About a few months ago, at the end of a Sunday Mass, I was outside our chapel of Mother Admirable and I was speaking as I usually do with some persons on the steps. At a certain point, I saw a man and a woman with a small child who were coming into the courtyard in front of the church. He remained outside with the daughter, seated on a bench, with a sad air; she came into the church.
Meanwhile, I, having finished the conversations, set out toward the sacristy to change. In the central nave, the woman who I had seen outside approaches me and asks: “You all, here, do you have groups of ‘Marriage in Christ’?”. I don’t really understand what she is talking about, and so I ask her: “If you want, you can wait for me here while I change in the sacristy. Then we can talk more at length. When I come back to the church, with her, seated in the first pew, are the man and the baby. We begin to speak. I try to understand exactly what they are looking for. After a few confused and vague explanations, he speaks up and tells me: “Look, the truth is that we are in crisis and we need help.” I thought for a few seconds what I could propose to them. In the end, I said: “Give me a few days. I’ll think about it, pray and I will let you know.”
«Now we ask you to bless those rings because we want to start again.»
After speaking about it with a fellow member of the house, I invite myself over to their home for dinner. They accept our proposal, exclaiming, “But that was exactly what we wanted to ask you!” The following week we are having dinner with them. Appearing pleased and grateful, they tell us that they entered our church by chance, out of curiosity, because while walking they saw it open. They reveal that as they were walking, they were discussing how to separate without bringing too much pain to the three-year-old girl. The woman confessed to me that upon seeing the church, she had literally thrown herself into it to ask God to save her family. As for the man, he acknowledged that he had entered it without enthusiasm, but had agreed to get help because I, instead of immediately offering a ready-made recipe, had shown myself to be like them, that is, in need of seeking a way forward.
I can’t really explain what happened, but at the end of dinner they went to get a small box and opened it. Inside were two rings. He explained, “Five years ago we had decided to get married and we exchanged these engagement rings. Then came the pandemic, the birth of our daughter, some family bereavements, and those rings stayed in the drawer. Now we ask you to bless them because we want to start again.” A friendship began between us that led them to a reconnection with God and the Church. Now they come to Mass and invite other friends. And I, too, feel grateful to see how the lives of individual persons and the lives of married couples can flourish again from a simple meeting.
