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“Foster Care: Hospitality Without Measure”
Excerpts from a talk at a meeting of Famiglie per l’accoglienza (Families for Hospitality) in Bergamo

by Giancarlo Cesana

I have had two boys in foster care, first one, then the other. It’s not that they did, or do, what I want, but as a responsibility I can no longer leave them; in this sense the fundamental aspect of foster care is not that you are hosting someone who will eventually not be yours any more, but that you are taking in someone who is not yours from the beginning.
Even our own children from the beginning are not ours, but in the experience of foster care this is clearer, because there is not even the ambiguity about what could be a natural possessing. The experience of foster care teaches, especially to us, what it means to love–to love the children entrusted to your care, your natural children, your wife… what it means to love within the daily routine of home; what the word charity means existentially.
Loving is either at home, in the day-to-day life of your affections, or it doesn’t exist. Jesus said: If you’re not reliable in the small things, you won’t be trustworthy in the big ones. If you are not faithful to your wife, you can’t even be faithful to the ideal of the political party, except for out of pure convenience–that is, “not giving a damn” about the ideal at all.
The experience of the two boys who passed through my home–they arrived because of my wife’s initiative; I remember I told her, “If you’re convinced, let’s do it!”–was a loving that, as Fr Giussani said in his “Letter to the Fraternity,” co-extends itself, because it involved, a bit at a time, everyone: first me, and then the children who, like me, had not decided to do this thing.
The first of the two boys heated his keys with a lighter, went to the school principal and, giving them to him, said, “I found them.” The principal took them, got burned, and ended up in the emergency room. The second even stole things from our home. The experience of foster care is the experience of one, unforeseen in your plans, who enters your home. I thank my wife for having made me live this experience, because I was forced to ask myself what it means to love at home. The challenge is the same: give hospitality to the other just for who he is.
The challenge contained in the education process is not so much in the fact that the other is entrusted to me, but in the fact that we entrust ourselves to another. That is, what we think, what we hold to be true for our life, we entrust to another. Foster care is the recognition that the greatest charity that you can extend to a person is education–that is, communicating the meaning of your life, the way Fr Giussani told us: “I don’t want to convince you of what I think, but communicate to you a method so that you can verify what I say and what all the others tell you.” Education is precisely an entrusting yourself to freedom, but in order to do this you have to want the good of the other, you have to love, to recognize that the other has come definitively into your life, as a sign of the mystery for which life is made. There is no measure in love.
The first boy who entered my home I won over right away because everyone was telling him he shouldn’t smoke and, when he was sitting at the table and we had finished eating, I asked him, “Do you smoke?” “Yes.” “Well then, give me a cigarette!” A person is what he is, and you have to begin with what he is, welcome him for what he is, not for the project we have for changing him, but certainly without forgetting that we and he have to change. The point of departure is hospitality, not calculation about the future; for this reason, in foster care the point of departure isn’t that I’ll have to let you go, but that I take you in. And this is the point that always lasts exactly in the same way that it lasts with my children: in order to truly love another we have to realize that we are loved; in order to welcome someone who “isn’t all right,” we’ve got to have the clear consciousness that we are not “all right”! We are needy!
The gratuitousness required in the action of foster care is the gratuitousness required with our children or wife, with our own friends. It is a gesture of love that recognizes the value of the other for my life.