Monserrat Bernal

My mom sent me to a pilgrimage in Bosnia. She said ‘Hey, you’re going to Croatia in Bosnia.” I said, ‘Hell yeah I’ll go I don’t know why, but hell yeah.’ I assumed it would be religious because everything she does is religious. But I didn’t ask and when I got there, it turned out to be a conversion trip.

One day, I told a priest, ‘Hey, just by the way my mom sent me here. I didn’t even know this was conversion trip. Just so you know I don’t believe in any of this stuff.’ He told me ‘If you want answers, if you say you’re agnostic and you want someone to prove it to you, you have to be open and the only one that can prove it to you is God, the one person you don’t believe, so you need to be open.’

So I said ‘OK what does that mean?’ He replied with ‘Even if you don’t want Christianity, even if you just want answers you have to be open, you have to pray and have a regular dialogue with God as you would have with anyone else.’ So I started to pray and asking OK if this is true and if this is really good, I want it, I want to see it, I wanna believe it, but show me, do your part, I don’t know what else to do to believe.

One day we went to a shrine, a little room where you pray, so there was like 15, 20 people there. It was packed. So I started to pray and I thought that only like three minutes had passed by, but when I opened my eyes, I was alone in the room, there was no one, and I didn’t hear anyone leave. It was an intense experience. I left the room and I went to go find my group for dinner. They were about to start praying the rosary before dinner. I sat, in the middle of the prayer, I looked up and saw this statue the Virgin Mary. In Catholicism every country has their own version and it changes according to the appearance of the people in that country. My name Monserrat is a Catholic version from Spain, and she’s black actually, which is so uncommon.

When I looked up I saw a statue of the virgin of Monserrat. It just shocked me, I had never seen this statue. I’ve seen pictures on the internet. I don’t even have one, and that’s my name, that’s why I was named that. When I saw that statue, it just hit me. And I had been asking for answers, It was too much of a coincidence. Why would a statue of Spain be in Croatia? When we finished the rosary, I told one of the ladies, ‘that’s me, and I pointed to the statue.’ This lady didn’t even know me, she didn’t know I didn’t believe. She told me ‘Those are the answers you were asking for.’

Because of this experience, I am more open. If people ask me I will say that I am Catholic. I don’t go to church, I don’t pray every day, but I do say it is my religion.