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 A
providential suspension in our daily routine is a valid occasion to
relax physically and to nurture the spirit. It can be also an opportune
time to cultivate the inalienable demands of spirituality. It was Pope
Benedict XVI to remind it on the occasion of a recent Angelus Domini.
There are possibilities of cultivating in various parts of Italy this
desire, which sooner or later will catch us at a certain point of our
life. Seven days or just a week-end for a reflection, starting from the
Word par excellence : there are many opportunities to be grasped
straightaway to the end of going deep into the sense of our existence
and of the last things. There are experiences rich of hints for
meditation that can bear fruit in our daily life. We have faced some of
these experiences with Don Vittorio Peri, who is presently Episcopal
Vicar for the Culture of the Diocese of Assisi and national President of
the “Unione apostolica del clero” , after being for several years the
national ecclesiastical consultant of the Italian Sportive Centre, and
supplier of numerous proposals of this kind.
Is the vacation an empty space or a container to be filled in?
“I
would say that it is both of them. In fact, the word “vacation” (from
the Latin term vacuum) may mean “empty space”: suspension of
the working activity, a sweet doing nothing, but it may also
indicate “fullness” of attention paid to oneself, (the necessary
recuperation of psycho-physical energies, relaxing readings, visits to
cultural places), to nature and to others among whom, at the first place
for the believer, there is the encounter with and listening to the Lord.
Boccaccio had this in mind when he wrote, “I would consider right and
honest, in the honour of God, to spend the vacation in prayer more than
in reading novels”. In this sense, vacation is an otium, a free
time opposed to negotium (nec-otium), which is a time for things
of obligation.
The
vacations time, which anyhow not all men can enjoy, should first of all
become a fullness of relations, culture and spirituality.
Yesterday’s and today’s free-time. What do you say about this?
“Understood as free from”, the free-time is a rather recent reality. In
fact, in the olden times it was the privilege of a few. Most persons
lived to work if they wanted to live, so much so as the time not spent
in working could appear even wasted, as the cobbler of the novel by La
Fontaine wittingly says; “What a pity to have feast days every now and
then and to have a curate who keeps on filling his preaching with some
new saint”, to be celebrated of course, abstaining from work…. …
One
of the greatest aspirations of the workers movement of the ‘800 –eight
hours to work, eight to rest and eight to dream- began to become a
reality only in 1914, when Henry Ford established that, in his car
factory, the working time per day should be eight hours.
It
has even been said that, since work is not the end of life, but only a
means to live, the free time does not come after, but before the working
time. Of course, it is the matter of a paradox but, perhaps, it is not
entirely unfounded”.
Are there intelligent ways of living our free ime, especially in the
light of the Gospel?
“There is a delicious dialogue in the very much known Little Prince,
which could suggest an interesting reply to this question. “Good
day, the little Prince said. Good day, the shop-keeper answered. He was
a shop-keeper of prodigious pills which quenched the stimuli of thirst.
One pil per week was enough for a person not to feel the need of
drinking. Why do you sell these pills? the Little Prince asked. Because
it allows a remarkable economy of time, the shop-keeper answered.
Experts have calculated that we save 53 minutes per week by selling
these pills. What use is being done with these 53 minutes? The Little
Prince asked. Well, one does what one wants…Well, the Little Prince
said. If I had 53 minutes to use at will, I would go slowly, slowly
towards a fountain.…
See:
walking at slow steps towards a goal, perhaps observing nature
attentively, is certainly a good way of spending our free time. If,
then, this goal is a Fountain with capital “F”, we understand well the
metaphoric sense of this story by Saint-Exupèry. He is the true source.
The Samaritan woman understood this at the well of Jacob; the first
disciples understood it when Jesus said to them, “Come with me to a
solitary place and rest for a while”. Is there any better way to spend
our free-time? The invitation of Jesus is not less actual than it was
yesterday. Thanking God, those who welcome the invitation today are not
few, as I have been able to see recently”.
Do you refer to some specific experience?
Yes.
