"God, I come to you with my desire to live. / You know me and know what drives me / and what is important to me. / Nothing is hidden from you. / I can stand before you with everything that moves me. / I feel so much life in me. / I am full of dreams and ideas. / I believe that your Spirit lives in me and sustains me. / Are you yourself hidden in my desire?"
After arriving in Malmantile on Sunday, on Monday 7 August, we started the 36th Eurocamp with the invocation reported above. We had announced this in the Newsletter No. 318 of 8 March, in which, revealing to you the theme and venue, we involved you by informing you about this experience and asking you to help us share the invitation to participate to young people close to the SSS communities.
First of all, I would like to try to share with you the emotion of feeling at home, as a family, in the Blessed Sacrament community of the Lecceto Hermitage. This comforting feeling made us think - especially the animators - of all the times that a religious family has chosen and accepted to welcome us and to live with us a piece of the wonderful journey of life that God the Father has given to each of us. This summer, the warmth of the "home hearth" was even more intense thanks to the service and presence of a small group of laic people from the Eymardian Family who were for us witnesses of the Eucharist lived in the service of their brothers and sisters. We feel deep gratitude towards them.
Being a small group - in addition to the animators, other twenty young people from Italy, Belgium, Germany and, more numerous, from the Czech Republic - certainly helped to make the relationship between everyone deeper and more direct, as well as to quickly create bonds of mutual affection and care. Listening to each other and sharing reflections, fears, fatigues, joys, dreams and desires was spontaneous and natural, and led us to discover ourselves “always loved and desired, in order to love and desire forever”: desiring-desired ones, recipients of the immense love of God the Creator, Father, Shepherd and Spouse, which is manifested to us from Baptism and which makes us “brothers and sisters”.
Like every family, we have recognised the desire to gather, at least weekly, in the same House, for a true encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist, aware that "Jesus himself 'ardently desires' to share Easter with his disciples to give them himself in bread and wine... and it is a 'sin' not to live up to our great desire because, deep down, we are also Eucharist..." (Robert Cheaib).
We also got to know a little more St Peter Julian, who realised his desire to put his life at the service of Jesus-Eucharist with determination; particularly touching and close to the path of this year's Eurocamp are some of his exhortations, among them: "Have a passion for the Eucharist... Man's life is all in the passion that dominates him... Be great in your ways of seeing, great in your desires, great in your love!"
We hope that the young people who participated to the Eurocamp have been able to discover or deepen God's desire/plan for their lives; our wish is to continue offering this exciting experience of Eucharistic spirituality to young people from various European countries!
for the équipe of the Eurocamp,
Daniela Baggi
