Among the 4,000 participants at the Spiritual Exercises for university students, held in Rimini last December, there were three young people from Uganda. Eighteen-year-old Marvin had just finished high school in Kampala. He plays the guitar, writes songs, and would like to study Aeronautics. He was at the CLU Spiritual Exercises for the first time. “I wanted to come last year, but I was still a minor,” he said, smiling. We met him on Saturday at lunch. He was very enthusiastic about the morning lesson. “What he said is true. It’s really this way. It happens so often that I run away from myself, trying to distract myself so that I don’t see my heart. Instead, this companionship helps me to look at what I truly want. It’s a place where my miserableness and sin no longer count for anything. Here I’m not judged at all. I’m not looked at not for what I’ve done, but for what I desire. This is the gaze of Christ.”

Michelle speaks little. The 21-year-old Education major is here at the Spiritual Exercises for the third time. “I feel like a child discovering her father,” she said, “full of how Christ knows and embraces my desire. I return because this is where I want to be. Jesus achieves what would seem impossible: He frees me from judgment. He doesn’t look at me in terms of my past, but makes me feel continually chosen.”

Arnold is 19 years old, studies International Marketing, and seems to be the most timid of the three. He previously suffered from an eye disease that could have left him blind. Last year he came to Italy for treatment and went to visit Fr. Giussani’s tomb to leave a prayer request. The most natural prayer would be to ask for healing, but Arnold had an even more pressing request. “At Fr. Giussani’s tomb I asked that I be given the same gaze that he had, the same desire to live reality fully in every moment. I’ve learned from Fr. Giussani the profundity of my heart, something in me that is stronger than any drama or sin. I’ve understood that my desire is to be loved.” He said that he discovered this in the Movement. “This is why I’ve come here to the Spiritual Exercises, because Christ embraces me in every moment. There’s nothing similar to this: there is nothing like it in the world.”