On the beginning of the year day for the South of France, whilst we sang "The things that I see" (Bay Ridge Band, 1999), I wondered: if someone who didn’t know us came to live these two days with us, would they not, at some point, ask: “Who on earth are these people?”

Who are these people who sing constantly in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, and even in Latin?
Who are these people who have come from Toulouse, having spent more than four hours travelling, without knowing anyone or even knowing what will happen there, driven only by an impulse, who, "even if they don't know anyone, makes them feel at home, as if they were with old friends"?
Who are these people who claim to have discovered a "rare place": School of Community?
Who are these people who live within their community as though it were their “own family”; as "a place to help them get to the depths of things"?
Who are these people who feel the need to ask themselves "what withstands the test of time?", in a world where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish who is male and who is female?
Who are these people who claim to have understood that life has meaning "since they opened their hearts and discovered what faith is"?
Who are these people who are certain that they "are never alone", because they always have the opportunity to meet a friend?
Who are these people who return, after 23 years away, because it’s always possible for them to "meet Christ through every person"?
Who are these people who still wonder if “one of our emotions or the sign of our belonging” was burnt in the fire of Notre Dame?

Seeing these friends gathered there, I could not contain these questions. All these faces, known to me through the many events lived together, known to the point of being able to name them one by one. Nevertheless, finding these ever new and alive faces filled me with surprise. The surprise of us having found each other in order to begin, once again, to look at Christ: the emotional center of our humanity.

It’s not a cult where there is an inside and an outside, a good and an evil. Being “magnetized” by His Presence, within this companionship, helps me always remain poor. Or as T.S. Eliott said in "The Rock": "bestial as always", that is, deeply rooted in the vicissitudes of life, with all the limits I might have. But by remaining poor, because this company helps me to never forget to beg for His Presence.

After so many years on this journey in this companionship, after so many gestures that might seen identical, I am surprised that no fatigue or difficulties have spared me. In fact, it even becomes an opportunity, as Father Filippo Belli recalled during his testimony, to rediscover that "a Presence is face charged with proposal".
Being able to return to this place gives me the opportunity to enjoy this "unexpectedness", to be surprised again by the fact that my life really is an endless story, that it is, I would even dare say, infinite.

Silvio, Aix-en-Provence, France