Dear friends,
This Christmas, the AVSI mission was supported throughout the US by various groups of adults and kids crafting to give gifts to their community. The Advent campaigns this year highlighted a greater sense of communion and attraction to beauty, therefore underlining Giussani’s interpretation of Charity. He writes, “The supreme law of our being is to share in the being of others, to live in communion.” (The Meaning of the Charitable Work, L. Giussani) In sharing our own separate experiences with the Advent fundraisers, we each encountered some form of ‘share[ing] in the being of others’.
Whether it was being accepted and becoming a part of a new community or reaching out and making new connections, everyone felt this ‘live[ing] in communion.’ Raffaella of Rochester, MN, fundraised locally with the help of the kids in her Fraternity and the effort then quickly spread to relatives, neighbors, and colleagues; Beautifully put, she says, “We saw a net of relationships raising and unfolding around the desire to give.”
Many others shared a similar experience: Being in awe of her friends’ care for the work and moved by their enthusiasm and dedication, Laura of Boston, MA, expresses, “I just found myself following them. And by following them, I discovered myself happy to do the work.”
From Chicago, IL, Gaia contributed by hosting online cooking classes in collaboration with her friends. This meant seeing new faces and adjusting to a different way of communicating. She was embraced into a new community of virtual faces, and her cooking project revealed the hundredfold. She says: “My cooking became the way I was hoping to embrace the world, and I am still very happy about that moment even if I made mistakes and I did not cook as I hoped. The embrace I have received was much more.”