New Insights, New Friendships, New Perspectives
Youth and young adults from 187 different countries traveled to World Youth Day 2016, but our hearts beat as one – united by our shared faith and love for Jesus Christ. “Throughout this amazing week, I have gained new insights into my faith, grown new friendships and gained a new perspective on life,” Diocese of Evansville pilgrim Joseph Lutz said.
A pilgrimage is an act of faith and a journey towards growing in a deeper relationship with God. The theme of the 2016 World Youth Day was one of the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” (Matthew 5:7). This Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy is a time of celebration and reconciliation with God. During this jubilee, our purpose is to rediscover the mission of being merciful like the Father and to become a people of mercy. We were called to cultivate a deeper relationship with God and others, and to be missionaries of Divine Mercy. The acts of mercy we perform provide fulfillment, happiness and salvation. We must allow ourselves to be touched by the mercy of God.
“Making a pilgrimage matters because it literally takes us away from ordinary life for awhile. Being freed from the daily demands on our time and attention, and surrounded by others who are intent on growing in their faith, affords a pilgrim a unique space to receive God’s grace,” said Father Tyler Tenbarge, associate pastor of St. John the Baptist parish in Newburgh, who accompanied us on the pilgrimage.
A pilgrimage is not a vacation, and we found that out pretty quickly. There is much suffering in these journeys of faith, and our first taste was the traveling itself. We rode a bus for almost six hours to catch our flight in Chicago, and there was a two-hour delay at the airport due to thunderstorms. Our flight from Chicago to Warsaw was nine hours long. From Warsaw, we got on a bus and rode for about three hours to Czestochowa.
Our fearless leader Steve Dabrowski, Diocesan Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry, warned us of many little sufferings to come. He encouraged us to offer up the misery we might feel and to embrace the nature of the pilgrimage. He helped us recognize that this World Youth Day would be a prayer experience unlike any other.
After almost a full day of travel, we were blessed to have Sunday Mass with Bishop Thompson in a small chapel next to Jasna Gora.
The mass was a sigh of relief that we would have a blessed and life-changing pilgrimage, for with the body of Christ nourishing us, we were an unstoppable force of mercy, on fire with the burning love of God. It is in the Eucharist that we find the strength and motivation to be people of mercy.
The following morning, we were blessed to watch the unveiling of our Lady of Czestochowa. The brief ceremony takes place every morning and is accompanied by drums and trumpets. The unveiling is moving, and I was in awe of the devotion the people of Czestochowa have for the Blessed Mother.
Later that day, we visited the World War II concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I have learned about the Holocaust throughout my life, but nothing prepared me emotionally for experiencing it. We walked down the same roads these prisoners once walked. There was a tangible presence of pain, death, and despair in the atmosphere. Their unbelievable agony seeped through the stones and into my bones until it was a weight crushing my chest.
Tears came to my eyes, and I mourned the lives of the millions who died there; the men trying to be brave and protect their families, the women lying to their children and telling them everything would be okay, the precious young ones whose innocence was snatched from them. Though we were just passing through, that place tried to shake my faith and drain me of my hope in Christ.
Throughout the week, we visited several breathtaking churches that were elaborately decorated with precious metals and beautiful paintings and statues. This revealed to me the outpouring of love from the Polish people and how dedicated they were in donating their treasure to creating beautiful places of worship.
When Pope Francis spoke to us, I felt a rush of love for him. It felt like he truly is a Father to all of us.
He spoke with a compassion and wisdom unlike anything I’ve ever seen. His words comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable. He challenged us to build bridges instead of walls – bridges that will connect us and hold us together.
He reminded us that Jesus is not the Lord of comfort and security, so we need a good dose of courage to live the faith. He encouraged us to treat one another as family, and to live together in diversity and dialogue.
Sleeping outside with more than a million other Catholics was amazing. I woke up around 4:30 a.m. to go to the restroom; and as I made my way through the hundreds of sleeping people, I realized how vulnerable we all were. In sleep we have our guard down, we are defenseless and exposed.
We were brought together from so many different countries, and we let down our barriers and opened our hearts to God and to others. Each one of us allowed ourselves to be vulnerable and trusting to one another.
“It was a joy accompanying so many young people from our diocese. Seeing the faith alive in their prayerful spirit at Mass, in their tireless treading the streets to see more churches or more saints or to catch more glimpses of Pope Francis was inspiring,” Father Tenbarge said.
“World Youth Day was an overwhelming experience in so many positive ways. Being able to walk down the streets that so many saints walked was amazing,” Nick Sellers said. “Singing and dancing down those streets with millions of youth from all over the world has shown me that the Church is alive. It was a life-changing experience.”
We opened wide the doors of our hearts so that we could allow ourselves to be loved and to love. Knowing how much we are loved changes every aspect of our lives. We knew that at the end of the trip we would go back to our own homes and our own lives, and we will have to face the same problems. But we have returned different; we came back with changed hearts.
We can become unstoppable missionaries of mercy if only we allow the Holy Spirit to transform our souls and our lives.
Every experience comes with a choice. You can choose to let it change your life forever, or you can choose to let it pass you by. Only you can decide if an experience decide is worthy of affecting your heart and the course of your future.
I choose to let this pilgrimage be a turning point in my life and to let this experience be the force that shatters my heart of stone so that I may become who I am called to be and set the world ablaze.
