Wednesday, February 8, 2012

"More beautiful than the beach" -- Volunteering at the Meeting in Riminit

by Brandon Vaidyanathan

domenica 17 gennaio 2010

Why would people pay good money to spend a week of their vacations working long, tiring hours, often in mundane tasks such as sweeping floors or waiting tables?

I had wondered about this ever since, a few years ago, I came across descriptions of the curiously-titled Meeting for Friendship Among the Peoples. A week-long cultural festival of massive proportions. 700,000 plus attendees. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics. Renowned personalities: Pope John Paul II, Josef Ratzinger, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama , Emmanuel Levinas, Lech Walesa, José Carreras, Simone Weil, George Smoot, Steven Beckwith, and more. Exhibitions and presentations on an extraordinarily vast array of topics—astronomy, agriculture, chemistry, economics, history, international development, literature, medicine, politics, theology. Soccer tournaments and bicycle races. And all supported by the dedication of more than 3000 volunteers. But what, I wondered, generates such a commitment?

“Come and see,” people would tell me. And so I did. I attended the Meeting in 2008, and in the process, interviewed nearly 100 volunteers between ages 18 to 80, in an attempt to understand what the event means to the people who sustain it.

One curious finding was the difference in the ways in which younger and older volunteers spoke about why they volunteered.

Younger folks I spoke to primarily insisted on the pragmatic value of volunteering at the Meeting. For example, many claimed that the choice to volunteer was merely a way to organize their time at the Meeting: there are so many events and exhibitions that without structure, one would very easily feel exhausted. So volunteering gives you structure and routine, forcing you to make choices only with your limited free time.

I found this reason odd. While nearly everyone I spoke to said they were struck—even deeply moved—by exhibits and “encounters” they attended, many volunteers said that they didn’t get to see all the presentations and exhibits they wanted to. Many, during their breaks, were so exhausted that they would lie sprawled on couches or on the floor. Some said the hotels they were staying in were ghastly, sometimes with roaches and no running water, so they were left very exhausted by the end of the event. Yet, they insisted, it was all worth it. But why?

It is not that such gratitude and faith were absent among younger volunteers. Rather, such factors were more common in the responses of older volunteers, who perhaps had less need to defend their decisions in pragmatic ways.

Most volunteers emphasized the universality of the Meeting—it was an event for everyone—and most of them insisted that it was not a “religious” event, but rather, a “cultural” or “human” event. Yet, they also stressed that it was distinctly Christian. “It is a beautiful and visible form of a culture that is distinctly Christian… The fact of Christ touches all factors of life—all the exhibits,” said one student. As a result, as one middle-aged woman put it, volunteering at the Meeting, year after year, was “more beautiful than going to the beach.”

Younger volunteers offered another pragmatic reason: spending time with one’s friends. They themselves had often been first motivated to volunteer at the event because other friends they trusted had invited them. “Friendship among peoples” surely was being generated at the event—for example, in conversations between Israeli and Palestinian foreign ministers, or between Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist theologians. But the people I spoke to said that they rarely ever made new friendships at the event. It was mainly an occasion to deepen existing friendships, which plausibly could happen anywhere else.

A more telling reason might lie in their insistence that their participation was “not altruism”; they wanted to downplay any allure of selflessness that volunteering might suggest. Rather, each one insisted, there was something in it “for me”—something which benefitted them personally. Volunteering at this event contributed to their growth, to their happiness; it was enriching; it broadened their horizons. But it was not simply the experience of different cultural events and activities. They also learned something about how to work—a different attitude towards work that they could take back into their daily lives. Many said they had learned to see work at the Meeting as “building a cathedral,” where the simplest actions done out of love and fidelity contributed to something great.

It was this sense of building something great together, of sharing something with the world that was the fruit of “the experience of a people,” that older volunteers were more quick to emphasize. There was no attempt to provide pragmatic justification. More prominent among older volunteers was a sense of gratitude and their desire to communicate it. One elderly gentleman, constructing one of the stages before the event (during what is called the Pre-Meeting), said that he was building “la nostra casa.” This was their home, into which they wished to receive the world with hospitality. What they were building, they were willing to say more explicitly, was a space in which to encounter Christ, who was at the source of their friendships, and who had generated their companionship and their culture.

The key to understanding their commitment may lie in one factor that young and old volunteers alike agree on as characteristic of their experience of the event: “la bellezza.” Beauty. They would refer to the beauty of art or astronomy, the beauty of harmony in diversity, the beauty of people who share their deepest struggles and passions, the beauty of friendship, or the beauty of Christ.

Beauty, unlike other pleasures we experience, is something we never tire of. It is perhaps this inexhaustible quality that serves to sustain both its attraction and commitment to it. For these volunteers, it also serves as a constant provocation, inciting them to seek its origin, which is something about which they have little uncertainty. In the words of one student, “In the meeting, the Christian experience is made concrete through works: meetings, exhibits, etc. This strikes people. The first aspect is aesthetic. From here, we can arrive at the root: it is Christ who generates all this.”

reprinted from Il Sussidiario

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