On May 13th of this year, the Feast day of our Lady of Fatima, I had to venture from my home to Santander, on a road following an endless line of trees, in the middle of a forest. My reason for departure was painful: to attend the Funeral of Carmina González.* She was a faithful friend of Mamie, a member of the Home of the Mother, and wife of Luis López. Amazed, I contemplated the clearing of land and levelling of earth, of a scenery that would never return. These are not simple scars of nature, but a true death in favour of an accelerated process of out of control urbanization.

Perhaps some of my readers have already experienced this same sensation: the aspect of your neighbourhood is no longer the same. It has been transformed and with it has disappeared the charm of your eyes when you strolled through her streets and walked down her sidewalks. It is a strange sensation watching your house be torn down, or bulldozed, the home in which you were born, in order construct in its place a new modern building. But the organizers of this mass construction do not understand feelings. Money crushes all of those beautiful affections. They will always find some “reason” to undue it. The law is inexorable: the new city destroys the old. Not all of those placed at the head of this administration have a sensibility in respect to beauty. Money is the “excrement of the devil.”(Giovanni Papini) He soils everything.

It was in this very moment that I understood what Mamie had told me and that to me, was incomprehensible. Mamie had affirmed that she felt no desire to return to Belgium, and even less was her desire to return to Brussels. But least of all, to the home that she had rented on Tervuren Avenue: one of today’s widest and most beautiful streets in the European Union. More so, she feared the arrival of this moment.
However, the moment arrived: her sister Jeannot, a Daughter of Charity, whose religious name is Maria Elena, had returned from Vietnam. The war had just come to an end, and she had been living there many years as a missionary amongst the “montagnards.” Mamie prayed for her sister during the four months in which the Vietnamese Communists held her prisoner. We met up with her in Paris in order to go to Brussels afterwards.

While in Brussels I took the opportunity to visit the different places, in which she had lived, in addition to other very interesting sites: Schaerbeck’s street, where she was born, the church where she had been baptized, the Park of Saint Josephat, where she played with her sister, the midday station where she met Marichen, the Church of Saint Suzanne where she married François Treuttens, the Well of Saint Reinadle where she was cured of her blindness and many more places where she had lived, until reaching her home on Tervuren Avenue.

Together we visited these sites, full of pleasant, but at the same time, painful memories, and I saw how Mamie’s soul suffered. When she observed Tervuren Avenue, where she had lived, she told me the kind of life she had led there. “But,” she said to me with a tone of sadness, “this avenue is no longer the same. The nunciature was practically in front of my house and it is there that they met me, because, since my sister was a Daughter of Charity, she visited quite often. The street was very wide. Back then there wasn’t as much traffic as now. There was a large sidewalk in the middle with large trees, and a garden where the people could peacefully stroll through. It’s not longer the same. Everything has changed.”

When we returned from the trip, Mamie made the firm resolution not to return. For her, the memories must have remained very intact in her mind, like a treasure for the soul. They are the sun of the soul when the memories are beautiful.

It was not about a discouraging romanticism. It was enriching for the soul. I can now understand those sentiments, when, looking back, I see disappear the surroundings in which I lived. And now I realize their true value.

By Fr. Rafael Alonso

©HM Magazine No. 137 - July/August 2007