A feast for the "common home"” “

It was 17 December 1989: early in the morning the first snow flakes began to fall. They fluttered solemnly down on the city of Bucharest and heralded in silence the forbidden arrival of Christmas. I was 19 at the time. I was serving compulsory military service for my country. I had been drafted in September 1988, following the closure “by order of the Communist dictatorship” of the Orthodox Seminary of Bucharest. All of a sudden a state of emergency was proclaimed in our barracks. No one told us anything, other than that the city of Bucharest had been occupied by the army and by armed tanks that crushed the first snowflakes and the children’s joy under their tracks. The first shots were heard, while rumours began to circulate that the dictator [Ceaucescu] had been driven from power, or even arrested. After 45 years of dictatorship and suffering, people wept for joy and embraced each other. Christmas was now approaching. It had already come to be considered a festival for everyone: of Orthodox Christians and Catholics, of Moslems and Jews. But as the snow continued to fall even more thickly, forming an immaculate carpet, disturbing news began to break. The first soldiers fighting on the side of the people against the regime fell, the first youths fell, but the freedom so deeply yearned for had by now become irreversible: a life-giving breath for everyone. Finally free! What greater gift could this Christmas have brought us? No more churches would be destroyed. No one would be persecuted for faith in God. Released from prisons, priests would resume their place at the altar, and students of theology would return to their seminaries or to the university faculties. Freedom would finally permit children to call Father Christmas by his real name. As Christmas 2002 approaches, a Christmas we will celebrate in the following pages in the testimonies, thoughts and events in various countries, I have wished to recall my own experience of a Christmas of bloodshed and gunfire, also so that other Christmases experienced with the same suffering, elsewhere in Europe, be not forgotten. Now I find myself in a city in western Europe where I live with Orthodox faithful, who came here in search of freedom and a better future. We are fast approaching Christmas, but I see that also in the affluent West there are so many faces of poverty, fear, loneliness. So the West isn’t the land of milk and honey we imagined: the immigrants especially say so: they discover that freedom is at times a gift only for some, and that life is serene especially for those who who possess an EU identity card. Europe is now being enlarged. I think of my Christmas thirteen years ago in Bucharest and I think of this Christmas and those that will come, like an enlargement of the heart of Europe and not just a rolling back of the frontiers. I dream of a “common light” for so many peoples kept in the dark by dictatorship and for so many others still kept in the dark because they have chosen the culture of superfluity and self-interest. I dream of thoughts, gestures and experiences that run counter to the cultures that corrupt man. I dream of a Christmas that may be, for all time, a “common feast” for Europe.