Christmas
Lunch
with the Poor
|
Christmas
Lunch |
|
|
�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�.
|
The Christmas Lunch with the poor is a tradition of the Community of Sant�Egidio since when, in 1982, a small group of poor people was welcomed at the banquet table in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere.
Why, right at Christmas, does the Community gather with the poor at the banquet table? The Community is a family gathered by the Gospel. Therefore at Christmas, when all over the world families gather around the table, the Community celebrates with the poor, who are our friends and our relatives.
Who are the friends that participate in this Christmas? They are above all people who live on the road: our tramp friends, homeless refugees, road children. But also beggars�.
A world-wide feast The feast has widen year after year, like a beneficial contagion, and has reached also many countries of the South of the world in all continents.
Where does the feast takes place? Everywhere, above all where there is sorrow. In the churches, in the houses but also in the institutions for elderly, for children, for handicapped people, in the prisons, at the hospitals, and also in the streets.
Christmas miracle 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.
|
Records:
|
||
| by Francesca Zuccari |
