sign of blessing
sign of peace
token of grace
sign of Mary
My name is Sr. M. Zeli Villeti, I have been a Schoenstatt Sister of Mary for 40 years and I would like to share some experiences from my vacation with my relatives.
My family lives in Rio Brilhante, Mato Grosso do Sul, in the central area of Brazil, more than 1,000 km from Santa Maria/Rio Grande do Sul. I need several buses and a plane to visit them.
On Sunday mornings I leave very early to attend Holy Mass at 7:30 a.m. in the parish church Divino Espírito Santo, in Rio Brilhante, and to visit the Blessed Sacrament. One Sunday I walked through the street with my head bowed and praying the rosary. When I raised my eyes, I saw a rather young woman at the other side of the street looking at me intently. I smiled at her and she cried out loudly: “What a blessing, what a blessing!”
We live very close to the border of Paraguay; my sister often goes to the town of Pedro Juan Caballero and buys fabrics. During my holidays she invited me to go with her. For lunch we went to a big shopping mall. When we helped ourselves at the counter, a woman sat at the side with her husband. She saw me and very quickly came up to me and said: “Sister, please let me touch you”. Surely she needed graces and asked the Mother and Queen for them.
After lunch in the same department store we did our shopping. A young employee came up to us and said: “Sister, let me thank you. Today something very unpleasant happened in our work and I was very scared and felt very bad. When you passed me, I felt great peace, a relief. Now I am well again, peace has entered my heart. I said to my friend, ‘I can’t let her go without thanking you’.” I talked to her a little and gave her Father Kentenich’s novena pamphlet. She was very happy.
On the return trip to Santa Maria, an elderly lady sat in front of me in the bus with her six-year-old granddaughter. She told me when I got off: “My granddaughter said: Grandmother, have you seen Our Lady, she is going with us? She’s sitting behind us.”
These encounters made me think: how our sister’s dress works! We are not aware that we represent so strongly the presence of the Blessed Mother in the world. In all moments I asked the Blessed Mother to truly give HERSELF, give what each one of us needed during the encounter.