Monday, August 29, 2016

Young Janaro Goes to Rimini, 25 Years Ago

I've seen some of my friends posting from Rimini, Italy in these days.

They are attending the annual Meeting of Friendship Between Peoples, the remarkable festival that has been sustained for some thirty plus years now by the Catholic ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation.

It's been a long time since I last attended the Meeting. I still hope to attend our own annual New York Encounter or one of the other festivals that are popping up in different parts of the USA. Now that I have made a trip and survived, who knows?

It has been 25 years since the first time I went to Rimini, which was before some of the current generation were born. I have vivid memories because I kept a journal in 1991. Below I share some excerpts from those days, texts which evoke rich memories for me but may also give others a sense of the experience of the Meeting a generation ago.