“To hope beyond all hope”

Chiara M. in an excerpt from her diary from a few years ago, writes: “I am groping about in this painful darkness, so alone and full of spiritual tears, a silent cry that reaches out beyond the infinite galaxies, directed to heaven with a resounding echo. But where are you? Why don’t you say something? What are you busy doing while I cry out my pain, my powerlessness, my solitude? Just clench your teeth, I told myself, and believe beyond all of this that you feel. Believe beyond that which is unbelievable, beyond the impossible, lose everything. Nothing, nothing should remain. I felt my soul crying. I had nothing left, a nothingness that was filled with everything, God alone.”

After finishing my studies I began to work in a hospital in my native city of Trent, in northern Italy, as a professional nurse. I really loved everything: traveling, playing the guitar, photography, reading, studying languages, getting to know different peoples and cultures, climbing the mountains, or contemplating the beauty of the sea, singing around a camp fire, or watching the play of sunlight through the forest. I had made plans to go to Fontem, in the Cameroon, our little city. I wanted to grow, to be enriched with different cultural and human experiences.

But I had not calculated on the unforeseen. I had an adverse reaction to a medication, rather unexplainable, so serious that I had to be hospitalized in the very department where I worked. That’s where my Calvary began, made of tests, hospitalizations, going to specialists in different cities, different clinics, cures or attempts at cures of all types, hopes, expectations, disappointments, hopelessness, but above all, a lot of pain, so much pain that not even morphine has ever been able to fully take away.

My physical deterioration began slowly and continuously like a slow drip. I remember the moment that I placed my guitar in its case for the last time. I cried because I understood that it would be for the last time. My hands hurt too much and I knew that every decline in health was irreversible.

Then another time, due to a very serious medical mistake, I almost lost a leg. And that time I really thought that I would not make it on my own. Something that one of my friends in the Movement said helped me not to give in to total desperation. “You know what this pain is – we can carry it together; but if you can’t make it, don’t worry, we will carry it for you.” In that moment what was happening to me physically didn’t change in any way, but inside I felt the strength of unity.

There were moments when it was truly difficult to say yes to God. I had to say yes to giving up my profession which I dearly loved, to being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. If I just stop and think about it, it seems crazy to say yes to him constantly, tenaciously, and continually. Only someone who is crazy can throw him or herself into the unknown, trusting only in him, giving him the full go ahead, letting him do whatever he wants.

And yet, oddly enough, every apparent jump into the unknown, into the darkness, became a plunge into the light; and my partner never ceases to surprise me. A year ago, he also gave me the possibility of writing a book entitled “Cruel Sweet Love,” in which I tell this experience of mine. Every day, I receive e-mails, letters from people who open up, who share the deepest part of themselves and begin to hope again, thanks to this total yes that I have said to him, to my partner.