Sunday, 6:30PM. They begin to arrive…Today, Farah has also joined us [invented name, ed.], a Middle Eastern girl who learned about our meetings from a friend. She doesn’t yet speak Italian, but her eyes are wide and every so often asks the friend who invited her what we are talking about. After the meeting, she helps to set the table and is struck by the hospitality, attention to detail and familiarity that she sees active in all of the others. At dinner, the dialogue continues. It is surprising to see many young people, between 20 and 30 years old, listen to each other in silence and discuss such great questions. Even Farah contributes to the conversation speaking about herself to 40 complete strangers and then confides to the friend who invited her: “You can see that you all are friends; I have never seen something like this. You are a family, a home.” Having just arrived, she had the impression that these people had known each other forever. In reality, what she was seeing was fairly new for everyone. A blossom still very fragile and new.
When I arrived at the parish of Zion in Trieste a year and a half ago, I asked the four or five college students who helped with the catechism for the kids if they would be interested in gathering once a week, on Sunday evening, inviting their friends as well. We began with about ten people and today, to the amazement and trepidation of everyone, we are more than quadrupled. Every time, there are new faces, invited through word-of-mouth. Some of them are very far from the faith or even self-declared atheists.
Now, I feel a kind of trepidation to use the word “friend”… I realized that it has to do with something sacred.”
In time, the structure of our meeting became more defined: an appetizer and a bit of soccer or ping pong; a meeting, cooking together and eating, and then Night Prayer in the chapel. After a few Sundays, I also began to propose a half-hour of adoration and Vespers before our first appointment. During the meeting, I ask the young people to share the most significant thing that they have lived that week and together we seek the connection between those facts and the deepest desires of the heart. In the background are the provocations of Gospel that we often read at the beginning of the meeting. The question we are working on this year has to do with the relationship between love, truth and sacrifice. “How can one love?”, “What does sacrifice have to do with love?”. Many of them began to share their questions and their wonder for what we have begun to live together. “We have known each other for just a few months, and yet I feel that there is a close relationship among us, one that is more true that what I have with the friends I’ve had forever,” is a shared sentiment between Marta, Matteo and Giulia. “I am discovering that friendship is a gift, a home, a space that builds us up,” says Alice. “Now, I feel a kind of trepidation to use the word “friend”; meeting after meeting, I realized that it has to do with something sacred,” concludes Virgilio.
One Monday, after the Meeting, I received a message from Marian, the friend who invited Farah for the first time. “You know, Father, Farah yesterday asked me tons of questions. She saw how we pray the Psalms in two chords. She also wanted to pray and made the Sign of the Cross! At the end, she told me: ‘You can see that God is in your midst. I…believe in the Church’”. I was moved, not least because Farah is Muslim. Often I hear: “I believe in God but not in the Church.” I do not know how conscious this observation of hers is; perhaps she doesn’t either. And yet, she intuited the profound reason for which Fr. Federico and I are in Trieste: to live, among ourselves and with all of those whom God places before us, that communion that Christ began to live with the apostle. The Church. And Farah had said exactly this: “I believe in the Church!”.
