2012
Dear cousins, a friend advised me to write down what this Christmas has meant to me, and what God is doing in me is so great that I must share it.
The relationship that has grown up with Garci goes back less than a year; in fact I met him about 6 months ago. For the last 3 he has been accompanying me in everything that happens to me, I see him regularly, and whenever he sets foot in Barcelona he has a moment for me. The last time I saw him before Christmas I was troubled about something, and right there in the airport, after accompanying me in each one of the things I told him about, he looked at me with immense tenderness and suggested I come and study with him in Arizkun, in a convent of enclosed nuns lost somewhere in Navarre. That same day he gave me an enormous hug and said: «It’s a pleasure to be with you, it always is». That same night, driving back in the car, I thought: «How many people has God given me to accompany me? How many adults has he placed around me to love me? There’s Suca, Luis, Yago, Nacho, Miguel Ramon, Betty, my parents… and now Garci? How can this be? Do I deserve it? Did I ever imagine that God could give me so much?
Three weeks later I bought the ticket to Pamplona, and two days after buying it, having told Garci, he sends an email to all of us who were going saying that nobody can come, that one of the nuns has fallen ill and that they don’t want anyone there except Garci, since they need a priest at the convent on those very dates. He told me that the nuns were letting me come because I had already bought my ticket.
On the morning of the 30th I was taking the train to Pamplona, and I was thinking: «do you realise, you’re the only one who’s going to be with him, the only one»; it was impossible not to think from the outset that I had been chosen.
We spent the whole morning walking around the city. We went into several churches and then got in the car and headed for the convent. In the car I took the chance to pepper him with all the things that were going on in my life; above all I told him I was very happy, grateful for the things that are happening to me, but I also told him about my difficulties. In a very direct way he accompanied me in each thing I said, and with everything I told him he insisted: «patience, only Christ answers this». Thank God I had several days to turn over in my mind what he said to me.
We arrived at the convent: freezing cold in the corridors, very old nuns, and above all not a single bar in the whole village. We got there at about five in the afternoon, we studied until 7 and then went to pray before the Blessed Sacrament (exposed all day long in the convent church); I took the chance to think over everything he had said to me and to greet the Boss, asking him to make himself tangible those days. Over supper he told me what his timetable was and I was a bit alarmed: up at 7, shower and silent prayer in the church until 8.30 when there’s Mass, then breakfast and «super-study-backside-glued-to-the-chair-barely-breathing» until 1.30, lunch and after lunch an hour and a half’s walk in the mountains until 3.30–4, study until 7, at 7 an hour of prayer and Vespers with the nuns, and at 9 supper, then study or a film depending on how tired you are, and off to bed. Obviously he told me I could do whatever I liked.
From then on the days have been an adventure; I ought to tell you about every one of them because they have been full, without fail, of the intensity my heart asks for. I have spent the whole week watching him, like a little boy who watches his father because he admires the way he does everything he does, the way he looks, the way he studies, the way he prays. That is probably what I did most: watch him and take notice of him.
At this time of year, if you’ve noticed in the Gospels, they all recounted how the disciples went to Saint John the Baptist and asked him «Where is the Messiah?». I prayed every day with that same question. «Lord, are you concrete? Are you capable of fulfilling my affection? Do you surprise me day after day?» And these questions have filled my mind: everything we did, every conversation, the walks, looking at the clouds, having a glass of wine, praying or reading what he suggested I read, all of it with the restless, wide-awake question: «Where are you, Lord? Why does my heart seek you so much? What is it that I’m looking for?»
And so the same thing has happened, exactly the same thing that happened in the following Gospels: John and Andrew meet Jesus and are GRIPPED by his presence, for life. What has happened has truly been from Another world. Over these days Garci has looked at me with His eyes, with a tenderness that I can only attribute to the One I met several years ago and who keeps on surprising me, to the One who calls me at every instant in the «stabs» I feel in my heart. Garci’s preference for me, Garci’s immense preference for me, is for me the way God uses to love me, to care for me and to accompany me in everything my life contains. I can’t define what has happened these days. The Lord has set his sights on me, he has conquered me entirely and will not let me go, and my life, then and now, only breathes and only finds peace in the inevitable dialogue with the One towards whom my heart pushes me, at every wretched instant! The walks have been astonishing, looking at the mountain, the silence up there, everything invited and compelled my heart to ask «Here too do you surprise me, Lord? Here too do you conquer my heart?»
