RIMINI/ “More beautiful than the beach”: Volunteering at the Meeting

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.

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