I shift my weight from one knee to the other. What decade are we on? Fourth or fifth? Didn’t we already say 10 Hail Marys? I think we are on the 11th. I must have lost count or sped through one. Kneeling in a large Gothic church, I pray the rosary with 200 or more other souls attending a retreat on the power of forgiveness. As others shift and adjust their positions, I know I’m not the only one who has not knelt to pray in a while. I feel envious of the Mother Teresa sisters praying in the pew before me. They barely move as their beads gently pass through their fingers. I adjust my knees again, remembering my mother’s advice when something is difficult or uncomfortable: ‘Offer it up.’ I’m ashamed of my awkwardness kneeling while praying, especially in the presence of the retreat leader, Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza.
Charlotte and Ella, this is a letter I will write while the experience of attending Immaculée’s retreat still pierces my mind and heart. However, I will save it for you until you are older because of the details of her tragic yet heroic story. With unparalleled grace, Immaculée recounts the terrorising 91 days she hid in a 3x4 bathroom with seven other women as her family, friends and neighbours were massacred. Author of several books, including Left to Tell, and The Rosary: The Prayer that Saved My Life, Immaculée Ilibagiza tirelessly travels the world to educate people on the Rwandan genocide, the importance of prayer, and the power of forgiveness.
PRAYER AND SURVIVAL
Although I was only able to speak with her briefly during the retreat, Immaculée’s love for her Catholic faith and her story of forgiveness is so inspiring that I walked out of the retreat’s bookstore with my arms full of her books. Born in a small town in a western province of Rwanda, Immaculée was raised in an idyllic family, praying nightly with her devout parents and three brothers. Her faith was also nurtured by the local devotion to Our Lady of Kibeho, the first African Vatican-approved apparition to three schoolgirls in the Rwandan village of Kibeho between 1981 and 1989. The messages from Our Lady of Kibeho regarding conversion, repentance and prayer inspired Immaculée to pray the rosary daily.
The strength of Immaculée’s faith would become the cornerstone of her survival during the genocide to the present day. Now a mother of two grown children and a US citizen, Immaculée’s recollection of her homeland’s sudden descent into a vicious genocide sends a chill up the spine. But it’s Immaculée’s ability to relay her story of hope amid despair that causes the sophisticated urban retreatants to cling to her every word.
AN UNTHINKABLE NIGHTMARE
Her nightmare began when, like many university students, she visited her family for Easter break. On the morning of 6 April 1994, Immaculée woke to the news that the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down, unleashing long-growing tension between Rwanda’s two main tribes, the majority Hutus and minority Tutsis. The event allowed Hutu extremists the opportunity to wage war on their Tutsi neighbours. For her safety, Immaculée’s father told her to run to a trusted Hutu Protestant pastor, who hid her in his tiny bathroom, where she would pray constantly until the genocide ended. The UN estimates more than one million Tutsis lost their lives in those three months. Of her immediate family, only Immaculée and one of her brothers survived.
While her country’s government fell and she hid from the waging war, Immaculée recalls clinging to her father’s last gift to her, a rosary with red and white beads. Immaculée credits her continuous journeys through the mysteries of the rosary as not only saving her life but also rescuing her soul. Each day, she prayed 27 rosaries. In The Rosary: The Prayer that Saved my Life, Immaculée writes, ‘I never understood what spiritual wealth was until everything I’d ever owned and everyone I’d ever loved had been ripped from me overnight’.
Immaculée discovered these spiritual riches while learning to forgive the unthinkable. ‘Forgiveness and love are an ongoing process, and for me, the process began while meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries on the floor of a filthy bathroom while being hunted by killers,’ she remembers. In the Fifth Sorrowful Mystery (the Crucifixion), Immaculée heard Jesus’ call to forgiveness, ‘Father, forgive them. They know not what they do’. However, she dismissed the thought. How could Jesus expect her to forgive? For months while in hiding, she had heard the sounds of murder and death through the pastor’s wall. While praying the ‘Our Father’, she battled with Jesus’ words, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’. Immaculée could not bring herself to forgive these murderers. While praying, she began to skip over ‘as we forgive those who trespass against us’ each time she prayed the Lord’s Prayer.
However, as Immaculée kept returning to the Fifth Mystery, she slowly changed. ‘When I heard Jesus say, “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do,” I really did feel something change in me.’ Immaculée continues, ‘That blocked me from giving my heart completely over to God’. Jesus’ words healed her anger and hatred for those who were responsible for the murder of her family members. As she felt this transformation within, she could recite the entire ‘Our Father’. Through this, she recalls, ‘God’s love was able to pour in.’
GOSPEL EVANGELISATION
As Immaculée closed the retreat on forgiveness, I realised I was the soul in need of evangelisation. I am a first-world Catholic who needs the invigoration of the Gospel. If Immaculée can do the prayer work to forgive the atrocities inflicted on her innocent loved ones and herself, I can begin asking God to heal the unforgiveness in my heart, too.