This very summer I have had the joy of meeting groups of youths who,
instead of wandering here and there just “to kill the time”, have
preferred to have meaningful communitarian experiences in search of the
sense of life and an authentic Christian spirituality. At the end of an
intense three-days time, one of them said: I have come not to be in debt
of oxygen, and now I take my breath again.
Would you, please, tell us some concrete detail of these moments in the
Source?
I
could speak of some twenty boys and girls recently come from
Caltanissetta in the lake of Monte Colombo, into the inland of Rimini,
to the end of deepening together, in a climate of listening to, dialogue
and prayer, the sense of the Bible as Word of God. The little group
works very well together after giving a theatre performance on the
figure of the Evangelist St. Mark, patron of one of the two parishes.
I was
impressed by the way they are “nailed” for hours every day around a
table to listen to, to read and meditate individually or in groups some
pages of the Bible, after which to share the fruit of their research.
Before that, they knew the Bible through hearsay; now their direct
contact with it fascinates them.
Will these meetings on spirituality continue?
Yes,
surely. It would be a true sin of omission to interrupt this positive
experience of evangelisation, especially in this decennium in which the
Italian Church asks us to assume a supplementary commitment to the
communication of the Gospel in our changing world.
Some
ten week-ends are foreseen, from November to May, on themes specifically
indicated for each meeting, (the Bible as Word of God, Christian hope,
Christ light of the nations, Liturgy, font and apex of faith, vocational
research, etc.), so that each one may choose the way aimed at.
Everybody can obviously participate in them, single persons or groups,
parish or other ecclesial reality groups. The programme will be
communicated through the Catholic printing.
Will these experiences be made to fructify in the daily life?
“No
seed is useless if it is sown in a fertile soil. The Word of God is
always efficacious, it generates always what it expresses. Differently
from our words, which are purely descriptive of what exists, the Word of
God is sacramental, because it creates what it expresses, it offers what
it transmits.
The
gift of God is surely to be welcomed and safeguarded, individually and,
above all, with the mediation of the Christian community. This is why we
prefer groups to single participants, especially if the groups are
accompanied by their respective priests. The presence of the parish
priest, or of any other educator, is usually a guarantee of continuity
for the formation value of the group –education takes place above all in
the group and with the mediation of the group, Vittorino Andreoli has
written”.
Would you, please, give us some information about the residence of these
groups of spirituality?
“Their meetings will be held in Lake Monte Colombo, a few kilometres
from Rimini. It is “a little town outside the world”, as a writing at
the door of the “Associazione Dare” says: it is an associative reality
made up of some hundreds of youths and adults who try to live their life
of faith also through communitarian experiences, besides living it in
their family and profession.
Among
many activities (social assistance, homes for the aged, reflection and
natural medicine centres, agro-tourism, dance and singing academy, hotel
and restoration activities), the Association promotes musical
spectacles, rich in spirituality, in the local Theatre Leo Amici, as
well as in other Italian cities. From the beginning of August, for
instance, almost 30 young artists, among whom some professionals, go on
performing successfully in the “Teatro Comunale Metastasio”, the
musical Chiara di Dio, an artistic scenic jewel of Franciscan
spirituality”.
We have started speaking of vacations. Do we want to conclude with some
reflections on the sense of “rest” in the Bible?
“The
thought goes to the Book of Genesis, to the deep meaning of the “rest”
with which God concludes, curiously I would say, his creation. He brings
it to its end…by taking a rest. He creates man on the sixth day, on the
seventh day He enters the communion with him and the whole cosmos.
Communion with the Creator is the landing of history, the harbour to
which it is directed. History finds its fulfilment on the seventh day,
in the communion with God. It is a reciprocal contemplation between God
and man that gives sense to our chronological time and that will be the
perfection of the eschatological one.
The
invitation of Jesus addressed to his disciples at the end of their first
mission –Come and rest with me”- is a clear invitation to anticipate
today the beatitude of the day without sunset. I think that this
orientation is not yet sufficiently “evangelised” in the
ecclesial life; I think that there is an unbalance on the temporal
horizon, on the side of the things to be done. The last but one things
put the last ones in the shadow, among the Christians themselves. It is
urgent to recuperate the Biblical vision of history: to live in the
last-but-one things in such a way as to give sense to the last ones”.
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