THE facts answer

A Joyful Whisper, Like
after the Resurrection
The Rimini Meeting addresses everyday themes, but not in an ephemeral way. It lets you enter existence with the heart.

by John waters

This August, please God, will be my fourth time in a row attending the Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples in Rimini, Italy. It is difficult to tell those who do not suspect what this means, and equally pointless trying to explain to those who already understand. It is not like any other event, not because it is bigger or better (though it is, of course, bigger and better) but because it operates at a parallel to conventional culture. It looks at the same things we look at in everyday discourse and speaks of them using roughly the same words. But it is different because it sees everything differently. The themes are the same, but the premises and assumptions are all different because what is seen from behind the human gaze in this place is not what our culture usually allows us to see.
If I were to encourage an “uninitiated” friend to go to Rimini, I would not necessarily say this. I might simply say that the discussions are fascinating, the exhibitions amazing, the music sublime, and the theater spectacular. I would not emphasize the “religious” dimension. I would talk about life and, if the “religious” dimension came up, would assure my friend that this would not be a “problem.”
Just as Christianity begins with an event in history, it begins also with a phenomenon in the individual heart: the desire to know something that, in the culture we have created, is not immediately obvious. Behind the meanings we take for granted as the totality of reality, there is the Event, which ignites a spark of recognition. This we discover not in some mystical way but by looking more closely at reality. This is true knowledge. It can take a long time in our culture to comprehend that you are really seeing what your heart desires.
To go to the Meeting is like visiting a place from a parallel time, in a version of culture that has evolved differently than the mainstream. Even having barely comprehended what the difference is, the Meeting causes me to hear the “ping” of recognition as things enter my total capacity for knowing in the way they should, as pure knowledge, rather than as affirmations of a version of myself already decided and accepted. I see and hear and read with my heart.
Each new item of knowledge comes not as ephemera but as revelation, an event relating to the total potential meaning of existence. We encounter at the Meeting the stuff of modern culture but without the false curiosity that afflicts modern man. Art, science, literature, politics–all these things, yes, but also something else. Christ, yes, but in a particular way. Not in a sentimental, and still less a moralistic way, but in a way that opens up again the circuitry of man’s total relationship with reality. Christ whispered, not out of embarrassment, but rather as a joyful yet in some ways improbable rumor, like in the hours after the Resurrection: He is here! “No!” Wait, and see!