III/ – THE RETURN TO SAMARIA

What I have said hitherto is the principal thing: we need to return more decidedly to the roots of faith in the very ‘Franciscan’ awareness that the gospel has enough strength to be the response to what is taking place today.

But then there is another passage – all of this should be placed in the life and the mission that has been assigned to us. The prophet Elijah met God on Mount Oreb and what was given to him is very clear and equally demanding: now go back over your footsteps! God sent him back to Samaria to his mission because it was there that what had been given to him on Mount Oreb had to be applied.

   Such is also the case for us: after a deeper encounter with Jesus Christ and the gospel we must return to our homes, to our mission ‘in Samaria’. And here there is the other problem: what does this return mean? How should it be achieved?

   I do not have space here to dwell upon this which, indeed, would be the second part of my analysis. What, however, is of fundamental importance because it is specifically from here, from how we know how to express our presence in history, is that people see who we are and whether we have something to say and give to the world. I will confine myself here to some passages with reference to the subject that we are addressing – that of spiritual life.

1/ – The risk of spiritualism

I come from a centre where we work a great deal – it seems to me with seriousness and success – in the field of spiritual life and we observe various things.

The first is this: side by side with a strong demand for spirituality there is a strong risk of spiritualism. To employ the same image that I have used: the belief that between the mountain of God, Mount Oreb, and the place of mission in Samaria there is an immediate passage – that it is enough to pray more, to take up again in a serious way the commitment to ascesis and the dynamic towards holiness…and everything will be solved.

It would be too easy if such was the case. Between Mount Oreb, Jesus Christ and the Gospel and the reality of our lives in which we must express ourselves, an immediate passage does not exist. In between there is a work of mediation, of a theological and cultural character as well, that cannot be dispensed with.

To express this in a few words: all the great voices that go to make up the CL project – the community, vows and above all the great challenge of mission – need to be taken up again and thought about anew at a much deeper level. Only by doing this will we be able to understand what the return to Samaria involves.

We have before us a great work, of a theological nature as well, to engage in, but an important observation must be made: this must involve a thinking anew that is engaged in not ‘from below’, centred around institutional problems and the mere ‘way of proceeding’, with all the recommendations that can come from the human sciences as well, but ‘from above’, in a deep theological-spiritual approach which is at the same time attentive to the world to which the Lord sends us. Only those who have really encountered the Lord and have been taught by him can understand and then make others see how to live in history – and in a new consecrated life – what has been understood. This thinking anew is indispensable.

There is still a great deal to do in this domain because a synthesis has still not been achieved – an overall vision that leads to unity the many important things that have been talked about and acquired in recent years. It is absent above all else as a mentality, a new vision that is truly shared. This means that we must continue in our analysis and research, and this should be done together, as communities and as institutes. This is a hard undertaking which is not gratifying, but it is indispensable because the destiny of consecrated life also depends on the vision that we have of it.

2/ – Not only individuals

If we keep alive the awareness that a true renewal requires a reconsideration of all the components of the project of consecrated life, then one will also avoid the error – and this is another element of spiritualism that is very widespread – that one can limit people by ignoring the components of the community and the institute. It may even be spontaneous to dream of a spiritual renewal that will regenerate everything without changing anything – but this does not work. We have to be aware that the spiritual retraining that consecrated life needs does not concern only individuals – it also concerns institutes, and thus the approach that one gives to life at a community, apostolic and government level.

There is a spiritual decay in today’s CL that must be addressed with great frankness specifically at a general level and at the level of institutes. We may ask, for example, whether today’s religious life is or is not undergoing a crisis of identity. A simple criterion for understanding this seems to me to be the following: to see whether amongst ourselves we are able or not able to make clear and binding choices as institutes and as communities as well.

One would be led to say that this is very much a question of climate. What is the climate that is breathed in when one enters our communities? What are the conversations – or silences – that take place amongst us when we are at table together? What is on the agenda at our meetings and what are the criteria that guide us when something is decided together, at the level of government as well? What is the approach to free time and holidays? And in addition: how is going into Advent and Lent experienced during the course of the liturgical year?…This may appear banal, and yet it is through these concrete things that in definitive terms one sees the quality of life of a community or of an institute.

