Priest Ioan Istrati
I went to people on Christmas Eve. Poverty is huge, especially at old people. 90% of the houses have only the bare necessities, very old things, washed for a hundred times. They speak of a town or a district where a small house land is 70 thousands euros.
People became old because of sadness. Some of them have very small pension. They have rugs old of hundreds of years, clothes they had worn for a hundred times, long soups, puny dogs.
Everywhere on the table stays the new ferocious dictator: the bill for gas and electricity. The people sigh deeply, they complain.
I ask them all how they are going. No one in hundreds of people tells me he is fine. Everywhere they suffer of untreated diseases, distress and poverty. Three quarters of the old women have diabetes, problems with their legs, with circulation.
Everything became expensive. In the rural area they still have a cellar, a garden, a pantry. In town everything is taken from the market and it costs a lot.
The Christmas Eve is like a plunging into an ocean of distress, of problems, of deserted old people who shed tears. The children are at thousands kilometers distance. The stupid phone can`t replace an embrace. The tablet doesn`t value as much as a kiss on the heart of the one you hung in your arms.
That is why it is so welcome and actual the concern of the Holy Synod for the old people of our Romanian nation.
Let us seek them and bring them a bowl of food, let us embrace them and tell them a prayer. Let us ask them how they are. They miss a human glance.
Like some shadows like some whispers they withdraw discretely saying a prayer and they leave easily to the afterworld, beyond death.
