Why did I get to the "La Fonte" group in Milan?

Testimony of Enrico published on Fonte water, periodical bulletin of the group "La Fonte" of Milan, March 2006, n.38, pp.2-5

"Come and see ... see and do". These are the words of Jesus who resonate me in the mind when the decision to approach the bank of the "source" as a ship, a small boat who 25 years ago left his primigenio port to venture in the world. After only one, first intense meeting, I am already invited to do something: to tell me.
In throwing these few lines of me on the sheet and in observing my smile on the face, I welcome this invitation with pleasure, but also with a little suffering, because it means recalling to the mind, although constructively, a small ordeal. Despite this, I don't fear me bare.

The main reason that pushed me is easy: the desire to love, but to love with capital A; The deep, rooted certainty that I am the son of God and that he loves me. How, by what means he loves me? He loves me through my human way of loving and loved.
In my desire to love, therefore, you can find many things: the search for a new way of being a young gay, that is, being an all -round person, the desire to share with other men like me a story and experiences of life and faith, the desire to get more involved and find, in my daily life, the sense of myself and the other. But let's get to history ...

My first 25 years of life have always been accompanied by the figure of Christ, although with alternate events. For years I have sailed in my parish Sestese by attending meetings, retreats, involving myself in the musical commitments and summer 'Grest' and in a thousand other things, yet I felt not to be satisfied.

A mosaic piece was missing, the most important element had not yet come to light: the way I love. However, I know I have lived for a long time with a facade faith, a little superficial, ritual, in which God was something "told" more than someone "of known", also because he did not go precisely to move the most intimate core of me, to whom I myself did not yet know how to give a name.
A verse of a song by Angelo Branduardi makes the idea: "It is divided by a sudden / by those who only witnessed / who indicated the moon with the finger / and each time the fool / who has one / look at the finger and does not look at the moon". I was the fool in question.

The crisis began towards 18 years: what to do with my life? Who am I? I asked God: "What do you want from me?". He was stubbornly fleeing from the obvious, from the immediately close and perceptible, to take refuge in who knows what certainty, to condesce on who knows what expectation or pseudo-vocation. Certainly these expectations did not come from my family and much less by God himself, but so much so that I was about to start at a path of vocational discernment to the minor Franciscan friars, clearly in order to join the order.
From the many and beautiful experiences shared with them, I had extracted the "certainty" that my future would have been that of consecration. It matters little the fact that, inside me, another loudly claimed to come to light, others were the drives and passions. Yet, through the dear figures of friar Emilio and my mother, God spoke and I did not make the mistake of a wrong choice. But what did my, very personal error consist of?

It was the fundamental mistake of not experimenting, of not wanting to know each other, after all that he does not want to grow. I heard something inside me, because, slowly, the pieces of my desires, of my more or less daring fantasies, of my affections they joined and took a form that I did not understand if I liked it or not; After graduating, starting to work, a year before enrolling in the Faculty of Psychology, I made my homosexual condition.

The serious fracture, however, was with God and his Church. For seven years I have experienced myself in many aspects: as a student, as a young worker, like being finally "sexual" who, little by little, discovered a varied, multifaceted world, more or less hidden and more or less dark in the reality of Milan.
However, I was no longer able to live as the object of the love of God, I radically removed his presence, eliminating (or believing to do so) everything that had characterized me until then. A sort of indefinable grudge had taken me; I downloaded him to God and his (more or less) saints Servi.

Over time I understood that in reality I poured that resentment about myself, indeed I was the cause myself. Remember the parable of the prodigal son? I find myself a lot. A stuco as a mule they get away from the house, I throw myself into the fray, in a hectic life, in arid and ephemeral knowledge and adventures, even if this stubbornness, however, was not entirely negative: he helped me to shake off that little shame of me who was attaching me. The fact is that I was at the center of everything and, of course, I was my only guide. Beautiful rip -off ...
Once more I was not satisfied with that life. Perhaps it was an experience common to many of you; We approach the gay world with a certain share of idealization, imagining almost a kind of ancient Greece, but we soon clash with another reality. At least this was my experience.
I approached pain and suffering, profound solitude, I myself tried it: I saw the affections devoured by the fear of bonds and fashions, I met cynicism, I observed the man getting lost in the labyrinths of himself, I saw the superficiality and consumerism as two beasts that devour love. I used and made myself used, I forgotten the "therapeutic" welcome and power of real relationships, that is, to be "service" for others; This is the ancient Greek meaning of the term "therapy".

Now, in retrospect, I understand which weak and imperceptible voice God was talking to me. I couldn't hear it, my I always spoke! Yet he was guiding me; Even in the darkest night of the heart, he had a hand on my boss. In a sense, he granted me the freedom to get lost, and then help me to return home, and at the same time fed a weak, pale flame in my heart.

I approach the conclusion. Forgive me the prolixity, yet I feel that this story was necessary to make you understand the importance of my landing at the source. I don't know how things will go, but the joy of having met you is great. I also have to thank the dear Sr. Annunciata, who many years ago had told me about the existence of this training group. Here is the key word: training. I need to grow and share

My trust in love, to believe every day more in love, to get closer now, as they are, for everything they are and I am not, at the Gospel; To believe that being homosexual people does not only mean sex and fashion, discos and politics, to believe that one can live like a community, to believe that giving yourself to another, soul and body, is still a great thing in this world.

I am not a sinner in front of God because I am gay; I am a sinner when I do not follow the way of full and sincere love, first of all with myself. I am a sinner for all the times that I have not loved enough, but I am not a sinner if I hold another man in my arms and I tell him "I love you", because, if it is true love and if I have learned the true and authentic meaning of "putting myself in relation to ...", God is with me in any case.

And I see him ... and I sing it.