3/ – The negative tendency of Gnosticism

On the side opposite spiritualism, there is what we could call the negative tendency of Gnosticism. It seems to me that here we encounter the real trap into which we have fallen in recent years and from which we urgently need to free ourselves. I would like to try to explain what I mean and you should have a little patience as I do this.

Above I laid emphasis upon faith and our rooting in Christ as the only possible source of meaning for our vocation and our mission. If we forget this or we leave it in the shadows, as often happens all too easily, the only thing that remains is law. I do not mean written law or law to be found in codices but the set of beliefs and cultural equipment that we have in our heads and hearts and that constitute the ‘having to be’ on the basis of which we judge everything and which we impose on ourselves and other people.

Along these lines everything becomes ‘our project’, and that includes new or renewed religious life, at least for those who intend to act on this front. This is said to be certainly a good project, deduced from the word of God and many other ‘good’ sources, like the thinking anew of recent years, but it is anyway ‘our’ project. I do not say simple drawn up at a desk – often this has often happened – but our thing, our project. We know how things go/should go and this is how things should be.

This is an approach that could seem also very dignified, very ‘nobly law’, as used to be said, but it is in reality pure Gnosticism: our work takes the place of or overlays that of God. Palo would say ‘the claim to save oneself on one’s own’. There comes to mind what D. Bonheoffer says of community – that it is not our work but the work of God and can only be received as a gift. Those who make their own projects destroy community rather than building it (cf. La vita comune, pp. 46-47).

And in fact why is this not a good pathway? Because in an approach of this kind, strictly speaking, there is no place for God, He is no longer needed. Or reference is made Him – and how could one not refer to Him? – but He and His grace are thought to be of service to our project. We refer to grace to order to achieve what ‘we’ think should be achieved!

And then the following happens, and this has been the story of many people in recent years: when our projects, even the most splendid and meaningful, are not implemented as we think they should be, everything is abandoned. This is what explains the birth and the death in a very hurried way of so many things, even though they were very fine, during the decades that followed the Second Vatican Council. Only those who have understood that the building up of the kingdom and the renewal of religious life is the work of God can hold up during difficulties.

4/ – From Gnosticism to true gnosis  

Here the problem is once again the same – a problem that is essentially spiritual and one of faith. The point would be this: to pass from Gnosticism to faith; or, as the ancients said, from Gnosticism to true gnosis. Becoming believers in order truly to live as believers.

This would require a great deal of explanation, and this is again a question of that ‘sapiential reading’ to which reference has been already made in this paper. For example, the very widespread ‘intellectualistic abstractism’. How easily is it thought, or have we thought, that it is sufficient ‘to know’ how religious life should be in order to see it achieved as well! How many of us believed themselves or believe themselves ‘new’ simply because they have a new concept of RL!

Or – and this is also a typical ‘Gnostic’ attitude – being satisfied, with the albeit necessary changes, with ‘casting aside’ what does not work or is held to be superseded, without asking what should be chosen as an alternative. This is the tendency to allow oneself the freedom of disengagement but not equally the freedom of engagement. The consequence of this is an emptying – not only because at times good things are thrown away but also, and above all else, because we have ‘left without choosing’, without real alternatives.

5/ – The point of synthesis: spiritual life

I will end this paper by referring once again to what seems to me to be the real point of synthesis, starting from which everything else as well can be taken up – spiritual life or, if this is preferred, the spiritual retraining of our institutes.

Unfortunately when reference is made to this – of spiritual life and spirituality – a whole series of prior understandings are unleashed which lead the analysis immediately off beam and then lead to an abandonment. This is a disastrous error, avoiding which is indispensable. I will refer to just two things.

First, there is certainly an urgent need to return to a more decided and concrete moral and spiritual dynamic – what we used to call the dynamic to holiness. The journey of each religious in today’s RL is called to go into the depths again, with a humble and concrete return to all the instruments that can give breadth and depth to a serious spiritual life.

   But – and this is the second thing which is equally important – one should advance in a decided thinking anew about what we usually call spirituality and the spiritual life. What we have behind us is from many points of view a poor spirituality that was very weak and moralistic, made up of practices more than true spiritual wisdom, and it needs to be regenerated, drawing in a new way on the word of God and the great ancient theological and spiritual tradition. Only after, or together with, this can the dynamic to holiness to which reference has been made flourish again in the due ways.

