Sitting quietly in front of my computer, many thoughts and ideas are crowding around my head, waiting to be written about. And among this tangle, three names: Javier, Ainara, and Rosalía.

I’ve had a very cinephile weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the movies on Saturday and Sunday in a row. Or at least I don’t remember. In fact, I’m not much of a big-screen person, but it just happened that way. On Saturday, I saw Los Domingos, and yesterday,  Solo Javier, which I saw for the second time, but this time in the company of someone very special: my family. I wanted them to see it, and with a lot of effort, I managed to do so.

The film Los Domingos stars a 17-year-old girl named Ainara, and Solo Javier, as his name suggests, stars Javier, a boy whose journey also begins when he was very young.

Both of them, moved by that immense thing called vocation, consider the possibility of giving their lives to God by consecrating themselves to religious life.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with Ainara and Javier. It’s impossible not to think of them and that something that’s there, present and intuited, but difficult to name. And I think it’s also impossible to leave the theater feeling indifferent.

Each in their own way. Solo Javier is a documentary based on a true story: Javier’s. A person who lived a few years ago and whose memory lives on in the minds of many. Now, in mine too.

A person who had everything in the world: success, triumphs, money, fame… and yet felt a void inside him that none of it could fill. His life was built on having and doing, and believing himself to be the most free, he realized he was the most enslaved.

In Los Domingos, Ainara, the protagonist, portrays the story of young people who, in the 21st century, decide to enter a convent in the face of the world’s incomprehension. A story told objectively and authentically, without judgment or ideology. It’s told from the different perspectives of each of the characters in the story.

It’s hard to find a story told like that these days. With such simplicity, sensitivity, and honesty. And the director, Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, who I don’t believe is a believer, has achieved this by far.

What could lead a 17-year-old girl with a normal life to want to leave everything behind and enter a cloistered convent?

The same thing that led Javier to change his life: an unfilled emptiness. A longing for fulfillment. A thirst. An inner calling. A love that’s hard to put into words.

Ainara tries on several occasions, with great delicacy, to explain this to her family, and Javier, in his letters, speaks of that restless heart of Saint Augustine, which cannot be filled with material things and seeks something more. As C.S. Lewis says, “Earthly things cannot fill a heart that was made for heaven.”

A heart that, if you listen, speaks to you. A heart that needs your silence and your attention.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers for these amazing stories, but I can’t help but encourage you to go see them and judge for yourself. And I’ll never tire of thanking the directors, screenwriters, producers, distributors, etc. of these films for making them.

And in the middle of both, my Instagram feed tells me about some statements by the singer Rosalía that have appeared on several profiles, the kind the algorithm feeds my feed with. In a conversation with someone, she ventures to talk about the emptiness in her heart and how she’s tried to fill it with things that haven’t filled it and never will, because it’s a “void that only He can fill,” she says, referring to God. She also talks about nuns and her admiration for them.

Once again, emptiness. Once again, that something we struggle to put into words, but when we stop and look at ourselves with attention and silence, it reveals itself. Once again, a heart that yearns, seeks, and speaks.

The rush, the noise, the productivity, the efficiency and effectiveness, the accumulation… they don’t help us hear it in the least, but it’s there. Our way of living, often like zombies, without questioning the purpose of things, covers it up and buries it, but it doesn’t disappear.

We spend our lives consuming. We spend our days connected to a cell phone, which makes us more disconnected from reality, from others, and from ourselves than ever before. We think we’re free. We think we’re self-sufficient. We believe so many things that we don’t even stop to think… and this is perhaps where the crux of the matter lies: in keeping us so busy that we’re on autopilot and think little. In making us vulnerable to what they want us to believe. In turning us into puppets with no time to reflect, where having our own critical thinking is a heroic feat of only a few.

And maybe, just maybe, someone is interested in us living like this, as if under anesthesia…

But the life and true testimony of Javier, the character of Ainara, and Rosalía’s search, among so many other examples, remind us that our heart is well-made and that we only see clearly when we use its eyes. That it speaks to us if we listen, and that the emptiness we experience can only be filled by God when we let Him. When we freely, free from ties, free from prejudices, free from disordered affections, free from ideologies, free from the opinions of the world… we open the door for Him to enter. When, making use of that enormous and magnificent gift called freedom, we say yes.