Reflections

Hello readers,

having recovered sufficiently from the WYD SYD pilgrimage, I'd like to share with you all a few reflections which have occurred to me since returning.

I'd like to pick up an idea that a bishop we were travelling with suggested in a homily. The Bishop was talking about the use of young people.

All people are used in this culture, but most especially young people. They are targetted by advertising, and groups with alterior motives, hoping to push all kinds of strange products and doctrines on them.

Let's look around ourselves, look at the mind-numbing, soul destroying products / programs / and ideologies pushed on young people, from the earliest age, which sow the seeds of misery, skepticism, depriving the world's youth of hope and joy (qualities inherent in the young, which our previous Pope so admired and encouraged). The way the young people are portrayed shows the state of affairs. The media shows young people as just these things, miserable, skeptical and anti-social.

However, in my experience young people ARE full of hope and joy. Young people, (I must stress that I write as a young person) are desperate for the truth, for understanding of the world. Young people desire to love and understand the emotions and feelings connected with love. They passionately desire to comit themselves to justice and peace and the building of a better world.
This was my experience of the youth on WYD, I feel I have grown personally with my experience of young people over the course of the World Youth Day.