To speak the unspeakable

It was raining in Rome on Friday night. All the streets and squares were empty. A strange silence hung above the city. Only one single man stood on the steps of St. Peter’s Cathedral and kept saying „Do not be afraid.”

It was Pope Francis who emphasized the same things in his Urbi et Orbi blessing as the testifiers of Him and Me series made by the Hungarian team of International Eucharistic Congress: that we should not be afraid, as God is there for us even in the hardest moments of life. Now perhapst even stronger than ever.

This was the thought from which the series Him and Me was born from, in the summer of 2019. The idea of 52 testifiers came from Tünde Zsuffa, press chief of NEK and Beatrix Siklósi, channel director of Rádió Kossuth. They wanted a show which is able to bring people closer to God, to faith and to a genuine relationship with Jesus. They wanted to record thoughts, confessions, testimonies which have an enormous power within a few minutes. It was a real challenge in a world which pays attention to everywhere but inside. Where surface is more important than honesty, credibility and real fights.

However, the creators of the series made the (almost) impossible possible: the five-minute-long shoots are able to present the essence of the most basic human features. Through one person’s lifeline, we can experience the deepest doubts and the purest recognitions within only a few minutes.

When the series of the International Eucharistic Congress has launched before Christmas, each episode helped us to get closer to the warmth of Advent, the light of the Nativity. Week by week, we watched the fates of „ordinary” people, and for a couple of minutes, we were allowed to see the depths which a soul contains. Every testimony shed lights upon the truth: real faith and connection with God is (almost) always born from the most difficult moments of life.

We’ve seen incredibly brave people who had the courage to talk right to the camera about their fears and peace, infidelity and faith, pains and joys, denial and acceptance. Sometimes with tears in their eyes, sometimes smiling, but always with the greatest honesty. It would be hard to rank among them. In the first ’season’, we’ve met a man who was once homeless, and now is a leader of a retreat house. We’ve heard the worker who became a theologist, the young skate champion who made a vow for his grandfather by his deathbed, the woman who became a paralympic after trying to kill herself, the doctor who experiences her faith during healing, the nun who’ve found heaven in captivity, the prisoner who’ve experienced the greatest freedom in his cell, the business man for whom faith became the most important thing instead of money, or the social care worker who claimed that God and him are cooking in the same kitchen.

While the first ten episodes of Him and Me were broadcasted on TV, an unknown epidemic broke out at the other end of the world. Coronavirus – it was a new and strange word for us. In China, they already knew what it meant. In Europe, we had no idea what this expression holds for us: how it is going to change our lives, our way of thinking, our values … and our faith.

Duna Television is launching the new episodes of Him and Me on Holy Week. Twelve parts, twelve testifiers. Just like the disciples whom Jesus told: ’Do not be afraid.’ These people has been afraid a lot. They had many doubts. And they had problems, difficulties and pains like any of us. They’ve asked for a thousand times: Why? Why me? What is the purpose of God with this?

Now, these questions are more relevant than ever. The timing of Him and Me is just perfect in a time when fate pushes us out with full force from our comfort zone and makes us value everyhing we thought was obvious: our freedom, our comfort, the gifts of the Earth. Pope Francis said: ’Greedy for profit, we let ourselves get caught up in things, and lured away by haste. We did not stop at your reproach to us, we were not shaken awake by wars or injustice across the world, nor did we listen to the cry of the poor or of our ailing planet. We carried on regardless, thinking we would stay healthy in a world that was sick. Now that we are in a stormy sea.’

The words of the Holy Father are in perfect harmony with the thoughts of the testifiers in Him and Me. Or of any of them. Because a testimony is nothing else but telling things hardly anyone dares to. To talk about God with content and faith behind the words. To speak the unspeakable. That is how these lives become real and outstanding examples.

Following the base concept of the series, the ’characters’ of the twelve new episodes are ordinary people in the best sense of the word. The father of four children who has cancer and whose only explanation for the illness is that he is strong enough to endure it. The young woman who as a child lived alone with her little sister for a whole year because their parents abandoned them and who says that today she is able to convert every single day. The young butcher who has sensed the presence of God in a single moment and believes that his mission is to show people what real happiness is. The mother who turned towards faith because of Brother Csaba, and says that sometimes Jesus sits in front of her and let her admire him. The prisoner who recognises that he had to go to prison in order to fulfill his dream and become a theologist. The doctor who, while healing in a mission in Africa is gaining strength from the incredible faith of the African people. And her daughter, who says God loves her as she is – for herself, for her fights and her love. The university student who has lost her father and admits among tears that it takes her huge efforts to reform the picture about God living in her. The religion teacher who is certain that when she doesn’t get an answer immediately, God hears her and ’does something about it.’ The psychologist of a hospice home who had a brain tumor as a child and now helps people to lift their crosses at the end of their lives. The young girl who wants to be a nun because this is the way she can live the freedom she has always searched for. And the mother whose child needs a 24-hour care and still says that there are much more joy than problems she experiences through her daughter and is now in peace with herself.

’We find ourselves afraid and lost’, Pope Francis said in Rome on Friday night, standing in the rain. ’We have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.’

All the world is in quarantine now. It may be hard to endure it. But if we manage not to put ourselves in the centre, and let ourselves see that it’s been decades since air and the water was so clear on Earth, or that there have never been so many donations for those who fight in the front line of the epidemic, or that young people offer their help for the old ones to protect them from danger, we may realise how a seemingly senseless and bad thing becomes undertstandable and essential.

As Pope Francis ended his speech, the bells rang in Rome. It was the very same moment when an ambulance car started to hoot in the distance. Someone is in trouble. It may be all of us. But we all have a chance to find a solution. That is Him and Me about.


IEC Secretariat