All our conversations have been brimming with this intensity: food, books, history, science, friends, travel, nothing has been left out. But above all we have talked about the Church, about the saints, about the disciples and about Our Lady. I have prayed with him every one of the prayers he prays and I have followed each Mass attentively on those days, and afterwards I would bombard him with questions: «What does this psalm mean? What does this gesture you make signify?» and little by little, day by day, the psalms of «the hours» have struck me as the most fitting words there are for prayer, and every prayer has amazed me because they were what my heart was crying out. From the Magnificat to the Angelus and the Te Deum, all these prayers were the most beautiful poetry I could offer my heart. Garci put it like this, quoting Saint Augustine: «We pray to God with the words God gives us»
But without doubt, the best thing of all these days — if that’s even possible — happened on the fourth day there. We studied like champions, then we talked our heads off about a thousand and one things and laughed a lot. It was a splendid day and we went for a 2-hour walk, lost in the mountains. On the way back, while studying, I was thinking: «Can you ask more of life? Is there anything I lack?» and the hours flew by. At about 7 he got up and I asked him, puzzled: «Where are you going?» and he said «to pray»; it was 7 o’clock, an hour still to go before Vespers. And I thought, «What for? It’s been a splendid day, you couldn’t be happier!» After a while I went down and knelt beside him. I looked at him and he had a very curious bearing: he was all hunched up, his face serious, kneeling and looking towards the Blessed Sacrament, like a man who is suffering greatly or who is at the point of death and prays in desperation; in a word, his whole bearing was one of dependence. As I was saying, I wasn’t even praying, I was distracted. And I thought «how can this be? but this man is huge! he has answers to everything, he’s lived through everything! Why does he pray like that?» and then I realised that Garci’s secret is without doubt nothing other than that: that he depends more than I do! that he depends more and more, that every morning, every midday, every afternoon and every night he depends on him! And then I prayed: «Lord, I want to depend like that, as much as he does».
The next day I woke up tired, distracted, whiny and lazy, but I went down to pray all the same, and when I settled down in the church to pray I was thinking «how can this be? why am I so fed up, with all the things that are happening to me? has it all gone down the drain?» and I immediately realised what I had prayed the night before and I was amazed all over again and I said to the Boss «one day, Lord, that’s all it took you, one day to answer me and make me depend on you even more». Since that day, to feel my heart bleeding, to realise what I desire, to discover «the famous sadness» that fills everything, is nothing other than Jesus knocking at the door, making me more his at every instant. Now it is inevitable for me to find him «in the depths of my being», calling me and saying: «I want you to take up the dialogue with me again», something «more intimate to me than I am to myself».
I have seen the very face of Christ, the tenderness with which God loves, I have seen how he loves me and it makes me dizzy — why so much!, why me!, why?!! when I’m not even capable of asking you for so much! God prefers me, and in Giussani’s words, he prefers me «because I am nothing, because I am like that 15-year-old girl from Nazareth, nothing, or like her husband, a man full of doubts, confused, humble, a carpenter, nothing».
The life we led these days, of study, conversation and above all prayer, is the only one that lets my heart breathe, because a strength that is not mine asks me and asks me and asks me again to pray, to seek him, to speak to him. I understand the life of prayer we led there in this phrase of Giussani about Mary: «This familiarity acquired with the immense belonging that constituted her made her immediately capable of perceiving the signs of the proposal; more deeply and even before that, the signs of the Presence»
Now that I’m back in Barcelona Garci isn’t here, the landscape isn’t the same, not even the intensity of study is the same, but he keeps on granting what I asked him for that day in the convent, because every day I depend more on Him, I discover more how fragile I am, and the more I depend on him the more intense and more continuous is the dialogue with Him.
Machine translation. If you spot a mistake, do write to us.