“Are you ready to go through with what I ask of you?”

In the 1990s, with Michel, my husband, we were led to lead a group of the Vivre et Aimer movement, for couples. We practiced communicating together daily, based on our emotions. Furthermore, my spiritual guide had encouraged me to create a sharing and prayer group which was based on the contemplation of a work of sacred art. I am very sensitive to people’s looks, in general.

That day, we meditated from a small stained glass window by Françoise Burtz, designed to become the door of a tabernacle: a Christ presents the host and the chalice, thus signifying the incredible proximity of God in the Eucharist – the heart of my faith. His intense blue gaze plunging deep into my heart moved me, and I seemed to hear him say to me: “I love you. I give you my life. Are you ready to go through with what I ask of you? » In 1994, we lost one of our daughters, a young mother of two children aged 13 and 11, to devastating cancer in seven weeks. Despite our overwhelming grief, we never rebelled. For us, she had “arrived” where we are all going. Michel and I were of very different temperaments. Me, exuberant; him, extremely sensitive, delicate. Shaped by his education according to which a man acts, leads, but has no feelings, he keeps silent. We no longer spoke, until the day I understood that he did not want to burden me with his suffering. Then I remembered the look of Christ from the stained glass window, and his call. Michel needed me, his wife, to be close to him. And we overcame the terrible injury.

At the end of December 2016, a fall landed him in hospital with a brain hemorrhage. He no longer spoke. I didn’t leave his side, held his hand. He reacted, although his eyes were closed. It lasted three days. And then, the day before he died, he turned his head towards me and looked at me. I received all his love there. “Mom, that’s the look of a young lover!” “, one of our daughters, who was present, told me. There again, I remembered the look of Christ.

In January 2024, our eldest son died, without me being able to be with him. The gaze of Christ in the stained glass window joins me and helps me to continue the journey in hope and peace day after day.