THERE IS MORE!
My name is Jacopo Maria Favotto, I am 28 years old and I come from a small country called Trevignano (TV). I am the third of four children. Since I was small my family teach me to see the parochial community as a second family. As you can imagine from early the person of Jesus was in the background of every activity, he was often presented and many occasions were designed to get to know him better, but in me he remained in the background. He was there, but nothing more.
Scouting was one of the fundamental centers of my adolescence, this is where my passions for life in nature, for music, for hiking in the mountains were born.
Community life was very exciting to me, in particular my relationship with my parish priest became more and more important. I saw in him a man deeply in love with what he lived, a man capable of looking with love and loving.
“What about becoming a priest?” The question had been in me for some time, sometimes teased out by others. At some point I felt the time was ripe: I wanted to become a priest! The most natural choice was to think about the Diocesan Seminary in Treviso.
So it was that at the end of high school I entered, in 2014, the Seminary community. I was very convinced of my choice, deluding myself that I understood everything about reality and myself. Those years were an “Easter” passage for me, from a Jacopo who believes he is strong, to the truth that I am weak, from a Jacopo who believes he is the best, to the truth that I am one like many. During those years, I frantically tried to give answers to the many doubts that had slowly emerged and that could not find the right place to clarify themselves.
In 2020, the Seminary path came to an end, I returned home, and in the normalcy of commuting life I let many things settle, I had many to understand and embrace. I had a somewhat battered life on my hands, with half-grown desires and no particular prospects. But lo and behold, that Lord whom I had learned to be my center and no longer background, began to offer many blessings, in relationships, in my psychology studies, in my community, at the very time when I did not expect it. I had found my family again, many friends, I was doing well! Many doubts I had melted like snow in the sun. We could say a life that regained its balance, what could be missing?
“When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.” (Luke 5:11) I found myself like these disciples; so many years of toil to fill the boat with fish and then all of a sudden something changes, the boat fills up, but I already don’t care anymore. There is a more!
In daily life and prayer I clearly felt that the relationship with Jesus by its very nature demanded something more, to go beyond the ordinary of my good life. There is a more!
Already in my seminary years I had gotten a taste of Ignatian spirituality. The image of the Society of Jesus that I found in me was that of a life radically spent for Jesus and for my brothers and sisters; the wisdom and deep humanity that flowed from the oft-experienced Exercises made me sense a place that could be somehow close to that “more” that I desired for my life.
In the spiritual accompaniment I began to carry these thoughts. At first I was afraid of them, a part of me recoiling at the possibility of new disappointment. But it is true that there was Someone Else in the story, and at some point I let it be. So around the summer of 2022 I met my first Jesuits, passing through Bologna, Padua and Albania. In the back of my heart the feeling was becoming clear in me that Jesus had accompanied this whole life of mine, for better or for worse. In everything He had been present and was leading me to an unpredictable, unexpected place, beyond what I could initially imagine. There is a more!