On January 21, one day after President Trump’s inauguration, my husband and I made our way to the metro to go to downtown LA. When we got there, the scene was totally unlike what one usually sees around a Los Angeles metro stop: the cars were crammed full of people and on the platforms hundreds more waited. There were too few trains and they were moving far too slowly to deal with the crush of human beings. It had all the makings of a scene that would quickly devolve into frustration, impatience, and eventually anger. And yet, no one was complaining. The crowd of men, women, and children smiled, chatted, cheered, and sang.

An hour and half later, we arrived at the 7th street metro stop in downtown LA, practically carried above ground by the crowds. And there we joined the largest mass of people I’ve ever been a part of. Later estimates suggested that somewhere between 500,000 and 750,000 people had all braved the public transportation snafus, the infamously congested LA highways, and the sheer inconvenience of a disrupted Saturday to take part in the Women’s March.

In the run-up to the March, my friends and I had discussed whether or not to attend. We knew the March’s platform included supporting women’s access to abortion. We had seen the news about the organizers removing a pro-life feminist group from their group of sponsors. Did these facts mean that Catholics who follow the Church’s teachings on life shouldn’t participate in a rally whose overarching mission was to support those who felt marginalized by the rhetoric of our new president?

One of my favorite things Pope Francis said when he spoke before the U.S. Congress in 2015 was this: initiate processes and don’t just occupy spaces. The election and its results have had me feeling anxious and isolated for months. For me, the March was about starting a process. It was about standing in solidarity with other Americans who want to reject sexism, racism, xenophobia, and scapegoating of other groups of people. Trump’s campaign encouraged all of those things. Attending the March was about building bridges instead of walls. It was about showing up and not letting others narrowly define feminism for me.

I didn’t agree with every sign I saw. That wasn’t the point. The point was to live my faith, as Giussani says, through a culture of encounter. And the March offered this opportunity in spades. There was the Austrian woman who approached us to speak about the Martin Luther King quote on my husband’s sign (“Let no man pull you so low as to hate him”) and to share a moment of mutual frustration over Trump’s ugliest statements during the campaign. There were the mothers with their children who read my sign (“Make America Kind Again”), smiled at me, and simply said “thank you.” There were strangers helping parents with unwieldy strollers get down the metro steps. There was the time my friends and I were given to judge why we were there.

We could have reduced the day and the crowds to the extremely narrow and overly simplistic debate of pro-life vs. pro-choice. But doing so would have overshadowed our important common ground and our shared human need for solidarity in a time of uncertainty. What I found in downtown LA was an overwhelming positivity. I felt a simple joy from walking shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of people who—it was made so obvious to me—are clearly stronger together than they would be apart.