For my husband and I, coming to the Ile Blanche * – a guest house in Locquirec, France – to experience the Pascal Triduum has become an eagerly awaited event.. This year it is Gilles Rebêche, a deacon from the diocese of Toulon, co-founder of the Diaconie du Var *, who will be teaching us, or rather sharing his rich experience with us.
Each Holy Day is a stage to be lived to the full lived thanks to the sisters who animate this place (songs, evocative icons for each day, preparations for the celebrations, multiple attentions to each person…), experienced with the retreatants (around thirty of them) and also with the people Gilles introduces us to, so rich is his mission in terms of encounters.
And so, as the hours passed, my list of first names grew longer and longer, and I seemed to know – the gypsy woman who offered the group of women on pilgrimage to Lourdes this word of wisdom: ‘when you die, you are not finished’, to evoke the time of purification known as purgatory. – the elderly priest who, in the evening of his life, experiences the ultimate self-denial after a life of gratification, -the man who thinks he sees a fault in the French phrase: “Thy will be a feast’, when in fact it is.
Our retreat is not a list of short stories, but an anthology of holy stories to invite us, through personal silence, prayer and sharing, to discern God’s passage in our lives, and to re-read our trials and our bereavements. God’s will.
Good Friday prepares our hearts. Some carry Our Lord’s cross during the Way of the Cross…. as a call to carry with others the crosses of our world today. After the great silence of Holy Saturday, when we all let ourselves be guided by the question: “What, Who are you looking for?”, the Easter Vigil begins around the new fire outside, (as it doesn’t always rain in Brittany) and continues in the chapel, where our songs resound: “Christ is risen, Alleluia! “. Our joy is great. On Sunday morning, before continuing our praise of the Risen Christ, each of us offered the group our experience of ‘new mornings’, as Philippe Mac Leod’s * poem invites us to do.
“Before me you have opened a way…” Ps 30:9.
Amen! Hallelujah! Thank you, Lord.
Hélène, one of the participants. Published on 24 April 2025
* https://www.ile-blanche-locquirec.fr/
* The Var diocese. This diocese offers various initiatives to reach out to people at the heart of their suffering. Illness, poverty, loneliness, bereavement, and exclusion are all difficult situations that can be experienced with Christ in fraternity, listening, compassion and solidarity.
* Philippe Mac Leod. Christian thinker, intellectual, writer and poet, seeker of God. 1954-2019
