A Gift
I arrived at l'Arche in France after discovering Christian faith in the Swedish Lutheran Church. I found that the Catholic tradition of l'Arche was very close to what I was used to—this helped me feel at home.
But there were some things I struggled to understand, things that felt foreign. The hardest was how people spoke about Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the way they prayed to her.
Almost every Mass, and all the evening prayers, reminded me of this connection to Mary that the people I lived with held so deeply. It was strange, hard to grasp. And I felt what they were doing was wrong. I didn't want to feel forced to do something that contradicted my convictions. At the same time, I was questioning my own faith.
I was afraid of losing it.
Yet many things pushed me to stay at l'Arche. Gradually, as I got to know the people better, my questions became fewer, less painful.
During my second year at l'Arche, I met Nicoletta. With great gentleness and simplicity, she told me about the importance of Mary in her life—as though a friend were introducing me to another friend I'd never met. At the end of my second year, as I was preparing to leave for Sweden, I asked Nicoletta for a gift: a rosary.
The rosary—a symbol of what had been foreign and threatening to me—now represented the people who had become my friends.
We always had different ways of understanding Mary. But our friendship taught me to respect and try to understand what they lived. From then on, my experience in Fede e Luce and in the ecumenical commission was very much like what I had lived with them.
By being together, by deepening our knowledge of each other through friendship—only then can we dare to draw close and try to understand what is different and unknown.
Six years have passed. I still have the rosary. I carry it with me.
- Tony Hulten, 2003