witnesses
stronger than darkness

What Has God Got
to Do With the Bills?
In northern Greece, Nicola and Rosaria meet jobless people and those with debts, “But happiness is possible.”

by Paolo Perego

Aman sets himself on fire in front of the town hall of Thessalonica, the second capital of Greece. A video was published a few days ago, accompanied by an article reporting an increase of 40% in the number of suicides in Greece in the past year. The cause? The economic crisis, and human dignity that is failing, giving way to the despair of fathers who can no longer bring home enough to feed their children. “Because man  builds islands that cannot stand up: job, family, money. As if his needs were all there.” Nicola, 49 years old, is the doctor in a small town 25 miles from Larissa in northern Greece. He is of Orthodox faith, married to Rosaria, an Italian Catholic. They have two children, Antonio and Mario, 13 and 12 years old. “We were used to a certain style of life. Now many run the risk of sleeping in the open. Unemployment has risen above 20%. On the streets of the town, in the parish, and at her children’s school, Rosaria meets people in greater and greater difficulty every day. “It’s becoming difficult, even for us, when someone comes to ask for food, or when your neighbor has no money for the rent.”
“At one time, we were taught that life is made of other things, that there are values, fruit of a history, Greek and Christian history.” Okay, but when you have no bread yourself can values be enough? “You have to grasp on to something. Like when I have to tell someone who is 40 years old that he has a tumor, and that he has not long to live.” What do you do? “It’s hard. Only God can sustain him. There are people who have relationships that sustain them and who are able to live this kind of situation without despairing. Then, when you dig, you find they are Christians. You see it immediately. But at once the doubt comes back to me, the difficulty of reality overcomes me.” This reality is made up of a lot of work, of bills to be paid, another debt taken on to make a small investment, to prevent the crisis from eating it up: a little house by the sea, where they spent their summer. There they met Alexandros, a boy of 13, a little retarded. “He is the son of the people who sold us the house. They all treated him badly because he was a bit turbulent. From the first days, he would come to our house, and I asked my children to play with him. I invited him to lunch, and he was happy.” No one had ever treated him like that. Even his mother, Eleni, realized it. A few days ago Eleni telephoned: “Can we come to see you, to recharge our batteries?” “You can help him out of pity,” says Nicola, “but then you begin to discover that he, too, is made to be happy.” Like the cancer patient. Nicola keeps quiet for a moment. “Yes. No circumstance is an objection to happiness. You can live everything in a new way, because there is the Mystery.”

Knocking on the door. It’s a relentless fight, which breaks out again in every daily encounter, says Rosaria. But it’s inexorable: “How I wish that the heart of the person I meet could recognize Him and burn with love for Him who never tires of knocking on my door.” And it’s not just a figure of speech. It actually happened to Vivi, with five children, and a husband who is out of work and violent. After the latest episode, she went looking for Rosaria: “I had never told her to leave him. But that day... This is someone who beat her, then closed himself in the bedroom with the two youngest children and spent all night drinking.” That evening, Rosaria was worried, so she called her, but her husband was there so Vivi could not talk. Rosaria was unable to sleep, and prayed all night. The following day, the door opened and Vivi appeared, all made up, elegant. “She seemed to be flying, she was so happy.” She had spoken with her husband. “I don’t know what happens when I am with you,” Vivi tells her. “After your call, I went to him. I told him he must get treatment, and that the children need to sleep with me. For the first time, he looked at me without beating me, and broke into tears, then he kissed me.”
“Once in a while, people tell me I am an idealist,” Rosaria says. “The objection is, ‘What has Christ to do with the shopping, the rent, and the bills?’ But the real question is, ‘What is dearest to me in life?’ I found myself saying, ‘Alone without You, my God, I would feel myself a finished creature.’”