(ANS – Turin) – After a very intense and stimulating first day, on the morning of Friday, January 16, 2026, participants in the Salesian Family Spirituality Days received a new and rich collection of insights and reflections through a lectio divina led by Turin deacon Paolo De Martino on the Gospel passage of the Wedding at Cana (Jn 2:1–11), which provides the theme for this year’s Strenna.
Proposed as a central moment of listening, prayer, and interior reflection on Friday morning, the meditation—significantly titled “The Gospel Is a Celebration”—offered a profound and spiritually rich rereading of one of the best-known texts from the Gospel of John, highlighting its symbolic depth and its relevance for both Christian and Salesian life.
The Gospel scene—the first of the miraculous signs narrated by John—unfolds in a setting of joy, relationships, and shared celebration. For this reason, the speaker emphasized that the Gospel does not distance itself from concrete life, but fully enters into its human dynamics, and not only the most difficult or painful ones: “Slaves and lepers cried out in their despair, and Jesus begins not with them, but with a wedding feast. There must be something very important beneath this: it is the new face of God, a God who comes as a feast.”
If the feast is the setting, the protagonist is wine, which runs out. “It is not bread that runs out, not what is necessary for life, but wine, which is not indispensable, but rather ‘something extra’—something seemingly useless, except at a feast or for the quality of life,” De Martino noted. And the one who notices this lack is Mary, who “at Cana is the Help of Christians par excellence.” In fact, she “takes part in the celebration, converses, eats, laughs, tastes the wine, dances, and at the same time observes what is happening around her,” with an attentiveness that “is already a form of prayer.”
Her invitation to the servants—“Do whatever he tells you”—the first and only words spoken by Mary in the Gospel of John, was presented as a synthesis of the believer’s attitude: the ability to unite word and action immediately, and to open new possibilities even without fully understanding what is happening.
The meditation also highlighted how the sign worked by Jesus is not a spectacular gesture, but a silent and almost hidden action that unfolds through the collaboration of others. The jars filled with water, the service of the servants, and simple obedience to the word received all become integral parts of the miracle. In this sense, it was emphasized that Jesus does not create wine out of nothing, but takes water—“the simplest and most ordinary thing there is”—and transforms it into something precious and joyful. This, De Martino explained, is what God does with every human life: whether small or great, God dwells within it in everyday reality and, if welcomed, can transform it into something beautiful.
“How wonderful it is to know that God does not change our lives, but transforms them. It is water that is transformed into wine. God needs something that already exists, something that has already happened, in order to accomplish His work. That is why He will use my humanity, which may seem unclean to me but is precious to Him, so much so that it becomes the object of a miracle,” the deacon observed toward the conclusion.
For this reason, he urged those present with particular emphasis: “When we continue to believe, to belong to the Church and to the Salesian Family despite their obvious limitations; when we do not give up in our forgotten outskirts and continue to gather to pray, to speak about Christ, and to proclaim the Word, we are filling the jars.”
Looking ahead to the new year that has just begun, he concluded with this wish: “As at Cana, so this year of the Salesian Family begins—with simplicity and wonder. Whatever happens, this is the year in which we want to offer the Lord our imperfect fidelity and our hardened lives, to see them transformed into the new wine of the Kingdom.”
With such depth and richness of reflection, the lectio divina helped participants connect the Gospel with the concrete life of the Salesian Family, encouraging each of those present—and the thousands connected via livestream—to be a credible sign of joy in today’s world.
At the end of the session, participants were divided into language groups to continue reflecting on these themes, guided by questions proposed for meditation. Later in the morning, what emerged from the group sharing was gathered together and concluded in the form of a prayer.