Responding to the faithful presence of Christ with our own faithfulness

On June 4, I met the group of future confirmed of my parish to exchange with them on the theme of fidelity, the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

This exchange was prepared in advance by a meeting of the local team of the Mouvement Chrétien des Retraités (MCR), whose theme was: "how has faith given meaning to my life and how does it continue to support and enlighten my life"; it is as bearer of the reflections resulting from this meeting that I came to dialogue with the confirmants.

At first, the young future confirmed answered three questions prepared at home: "1) How to define a faithful person? 2) To whom can I be faithful." Note that in the answers provided to this second question, Isabella answered "to God"; the third question invited them to find out how two texts (Matt, 7,7-11 and Exodus 32,1-14) had a link with the theme of fidelity.

A second step led me to give two testimonies from our MCR meeting: the first showed how Eliane had managed to overcome, through prayer and the Eucharist, the hatred towards her husband who had left her, and to establish peaceful relations between her and her ex-husband; the second showed how our membership of the Mouvement Chrétien des Retraités nourished our faith,  allowed us to "grow" in faith because it was in this way that we were faithful to God and responded to our mission as baptizeds, to be at the service of our brothers and sisters in humanity.  Following these testimonies, a dialogue was initiated with the young people who challenged me on the basis of two questions chosen from a list that included five: 1) "Did God intervene in my life and how?" 2) "What about the Gospel phrase 'Ask and you will receive'?

After a time of synthesis, the meeting was closed with a prayer that was an excerpt from Christus vivit (129): "If you... are willing to encounter the Lord, if you are willing to let him love you and save you, if you can make friends with him and start to talk to him, the living Christ, about the realities of your life, then you will have a profound experience capable of sustaining your entire Christian life. ".

Monique Bodhuin