Having entered a chapel in the Latin Quarter of Paris at 5:10 to look for a friend, I found myself leaving at 5:15 in the company of a friendship that was not of this earth. I had entered skeptical and atheist... indeed, more than skeptical and more than atheist: indifferent, preoccupied with countless things other than a God about whom I never thought, not even to deny Him... Standing by the door, I looked around for my friend, but could not spot him... My gaze passed from the shadows to the light... from the faithful, to the sisters, to the altar...
André Frossard
My eyes came to rest on the second lighted candle to the left of the Cross (unaware that I was standing before the Blessed Sacrament). Suddenly, there was unleashed a series of wonders whose inexorable power dismantled in an instant the absurd being that I was, giving birth to the astonished youth I had never been...
First, these words were whispered to me: "Spiritual Life"... as though uttered in a soft voice right beside me... then a brilliant light... a world, another world of splendor and density that in a single flash reveals our own world among the fragile shadows of unfulfilled dreams... the self-evidence of God... whose sweetness I felt in all its fullness... an active sweetness, filled with wonder, beyond all violence, capable of shattering the hardest stone, and harder still than stone, the human heart.
His overwhelming, total inbreaking was accompanied by the joy that is the exultation of the saved, the joy of the shipwrecked soul rescued in the nick of time. These sensations, which I struggle to translate into an adequate language of concepts and images, were simultaneous... Everything was dominated by the presence... of Him whose name I can never write without the fear of wounding His tenderness, Him before whom I have the blessed fortune of being a forgiven son who awakens to learn that everything is gift." Frossard would later comment:
God existed and was at the very same time present, revealed, veiled in that lavish outpouring of light which, without words or figures, offered itself entirely to understanding and love... Only one thing astonished me: the Eucharist. Not that it seemed incredible to me, but I was amazed that divine charity had devised this unheard-of means to communicate itself, and above all that to do so it had chosen bread, the food of the poor and the favorite of the young...
Frossard concludes his confession with these beautiful words: "Love, to speak of You, eternity itself would be too short."
Text and photographs: International Exhibition "The Eucharistic Miracles of the World", by Saint Carlo Acutis. Original panel at miracolieucaristici.org.