03 Nov Turin 2024 – Sending
We had a great experience at the gathering. Seeing and meeting so many couples from around the world, all there to celebrate Christian marriage was amazing.
The theme of the first day was fragility. We weren’t fragile arriving, but we were nervous about the week as it was our first gathering and we weren’t sure what to expect.
To paraphrase Marina Marcolini’s sharing on the first day, each day we were offered bits and pieces of the gospel that we quietly savoured together to rediscover how much richness of flavour and fragrancethere is in a morsel of the gospel. Throughout the week we savoured the word of God through the events of the gathering, listening to the talks, the mass
the singing, through being together. During the evenings at the mixed team meetings, we picked up the crumbs of the day’s activities. At the meals, we shared our experiences from around the world. Even relaxing around the hotel we experienced the enthusiasm couples had for marriage, wherever they came from.
One theme in Marina Marcolini’s talks was making decisions, at each point the couple on the road made the most creative choice. Choosing to allow Jesus to walk with them, choosing to share what had happened, choosing to invite him to share their meal. At the end of the passage they choose to return to Jerusalem. Jesus didn’t send them. They made the choice to go
back to Jerusalem at once and share with the disciples.
Jesus had shared his message with them and their hearts were burning within them while he talked on the road and opened the Scriptures. They were free to do what they did because they wanted to, not because it was commanded to them from the outside, the urge to move came from within.
The Road to Emmaus is a reading about freedom and about choice. Even though the theme of the last day was sending the message was not that we are sent but that we choose to go.
The couple, or friends, on the road, went back to Jerusalem on a mission to share what they had received. When the priest says “Mass is ended, go in peace to Love and serve the Lord” we are going out on mission. “One forgets that it is not life has a mission, but that it is mission”. Xavier Zubiri.
Choosing mission means choosing your identity. We can choose to reject responsibility, or we can assume it, a further choice is indecision and procrastination. Without hesitation the couple in the reading chose their path, to go back and rejoin the community.
During the gathering, we listened to and met so many people who have chosen to join a community and witness their faith through Christian marriage. The story of the Road to Emmaus is the story of our team meetings each month. Gathering around the table to share a meal, sharing our lives, sharing the word, savouring, and picking up the small crumbs of the word of
God. We always come away enthused to live mission each day.
What we have shared only touches the surface of Marina Marcolini’s sharing, it’s well worth going to the Turin website and looking at all the talks that were given.
At the end of the week, our hearts were burning with enthusiasm and we didn’t need to be sent, we have chosen to share what we received.
We will finish with the poem that closed the week of reflection on the Road to Emmaus
Pass on your Spirit, by John Vannucci
Pass on your Spirit, O Lord, like the spring breeze
That makes life bloom and opens up love
You pass your Spirit like the hurricane
Unleashing an unknown force
And raises sleeping energies
Pass your Spirit into our gaze
To take it to farther and wider horizons
Pass into our heart to make it burn with an ardor eager to radiate
Pass your Spirit over our saddened faces
To make us smile again.
Stroke our weary hands
To revive them and joyfully put them back to work.
Pass your Spirit upon us […].
And remain in all our lives to expand them
And give them your divine dimensions
John & Bernie Healy
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