SOUTH AFRICA, Sarah-Leah Pimentel. As we celebrate the Year of the Shrine current in our preparation for 2014, the Women’s League in Johannesburg has committed itself to going on pilgrimage to Africa’s first shrine. Work and personal commitments prevented the whole group from going on pilgrimage together. But each member has said that she will go in this year as her schedule allows. Four Women’s League members took advantage of a long weekend with two public holidays to make the 12-hour bus trip to Cathcart in the Eastern Cape. They left the bustle of South Africa’s busiest city and found themselves in the stillness of a small farming community, an hour outside the nearest town.
Stepping into the shrine for the first time, Blanche said: “My journey to the Mother Shrine of Africa [what we affectionately call Africa’s first shrine] started as a search for peace, quiet, calmness, stillness and silence. I found them all and so much more. I call my experience “Where it all began” – my new way of looking at life all started at Africa’s first shrine. The place that felt like home, the place where I felt like I belonged. It was the most amazing experience of my life.”
Thope described the experience saying: “There was a sense of peace! I was at peace.”
A moment of unity with the International Schoenstatt Family
We arrived in Cathcart on 27 April which is a national holiday where South Africans celebrate Freedom Day, the day Nelson Mandela was inaugurated in 1994 as the first president of a democratic and multi-racial South Africa. The very next morning, we gathered in the shrine and joined with the International Schoenstatt Family at the same time as Fr. Michael Hagan celebrated Mass in the Mother Shrine in covenant with South Africa. We used this time to pray for our country and its people – that the exterior freedom that we conquered as a nation can also reign in the hearts of all its children.
This moment of unity with the International Schoenstatt Family led Blanche to comment: “There is no way I can miss an opportunity to share happiness with the rest of my family from all over the world in 2014.”
Our joy and hope are determined by our attitude to change
Over the four days, we explored the Johannesburg motto for 2011-2012: “In hope and joy, we ‘rebuild’ the shrine.” It became a journey of self-discovery where we realized that we had become burdened by so many worries that they had prevented us from experiencing hope and joy. Thope said that she had arrived feeling “broken and very discouraged.” Sr. Joanne, who led our pilgrimage, explained that we had allowed our field of study and our careers to dictate who we were, and invited us instead to reflect on who God made us to be.
Nthabiseng explained “Our joy and hope are determined by our attitude to change.” She added that the best way to make this change of attitude concrete in our lives, we need to remind ourselves again of the importance of “adhering to our spiritual daily order” and that we should find time for prayer in the busyness of the day “so that they [hope and joy] are not forgotten. This helped her to “understand the meaning of the contribution to the capital of grace, in giving everything to the MTA, that she will unite her part to our efforts in order to have inner transformation and apostolic fruitfulness from the Schoenstatt Shrine.
We also made time for companionship, to get to know each other better, which is often not possible during our monthly group meetings. As Thope said, some of the most “powerful moments were around the dinner table” as we shared our life experiences and learned from one another.
In contact with the heart and soul of Schoenstatt
For me, the most powerful moments were spent in the Father Room – the room Fr. Kentenich stayed during his time in Cathcart. I could feel his presence there. There is a photograph of the Founder Chapel where Fr. Kentenich is buried. One afternoon, I reached out and touched the photograph and am almost certain that I felt the rough, stone-cold feeling of the sarcophagus the way that I had done so many times when I was in original Schoenstatt. This pilgrimage was, for me, what Oprah calls a ‘full circle’ moment. I sealed my Covenant of Love in the Cathcart shrine many years ago, starting a journey that changed my life in so many ways and brought me into contact with the heart and soul of Schoenstatt in many parts of the world. All these years later, I was able to return and thank our Blessed Mother for her “wondrous gift to me.”
Blanche felt a very strong connection to the first Sisters of Mary who arrived in Cathcart and we would often find her sitting in a small, shady alcove where the Sisters used to find respite from the heat of the day and expressed her gratitude towards them, saying “I was touched by Our Lady, Fr. Kentenich and all the Sisters” who founded the movement, who “started it so that people like me could find their way home.”
Common history
We also took advantage of the uncharacteristically good weather and untouched natural beauty, spending a day at Pallotti Farm, where the Pallottine Fathers have a large retreat center. It was beautiful symbol of unity to see exact replicas of the shrine windows and the tabernacle doors inside the Pallottine chapel. It was a wonderful reminder of how much common history Schoenstatt has with the order started by Vincent Pallotti and how much we need to thank the Pallottines for the important role they played in the life of our father and founder.
With this thought in mind, we set off on a hike of several kilometers up the rolling hills to a beautiful hermitage that looks out over the entire landscape. Contemplating the feast of beauty, I was reminded that even when we feel worthless, God loves us personally and in his absolute care for us, he is in control of our lives and our future. This carefree attitude involves taking a child-like leap of faith.
Thope experienced this in a very practical way as she overcame one of her fears on the hike, saying: “Something inside me was stirred up after three days… going to the mountain … facing my fears…and as a result I am experiencing a great degree of peace and tranquility and at the same time, strangely enough, also a restlessness – good restlessness. Something in me wants to move on…”
The shrine within
And eventually, we did have to move on and return home to the fast pace of life in Johannesburg. But we returned with the realization that “worldly objects, thinking, expectations and living all mean nothing if you don’t carry the Lord with you in all the ‘worldly things,’ as Blanche put so succinctly. We need to carry the shrine in our hearts so that, as Nthabiseng said, “the Shrine is symbol of heaven on earth and that the Schoenstatt Movement is there to help us become new people in a new community thus building a better world for better people.
We can perhaps take Fr. Kentenich’s words to the Women’s League in South Africa (they were the first to greet our founder): “We must be to others what she [Our Lady] is to us…Her virtues must be seen in our lives, so that they are spread wherever we go. Wherever we go, there should reign joy, charity, justice, purity, courage, liberty, truthfulness and the conviction that God will win the victory” (1948).
What a great article this is, am reminded of my experience while I was there, almost three years ago, and what a great place cathcart is and a very peaceful one and what a lovely feeling it brought to me, the Father room was certainly my highlight. Well job well done on your article. God bless!