Silvano Cola

 

I was struck by the light

When I was ordained a priest I thought that I had already reached human and spiritual maturity. Besides my studies in philosophy and theology, I had a degree in education, I had studied pedagogy at the University of Turin , I had a degree in psychology, I was working in Turin , in a Boys Town , and teaching social psychology to social workers….

After only four years as a priest I started going through an intellectual crisis because I felt that all the philosophy and theology I had studied was of absolutely no use in the ministry. I was honestly thinking of leaving the priesthood when a friend who studied at the polytechnic school of Turin and who didn’t know anything of what I was going through, said to me one day: “You know, Silvano, I came in contact with a movement…” I blocked him at once. As a psychologist, I thought of movements as leaders with followers who were like sheep, the opposite of self-fulfilment. His insistence went on for at least two months, but I wouldn’t let him get so far as to even tell me the name of the Movement.

One day he confronted me: “Listen, Silvano, you are a Catholic priest and I am a Catholic; I came in contact with this movement and I don’t know if it is Protestant or Catholic: you must get to know it at least so that you can tell me if I can belong to it!” I didn’t realize that it was a trap. With great arrogance, I replied: “Well, if it’s for that reason….” An hour later we found ourselves in an apartment where there was only one young lady who welcomed us, greeted us, and we sat down. No one was speaking.

With a smile, she said: “If you don’t speak, I will have to say something. What shall I tell you… perhaps how we spend our day…. As soon as we wake up in the morning we choose God again as the only all of our life….”

That was the first blow for me: I felt my stomach twitching (in twelve years of seminary life I hadn’t heard a sentence like that). Then – she continued: “We prepare breakfast for Jesus in the others, we go to the office to love Jesus in the supervisor, to love Jesus in our colleagues….”

I don’t think I have ever suffered as much as I did in that half hour. My one insistent thought was: “She must be immaculate!” I was really upset. When we left I said to my friend: “I can’t tell you if they are Protestants or Catholics; I only know that something important happened.”

I left quickly (I had a motorbike). I wasn’t able to sleep for a number of nights. I was like a robot at work too; I kept asking myself: “Who are these people?” I thought: if I continue on like this, I’ll go mad. I must understand who they are.” I went back to that apartment, this time alone. Another young lady opened the door. I greeted her and asked if that other young lady was home. She answered that she was alone. A little hesitant, I said: “Please, when she comes home, would you tell her that Father Silvano passed by to see her.” Then she replied: “Oh, you are Father Silvano, please, come in!” I had never seen her before in my life, and she already knew me. I was quiet. She spoke to me about their spiritual experience.

When I left, going down the stairs, I sang: Quasi modo geniti infants, “like newly-born children seek the milk of wisdom.” It was as if I had been born in that moment. My past life no longer existed and was of no interest to me, it seemed to have no value. With joy in my heart I thought: Incipit vita nova, as Dante wrote in the song of paradise. I understood that I had not understood anything of the Gospel. “They speak but they do not act” St. Augustine had said in Sermon 74, adding: “if they speak and do not act, they are evil people, and if they are evil, they cannot say good things.” It was like a photo of myself. I felt dazzled by the new light that surged forth from the Gospel.

In the following two months, I went to the focolarine in every free moment I had. I didn’t speak; in contemplation, I listened to wisdom: the Gospel lived out in normal everyday living. I had finally seen the novelty of the Gospel.

When I went for the first time to the house of the focolarini, I met Vittorio Sabbione, a well-known lawyer in Turin . He told me how he lived the Ideal as a lawyer, things I never imaged ever happened, and so I dared to tell him the little experiences I had lived during those two months. In this communion, I was deeply impressed by a new reality never experienced before, which I understood later was what they called Jesus in the midst. In fact, in saying good-bye to him, I said: “Vittorio, working with abandoned and delinquent boys has to some extent made me a delinquent too, and perhaps I will always be one, but even if I go to hell, I will bring this experience with me.” It was the destruction and resurrection of the I into the “we” and, at the same time, it was “heaven.” The world was outside.

Six months later, at the beginning of July, 1955, I went to Vigo di Fassa, in the area of Trent where for the first time I participated in one of those summer meetings called Mariapolis. A new world, extraordinary. I saw Chiara, I saw the extraordinary simplicity and normality of the Gospel, harmony. I understood the meaning of a person who has a charism. She was very busy and so she sent one of her first companions to speak with me. With her I discovered the secret of God and of man: to forget oneself in order to truly love the other. I won’t explain more. It would be enough to understand deeply what Jesus means when he says: “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Love arrives to this point. And this helps us to understand that other statement: “The Father and I are one.”

Jesus forsaken is the only true key to being One. This is the trinitarian model that Christians must seek to live: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

In brief, these are the three revelations (I can call them this because for me they were revelations) that I have deeply placed in my soul: God-Love as the only all of our life (before the priesthood, before the ministry, before our family); to see Jesus in everyone because we are all creatures and children of God, men as Jesus was a man, indeed, the Man; Jesus crucified and forsaken, that is, the Man at the apex of his human maturity, free from every conditioning, even in the moment of the darkness of his separation from the Father, when, out of love, he entrusted again himself to the Father.

There was only one drawback: unity, this paradise, was easier to accomplish with the focolarine and focolarini than with the priests (our priestly Ego was very strong). It took the prohibition given by the Bishops’ Conference in Italy to continue having contacts with the Focolare Movement, a prohibition that forced us to take a step which seemed to be impossible: so as not to lose the Life we had found, a small group of priests made a pact of unity: “to die rather than to lose Jesus in our midst.”

And we are still here, in the splendid family of the Focolare Movement, true family of God because Jesus is its only true bond.