The community and fraternity, the strengths of our consecration
Ref: PG 0650/01
To all the Brothers.
My dear Brothers,
I am back in Rome again, after the celebration of all this year's Provincial Chapters. I thank God for all the good this has done to our Order. We are presently holding a meeting of the Major Superiors, practically one half of whom have been re-elected to office, while the other half are taking up their responsibilities for the first time.
I am writing this letter to you on the feast of St Raphael the Archangel who meant so much to St John of God, and who has signified so much in the tradition of the Order, and continues to mean so much both as God's Medicine, to soothe people's suffering and pain, and as our Elder Brother, who protects us during our life.
As our Elder Brother I pray that he will look after our Order, our Provinces and our Communities, and each and every one of us; and I also pray that he will be the brother to all his brothers and help us to be brothers to one another.
I have so often said that we are doing so much good. We should feel satisfied because God is working through us. But we also have so many things that we have to review, revise, improve and change.
And one of these is precisely the matter of brotherhood, and of communion, which is so important to the lives of the Brothers and the Communities.
In some places more than in others, there are some things that divide us, that separate us, and I would like to appeal to all of you to overcome them. The diversity of each individual must not make common living difficult, because it is a gift which should enrich us. It is in terms of our diversity that we have to appreciate and improve fraternity and communion, and also see it as a gift that enriches us.
I do not want to theorise on this issue, but to shed a little light on it for our community life. In the programme for the sexennium I intended to raise this topic, since I believe that, because of our ideal, we are called to fraternity and community and I do not feel that it is deeply-rooted in our common lives as Brothers, gathered together in the name of the Lord (Const 27).
I earnestly wish to see fraternity and communion as real strengths that reinforce our consecration.
1
1. An explicit call by the Church to communion
The Magisterium of the Church has frequently addressed the issue of the community as an ideal of life for the Brothers. In the community and in brotherhood we find "the human community in which the Trinity dwells" (VC 41).
We all remember that in 1994 the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life published a specific reflection on community entitled "Fraternal Life in Community". I recommend you to continue reading this from time to time, and to read it in the light of the faith, and to pray on it and continue reflecting on it at the meetings of your communities.
The Introduction to the document reminds us of the ideal of the community. Many changes have taken place over the past 40 years. Those of us who have experienced community life according to more uniform standards can feel the difference. These changes are things that we considered to have become necessary at a certain moment, and we promoted them. We pinned great hopes and expectations on them. But today, many of us are feeling somewhat disappointed, because perhaps these changes have failed to deliver all the good we had expected of them.
I would like to understand all the reasons that lie behind the situations in which we live, and I am offering a few elements on which to reflect and use to find light for the response we are being called upon to make.
I intend to follow the outline given in paragraph 7 of the 'Fraternal Life' document.
2. Our community as a gift
We should thank the Lord for the gifts that he has so freely given us: the gifts of life, health, intellectual values, faith, the vocation to which we have been called, etc.
Our experience of life, the difficulties we encounter, the moment through which we are currently living have perhaps given us a positive or negative opinion of the gift we have received.
I believe that we are all called to make the effort to use everything that God has given us as a free gift, find the capacity to interpret our life in the light of faith, and live community life as a gift.
This does not mean that we must be conformists, that we do not have to struggle in order to resolve certain situations which are puzzling us, or which we consider to be unjust. But we must start with the positive fact that we have been called by God with our fellow Brothers to live one and the same vocation as men consecrated to hospitality, which is a great gift.
1
If we make this our starting point, we will dispel a great deal of dissatisfaction, a great deal of our disenchantment and disappointments, and many things that have been hampering the development of our personal and community lives. But it is also necessary for us to remain focused on God to enable us to transform our human relations by creating an environment imbued with solidarity and fraternity (VC 41).
We set out on the religious life with high hopes and expectations, with the certainty that we were responding to our Lord's call, which was something great to us, the treasure we had found for our life project.
This was a conviction that had brought us through a number of high moments of great commitment and radical dedication: leaving our family, choosing between different possible lifestyles, entering the Order as a place for personal self-fulfilment, enjoying the novelty of community life, enjoying the novelty of serving the sick and needy. All of this was imbued with hope. We made such great efforts to prepare ourselves for the mission.
I am speaking in the past tense because I am speaking for myself, and I have been in the Order for more than 37 years. This is a phenomenon that is typical of so many Brothers. The same phenomenon is experienced by postulants, novices, scholastics and recently professed Brothers. It is possible that the thoughts I am now sharing with those of you who are in any of these stages might help to shed light on your future.
I believe that one element that we have to enhance is our ability to experience the community as a theological reality. For us, the community is the manifestation of the presence of God, "the specially favoured place where the experience of God should be able to reach its fullness and be communicated to others" (Const 27).
But not some theoretical community, but the community to which I personally belong, the community of my own Province, the community in which I live. My community, in which I find many values as well as many difficulties, because all of us that make up that community are individual persons, and as individual persons we have our values and our weaknesses.
