What truly makes us happy

RIO DE JANEIRO – 21 TO 31 JULY 2013

Now that I sit down to write a few lines about what the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro meant to me, images, memories and anecdotes keep coming back to me from that trip, so special, unique, different and strange, that we lived in 2013, and I can’t help the smile that slips out. In any case, I’ll try to be brief and explain a little how the Lord makes use of anything to touch our hearts.

Let’s start, then, at the beginning. I was just a girl who had only just turned 13. As you’ll have worked out, I was a little under the minimum age now required to be a true Sant Mateu pilgrim; but it didn’t matter, because our group was... peculiar, to put it one way. A group of children, young people and adults from different parishes, of all ages, who barely knew one another, decided to fly off to Brazil in search of adventure to meet Pope Francis, recently elected, at his first WYD. In fact, that was something he and I had in common. It’s true that I remember seeing on TV, two years earlier, a certain event being held in Madrid where a huge crowd of young people gathered and celebrated Holy Mass, but I knew little else about these gatherings.

It should also be said that the previous year had been an unusual one: a new priest had arrived at our parish and had suggested starting a youth club with 4 families from the neighbourhood on Saturday afternoons. The truth is it had gone pretty well: we had a wonderful time with the other children and the leaders looked after us, while asking a little more of us every day so that we would grow and draw closer to the Lord. So what were we going to say to Father when he suggested this new madness? My older brother and I didn’t think twice and happily said yes.

The trip itself was wonderful: getting on a plane to cross the whole Atlantic for the first time and landing in an unknown country with people I was only just getting to know was something I never imagined I would experience, at least not so young, and yet it was the most amazing thing that could be happening to me. But of everything the World Youth Day was, the most striking part was the very days we shared with the who-knows-how-many million young people from all over the world who had gathered to share their faith. Seeing Copacabana beach so packed was a spectacular sight: you couldn’t have squeezed in a pin.

There I realised for the first time that I wasn’t alone, that there were so many more people who, like me, had on the one hand a thirst for Christ, to know the Lord more deeply every day, the One who created us and loves us to the point of giving His life for us; and, on the other, the need to share with everyone this great joy that is given to us when we receive Him, with every person we cross paths with each day, and I especially with my classmates and friends from school, from whom, little by little, as we saw and lived reality in different ways, I was growing further and further apart.

Many other lovely and fun things happened during those days. Thanks to the stopovers we had to make, we were able to pay a brief one-day visit to Our Lady of Fátima; of course, once in Rio, we also walked up to Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado, who, with arms wide open, embraced humanity; and we had the warm welcome of some nuns who let us celebrate Holy Mass in their community and gave us breakfast every day we were there. And let’s not forget the great unexpected finale of the pilgrimage when, after a little run-in at the airport over an overbooking problem that kept us from all going home together, we ended up at the grand 4-star Windsor Copacabana hotel, having spent all the previous days in the spirit of pilgrims, sleeping on the floor.

As you’ll have seen, it was a unique and perhaps slightly strange experience. Who would have told us that in just 11 days we would live such a great adventure and, above all, that through the small acts of everyday life we would be able to encounter God? At 13 I may not have been fully aware of it, but over time I have come to realise that that trip was the beginning of a seed the Lord planted in me, which has slowly been bearing fruit. Many other pilgrimages have come since, and they have watered it too, but I’m sure that one was the beginning of everything.

I thank God so much for all the people who were with us in those days and for those who made it possible. If only everyone had the chance to go on pilgrimage with the simplicity, diversity and richness with which we do it; because it is then, when you let go of everything that isn’t necessary and empty yourself even of yourself, that you are able to welcome God and others. And that (I’m sure of it) is what truly makes us happy, and nothing else.