The adventure of a student who, having grown up in a family belonging to the Focolare Movement, left the Catholic faith and the spirituality of unity, and then found himself and God again after an unusual journey.
‘Everything depended on meeting genuine people,’ Daniel explains. An important step took place in Tonadico, an ancient village in the Primiero valley, in the province of Trento. Here, in August 2017, he took part in the ‘Week of Unity’ between Christians and Muslims, organised by Sophia and Dr Mohammad Shomali, an Iranian and director of the Islamic Institute of England. ‘Through the testimony of Muslims and Catholics, including professors Piero Coda and Roberto Catalano, and also the young people of the international Gen Centre, I was struck by their authenticity of life, the quality of their relationships, the mutual respect in their dialogue’. And he emphasises: “I met genuine people in search of God. And this opened me up to something greater”.
Daniel Scullion, then 21 years old, returned to his native Scotland, to Glasgow. He was in his final year of university, studying law, while his inner search continued. He took part in various groups, with his peers, at university, and at a yoga centre. In the Philippines, in 2018, the Genfest was held, a worldwide meeting of the Focolare youth. He decided to go. ‘There I realised that I needed to have a deeper and more serious encounter with the spirituality and the life of the Movement’. Perhaps he had discovered the field in which to find the ‘pearl’. ‘Thus the idea of participating in the Gen School in Loppiano was born’.
On 5 October 2018 he arrived in the little town. ‘The Gen School met my expectations. The experience of mutual love made me realise immediately that I was a Gen. In love, I discovered myself and God, who for Christians is Trinity, a relationship of continuous love. And I was surprised to realise that I was a Gen even before realising that I was a Christian’. But the search is not over. ‘At the end of the Gen School, I developed the desire to deepen my experience with God and with others from an intellectual point of view.’
He enrolled at the Sophia University Institute, specializing in Trinitarian Ontology. ‘I wanted to enter into Christian thought and find out what could motivate me in my life and my future vocation.’ After the first year of study, something unexpected happened. ‘My attention to the Focolare members spontaneously increased. And I thought back to those I had known as a child.’ His parents, John and Jane, were members of the Focolare community in Glasgow, which had a strong presence of families. The four children, three of them boys, were happily involved, also attending the Mariapolis gatherings.
Daniel had grown up in the context of the spirituality of unity. He was six years old when he arrived in Loppiano in November 2002, with his family, who participated in the Loreto School until June 2003. He returned to Scotland and in the following years attended the local parish. As is typical of teenagers, he felt that the time had come for him to decide his own life for himself. His experience of living in his parents’ shadow was a burden. “The more I learned about Christianity, the more I discovered that it wasn’t for me.” The farewell also involved the Movement, including those focolarini who used to visit the family.
But now those good relationships were shining again. ‘At a certain point, an invitation became clear to me, an opening to the possibility of being a focolarino consecrated to God’. Perhaps he had found the ‘pearl’ and, suddenly, he decided to risk everything. ‘I interrupted my studies at Sophia. I wanted to verify the consistency of my vocation. I went to the focolare in London for 20 months. A positive test for the soul, the mind and the heart. Conclusion? I was called to that very life’. So he returned to Loppiano, but not to Sophia, but to school of formation for focolarini, where he stayed from April 2022 to December 2023. Then he resumed his studies at Sophia, where he completed his exams and is now finalising his thesis on ‘Time, echo of the Trinity?’. On 13 December last year he left Loppiano to go to the focolare in Belgium, where, at the end of January, he began an adventure that he is passionate about. Together with three other young focolarini, he is part of the focolare opened in the university city of Louvain-la-Neuve to be of service to the students and to search together with them for the traces of truth.