One baptism after another

My story really began when our family settled in the Somme. A year after our arrival, my mother had a stroke. When she can finally speak, she asks me to go light a candle at church. I protest – I'm 19 and not baptized – but I'm going. In the church, I feel observed, so much so that I go around each pillar. But no, there's no one there. A little later, on the farm where I work, the complaint of a worker, collapsed on the wheel of his tractor at the news of the accidental death of his son, struck me: “My God, why me? »

It's decided: to find out more about this famous Jesus, I'm going to the parish. After a long preparation (in which my two sisters joined me) I experienced my baptism, on August 15, 1973, as a rebirth. It seems to me that the water goes through my whole body. And the emotions keep coming: three nights later, I wake up, crying and reciting the Our Father. The next day I ask: “What do you expect from me?” » The following night, here I am in a dream at the foot of a mountain. A man in white climbs the slope. I interpreted his look as a call to follow him, so much so that in 1975, I planned to join the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. My father – whom I love very much – takes this prospect very badly, to the point of starting to drink. While the sisters offered me an internship in Africa, I went to the doctor to get vaccinated before departure. But the doctor makes me think: “If there is a soul to save, it is your father…” So, during a pilgrimage to Lourdes with the diocese, I asked Mary for my father's conversion. Ah, if he could experience what I experience!

When I returned, he took me by surprise: “I want to be baptized!” » I began to catechize him gently, by reading biblical texts to him, but two weeks later, he was hospitalized. Returning home one Thursday, he announced: “It still holds, I want to be baptized. » The next day, at home, I stood by his side when he received his baptism. Looking at the cross above my mother's bed, he addresses Christ: “You see, I am your brother. »And we recite the Our Father together. On Sunday, I go to mass. It’s one of my sisters, left at home, who collects his last words: “If you only knew how beautiful it is.” “.