I received the grace to attend the Assembly of International Responsibles (AIR) in La Thuile, Italy, at the end of August. It was a remarkable event that filled me with gratitude in many ways.

To start at the beginning, it was a miracle that I could accept the invitation to attend. I am a high school teacher, and the event occurs during our teacher preparation days, almost immediately before classes begin. I explained to friends that it was not reasonable to ask for permission to go. “Just ask and see. What the Lord is asking of you will be made clear” I heard. And so I did ask, thinking that my request would certainly be rejected, and then all would be decided. Instead, my headmaster said that it was clearly very important for me and therefore it would be good for me, my students, and for the school. It was a beautiful surprise.

So, after the second day of teacher preparation, I began a whirlwind trip to La Thuile, which is a little ski town in the Italian Alps, near the French border where a resort hotel hosts the AIR. I arrived in Milan in the morning, having lost the night over the Atlantic. I made my way to the train station, where I found the bus that would take me on a long journey to the mountains. I was so tired at the opening assembly Wednesday night, I sometimes fell asleep while I was taking notes. I later saw indecipherable, downward trending scribbles on my pages.

The days that followed were strikingly beautiful. There were people from 72 different nations. I had the chance to talk with people from Italy, Uganda, Ukraine, Russia, Australia, and Ireland. In the assemblies, those speaking came from every corner of the world. I was repeatedly impressed with the strange beauty in the way God found me and placed me within this extraordinary history. Through one Italian priest and his simple fidelity to the grace that was given to him, Christ reached a confused young man on the East Coast of America in the 1980’s and placed him in the same history as these people from Italy and from every continent of the world.

One incident that evoked this wonder and gratitude was my visit to Don Giussani’s tomb. After I returned to Milan, I spent the afternoon with other American (and one Australian) friends there and we all decided to go and visit Don Giussani’s tomb. It was a beautiful moment for me to go and pray at the tomb to this man who has been my spiritual father for the last forty years. We had not been there long when we were joined by five Ugandans, who had been in La Thuile and had the exact same idea. We laughed to run into each other again, but in our laughter was the knowledge that it was not such a coincidence. Our lives, from such different cultures and places, had been deeply united by a history that we share, that led us to the same pilgrimage of gratitude.

The time at the AIR was a powerful witness to the fruitfulness of a yes. When I left La Thuile to hurry back to start a new school year, I was very happy for the time there. The prayer in my heart since I returned is to embrace the grace that has been given to me in this charism with a greater simplicity.

Tom, Maryland