My name is Elisa and I study pediatric psychology in Padua, Italy. For a long time I had an intense desire to dedicate my time to doing good, both for myself and for others. That is why I decided to leave for Boston, where I spent part of the summer with oncological children at Massachusetts General Hospital. The pathology that I principally treated was brain cancer, which was fought through chemo and/or radiation. Before going to Boston, I knew that it would be a tough experience, but the desire to be with them and to give all of myself was stronger than any fear or second thoughts.

Once I arrived and after I was introduced to those little ones, I truly thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it. When I saw their suffering eyes and exhausted bodies at such a young age I was tempted to give up. The truth is that it would have been impossible to be by their side with peace in my heart without Christ. It took just one day to realize that I couldn’t face such circumstances relying only on my own strength. I couldn’t stand in front of children who could no longer speak or walk. I couldn’t peacefully say goodbye to a little girl, Irene, who at only three years old was leaving the hospital because there were no more treatments for her. I couldn’t bear my radical questions screaming out “why?” Why such a heavy cross for such small children? Why death at such a young age? hy this intense suffering for their parents?

Recognizing my own smallness in front of their lives and their challenges, I offered up my days each morning, asking for the grace to bring light. “May I bring Your light, may I look at them lovingly as I am also looked at by You” was my prayer before entering the hospital. The main issue was indeed this: to love them as I am loved. What those children truly needed was to feel cherished for who they were at that moment, even if they didn’t have the strength to get up from their strollers or to speak to me. They didn’t care about anything else, though it’s hard to admit that when considering children aged two to ten. They wanted to be loved in the depths of their being, and this wasn’t possible for me without asking for the necessary grace because such love cannot come from man alone.

Father Giussani wrote that prayer is “the only human gesture which totally realizes the human being’s stature”, given that “to be conscious of oneself right to the core is to perceive, at the depths of the self, an Other”. The weeks I spent with those children were therefore a tremendous opportunity for growth in my faith. Every day I experienced the truth of that dependent I that Father Giussani writes about in chapter ten of The Religious Sense (How the Ultimate Questions Arise), “like spring water rising up - it is, in its entirety, derived from its source”. The desire I had in returning home after this experience was to keep living each day with the awareness of being dependent on a greater design over me and others, to be a tiny flower that derives everything from the support of its root.

Elisa, Padua, Italy