SOCIAL ACTION AND SPRIRITUALITY
The encounter with the world of the poor may give life or it may destroy. The weaker the person or reality in which we wish to intervene, the more care we need to apply.
1. Live the social action as a gift
Social action is a commitment and requires a very personal response to an interior or exterior calling to this commitment. This vocation should be lived with deep sense of gratitude (as a gift). The gratitude is the fountain of generosity, joy, respect, gratuitous help, unconditional support, and perseverance. It is a lifetime task, which should be done with personal and spiritual maturity.
The social action/vocation could become a mystical experience. This mystical experience in social action occurs when the entrance of the poor in our life is so inward that it strips us and releases us to and from ourselves, and we no longer see with (only) our eyes. The gift has become flesh. The gift becomes Eucharist.
2. To be Contemplative in action
When we use contemplation in our prayer, we place Jesus as the protagonist of the prayer. The centre of the contemplation is always another person. To act contemplatively means to place the other at the very centre of my sight.
Contemplative action: observe, look, listen, exercise attention, patience, powerlessness and to let myself be impacted (by what is outside me). We will not be impacted if we do not clearly know the role and the dignity of those whom we want to serve.
3. Available to choose
Placing love of the other before self on a daily and concrete basis requires decisions based on deliberate choice.
We mean “available” in a triple sense: a) The person is conscious, ready, active and involved; b) The person knows that she/he is limited and has an affective and effective capacity to choose; c) The person who wants, can and knows how to act.
Be aware of the fact that self-seeking mechanisms (narcissism, selfish satisfaction and justifying the unjustifiable) multiply as the difficulty of our social action increases, or when recognition and gratitude for work done is not forthcoming.
To be available to choose we need to risk, enter into conflict, to leave the habitual. These always produce discomfort and even fear. Fear can take away freedom and decision-making. Pedagogy and therapy of freedom.
4. To be with the Spirit of Strength
Strength = patience. Patience is not passivity but is the sense of remain, persevere, to not abandon, permanence, authenticity and resistance. We need patience with the people we want to help, patience with the processes and rhythms of transformation. It can be also called “the law of the long period of the Gospel”.
We cannot let our anxiety to obtain results, or our frustrations at not obtaining them, or not obtaining them as quickly as we had hoped, make us downcast.
The spiritual strength is also a gift. Through this gift we should let ourselves be accompanied, be capable of letting ourselves be helped by others.
5. Gratuity
Jesus frequently said: “your faith has saved you, go in peace”. This is a perfect synthesis of gratuity (respect to Jesus and respect to the person healed). Gratuity = our action is not conditioned by the answer but by the need that we detect.
It consists also in not seeking benefits or personal yields. It means never to treat people as “my property”: “my poor”, “my group” and “my children”, etc.
Nothing we give can have value if, in giving it we take away the dignity of the receiver. Gratuity promotes towards “progressive autonomy” making people effective agents and less dependent.