“Let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet” The Song of Songs, 2,14)
To love and to be loved. This is our dream, the most profound desire of every person. For this dream to come true, we have to transform it into a project which we have to work on day after day.
What we are proposing is an itinerary to help you discern this project of love for your life, which shows you the way while helping you to keep your feet to the ground. This project encompasses all your everyday activities and relations and requires that you keep your eyes and heart fixed on high towards heaven, towards a light which can guide you on your way even in dark moments. It is an itinerary along which you are not alone: there are so many friends, so many witnesses, who in the simplicity of their lives, have shown what loving, right to the end, really means and who will enlighten you with their testimony.
The way we propose is that of the beatitudes of love. For we young people, the word beatitude means to establish authentic, sincere and free relations in our life which are far from being possessive or egoistic. If we wish the best for our body, we should accept it as it is without being slaves to the beauty myth at all costs. We should respect and learn how to look at the beauty of the body and the soul of the person we have in front of us. We should try to discover the beauty of chastity, of a friendly relationship and of a love, expressed through tender and delicate gestures and which focuses on the genuineness of our relationship and on the dignity of the person with whom we establish a relationship.
Beatitude also means starting a journey along which you discover your fragility and that you can make mistakes and fall many times but also learn that, thanks to God’s mercy and pardon, you can rise again; a journey, along which, even if you fall to very lowest level, you will have the strength to look up again and to start working on a project, which indicates to you a sound way of living, guided by true love, directed towards matrimony or towards a love dedicated to the service of others in consecrated life.
The journey, divided into eight stages, consists of a meditation, a testimony and points for reflection which question your life of prayer. In fact, in each stage you will find a beatitude for you to relish and meditate upon, a passage from a very beautiful text, dedicated to love, by Pope John Paul II entitled “The Jeweler’s Shop” which deals with an enlightening testimony of love of a fellow travelling companion who, like you, asks himself what true love means, a question that you too should ask yourself about your life, and a prayer that opens your heart and mind.
It is a journey which is meant to be a point of arrival and not a point of departure, an invitation to take the first step, to let yourself be guided by so many travelling companions who have gone before us. Enjoy your journey!
