An alliance for life

At the time, studies completed, my professional life was well launched. My faith, a precious family inheritance, has become personal since I participated, three years ago, in a weekend organized by one of these movements which renewed the Church in the 1970s. His title, “Towards a new life”, summed up the turning point lived at this time. I had met young believers there, “normal”, that is to say not free of “pans”, capable of partying too. I also discovered with great interest the richness of an approach to the person taking into account the psychological dimension in spiritual life. It was new. Not to mention the beauty of the songs that touched me a lot.

Summer 1985. It’s been a few years since I participated in the life of this movement. I register for an Ignacian spiritual retreat, not for precise discernment – the specialty of Spiritual exercises – But simply to deepen my relationship to Christ.

This morning of August 15, sitting at the table of my retractor room, I open the notebook where I take notes. I am neither in an Olympic form nor in a state of spiritual “desolation”, as Saint Ignatius of Loyola says: an interior weather just a little gray.

And something is essential. I write to Jesus: Yes. A yes for life, with him. That day, in the secret of my room and my heart, I sign like a white check for Jesus. A final alliance. Without thinking of a commitment in a state of life, in a place, if not within the great universal church, to which I feel belonging since childhood.

Everything is open. This is not a love at first sight. A quiet evidence, rather. I understand that we are on August 15. A wink from the super team Marie and the Holy Spirit? I like to associate them as well: the king of the unexpected, and Marie, whom I see like a sister, before us on the path of faith.

Forty years later, while I take the retirement turn, the grace of this moment is still renewed, always more obvious. The novelty does not stop on my way. “Towards a new life”: a promise more relevant than ever. Gratitude.