“Look at me”, the book that invites us to be attentive to discover God in everyday life

With real stories and short stories that combine the everyday with the extraordinary, the book Look at me, testimony of life and encountersby Chilean author Magdalena Ross, proposes sharpening our gaze to decipher the presence of God in the simplest and smallest.

“Be attentive. Be attentive to all those details of life that seem everyday to us, that we let them pass by, because in that contemplation of everything, in the smile of a child, a conversation with a friend, in something that you did not expect and that gives you immense joy, you can identify those invisible signs and see in that hidden the divine message, because God manifests himself in the simple, in the simple,” Magdalena summarizes to ACI Prensa about the book proposal.

It is a journey of almost 400 pages, where the author goes through different moments in her life in which God was present, sometimes in a more subtle way and other times, in an extraordinary way, with unexplained events, even in circumstances where her life was in danger.

In this way, and based on her own experience, the author invites the reader to a change of perspective in order to recognize the living presence of God.

What are they going to think?

Her past as an interior decorator, an activity that she describes as “very expressive, very full of life, with many friendships,” made it difficult for Magdalena to make the decision to share these experiences. He was worried about “what they are going to say and what they are going to think” about this new facet that highlights his interiority and his link with the transcendent.

However, that “inspiration that comes from within, that is born and you cannot stop it,” made him decide to write “Look at Me.”

The title of the book, he says, points to a specific experience “where I felt that the Lord was saying to me: ‘Look at me.'” However, his work does not focus on a particular experience that marked his life, but rather on “realizing how these experiences that I have throughout life enrich my life and I notice a real presence, a living presence in all the smallest details.”

Magdalena belongs to the Order of Preachers. During the pandemic he met a Dominican group in Madrid, and a priest who would mark his spiritual path. “I met the priest Jesús Villarroel Fernández, he spoke about the theology of gratuitousness. I joined this group a lot, and when I went to visit him, he offered me if I wanted to make temporal promises as a lay Dominican, because he considered that I had a deep spirituality, and I accepted.”

“Being a lay Dominican does not mean that you are consecrated, but you do consecrate yourself to the Order of Preachers,” she explains. It was the priest who suggested he sign his book with the initials OP.}

The testimonies touch the heart

Quickly, his testimony of life and encounters echoed in other hearts: “I have had every reception… people call me, tell me their stories. Truly, as a priest who was very inspiring to me said, when one transmits a testimony, what you touch is the heart of the other, and it is from heart to heart, it is no longer from person to person nor is it advice, it is from the heart,” he admits.

“The Holy Spirit also comes in to carve there, which was a bit what Pope Francis said,” she recalls, citing one of the figures who inspired her.

He discovered God in the small, like Pope Francis

“I loved Pope Francis, he talked about that: telling and relating stories with an evangelical flavor, but those of now. Because there are the stories of the Gospel, of the Samaritan woman, of the blind man, but it is also necessary to tell those of now, we must transmit them, because that is the encounter, that is the culture of the encounter. That touched me a lot,” he admits.

Such was the connection that Magdalena felt with Pope Francis, and the mark of the Argentine Pontiff on her work, that the book has been incorporated into the collaborative collection Francisco, legacy and messagefrom the Library of Congress of the Argentine Nation.

“For me, Pope Francis was a very, very inspiring figure, because he led me to look in a different way. He taught us to see life with mercy, to discover God in the small things, in the fragile, in the margins,” he says.

“Having it there, being present at the exhibition, is like having given it to him, but posthumously. It is like having given him my book, which was also a tribute to him, because it is a conversation, it is what he called us to, to this culture of encounter. An invitation to look with the eyes of the heart and let that look transform our way of living and loving, and our faith,” he summarizes.

In addition to being a writer and Dominican laywoman, Magdalena studied to be a postulator for the causes of saints at the University of San Dámaso in Madrid. “I arrived through ACI Prensa… it was there that they announced a course for postulators of the causes of saints. I took it and understood the seriousness of the path, the depth with which the Church takes these souls as models or as bridges to eternal life.”

Awaken the desire to look at life with new eyes

Presented on July 22 in Chile, the book is already in bookstores and in digital format. “It has been very successful. I think it has happened exactly what I hoped would happen. It is a testimony of a spiritual heart, more than the content of the book, where people have managed to find a mirror of their own lives and recognize in their own lives the presence and providence of God.”

“I sincerely hoped that it would reach all people, even non-believers. Especially non-believers, because in some way when reading it I hope that each one feels that desire to look at their life with new eyes. And that has nothing to do with a doctrine, but with a living experience of the human being,” he concludes.

Look at me, testimony of life and encounters can be purchased at Editorial El Libero, Antarctic Bookstore, Editorial ZigZag, SearchFree, MercadoLibrein digital format in Amazonin the Chilean Book Chamber, Pound y Libra Independent.