.

If we are not after the essence,
then what are we after?

Last week as I entered the last couple of weeks of my sabbatical I spent a few days at the annual Rimini Meeting. It was fourteen years ago when visiting this meeting on a trip to Italy that I met people who invited me to vacation with them the following year. In the years since my regular visits to be with them in their home town, and the week spent each year on vacation with around 350 of their community in the mountains, has become an important part of my life.

The full title of The Meeting (as it is widely known across Italy) is “The Meeting, for Friendship among Peoples” and this year along with the regular number of 700,000+ visitors to the week-long event (yes that’s three quarters of a million people) my appreciation of their friendship and my practical experience of the centrality of Christ for the world has deepened.

The theme of this year’s meeting was especially apt: “If we are not after the essence, then what are we after?”

That word, essence, has become something of a theme of my sabbatical months and next week as I reach the end of these five months of renewal I will share with FFF readers a sabbatical summary – and the word “essence” has been at the heart of this experience for me.

While each day of The Meeting is filled with lectures, exhibitions, encounters and events, a good part of each day is spent sitting and chatting with friends old and new from across the globe.

You might get a sense of the atmosphere of the gathering in this reflection given by Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem.