CLOSE-UP

In an Encounter, the Road for the Fulfillment of Happiness
Two years in the experience of GS. Then something breaks inside. Days filled with boredom, rowdiness and idleness. The desire to start over. The evening listening to Angelica, a Jewish woman speaking about herself. The unexpected chance to recover

Dear Fr Gius, I’m a rascal like many others. I want to tell you how God’s Grace has worked in my life in such an unexpected and carnal way that it seems incredible. It all started two years ago. I had finally joined GS, but at the end of the year, at the end of the short vacation, I passed through a really bad period. Everything seemed useless, meaningless and false. I began to think that all I had believed in for a year had been the biggest hoax of my life! I spent the summer with some kids in the town, who had only a bit of rowdiness to offer me which helped you forget things quite easily; it was just what I wanted! My days were filled with idleness, delusion, lack of interest and boredom. My father came to know about it and spoke to me about it during a trip to Rome, and, to be honest, he was convincing. I decided to start over seriously with GS, with my friends, with school! Although I had all the best intentions in the world, I couldn’t find that desire, that motivation, that something that could make life beautiful! Around me I saw people more and more content, and I had the continuous impression that the Movement, my family and my life had no longer anything to do with me! Something was missing, I was envious of people around me I could see were happy, and I couldn’t find anything to console me, something, as a great friend of mine said, “to give me the certainty of being truly loved for ever.” That something came in the most extraordinary, unforeseen and wonderful way! In Bergamo there was the series of “Sunday evenings,” meetings organized by us, youngsters, on lots of different subjects: Dante, philosophy, a film show, and so on. When Sunday, April 20, 2003 came along, I didn’t even want to go, I wasn’t keen on it. What interest could I have for Angelica, an Israeli woman who was to speak that night. I can’t define that evening, I can only be sure that that surprise, that unexpected grace, that correspondence with life, that evening came in with such a force that I was unable to resist it! A Jewish woman who has me meet the presence of Christ! There’s something incredible about it. I will never get over the wonder of this miracle: a Jewish woman, married, with four children who helps me, a boy of 16 with a thousand problems, and a Catholic! I cannot call it a chance meeting. I am convinced that if I was there that evening, then someone in heaven had done something! After that meeting I seemed to start a new life! Everything began to have value again: family, friends, prayer! In that moment I had the certainty that Someone loved me, just as I am, with my history, with all my defects and with all my sins! I remember that at that time, while we were eating one day, my father said to me, “For someone who knows you well it’s too easy to know when you are well and when you’re not: your face changes, these days I seem to have a happy son.” Let’s be clear, though, life wasn’t any easier, and it’s not even now and I don’t expect it to be ever. It will be even tougher in the future, because when a man sees something beautiful, or something true, he can’t draw back, he can no longer deny the Truth of what he has lived! And now there’s you, Fr Gius, only now do I understand that that name that is bandied around so much is a real person, like me, not a theory or an idea: you are a real person to whom I owe most of this history, as I owe it to some of my friends! I learned one thing, Fr Gius, that prayer is what lets us enter a relationship with anyone at all! Praying for you, I have become your friend, and the same goes for Angelica: if this relationship does not end, I owe it only to the fact that I am praying to that Man, with whom by a miracle, after 2000 years we can enter into a true, concrete and present relationship. This happened to be through you, through Angelica, through my parents and my friends! You are the Movement for me, those few friends who make it possible for me to live a happy life, a life with Him present! Thank you.
Marco, Bergamo