Some time ago, I spent a weekend in Xalapa with Stefano and some young workers, who by now are not so young. The house where we stayed belongs to one of them, Santiago. Arriving to Xalapa on Friday evening, we began to try to light a fire in the oven to make pizza, but the wood was wet. Knowing that our neighbors were also priests, I went to knock at their door to see if we could collect a bit of dry wood for the fire. An old, Irish priest opened the door. I informed him that I was also a priest and he invited me to sit down to chat a bit. I told him that we were in Xalapa for the weekend. “Ah, what kind of apostolate is it?” he asked. “Not really one at all. We are just a group of friends who are spending the weekend together.” He looked at me with a perplexed air, as if he did not understand.
And yet, this is exactly what I meant: six months ago, speaking with Stefano, there emerged a common desire to have a group of friends in this great city of 20 million inhabitants, and a place that did not have an ulterior missionary “initiative”: catechism, youth group, university student group, visiting the sick, etc. All extremely important things, don’t get me wrong, but which cause us, in the end, to risk always just being a “Father,” which is also due to widespread clericalism that is common in the country. It was a desire for a place where we could share with others the life that we live in our house, where we could simply be Tommaso and Stefano. And so, once a month, we began to get together for dinner with some young people, some of the community of Communion and Liberation and others whom we met in the parish. At times, we met at our house, and others times in one of theirs. We made it such that the dinners were free, without an agreed upon “theme” to discuss, but just attending to whatever came up: questions on the faith, the Church, vocation, work, political elections.
In the same way, this little group does not want to serve some ulterior purpose; it just wants to be
Then, a few months ago, we decided to organize a weekend trip to Xalapa. Hosted in the house of Santiago, we prayed together, cooked, visited the city, descended the rapids of Jalcomulco, dedicated an evening to a dialogue on the theme of work. Three days, we could say, of ordinary Christian life.
Which brings me back to the question of the old Irish priest, which implicitly contained another: “What was the point of the three days spent at Xalapa?”. I can respond with the playful provocation with which Giacomo Biffi began the spiritual exercises preached to John Paul II: “What is the point of the spiritual exercises? One could possibly respond, in a provocative way but with some truth, that they have no point. What I mean to say is that the question ‘What is the point?’ is legitimate and needful for what has the nature of a means but is completely without meaning for what has the nature of an end. What has the nature of an end does not serve some ulterior purpose; it just is.”
In the same way, this little group does not want to serve some ulterior purpose; it just wants to be: a point of truth, of communion, of simple, lived-out Christian life, a place of pure gratuity and for this reason absolutely essential. I love remembering these three days in Xalapa by the contemplation of the starry sky, the pleasure of spending time drawing an animal, the taste of good pizza with mozzarella di bufala. These are things with no real “point”, totally gratuitous and thereby absolutely necessary, especially in a world that tends to functionalize every aspect of life and to measure the value of things, of time and of relationships in virtue of their utility and reaching successive objectives.
