World Youth Day 2016: A Candle Lit in the Darkness

What kind of world do we really live in? If we attempt to answer that question by watching the nightly news, surely we’d come to the conclusion that our world has gone off the rails. The ubiquity of random and senseless violence, the absurd comedy of our political zeitgeist, the perverse affront to human dignity at every turn – it seems as though the human condition is totally if not irreparably depraved.

This is certainly how I was feeling about the world when I stepped on the plane a few short weeks ago. I honestly thought to myself (because surely I would never voice such a radical opinion out loud) that this must be the beginning of the end. This is the final and farcical finale before Jesus returns and sets everything straight (and leave it up to Jesus to time his return with the Cubs fated victory in the World Series). Frankly I welcomed the idea. Feeling so powerless in the face of evil, I yearned for the day when sanity could be restored and love could triumph once and for all.

Then something happened.

I took a journey, a pilgrimage, that allowed me to see beyond the matrix of fear and helplessness. Arriving in Krakow, Poland I lifted my gaze to see other pilgrims, two million of them to be exact, on a similar journey of the spirit. They too had left lands where violence and brutality had ripped apart their homes, their families, their peoples. They too had come to Krakow to see if divine mercy really had a place in this world, if this Jubilee Year of Mercy was more than wishful thinking amidst the “real world” of callous inhumanity.

World Youth Day restored my faith in God, in the Church, and in the larger narrative of redemption in human history. One moment in particular marked the turn in my mind. It was the Saturday night Papal Vigil. We had hiked eight miles out of Krakow, under intense summer sun, to reach the dusty plains of Campus Misericordia – the “Field of Mercy.” That night two million young people lit candles and knelt in prayer, lifting their hearts to Jesus, united as one people of God, commiting their lives to mercy, to forgiveness, to love. Two million faces illumined with the spark of hope. Two million hearts turned to Jesus. Two million lights cast out the darkness.

In that moment I realized once again that there is no greater power, that our present sufferings are nothing compared with the glory that will be revealed to us. In that moment I was reminded of the words of St. Paul, the patron saint of missionaries and evangelists, that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ro 8:38-39).

What kind of world do we really live in? God’s world. And we are his children. We are ambassadors of hope and heralds of the kingdom where nothing (and I mean nothing) can separate us from the love of God that we know through Jesus Christ. Though in the world we may have trouble, let us take heart, today and always, echoing the words of St. Faustina Kowalska, Polish nun and mystic, “Divine Mercy, inspiring hope against all hope, I trust in You.”