Perhaps when we enter the religious life we may have a more perfect community in mind. Sometimes we think that those who know us well will criticise us for the things that are not right in our communities. If we had come into a perfect community, it would have been a God-given gift to us. But Our Lord has given us a less perfect, a less ideal community than what we had imagined it would be, but it is no less a theological reality for that.
1
What is sometimes difficult for us to accept is the fact that the community in which I I've is the one that God had prepared for me from all eternity for this very moment, and that it is a theological reality in which I have to find the environment for my own spiritual growth, that this is the community in which I must bear witness to Jesus the Good Samaritan, that this is a sign of fraternal communion, the gift of the spirit of St John of God, and that my community is a great gift given to me by God.
I may have had something else in mind. But God had this community in mind.
One first practical conclusion as far as we are concerned is that we must manage to understand that this is the gift which God has given us. The Order that we have, the Province to which we belong, the community in which we live. This is the gift.
Accepting this may demand a great act of faith, which we must continue to make every day of our lives. It is not always easy to accept the will of God. Neither is it always easy to accept the difficulties we may find in community life. It is precisely for this reason that the community is a theological reality. And this is precisely the reason why, with a theological dimensional, we must undergo the process of accepting it.
Communion with God will enable us to enjoy this gift, and derive satisfaction from our experience of communion with our Brothers. We must frequently offer the question of our community to our Lord in prayer: "Lord, make me capable of understanding and accepting the fact that my community is the gift that you have given me, so that I may live it with joy, and be capable of experiencing the fraternity and communion to which you have called us in that community."
We must do this in our personal prayer and in our community prayer, and we must do it listening to the Word of God and meditating on it, and in the liturgy that we celebrate together every day.
The Eucharist as the sacrament of communion is particularly important, because it is in the Eucharist that "our hospitaller community receives its life" (Const. 30), helping us to overcome loneliness, and to share responsibility; it disposes us to mutual forgiveness by healing wounds, strengthening our commitment to communion, sustaining us in fidelity and leading us in hospitality (VC 45b).
As we grow in giving more time to God we shall grow in giving more time to the community, and we shall grow in the communion that the true community requires. I hope everyone will be helped by reflecting and praying on these ideas once again.
I shall now move on to the second aspect that I would like to address: building up the community of Brothers.
3. We are Brothers
The community is made up of the Brothers with whom we live. Since it is a theological reality, it is not ready-made. It needs to be built up day after day. This is a long, costly process, with its ups and downs, and with attitudes that emerge at different times depending upon circumstances and people. And we must all be committed to this process.
1
In this process there are some Brothers who, because of the way they are, or their spirituality, or their formation, or because of the moment through which they are passing, or their age, are more favourable to anything that may be advocated to enhance fraternity. And for the very same reasons there are other Brothers who find this more difficult.
The document "Fraternal Life in Community" urges all of us to make an effort. Bearing in mind the many different situations that can exist in communities, the document once again strongly emphasises the value of the community, because of the sense of fraternity and its power to enable us to live our consecration well.
We must not slip into the risk of losing the reasons for building up our community day by day. We have already said that my community is a gift of God. Now are now saying that my community is something that I have to build up jointly with all the Brothers who comprise it.
I should like to use this reflection to take up once again the task of building up our communities, and to make every effort possible to grow in communion, and to enable all of us to take a positive attitude to the construction of the community, and embark on a new process that will enable us to truly feel that each of us are Brothers to everyone else.
In each of our communities I beg you to do everything possible to truly live in communion, in order to truly become a brotherhood.
I believe that in order to reach this agreement all of us must grow personally: humanly and spiritually at one and the same time.
Can we manage this? I believe we can.
One of the temptations we may fall into is to seek to justify ourselves, looking for reasons not to budge from our present positions. We are already grown-up, we already know one another, we cannot give any more of ourselves than we have already, etc.
We have to be convinced that every day is a fresh opportunity given to us by our Lord to grow in the very depths of our being.
Here are a few suggestions to achieve this:
· We must mould our being, develop our human values, reflect on our conduct, read everything that can shed light on the criteria by which we work, and allow ourselves to be personally directed by people who can help us in our growth process.
Understanding ourselves is not easy; we are not always capable of promoting Gospel attitudes; it is hard for us to accept ourselves as we are; managing to live with interior joy, meaningfully, involves a whole process of personal integration.
Perhaps we have tried it many times and have never succeeded in it; but let us try again. Perhaps we have not given it the importance it deserves in our lives, and we find ourselves somewhat hamstrung, seeking the causes where they probably do not exist, or being reluctant to find out where the causes really lie. Let us start again by looking within ourselves, led by the light of Christ.
We must resume our interior personal growth.
· We must also work on everything that is needed to make us thoroughly acquainted with our Brothers, to listen to them, accept them, respect and love them. This demands a great effort to cultivate our interpersonal relations. If you like, our fraternal relations.