Word: emmaus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...France. Inside a warehouse, an altar has been set up on a kitchen table. Surrounding it are a coat rack jammed with secondhand clothing, rows of used appliances and abandoned furniture, and assorted bric-a-brac. All in all, an appropriate setting for the annual get-together of the "Emmaus movement," which has shown thousands of people in 23 countries around the world how to rebuild their self-esteem by recycling the junk of the consumer society...
...began renovating a large, ramshackle house in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance as a hostel for needy people. Soon ex-cons, destitute families and vagrants joined him, and the abbe and his growing family of followers started building new residences nearby, using salvaged materials. He called his commune Emmaus, after the New Testament town (Luke 24:13-32) where two disciples, despondent after the Crucifixion, met the risen Christ and were filled with new hope. As it happened, the Emmaus movement was to grow out of personal travail...
That came in 1951, when the abbé lost his assembly seat and with it his only income. But just when the commune seemed imperiled, a chiffonier (ragpicker) at Emmaus devised a new source of money: he taught his colleagues how to rummage through trash for useful objects. Scrap paper was sold, broken furniture and appliances were repaired and marketed. The commune became self-supporting and earned enough to add new centers elsewhere. A credo evolved: "Give instant help to those nearest and in need. Show them how to help themselves. Afterward let them help others...
...illusions were shattered in the first days of the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, when the Israelis razed the Arab villages of Yalo, Emmaus and Beit Nuba...
...health food" shops. But that was before the back-to-nature spirit roused the young, and much of the rest of the nation was shaken by the cranberry scare, the mercury-in-tuna scare and the cyclamate scare. Says Marshall Ackerman, executive vice president of Rodale Press in Emmaus, Pa., which publishes books and magazines about the movement: "I've been in this business for 16 years, and nothing happened for the first 13. Since then it's become phenomenal." Last year the organic food shops had sales of about $200 million...