The House of Joy
On “Vivere,” Fr. Ferdinando Colombo tells the extra-ordinary lifestory of Eva Lappi and her large extended family
In 1994 Claudia and Roberto Lappi fell in love and got married.
A family like many? Yes, but with the blessing of Fr. Giuseppe Dossetti whose wedding gift is to have communicated to them faith, a deep spirituality, a way of seeing life, work, and the future.
So Roberto, with golden hands that know how to breathe life back into what they touch, transformed a garage into their home and started a remodeling business calling it “Ora et Labora” that allowed them to maintain a family whose boundaries expanded according to their marriage promise: “Yes, we are willing to welcome the children that God will give us.”
“Yes. We trusted,” Roberto says, ”We then realized that the Most High is very generous, that the children themselves are very diverse and express the specific charisms given to each member of the Church.
Thus come to life: Francis, Catherine, Joseph, Andrew, Magdalene, Eve, David and Sarah.
And here is the main protagonist: Eve. She was born on January 4, 2005, the sixth-born, born with a severe malformation. A completely paralyzed child who is unable to eat or even breathe on her own because she is intubated with two automatic machines to keep her alive.
For about three years Eva becomes popular with doctors and nurses in the pediatric intensive care unit at Sant’Orsola in Bologna. Parents can go to see her in the morning and evening wearing masks and something reminiscent of a space suit.
Meanwhile, fidelity to marriage vows continues and Claudia is pregnant with David and then Sara. And to top it off Claudia tells us, “We have not arrived at 8 children but at 12 pregnancies and we must confess to you that the 4 unborn souls are more present and active from heaven than we ourselves are to each other, try also to invoke the intercession of the souls in purgatory and you will notice.”
The verdict of science
When Eva was born, doctors said she should live only a few hours or a few days: on January 4, 2023, she came of age instead. In the Lappi household they use an indispensable drug: love, to which Eva responds with captivating smiles and looks that penetrate your heart.
Eva is the spiritual and material center of the family; she does not speak, hardly moves, lives attached to a breathing tube and a thousand various contraptions that require expertise and skill, timeliness and precision, and involve the whole family .
At her birth we told the One who had given her to us to take her back,” Dad and Mom say, ”We were thinking of healthy and beautiful children, not waste and useless scrap. We hadn’t understood anything yet, our prayer read like this, “Take her with you this poor child, into your kingdom of infinite peace.”
What foolishness, what paucity, what ignorance. But then, by pure grace, we were made to understand the absolute value of life with the invitation to think of the good that would be lacking if that life had not been born.”
Around her, the family has continued to expand, because their home is always open and in addition to family friends, children’s companions, mom Claudia and dad Roberto welcomed anyone who showed up.
Gianni Varani, author of the book “Eva’s Sense for Life,” describes the situation this way: “Poor, homeless, refugees, prostitutes, junkies, depressed, Roma, prisoners, penitents sent by local parish priests or desperate cases suggested by social services have passed through there.”
Significant is what Massimo Pandolfi wrote in Il resto del Carlino: “These desperate people arrive there and are welcomed without preamble. Soon they realize that everything revolves around the very quiet Eva. But then they are involved in family prayer, discover what Lauds and Vespers are, and find peace and tranquility.
They are welcomed even if they don’t pray. Maybe as soon as they arrive they want to run away, they steal into the rooms, and Claudia and Roberto’s other children get angry. But then something happens, almost always something happens, in what Card. Zuppi calls “a small House of Charity.”
What happens is that stragglers find their way again. Kids who wanted to die who are now totems of life. And again: former prostitutes and drug addicts become small businessmen.
These wonders revolve around her, this girl, this mystery named Eva who is seen to listen and understand and who cannot do much else, but actually does so much.
Perhaps explaining it all is Caterina, one of Eva’s sisters, “I realize now that Eva has too much to give, she cannot stay locked in a family. She is a light on the bushel. No one who has met her forgets her. No one. We are her arms, her word, her hands. One does not learn this by reading a book who Eve is, but by being together with her.’”
The charity they practice is not a hobby. It is part of their whole life; they would not know how to do without it. And the other most striking fact that strikes those who enter Eva’s home, even if they were sunk in the deepest skepticism, is the gladness one sees at their large table.”
“Eva heals everyone who comes through here,” Papa Roberto tells us, ”she doesn’t tell you your mistake but while you talk to her she welcomes you with her love making you long to love.
For Mama Claudia, in fact, Eva is perfect just as she is: “My mom heart cries at all hours for her suffering, but not for her because Eva is complete like that. She has unique smiles that repay you for every sacrifice and allow you to be able to appreciate everything around you.”
Brother Andrea: “She in her weakness succeeds in something we fail at: to love sincerely without any prejudice. Eva without speaking and only with her gaze conveys a sense of love that never condemns you, whatever mistakes you have made.”
Catherine, Eva’s sister: “She shares by doing good to all the people who come to this house.”
And finally Francesco, Lappi’s eldest son: “I see my siblings as beautiful allies in life, with whom I can share anything negative or positive.”
The miracle
They come in despair, meeting new hope. A hope nurtured by the faith of Eva’s parents, “proposed to the guests and to the children themselves,” as Varani writes in the book, “without demands or obligations.
In Eva’s home they do not ask for tolls or certificates of faith. They just want to live that way.
Matteo Zuppi, Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna and president of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, wrote the introduction to Gianni Varani’s book. Says Zuppi, “The Lappi people did not think that Eve could infect others. They doubted, because the word of science said other things. Eve knows that science knows many things, but it often forgets the essential: science does not know miracles. Yet, some say that miracles exist.”
We can call this house in Casalecchio di Reno, the House of Joy that gives hope to those who live there but especially to poor and desperate people who happen to live there.
Source
- Vivere, October 2024, pp. 8-9