Ralph
Dear friends of the European Council,
First of all, let me say that I am sad not to be with you « in person » this Sunday morning. But you know the problem: sometimes the airlines dictate when we have to go home. In my case, the plane had to take off before 9am this morning.
Even though it’s not my habit, I would have liked to give you all a hug to say that you are very precious to me. For the three of us, it’s time to retire. From now on, we will follow the activities of the European Council as part of the enlarged team, and therefore from a certain distance.
When Paola and Felice phoned me three and a half years ago to ask me if I would be willing to join them in this responsibility, I must admit that I hesitated. Is it really possible to team up with a couple who live a thousand kilometres away and don’t speak the same language as me? Can I afford to neglect my commitments as a priest and take time, sometimes a lot of time, to travel, to dialogue, to work, to discuss the problems that concretely arise in the Marriage Encounter community in our beautiful Europe? Am I able to take on this task?
But immediately there were also all the beautiful memories of the three years I participated in the council as a member of the Belgian French-speaking national team. It was a period of great encounters. I really enjoyed getting to know other cultures, other situations, other experiences, other ways of living our beautiful ideal. The language barrier was a challenge for me, which I tried to overcome with the help of my few language skills.
In the end, as you will have understood, it was the positive that won out over my fears, my doubts and my limitations. And I didn’t regret it at all. The Covid period, with the different confinements, was a trial and a challenge. I like to discover other countries, but now I have to stay at home and communicate with you by videoconference. You can imagine: starting a team relationship in such conditions is not easy.
And yet, the magic of ME spirituality worked once again. Our team relationship grew from week to week, and even though the three of us have quite different ways of working, we were soon able to agree on a common thread that would run through our entire time of responsibility. These moments of reflection and preparation for the council were very enriching for me too. I am the first beneficiary of this whole process, but I dare to believe that we have also been able to give you some intellectual, spiritual and above all relational food to enrich your work as national leaders.
I would like to thank you for « playing the game », for listening to us. Thank you for your kindness, your positive feedback, your questions.
Thank you above all for the example you set and for the seriousness with which you accepted to put yourself at the service of the community. It also encourages me not to give up despite the many questions I have about the future of the community.
You may have noticed that I am a man who is eternally torn between extremes, between disillusionment and the joy of encounter, between the negative aspects of our « liquid » society and the enormous treasure we hold in our hands, between the need to move forward and the concern to respect the tradition of the ancestors. Sharing with you has helped me to keep the joy of commitment, to always turn to the essential and to believe that I still have something to give to the world and to our movement.
I would also like to thank the Lord. I dare to believe that it is he who has guided me towards this responsibility. He also gave me the strength to be useful and happy. Lord, give Almudena, Jorge and Sinisa the same enthusiasm, fill them with your Holy Spirit. And give Paola, Felice and myself the necessary energy to be at their service in the enlarged team.
Dear friends, I love you, and I hope our paths will cross again!
Goodbye to you all! Ralph
Paola
Dear couples, dear priests, dear relationship builders,
Our time at the Council is coming to an end today. The time has come to say goodbye, to embrace each other again and to let the tears flow. Tears of satisfaction, emotion, tenderness, but also of melancholy. Goodbyes are always a bit sad for me. But today I don’t want nostalgia to take over. After three years with the Council, I am returning home with great joy.
When we started our service, I really didn’t know what to expect. I felt a lot of anxiety and a lot of hope at the same time. We certainly didn’t expect the pandemic! It was our big challenge. Living the containment and surviving Covid (it was not so obvious when we were positive in the hospital); not letting this invisible virus block our lives and the life of the community; keeping a good team relationship despite the distance and the impossibility of seeing each other face to face; keeping the enthusiasm and unity with you who are our community.
Have we succeeded? I don’t know, but I would like to say what I received from all of you. I have received support, encouragement, appreciation, affection…. and that is no small thing! Therefore, I want to express my great and grateful gratitude.
