“Rabbuní”: the strength of faith during a pilgrimage in the middle of the war in the Holy Land

The new documentary Rabbunithat will be released this year, collects the strength of the faith that a group gathered in a Prayer and Pilgrimage Workshop in the Holy Land when the war between Israel and Hamas broke out.

The documentary, explains a statement shared by the Magdala Center – with the headquarters in the city of Santa María Magdalena, in Galilea – presents the workshops that taught in the Holy Land Marian Reynoso and Fr. Juan María Solana, founder and director of Magdala.

“What began as a project to document these workshops in the Holy Land became a prayer experience in the middle of the war, an unexpected conversion and a reminder that faith can flourish in any circumstance,” says the statement.

It was October 2023, and the workshops were underway. It was then, on October 7, that Hamas unleashed a terrorist attack against Israel, detonating the war. That day, Marian Reynoso recalls in the documentary, “while we headed to Mount Carmelo, none of us knew what was about to happen to so a few kilometers from where we were.”

Before the “uncertainty and tension,” says Magdala, both the production of the documentary and the prayer workshop decided to continue their work.

In the documentary it is registered: “We choose to stay and continue to pray, understanding that we should give ourselves in the hands of God with full confidence.”

In this way, surpassing the fears for the war that was unleashed, pilgrims and producers of the documentary travel throughout the recording various places of Holy Land, such as the mount of the bliss, the basilica of the announcement and Capernaum, as well as the own land of María Magdalena.

A “spiritual doctorate”

Interviewed by ACI Press, Marian Reynoso remembers the experience of the workshop in the middle of the war as a “spiritual doctorate.”

“My relationship with God before this production was a very close relationship, completely abandoned in his will,” he recalls. And this closeness was strengthened by “this opportunity to live a crisis of such magnitude being the group’s leader, being the one who carried this prayer workshop.”

On that occasion, he indicates, it was seen in a “moment of proof where you think that the same and do not leave that, that and there is no opportunity to survive it, because there were some moments of absolute uncertainty.”

The circumstances, he adds, “made me understand that by the hand of God everything can be, that prayer does miracles, that the fact of knowing us of course sustained by a much greater and powerful force that is fair of the one who knows everything” .

“It was like the spiritual doctorate,” he says, because “I tried that abandoned in God hope is still an opportunity of the heart, where we all know that in the end it will always be fine if we are in the arms of who loves us most and of the hand of the Virgin, by the hand of the Rosary. ”

“We do not stop praying, we do not stop contemplating, we do not stop living in the present, where God is always a reality. He and his love are absolutely available to our hearts when we get into prayer, ”he recalls.

Reynoso also says that “God Our Lord always loads us in moments of difficulty, that it is enough to look at Him, do not distract us.”

“As Jesus rescued Peter when he doubted, in the waters, we understood that we had to look at him straight in order not to feel that we were drowning,” he says.

A surprising conversion

Within the framework of the completion of the documentary, there was an unexpected turn: Ramiro Martínez, the producer and cameraman of Rabbunihe had a surprising approach to faith.

“From my camera, I was no longer just a spectator, but a participant,” he says in the documentary. “I had never lived something like that. I was accompanied by all that energy contained, of all those prayers. This was my own protection dome that, to date, I still carry with me, ”Martínez shares.