9 their home. Let us learn from these two elderly persons the meaning of hospitality! Ask your parents and grandparents, and the oldest members of your communities, what it meant for them to have welcomed God and others into their lives. You will benefit from hearing the experiences of those who have gone before you. Dear young people, now is the time to set out in haste towards concrete encounters, towards genuine acceptance of those different from ourselves. This was the case with the young Mary and the elderly Elizabeth. Only thus will we bridge distances—between generations, social classes, ethnic and other groups—and even put an end to wars. Young people always represent the hope for new unity within our fragmented and divided human family. But only if they can preserve memory, only if they can hear the dramas and dreams of the elderly. “It is no coincidence that war is returning to Europe at a time when the generation that experienced it in the last century is dying out” (Message for the 2022 World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly). We need the covenant between young and old, lest we forget the lessons of history; we need to overcome all the forms of polarization and extremism present in today’s world. Saint Paul, writing to the Ephesians, announced that, “now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (2:13-14). Jesus is God’s response to the challenges facing humanity in every age. Mary carries that response within her when she goes to visit Elizabeth. The greatest gift that Mary brings to her elderly kinswoman is that of Jesus himself. Certainly, the concrete assistance she offered was most valuable. Yet nothing could have filled the house of Zechariah with such great joy and satisfaction as the presence of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin, now a tabernacle of the living God. In that mountain village, Jesus, by his mere presence and without uttering a word, preached his first “Sermon on the Mount.” He silently
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