But I also want to tell you what I take away from these years of service. I take away a suitcase full of positive feelings. The most beautiful thing I have learned is to serve with joy and I have experienced the joy of serving.
To achieve this, I had to start with myself. I realised that it is essential to know clearly who I am: I am a child of God! And the weekend taught me that God does not produce rubbish; since my weekend and with you over the years, I have experienced being a child of God with more joy.
I have learned to recognise the richness I have received in my life and to share with others the most precious I have: my time, my qualities, my skills. I am grateful to the Lord and to you for what I have become and for this commitment in which I have tried to give the best of myself. The Lord does not deserve mediocrity. And when I give generously, I live in joy!
I have experienced that I can accept with love even the most difficult experiences and embrace the suffering that accompanies them. Often, once the storm had passed, I discovered how useful it was, how much it made me grow. Every difficulty has given me the opportunity to surrender to God and to feel supported by friends. This also has given me joy!
I have discovered that I have to commit myself faithfully and that faithfulness is not limited to my relationship with Felice. Fidelity for me is the decision not to run away from difficulties, because a faced and overcome difficulty gives me joy.
Finally, I have experienced the importance of prayer. Prayer helps me to be merciful. When Felice and I pray, we unite with God and try to love as he has loved us. We have prayed with you and for you with joy, and I live in the hope that this will help us to sanctify ourselves together.
Pope Benedict XVI said: “The first priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God”. If you think about it, this is our task as leaders. Our couples, especially the younger ones, are hungry for meaning, life and love and need to encounter Jesus’s love through us. Therefore, as leaders, we have the duty to be the loving and merciful face of God. This is our mission! This is what ME has been doing for 50 years! This is our strength, this is our joy!
Dear teams, dear relationship builders, today, as I say goodbye to you, I want to thank you for having accompanied me during these three years of service and for having helped me to understand that serving with life is the life of our service! To serve with joy is the joy of our service!
I thank Ralph for all our meetings of confrontation, friendship, prayer and good humour.
And finally, I want to thank Felice, the man in my life who decided to live the great adventure of love with me, who walked beside me, who taught me humility and generosity, who ran with me towards great dreams, who tried to make them come true, but who above all made my life and that of our family joyful, and I hope yours a little too.
I can’t sing like Father Jun, in fact I can’t sing at all, but I would like to say thank you through a song that I like very much. *
Grazie (Amara)
In every glance, there is a point of view
In every renunciation, there is a little conquest
I stop to think about the things I’ve experienced
The ones I have now, the ones I’ve lost
And it’s good to realise what it was for
To make a dream the best dress I have
I smile, I breathe, I’m alive, I walk
I walk and I thank the life I carry
I thank my days, the mistakes, the regrets
I thank the silences, I thank the presents
I give thanks for the pain I have sometimes felt
I thank for the strength I found I don’t know where
I thank life, so beautiful and infinite
And thank you to those I have met on my way
To those who remain close to me
To those roads I had to choose to grow up
In each step, there is a meter of life
In every case, downhill or uphill
There is always the need, the need to go
Because we are an instinct, an animal instinct
And it’s good from time to time to go back to childhood
To live the time, but without borders
Downhill or uphill, life is so beautiful
And thanks to this land that I now know how to appreciate
When I feel like singing
To this habit I have of losing myself to be here
And thanks to this anger that becomes love
To time being a good doctor
To those things that never happen and never last
And all the while the sun rises and the dawn excites me
It lights me up and I cry tears of joy
I want to sing, the rest can wait
I close my eyes and feel only peace inside
And thanks to this sun that beats on my face
To those who love me and to those who embrace me
To all the lives that had to be lost to be here
And thanks to this desire to start again
When I stand still and wait
All the times I don’t have to give up, but to believe!
With all my love. Paola
Felice
Dear friends, dear couples and dear priests,
At this point, … what is left for me to say?
