We were leaving for Lourdes when a relative pulled me aside to say goodbye. "I wish you a good trip," he said, "but I don't understand how you can still believe in Mary."
We set out without real conviction—or at least without anything deep. During the three-day drive, we said a few pious words, though more out of habit than love.
In that Marian town, we found an air unlike anywhere else. Yes, there were the usual worldly distractions, but such spirituality filled the place that at first my soul felt confused and uncertain. Then it drank in that abundance like someone who arrives starving and finally discovers real nourishment.
On the second day, after emptying my heart in one of the many confessionals, I decided to bathe in the pool. My wife hesitated to see me go, but within minutes she followed with our daughters.
We had not come asking for miracles or favors for our Jaja. We expected nothing transcendent from our time at the grotto. Yet I can say now—with a trace of pride, but mostly with humility—that I finally wept. It was a sweet, liberating tears, my own mixed with the pool water, watched over by four scouts as they immersed me completely.
I cannot find words for what that bath was. A second baptism, perhaps. Or the first true one.
At Lourdes I heard suffering sing. I understood, and saw with my own eyes, that one can suffer with trust—without despair, without collapse—not surrendering to fate with apathy, but accepting with love, for Christ's sake, the mystery of pain that wraps itself around all of human life.
To transform suffering into joy is not something that happens every day. But I am convinced that our heavenly Mother works miracles of this kind constantly, in every corner of the earth.
Someone might say I need not have left Rome to understand such simple truths. But let me answer this: to depart with a heart full of sadness and return full of joy and strength to fight—that was worth the journey.
- Ettore, 1974