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Discovering Mary Urban Camenzind, who has been a leader in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Switzerland for over 30 years, shares how he has come to realise the gift Mary in his spiritual life.
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"Having a devotion to Mary was just part of their everyday life" It was while I was there that a family I was staying with invited me to go to a prayer meeting. I thought they said sports meeting, so I was very shocked when I arrived and I saw all these nuns and priests jumping and clapping and praising God. I had never seen such things and thought they must be some kind of sect. I went back to Ohio where I was staying but I couldn't get what I had seen out of my mind and I couldn't sleep for 3 nights and I kept seeing the people from this prayer meeting. Eventually I said to the Lord, "if this is really you who calls me there, I will go, but please let me sleep now." It was my 25th birthday and my friends wanted to celebrate it with me but I told them I had to go back to New York and to that prayer meeting. I remember there was a young student preaching there. I didn't know what he was preaching about but I heard him with the ears of my heart and I felt the Lord say to me "I have always been waiting for you. I love you so much and I want you to give me your life." I burst into tears. As a child I had been told boys should never cry and so I never did. But that evening I wept bitterly as I realised how much God loved me and how I had rejected him and yet he had always been faithful to me. People around me wondered what was wrong, as I lay on the floor for an hour. When I returned to Switzerland I told my parish priest about it, but he warned me not to pray too much or get involved as he worried that it was a sect. But I started going back to Mass and reading the scriptures. I also started going to Pentecostal churches where they had the same kind of meetings that I experienced in the United States. They tried to persuade me to leave the Catholic Church which I probably would have done, if I had not been reading the life of St Francis at the time. St Francis showed me that the way for me was in the Catholic Church. "The priest told me that I really needed to develop a relationship with Mary"
I suppose I was worried that if one focuses too much on Mary, Jesus might be forgotten, so I prayed to Jesus and asked him to reveal to me the kind of relationship he wanted me to have with his mother. Afterwards I started to recognise biblical texts about Mary and I became more conscious of her role. At the time I was studying Catholic theology at Lucerne and I started reading Church teaching about Mary. I was always checking with the bible to see if it was true. This was a step forward but I suppose I was still looking at things from an evangelical point of view rather than a Catholic one. I started to notice though in reading the lives of the saints that all of them had a deep relationship with Mary. This spurred me on to pray more and I realised there was something missing in my spiritual life. Then in the 1990s I was invited to go to Medjugorje with my wife. There I was touched in a deeper way. Until then I had no affective relationship with Mary and in my personal life never prayed to her. After this visit, however, I started to pray the rosary. This was a journey for me. I became aware that the rosary is a mystical form of prayer as well as an intercessory one. It was a contemplation of the face of Jesus with Mary, like the Holy Father has said. This was a new experience for me. Before that I had thought that the rosary was just for old women or traditional Catholics, but now I realised there was something special in it. I started to love Mary more and she became a real spiritual mother to me. This was underlined for me some time later when I received a prophetic word from an Indian priest. He told me that he had seen a big light behind me and heard Jesus say "I am giving you my mother to protect you and you will experience this in the next few days." A few days later I was travelling with a companion by car along the
lake of Lucerne. It was the heart of winter and the conditions were
very icy and windy. Suddenly a Mercedes car skidded round the corner
out of control coming straight for us. I thought we were going to
die. My companion began to pray out loud a very old Swiss prayer of
protection to Our Lady. Miraculously the car rebounded on the lakeside
barrier and missed us by inches. For me this was a sign from the Lord that I should really accept Mary's motherhood and protection. I realised that whether people are aware of it or not, Mary is always with them, like Jesus, protecting them and helping them if they are open. Ever since then whenever I am travelling I pray a prayer of protection to her. In fact just recently I was in Rome and was about to be robbed by four gypsy women when one of them noticed that I had the rosary wrapped in my hand and was praying. "He has the madonna, leave him". One of them already had her hands on my bag, but they suddenly just melted away. This underlined for me once again the constant presence of the Lord
in our lives and our call to live totally for him. Praying the rosary
is a way we can keep ourselves in that presence. In the same way that
St Paul says, "/ no longer live I, but Christ lives in me",
so the same can be said of Mary. In the heart of Mary there is nothing
else but the glory of God. She is so transparent and so full of Jesus,
that she almost becomes Jesus. There is no more of her, just Him.
From all eternity God has chosen her for this as a sign of the supreme
working together of God and his creation. Before I suppose I God has also recently used Mary to heal me. At the end of December 2000 I began to have blackouts and I found out I had a heart problem and needed a by-pass operation. One was scheduled for mid April 2001. In the meantime I received a phone call from a young Protestant lawyer who had experienced a healing through the intercession of a marian mystic in Calabria called Fratel Cosimo. When he heard I wasn't well he kept trying to persuade me to go and be prayed with by Fratel Cosimo myself. I wasn't that keen, because I had already had prayer, and was quite resigned to having an operation. But eventually I relented and agreed to go. It was a special experience and I decided in faith afterwards to stop taking my medication. A couple of months later I went to my cardiologist for a check up. The experts were astounded at the change in my condition. I no longer needed an operation and I was practically totally healed. One of our problems in our secular society is our lack of expectant
faith that the Lord will work in our lives, and so we limit his action.
As my relationship with Mary has grown so has my expectant faith in
Jesus, that he will act through me as well, and I must step out more
in boldness to do his will. At the moment I feel more and more called
to intercession for my land. Switzerland, is in great need, as the
society is crumbling due to many social problems and it is difficult
to know what to do. Fratel Cosmo advised me to find a holy place in
Switzerland where faith is still strong and simply pray and intercede
for my country and ask God to tell us what to do. This I am doing
and I now have to simply trust God.
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We
didn't pray the rosary in my house when I was growing up or have a
big devotion to Mary. I remember visiting my grandparents, however,
and when the church bell rang for the angelus, you could see all over
the hills, the farmers in the fields stop and turn their eyes to the
Church and pray. Having a devotion to Mary was just part of their
everyday life.
In
1975 I was sent an invitation by my friends in the United States to
attend the big international meeting in Rome. This confirmed for me
that I should stay in the Catholic Church. The gathering helped me
a lot and when I got back I decided to start a prayer group. This
was an ecumenical group in the beginning. It was then that I found
there were other groups in Switzerland near Lucerne. We decided to
come together and join them and so we gave up our own meetings. These
meetings were very Catholic, and centred on adoration of the Blessed
Sacrament. It was there that the priest told me that I really needed
to develop a relationship with Mary.