When I wrote this page, I didn’t yet know what feelings I would have!
I think I might feel that strange feeling that the Portuguese call « saudade », that is, a subtle and sweet nostalgia that I feel for all of you.
If I don’t cry when I say goodbye to you, it’s not because I’m insensitive, … but because I’ve already used up all my tears.
As I say goodbye to you, I feel I must say a word to all of you. That word is « thank you »!
Thank you for your patience and understanding of me.
Thank you for the commitment and generosity you have shown.
To the French speakers, thank you for putting up with my bad French.
Thank you for the affection you have for your communities and for the fraternity and complicity you show as a team, you are a source of hope for me.
Thank you to the extended team who corrected us and listened to us with love.
Thank you to Paola for her infinite patience with me.
Thank you to Ralph, a friend for three years, who has dreamed with me and with us.
Thank you all for making me a better person.
Thank you because thanks to you I have experienced the most beautiful feelings a man can experience, the feeling of being loved, respected and belonging.
When I finished my first weekend in 1990, I was very dizzy, but I had two certainties. The first was that my life with Paola would get better, the second was that I would never, ever be a couple of animators. Time has proven that I only guessed 50% of the predictions!
For this, I have to thank ME too for becoming the person I have become.
Thanks to God who never left us alone.
In the journey we have all taken together over the past three years, we have seen how our communities are moving towards the ‘aristocracy’ phase, towards the downward phase of the growth curve.
We should not be surprised by this evolution. We should not be afraid of it.
Today, ME lacks « raw material », today couples no longer marry. In my parish, 30 years ago, there were 30 to 40 marriages a year. Last year there were three.
This is why I say that our community is lacking raw material! But, beware, there is no lack and there never will be a lack of young people, engaged couples, children, single people… so it is right and natural that our mission should also address these people, which it is already done with the family weekends and with the choice, engaged and singles weekends.
I hope that the friendship that links us to each of you will remain alive.
I hope that our destinies can still bring us together, and there are plenty of opportunities at ME, but if you are passing through Turin… we will be immensely happy if you come to visit us.
I promised myself not to make any recommendations to you, … you are no longer children. But let me make just one: you all have a difficult service to perform, an enormous responsibility towards your national communities. The recommendation is this: in your service you must also know how to have fun, laugh and joke, otherwise our service becomes a job. Worse than a job! Because when we work, we get money, but in our service, not only do we not get paid, but very often we pay out of our own pocket! That’s why I tell you: never forget to play and have fun.
I would like to end with the words that Charlie Chaplin* put into the mouth of the great dictator in one of his films: « In this world there is room for everyone ».
In this world, each of us has a place and our earth is rich enough to feed everyone, life can be happy and beautiful, but we have forgotten that.
The machine of abundance has given us poverty, science has turned us into cynics, greed has made us hard and mean, we think too much and feel too little. More than machines, we need humanity, more than skills, we need goodness and kindness, without these qualities, life is violence, and all is lost.
You have the strength to create happiness, you have the strength to make life beautiful and free, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
We are fighting for a new, better world, which gives work to all people, a future to the young, security to the old.
Let us fight for a reasonable world, a world in which science and progress give all men prosperity.
Look up Paola, Almudena, Bianca, Josipa, Ginou, Aida, Klarika, Alessandra, Marina, Josipa, Brigitte, Mary, Sofie, Karin, Marie Béatrice, Hildegarde, Leen, Bernadette and Jutta, Dora and Lucija and Sonia, as well as you husbands and priests, of course: the clouds are clearing, the sun is beginning to shine. We will come out of the darkness into the light and live in a new world, a better world in which men overcome their greed, their hatred, their brutality.
Look up, Paola, the human soul will find its wings and will finally begin to fly, to fly over the rainbow *to the light of hope, to the future that belongs to you, that belongs to me, that belongs to us all. Look up, Paola.
With love Felice