Things got more interesting when we studied the Passion of Christ. They made it personal, assembling us in groups and urging us to talk about our own sufferings—a task a young man can warm to. The terrible injuries we’d all suffered, or imagined we’d all suffered. Much of what we said was petty, if meaningful to us. And then a boy from a good family, the son of a general, wealthy and handsome, told us that his father regularly beat his mother, and had once thrown him out of a moving car.
“We weren’t going very fast,” he said, his face pale as the words emerged from his mouth, seemingly unwilled.
The Jesuit scholastic running the retreat, only a decade older than us and clearly with little experience in handling these things, looked terrified. These were the kind of secrets that had consequences when shared. This was dangerous. The son of the general lifted his arm.
“I broke my wrist,” he said, fear radiating from him as the words continued to spill out. “I had to get stitches. I still have the scar.” He pulled his sleeve back, displaying a faint, jagged line. He stared at it, we stared at it, then he looked up, his eyes attempting to make contact with another set of eyes. But after a person has opened himself, simply to look him in the eye is to assume responsibility for his pain, so the rest of us gazed safely at the floor.
After this, there was silence. I looked around. If no one else were to speak, it would be a betrayal. When you share dark secrets, you must be repaid in kind. I searched my memory, but had nothing. My father, whatever his faults, loved my mother passionately, and loved me the same, and would never have done anything like that.
Finally, one of the other boys spoke, and the group seemed to exhale at once. Thanks to God! He began in a tentative, small voice that slowly expanded into a world of pain and loss. The death of his mother to cancer. A worthy offering. Then another boy spoke, and another, depths suddenly opened, the kidnapping of a sister by the guerrilla here, the loss of a cousin to drugs there, and it seemed as though a secret world had been unlocked, a world in which sin and pain were real, and mattered, and infused us with a terrible sense of the true meaning of the world.
We retreated back to our cells, trembling with the weight of what had happened. There was nothing other than my little window and my little cross to focus my mind, to calm the turbulence in my soul. I knew I was supposed to pray to God. No matter the awfulness of what I’d just heard, such prayers had been made by countless Christians suffering worse crises, suffering martyrdom and torture, pains and troubles far larger than our privileged group of children had been able to produce. But I could not pray. I had no words. And then I heard a sound behind me, and saw a large envelope had been pushed underneath the door to my cell. I lifted it, opened the packet, and withdrew a group of letters tied together with twine.
Each was addressed to me, and when I opened them, one by one, I found they were letters from older boys at my school, and from my parents and relatives. “My sweet, my dearest Juan Pablo,” began the one from my father. Each letter was a loving description of me, a catalogue of the ways I had improved the lives of those around me. “When you were born,” the letter from my mother began, “my dearest aunt, Blanca Maria, who had raised me more than my own mother, was in hospice care. I took you to see her, you were less than a week old, small enough to hold with one hand, and I put you in her arms. It gave her comfort to know that she was passing out of life as another life was beginning. When she looked at you, the shadow of death passed from her face, and it seemed that all the comfort and promise of the Resurrection settled in her soul. I knew then you would be a joy in the world.”
There were letters from other boys as well, boys in the year ahead of me who had undergone this retreat, older boys who we looked up to and who maintained hard exteriors before us but here were telling me, “You are an exceptional, hardworking cadet,” or “I can see you doing some great act of heroism,” and saying that I was their “brother in Christ.” In that place, at that moment, it was overwhelming.
And so the presence struck me. I began to tremble. Tears fell down my face and in my heart I was filled with the most remarkable joy. I walked to the window of my cell, through which I could see the branch of a tree, a bit of sky. A bird flitted into and then out of view, and I had the absurd desire to reach out, cup it in my hand, and kiss it. The stillness in my cell was exquisite. I felt as though the material world had been pierced, and life itself was flooding out from the wound. I was aware of a presence within the room, that I was not alone, though also that the presence was not separate from me. It was larger than
