express them with a force such that I began to follow them in this radicality. Listening to them changed the way in which Simone and I spoke to each other at the end of each day: we too had to judge, to not let the beauty and the profundity of the experience that we were living slip away.
I had the grace to see those young people discover their intrinsic goodness
Once a week, a theater director came to work on a show with the residents. During our stay there, they put on the performance in front of their parents. It was a great success. One of them told me afterwards: “It was a beautiful experience. After the show, my mother hugged me and said, ‘I’m proud of you.’ It was the first time that I’ve heard her say those words. In that moment, I discovered that there is something in me that is more true than the evil I have done.” It was one of the many experiences in which I had the grace to see those young people discover their intrinsic goodness, recognizing that they are not reducible to what they have done or gone through. It was evident to me that our task is not to resolve their wounds but to beg that Christ make Himself present and enter their lives. In this way, even daily work, with the passing of time, became more and more an offering, an entreaty that Christ come to save us.
