The involvement of young people already walking with the Euro-Mediterranean youth pastoral team, central area, was implemented through a vocational weekend, which reached out and involved new fellow travellers among girls and boys from central Italy.

The slogan Choose Life guided us to the meeting with ‘Witnesses of Life Choices’!

Our weekend began with an online moment where we met Anna and Enrico and listened to their testimony of how they came to choose marriage.

Then we travelled a thousand roads to arrive in Castel Maggiore and celebrate their wedding together. It was a very intense moment. Even though some people did not know the bride and groom, except for the online testimony, they felt involved in their ‘yes’ and provoked to look for and discover their ‘yes’.

The journey continued to Ferrara, where the luminous and faithful testimony of our elderly sisters was a strong and tender provocation for the young people on the way. We experienced simple moments of storytelling, of exchange, of sharing. We prayed together and celebrated life! And in the meantime, with the young people, we immersed ourselves in our interiority touched by the Word of the Annunciation to Mary.

The times of listening to the Word were lived in an atmosphere of sharing. We had an introductory moment, through a map of the inner world, with which we tried to understand where we were and what path we had taken and were taking during the year. We felt challenged to begin to understand what yeses the Lord is calling us to today and therefore what steps we could take.

In the meanders of the map of our inner world where does the angel’s announcement reach us today?

BY A YOUNG MAN

‘Rejoice’, ‘she was greatly troubled’: these are the expressions from Luke’s gospel that accompanied me during the weekend. The initial turmoil arises when I let God into my story and abandon my schemes, my plans and my certainties.

But also the joy that this experience showed me in the grace-filled faces of Anna and Enrico, the sisters who welcomed us, who said their ‘Here I am’ to the Lord. I return from this experience with the serenity, the ‘Rejoice’ that abandoning oneself to Christ is wonderful.

BY A YOUNG WOMAN

For me, living such an experience, going from the celebration of the wedding to the happiness in the faces of the elderly nuns was a rediscovery that this life that God wants to give me, or rather give back to me, I cannot miss out on and that the happiness of those who have chosen life in Christ I also want to find, no less.

Anna and Enrico

Anna comes to us in 2018, saying ‘yes’ to the proposal to live the Easter Triduum with the invisibles of the San Vittore prison in Milan together with other young people. From there, we do not miss an opportunity to live our youth ministry experiences made of sharing, caring for spirituality and service, called La Bussola. During the years in which we walk together she meets Enrico, who is also animated by a strong spirit of service, which he carries out as a scout, and in serious listening to the Word of God about his life. Together they participate in the Alternative New Year 2022/2023. A year later, they tell us the good news that they have chosen each other for life, and on 18 May 2024…here we all are at their wedding!

Sharing and recounting was a beautiful testimony for the young people, an opportunity to gather pearls of wisdom, and at the same time for the sisters it was a moment of vitality, of joy, to be able to see young people on their way, to be able to recount the beauty of their lives.

Both, therefore, matured their choice of life together through the proposals of youth ministry. Thus listening to their experience, participating in their marriage contributed in a fruitful way to sharing a time of reflection on the vocational dimension, not so much in a theoretical manner, but in contact with witnesses, with their feet on the ground, in contact with the hardships, the slowdowns, the enthusiasms.

Our senior sisters of Ferrara

Anna and Enrico, therefore, together with the testimony of our elderly sisters: a faithful yes over time and over the years, a yes that has come even at the limit of illness, of physical ailments, and no less fruitful and flourishing for that. So the other very nice thing about this weekend was the meeting between generations, the moment of exchange with the sisters of Ferrara was very significant for the young people, because they really picked up many pearls from the words of the sisters who told something of their lives. We had reached them before the meeting with a letter, written by the boys, asking them to share something of their lives.

Sharing and recounting was a beautiful testimony for the boys, an opportunity to gather pearls of wisdom, and at the same time for the sisters it was a moment of vitality, of joy, to be able to see young people on their way, to be able to recount the beauty of their lives.

One of the sisters said: ‘I haven’t been able to go out for a long time, I can’t set foot outside the house any more because of my physical fatigue, and my health, and so the arrival of the young people was a bit like bringing the world home for us’.