It seems to me that it is the task above all else of religious life, because of its nature and how it has always been seen down the centuries, to engage in a real renewal of studies in the field of spiritual theology. This means the renewal of theology tout-court because it is theology as such, if we look at the teaching of the fathers, that speak to life and become specifically as such spiritual theology.

But here we are going too far ahead, even though it seems to me that religious life, if it wants to rediscover strength within the Church, must know how to express itself at this level as well.

6/ – Formation

Another fundamental question thus also enters the analysis and in its right terms – that of formation. In the centre I come from we work a great deal in this field, on the dual front of theological thought and concrete help at the level of guidance and accompanying to help people enter a real spiritual life. We have also engaged in thought with specific courses on the relationship between spiritual formation and the help that can come from the human sciences, and above all from psychology. And increasingly there has emerged the primacy of spiritual formation as a real point of synthesis which can also contain everything else.

In recent years a great deal of reference has been made to the formation of those who provide formation and almost always, in order to provide them with formation, they have been given psychological training. There have been good results but also many problems, and to such an extent that today one can see in many contexts a reaction involving the rejection of psychology, in a kind of return to the past which can be worse than a not sufficiently attentive use of psychology itself.

One cannot depart from the human sciences but they must be kept in their place. What really matters is spiritual formation, the formation of believers who are real believers, who love Christ and the gospel. With providers of formation who are, as a consequence, first of all spiritual men and women. Because it is here – and I repeat the point – in an authentic spiritual life of faith that there is the real synthesis of everything that is desirable, from a human point of view as well.

IV/ – a note to end

The service of the organs of government

When taking part in the congress of Rome amongst very many men and women General Superiors, I was also led to think about the services that are requested today of organs of government.

If what has been said hitherto is true, then we first of all need those who can refer us back to that, to our true identity, both as individuals and as communities and institutes. And we here we once again encounter faith and the things of faith – the evangelical quality of our lives.

Yesterday there was a great deal of reference to the dynamic to holiness and conversio morum. Why are these things not more talked about in the today’s religious life? The impression is that in our institutes there is no longer the courage to aim high and deeply. I would even be led to say that there is a great deal of loneliness in today’s religious life and often it is the best who suffer from this. And this is not normal.

The problem, and it is worthwhile making the point, is not sin: religious are and will be always sinners like everyone else; the real problem is the attitude that is adopted towards sin. Whereas to know that we also are sinners does not cause scandal, the fact that at times what cannot be accepted because it is not in harmony with the gospel receives official approval can be disconcerting. We must remember that the choices of individuals are one thing, and the choices of an institute, which is a reality of the Church, are another

It seems to me evident that the Superiors are the first to be involved here. They are the ‘living memory’ of the needs of our vocation and they must be its guarantors. They must do this with much pastoral sensitivity, with the right tolerance and common sense, but today’s religious life, it seems to me, must rediscover the courage to say with clear determination certain ‘nos’ and the Superiors are the spokesmen of this.

The idea is to not propose the method of moralistic condemnations – that would be a waste of time. The problem is once again faith and our rooting in Christ. As examples, and just to be practical, there are the following four things: recognising that faith is the problem; no longer accepting it being taken for granted; humbly confessing our poverty at this level; and returning to the Lord as penitents: conversio morum.

Are we perhaps engaging in inconclusive spiritualism in speaking in this way? I do not think so because the real revolution, that which goes to the root of things and changes everything, can be actuated by Christ alone with the power of his spirit. We were given confirmation of this by John Paul II through the witness that he bequeathed to us. And this is the lesson that comes to us from the saints. St. Francis did not lose time in discussing institutional problems and if he were alive today I do not think that he would give so much importance to the resources of the civilisation of the mass media and technology, or to the human sciences, psychology included. Not even St. Ignatius and St. Benedict would do this. They would know how to enter today’s culture by another route – that of the gospel. And this is the challenge that is also posed to us today.

[1] Cf L. Guccini, ‘Vita religiosa apostolica, interrogativi sull’identità’, in Una comunità per domani (EDB) pp. 175-192.