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by Gianni Gennari

Don't resign yourself to an insipid life

Two days later there was a wedding in Cana, a city in Galilee. Jesus' mother was also there, and Jesus was invited to the wedding with his disciples. At one point he ran out of wine. Then Jesus' mother says to him: "They have no more wine" (Jn 2, 1-3)

The wine. I believe it is one of the realities closest to our memories, to our life; without wine you can't eat, at least where we are not yet – so to speak – definitively ruined by a certain entirely technical and artificial modernity, even in eating and drinking. I remember that when I was a child wine appeared at the table only once a week, our long table where we were all sitting together with father and mother, and that time a week that it appeared there was a "little drop" for each, and it was a sign of the party.

Here you are. Today Jesus takes part in a party, a family party, a wedding party, a very popular party and gives wine. When the ordinary wine, the normal wine, is finished, he gives him new wine.

Wine is joy, wine is celebration, wine is affection. Wine is love. The song to wine, as the source of love, joy and friendship, is much older than the Christian era: it will be enough to remember Horace and Alcaeus... However, it seems very interesting to me to note that Jesus does not replace wine, but gives his when the other is finished. The joy that comes from Christ never competes with human joys, with those of everyday life, with those that come to us every day that we meet brothers and sisters, with those that come from fighting for justice, from trying to build a new world.

Here's the thing. Because sometimes this fight for justice, this attempt to build a "new world" seems to no longer produce fruit, it seems to lose its flavor and then we too are tempted to say "there is no more wine". At this point Jesus gives us his wine, he can give us his wine which, I would say, has the truest and deepest flavor of the wine which seems finished, but adds a new touch. So also sometimes, when we taste the joy of Christ, of his presence, of his word, of his Spirit in us, we realize that it does not conflict with the joys of every day, but is something more than that gushes from a a source that goes infinitely beyond what can be the source of our feelings and our heart.

And so it is very important that we remember Cana. When we find ourselves with life that seems to us to be reduced only to water without flavor, without taste, when it seems to us that we are doing nothing but drowning with nothing left to cling to, without any reason to resurrect the taste of existence or the fantasy of starting over every day... At that point the wine that is Jesus, the wine that is imagination, which is love, which is tenderness, which is the stubbornness of "hope that does not disappoint" and with which we start again from the beginning, at that point the Lord can truly come to meet us.

Here you are. Recovering the meaning of wine in life, refusing to be or become a teetotaler in a profound sense, that is, without joy, without celebration, is important. We must never resign ourselves to a life devoid of taste, imagination, brotherhood: this is the task that we Christians must recover every moment today. Make others understand that the wine of life that we taste every day does not have a competition, but a completion and a wonderful help in the wine that gushes from the presence of the Lord in our entire life.