If I could use one word to describe my experiences throughout the duration of World Youth Day, that word would be “intimate.” Sitting on an airplane shoulder-to-shoulder with the friends who are traveling to World Youth Day with you, sleeping on a hard marble floor with less than an inch between you and the person next to you, being crammed into a metro train nose-to-nose with a complete stranger and being able to smell them better than you can smell yourself: Those are all physically intimate experiences.
All of these things happened numerous times while I was in Spain, and although they were intimate experiences, they are not the ones that I will remember and cherish for the rest of my life. The intimacy that I experienced in Spain was an emotional, spiritual and mental intimacy that moved me on a much more heartfelt level.
In Loyola, Spain, our group was fortunate enough to be a part of a small Mass, which roughly 20 people attended. This in itself can be an intimate spiritual experience, an experience where you know that the people with you are seeking the presence of God in the Mass.
Our Mass was made infinitely more intimate by the fact that it took place in the room where St. Ignatius laid incapacitated while he recovered from the leg wound he received at the Battle of Pamplona. The experience of taking part in a Mass in the location where the Society of Jesus had its inception, coming to God on what, to me, truly is holy ground: That is an intimate experience of God. It’s an experience that made me feel, in a very real sense, that God was absolutely, unquestionably present – as present as any of the people sitting in the room with me.
After leaving Loyola, Spain, I traveled to Alicante, a port city on the southeast coast. Leaving Loyola, I felt lost and alone. The reality hit me that I was thousands of miles away from the family and friends who love me at home in St. Louis and at school in New Orleans.
Over the next week in Alicante, I made close to 20 amazing friendships with people from Portugal, France and Belgium. We had daily reflections during which we shared our personal experiences of prayer, the struggles that we were having with our personal pilgrimages in Spain and our journeys through life.
Those reflections and the things that we shared with our groups were both intimate experiences. Barriers were lowered. Fears were released. We made ourselves vulnerable to each other in a truly intimate way. Through this personal sharing, my feelings of loneliness and isolation passed into nothingness and were replaced with a feeling of community and love.
It may be difficult to believe that the papal Mass, which over one and a half million people attended, could be an intimate experience, but I’m certain that it was. It would seem that a Mass during which people walk around and yell out cheers in many different languages to demonstrate their national pride could only be a rowdy and distracting experience. Those cheers may have been spoken in different languages, but they were motivated by the same desire to announce to the world that the United States, or Italy, or Brazil was present.
By seeing all the different nations present, I also saw that the church has no boundaries, that it envelopes the earth in its entirety and that, in spite of the differences in language and culture, everybody there was united under the same belief and the same intense passion for their faith. The realization that we are all united in a manner that can transcend all other differences transformed the rowdy, disorganized papal Mass into an intimate encounter with God and the unique way he unites all of us together.
My intimate experiences throughout the course of World Youth Day all had their source in God. They pointed to God’s presence among us as individuals, as small communities and as a global church. Exposure to this presence strengthened my own connection with God and helped me come to what I believe to be a more intimate relationship with God.
Alex Hall is a religious studies major and can be reachd at [email protected]
