Testimony of faith. My path of prayer

I discovered prayer at the age of five or six, in the private school where my parents, who were at the time far from the faith, had enrolled me. One day, a catechist mother told us: “Praying to Jesus is like talking to your best friend. You can tell him anything, he will never give you the cold shoulder, he will listen to you with lots of love, he will watch over you.” I also learned that praying was simple: it was enough to say: “Here I am… Thank you…

Forgive me… Please.” Already sensitive to the figure of Mary, I prayed like this every evening for years, alone in my room, before and after my baptism when I was 11 years old.

At the end of my final year of high school, after a year of chaplaincy on the theme of “the Church in the world,” our group went to India. This changed a lot of things for me. I remember, for example, that on the way to a Gypsy camp, I was worried: we don’t speak the same language, we are so different, what will happen? Remembering the words of the song “Do not be afraid… I am with you” calmed me down. As we got out of the car, a little girl jumped on my neck, dragged along on a tour of her village, and we spent four hours playing ball, walking in circles and skipping rope. Back in France, friends said to me: “What happened, Louise, you are smiling like never before?” Faith had led me to discover service. I began to see Christ in the excluded, the poor. And all the others, too.

Since then, I have participated in various projects including meeting people on the margins, and this nourishes my faith and my joy. My prayer has evolved. The one from my childhood no longer nourished me enough. In my shared accommodation, we pray the evening office, Compline. The repetition of the psalms, initially obscure to me, has become fruitful. With the chaplain of my school, a Jesuit, I have tasted the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, which lead to meditating on the Word of God in everyday life. Mary’s “yes” in the Gospel of the Annunciation touches me particularly. Her confident “yes” despite the uncertainty, and the joy that accompanies it. This joy that confirms a decision made, I taste something of it now in prayer, this other contemplative prayer, to which a Carmelite nun introduced me.