I have just returned from Lourdes with the young people of our diocese of Mechlin-Brussels. We participated in the celebrations presided over by the Pope. Alongside each of us stood a sick person from our diocese whom we accompanied.
I returned with three scenes carved into my heart:
First scene: The Pope's arrival at the grotto on Saturday at noon. He is utterly without strength. He kneels and weeps at length with great sobs: "My Mother, have mercy on me, have mercy on me as I give myself entirely to you"—echoing the words of Saint Bernadette. His body seems to fail for a moment, then he prays intensely with his hands over his face. We weep and pray intensely with him. He has reached the absolute limit of what one can bear. You want to run toward him, take him in your arms, slowly, tenderly, and accompany him carefully to the residence. Then the Pope speaks to us: "I would like to embrace each of you warmly, one after another, and tell you how close I am to you and how much solidarity I feel for you. I am close to you as a pilgrim close to the Madonna. I make your prayers and your sufferings my own. I am living through a period filled with physical suffering, but this is no less fruitful in God's design."
Second scene: The Pope's private prayer before his departure, again at the grotto, Sunday evening. The absolute silence of thousands of pilgrims during the Pope's prayer. For at least twenty minutes time seems to stop: it feels neither long nor short. We pray intensely, with him, for him, for the Church and for the world. Then the Pope rises gently, and we dare not break the extraordinary silence and the great reverence it holds. His hands reach out, they join together toward us, and joy appears, a kind of liberation: we applaud him strongly and cry out that we love him. Between these two scenes came the celebration of the Assumption Eucharist. The Pope suffers after the homily, which he reads with great clarity. He asks for help at least three times—for water, for medicine—then begins the Eucharistic prayer. He summons all his energy but cannot begin. He taps his fingers on the armrest of his chair to show that he wants to say the prayer. His eyes plead with us to wait. The concelebrants begin to sing the prayer without him. He tries several times to join in, but in vain: the pace is too fast for him. The Holy Father experiences abandonment. We experience it with him.
For those of us who were there, it was an experience of intimate encounter with God and with a human person, Pope John Paul II. We experienced a presence never before known to us, an intense prayer, a humble communion, sober and silent—because aside from Sunday's homily, we understood almost nothing of the Pope's words.
"The weakest parts, those least presentable, are necessary and must be honored," Saint Paul wrote. Help us, Lord, to welcome our own poverty and the poor who represent your presence in the heart of the world. "We were created to love one another," Jean Vanier says, reflecting on the third luminous mystery of the Rosary, Saturday's mystery, on the Proclamation of the Kingdom.
To live at the pace of the smallest—that is an immense challenge.
The days at Lourdes will remain in my heart until my last moment on earth. I have concretely lived the experience of a Church—my Church, which I love so dearly—weak, weak in its Head, a source and sign for every person in the whole world of God's presence and of human communion with Him.
Fabienne Clinquart (youth animator at the gathering), 2004
from (Alleluja Arche)
===CORPO===