Asking to be confirmed

Last night, I had my second meeting for the preparation for the sacrament of Confirmation.  It coincided with the Junior High's night, and so Charlene, one of the candidates for the sacrament got confused and so didn't come for the preparation.  Simon, on the other hand was there.  Son of a very pious but internet-savvy couple, Simon's interests include comic-book writing and zombies.  Truth be told, I wasn't expecting Simon to really follow the program.  He wasn't even in the original list of candidates.  But this young man had shown unusual interest.  With him is Nadege, whom I knew only through a few exchanges of emails that we had recently.  She has stopped coming to the Aumonerie since 2011 but surprisingly, she showed up and asked to be included in the program.  She was of Portuguese descent, she's already in her senior high but she looked unusually young for a typical French youth.
We began our meeting with the lighting of the vigil lamp, which is nothing more than a saucer with a few drops of olive oil and a spindled cotton as wick.  Simon gladly demonstrated to Nadege how it worked, and our improvised lamp actually stay lit for more than an hour.  With my broken French and a bit of enthusiasm, we explored the meaning of faith, the importance of trusting, believing and putting one's faith on something. Videos and other things to animate came handy, while our little vigil lamp shone before us.  We were surprised after on how the time flew, and so we immediately and a bit hurriedly made our prayer.  I asked them to draw, and the two, completely different yet in many ways similar, huddled over sketches their made.  The pencil drawings of Simon and Nadege struck me hard, as they happened to be the most honest and most revealing prayers I ever heard from a French teenager.
We said our Notre Pere, holding each other's hands and then stood up to join the Juniors with the prayers I prepared for them.  The words of Timothy Radcliffe rang well in our experience that night:  Prayer is an act of friendship with God.  It's not about thinking about him but rather being with him.


The pages of the Sacramentary had traces
of panic and forgetfulness at its crease and tears.
Drops of candle wax dot the Easter prayer
while regularity sullied the Ordinary Times.
Spines are broken and leaves are folded
and somewhere, pieces of paper marked
a hope or a plan in a priest's mind.
Grime and sot is today's monastic illumination
on the Second Eucharistic Prayer, imitating
the familiarity and haste of every presider
who knew each of these words by heart.