The writer and philosopher Sara Barrena opens her heart to the readers of Omnes. For my part, I limit myself to transcribe with emotion what he writes to me:
They say that Catholicism is back in fashion: Rosalía, with what they call “aesthetics", is back in fashion.“christiancore", y Hakuna, with hundreds of young people filling the auditoriums with religious songs, are just a few examples. If only it were true that God is in fashion, but unfortunately, we often still treat him with a kick in the teeth.
I am grateful for what my family gave me in my childhood. I remember my mother ironing while the radio played the recitation of the Holy Rosary; the “Jesusito de mi vida”, the Sunday morning comics at the newsstand before going to Mass. I remember my grandmother clinging to God to cope with the loss of two of her children; my grandfather telling his grandchildren -I was nine years old- that this life is a valley of tears. We were in the car on our way to Irun, where he would soon bury his youngest son. Maybe that's where you can see the greatness of a man, in the way he copes with the blows that life gives you. In the valley of tears, my grandparents found, in spite of everything, the strength to teach me to pray and to laugh, to love me beyond measure. They were probably the best part of my childhood.
I used to think that being a Catholic was a complicated matter. Now, however, I have a new lucidity, even though I am entering that age that they say is difficult for women. Sometimes, from the vantage point of fifty, I look back and see the enormous failures of my life, the times when I have been lost or have taken the wrong path, the four children I was asked to send straight from my womb to Heaven, the inevitable worries about the two children left at my side, the heartaches at work, the impossible loves, the extraordinary crises and the ordinary ones, the marriage that was null and void and the one that I pulled through with many difficulties, the friends that disappeared, the books that I did not manage to publish and the ones that I published and few people read. The enormous tiredness that sometimes gives you to live. How exhausting it is sometimes to take care. The things that don't go as you want, as you expect or as you imagine. “Everyone has a mission in life.”, The priest says in church, and here I am with a lot of years and empty hands, still not knowing what is expected of me.
However, the other day I understood, and now I know, that the apparent failures are not such. They are rather the occasions when God makes himself present to you and gives you a hug. He has not been indifferent to a single one of my tears, even though at times I have been angry and have not even wanted to speak to Him. When you are most lost, it is precisely when God finds you. He appears by surprise around the corner or around a bend. In every failure he comes with a reviving embrace, comforting and consoling.
Now I understand that God directly affects our sensibility. That we are loved by Him is not something rational; there is no need for great disquisitions to understand it. Neither is it necessary to love God with the love of a son, a mother, a brother, a lover. It is enough to let oneself be embraced. Sometimes we are left with the external, with the ugliest, with the hardest. What can be done and what cannot. We do not remember to stretch out our hand and barely touch Jesus' cloak, like the woman in the Gospel.
In the midst of a crowd, with all the burdens, burdens and obligations, sometimes we forget to touch Him. Reach out your hand, only He and you will know, into the depths of your heart, and rub Him again and again, until you leave His tunic frayed.
God gave us the gift of sensitivity, even if sometimes we anesthetize it. Going to Mass is no longer boring, it is the physical contact we need. Blood, body, soul and divinity - as I was taught - that are glued to your life. The heart that is repaired and the body that is soothed. You take a walk and God gives you a sign. The clouds open for an instant and a star appears. There is always one on guard. “I am with you.”, he says. As close as you can get. Not only with us, but in us. God gives us a smile, a look, like those of other people who love us and that we treasure. A hug from someone you love without it having to end. A “I love you” that we look at and look again, that any given day remains engraved in our minds, without knowing why that day and not another.
It does not mean that the road is not hard at times. One suffers. But Leo XIV recently gave us the secret of true joy: life given, love that makes no noise.
There is something so comforting in entering a church, in kneeling before a tabernacle, as one who rests his head on the knees of Christ; in the phrase of a psalm that repeats itself to you like a mantra. The light, the refuge, the salvation. My shepherd. My name, which you repeat. I bend and you straighten me. With eternal love I love you. There is something so consoling in receiving Communion and leaving, even if it is a little more smiling, hand in hand with God himself. Saying the Our Father, crossing oneself and moving on. There is no need for great actions, nor is it a set of rules. It is simply a matter of receiving the gifts that come to us. And although I was always taught that to pray is to talk to God, now I have come to understand that perhaps the best form of prayer is to let God embrace us.
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