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

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.”

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.”