Christmas
1982-2002
Twenty Years having Lunch Together
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Christmas |
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�When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your kinsmen or rich neighbours, lest they also invite you in return, and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the aimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repai you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just�.
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Where does the feast take place Everywhere, above all where there is sorrow. In the churches, in the houses but also in the institutions for the elderly, for children, for handicapped people, in the prisons, at the hospitals, and also in the streets. Because, the sense of Christmas is to bring the feast also to the darkest and coldest corners as well as to the most dispersed and forgotten places . The feast arrives everywhere: we can, actually, we want to bring the feast in the numerous sad and sorrowful places of the world: that is why the community wants to celebrate Christmas also in the streets, in the prisons, in the institutions, where a lot of people live alone: children, the elderly, sick persons in the hospitals or in the leper hospitals, where they can forget the burden of disease and loneliness, for one day at least. This is the experience of many dinners in the street with homeless people at Christmas' night, in the cold cities of the Northern world, from Moscow to Barcelona, where, among lights and sign-boards, lots of poor stay alone, or in the poor cities in the Southern world. Even there, food, a simple gift, a small crib, a small Christmas' Tree, music and, above all, friendship, joy and the attention to everyone are the "ingredients" of a beautiful feast, as it is a feast full of love for suffering people. Christmas is somehow a miracle: the miracle of the smiling faces of many exhausted people, the miracle of being helpful to many people who need nothing but who have lost the deep meaning of the celebration. It is also the miracle of resources which seem inexistent but which instead can be found, involving all those that are willing to do something for others, even a small thing, at least once a year . It's a miracle for which it's worth while knocking on every door to collect all that is necessary for the Christmas party. Asking everybody for help - friends, colleagues, shop owners, people in the street - enables the Community to find all the goods to set this great table of friendship every year. But the miracle is also the fact that members of all religions can find their place at this feast, helping and being helped at the same time, all their hearts believing in the world salvation through faith, peace and harmony among human beings. |
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| by Francesca Zuccari | |||
