On Tuesday, May 21, we met with the young people who are preparing to receive confirmation in the parishes of San Alberto Hurtado; Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and El Buen Pastor, to climb the San Cristóbal hill, with the purpose of having a day of living together and friendship in contact with nature.
On a radiant autumn day, 23 young people from different parts of Santiago experienced the richness of the diversity of conversations, experiences and lifestyles. On the hill we made some stops: in the Japanese garden we enjoyed the silence and contemplation of the beautiful landscape; then in a large park we stopped to eat, rested and had teamwork and presentation games, where we laughed a lot and we discovered the talents and attitudes of each one; in the final stretch of the climb we did peripatetism, which is the form of dialogue in which Fernando Rielo, founder of the idente missionaries, teaches us to leave ourselves and to know the richness of the other through conversation.
During the ascent, formation was joined to living together, learning to “know how to be” in each activity, and to know the meaning and origin of the places we were entering; for example, the Basque chapel, a donation from the Basque community in Chile, which is a marvelous stone construction with paintings of different saints, which has at the entrance sculptures of the Chilean saints: Santa Teresita de Los Andes and San Alberto Hurtado. In this place there was a small talk on “God, Nature and Society”: the motto that Fernando Rielo proposed to the young people to live the noblest and highest ideals that they can conceive.
A very beautiful gesture was that some young people spontaneously knelt at the feet of the Immaculate Virgin who crowns the hill, with an attitude of true interior prayer.
At this summit we sat in a circle to share each other’s impressions. What touched them most was the gift of living together, caring for nature, the family, getting out of individualism and not getting attached to things or people, truly enriching each other, in God, Nature and Society.
