WORDS Ben Coleridge

It might not be until well after World Youth Day that you can really understand how the experience has shaped your faith.

One evening when I was sixteen I found myself lying on my back in the middle of a field in Germany.

There I was, spread-eagled in the long grass looking up at the sky with its few ominous clouds. Night was closing in. I had just walked fifteen kilometres to get there and was now comfortably resting my legs on my sleeping bag which had yet to be unrolled. Had I been on my own, I would give anyone permission to label me a traveller in search of the romantic, or just plain weird. But I wasn’t.

After glancing at the rain clouds above I lifted my head to look around me. The sight of a million people is a splendid one. As far as the eye could see stretched sleeping bags and figures: walking, talking, playing music and snoozing. The flags of a galaxy of countries waved above our heads. As darkness descended, we all began to light candles, one candle for every person so that across a field in Germany a million points of light flickered into life.

Preparing for World Youth Day 2005 I had my reservations. The idea of praying together with hundreds of thousands of others is not something you can easily get your head around. Yet being there was one of the most dramatic experiences of my life. As I look forward to World Youth Day this year, I wonder what effect my pilgrimage to Cologne had on me, and what I can expect in Sydney.

Every experience of a World Youth Day or week is different. My experiences in Germany were marked by the stage of life I was at. It is not an easy thing, in the midst of school, university or whatever you are engaged in, to depart radically from the norm and embrace something so unconventional. It needs some sort of openness, or maybe a push in the right direction. I had always ‘believed’ in God, or at least I went to Mass every Sunday. But that did not stop me from hopping on the plane half-convinced that I had condemned myself to two weeks of sausage and contemplation.

Underneath all this scepticism, although I hardly admitted it to myself, I did hope for some kind of spiritual change. But lying in the field there, it seemed that all I got was rain clouds. Two years later it took a closer look at my life since to realise what change had occurred. Because although I did not understand it then, the journey to the field, with all its accompanying enjoyment and difficulty, sowed the seeds of gradual change.

I was thrown in with a myriad of other cultural expressions of faith and cheerfulness. I became fast friends with people from far away places like Poland and the Philippines. At the train station in Cologne, each platform was crowded with cohorts of different nationalities. We all began to sing together, just any fun songs that came to mind, waving and gesturing across the tracks. Unconsciously I was being opened to new possibilities and to a broader vision of life, mine and others.

So what am I looking for in Melbourne and Sydney during those two weeks? Not long ago I was sitting out in the garden on a hot, balmy evening. I was thinking about the year ahead and what experiences would unfold for me.

My thoughts eventually arrived at the question, what makes me happy? What overcomes any downheartedness I may feel? And why do I even get downhearted? Then I remembered a poem, one that I had read while overseas in Russia.

It began with ‘No one could tell me where my soul might be’, and I mentally glanced at the periods where I had felt inner unrest. Then another line drifted through my mind: ‘I sought for God but God eluded me’. I thought about times I had despaired of God’s existence at all. Then there was a pause before the last lines found their way into my reflections: ‘I sought my brother out and found all three/my soul, my God, and all humanity.’

World Youth Day is us seeking each other out, a great coming together to celebrate and take heart at each other’s presence. Celebrating and making friends in new ways makes me happy; it should make any of us happy. And in the company of each other, in some mysterious shape or form, we might find something that goes deeper than things we have experienced before—namely Jesus.

Picture the scene: the racecourse in Sydney is covered with bodies, hundreds of thousands of people, all sleeping on the grass under the stars. Then lights begin to flicker, and again the candles are lit, three years later, on the other side of the world.

But somewhere in the mass of people, there will be a young person, perhaps from the Philippines or France or some far-flung place, who will sit up, take a glance at the sky and then cast their eyes on the vast expanse around. The thought comes: ‘What am I doing in the middle of a racecourse in Australia with half a million others?’

It may not be until later that the answer will arrive, but, when they find the space to breathe and breathe deep, arrive it will.