Preparing for the Fraternity Lent Retreat

Here is my summary of pages 28-40 of the 2008 Spiritual Exercises of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation ("This is the Victory that Conquers the World, Our Faith"). These pages will be the focus of the Fraternity Lent retreat this year.


1. Those who believe have eternal life:

• We first receive this life, which derives from faith, at Baptism: "The only thing that makes faith reasonable is its promise to bring us life. This is why God intervened in history, to bring us this life, and this life reaches us in Baptism" (p. 28).
• "Baptism is the sacrament of faith, which, however needs the community of believers" -- "Baptism encorporates us into the community of believers through the fact of becoming one person in Christ" (29).
• But if we're not careful, we can reduce our companionship to its external appearance: "If there's not a personal 'I' that says 'You' to Christ, as you say it to a man who is present, Christ is 'bleached or faded away from the beautiful and glad appearance of the companionship of faces that should have been a sign pointed to Him!' but we stop there; we stay there with the sign.
• "It's as if one of us had received a stupendous bouquet of flowers, and never tired of talking about the bouquet of flowers, but felt no urgency to say the name, to speak about the person who had given the flowers."
• Two temptations to avoid: "first, conceiving a Christ without Church, that is, excluding Christ from reality, to a far-away supernatural world, and reducing Him to our interpretation or our measure, or, second, having a Church without Christ, where the Church is perceived not as the body of Christ, that makes Him present, but as the substitution of Christ.
• "Jesus Christ isn't a presence isolated in far-off history, so as to seem the fruit of imagination. He is a Presence ten years after His death, a thousand years after His death, two thousand years after His death, up to today, through this different humanity of the saints, a human presence impossible to think up" (33).
• "Anything but Christ in the abstract! He is something so real that through His historical presence in the Church and His witnesses, He becomes a reality that can't be reduced by any attempt of ours, challenging man's heart, reason, freedom, and affection. Anything but abstract!"
• "Our companionship isn't here to spare us the drama of freedom, but to continually provoke our responsibility.... 'Our companionship means not to let time pass without our life asking, seeking, wanting the relationship with God present and without our life wanting or accepting that companionship, without which not even the image of His presence would be true'" (34).
• "Christ reaches us through our communion to introduce us to a relationship with Him, so the Mystery may become familiar" (34).
• "The test of faith, of the true relationship, not virtual, not with someone abstract, is satisfaction. Only if we experience faith as satisfaction, the greatest satisfaction one can imagine, because of the hope that He has brought forth in me, do we have an experience so powerful that it sustains all of life, because life consists in the affection that sustains us most, not outside reality, that sustains in satisfaction, in the unique correspondence that Christ is for life" (36).

2. New Knowledge and affection:

• "The new knowledge is born of the adhesion to an event, born of the affectus for an event to which one is attached, to which one says yes. [ You have to say yes. Faith is a free gesture: you need to say yes to this event, so that this newness can begin to happen.]" (37).
• "To think, starting from an event, means first of all accepting that I don't define that event, but rather, that I'm defined by it" (37).
• "the new judgment is possible only in a continual relationship with reality, in other words, with the human companionship that prolongs in time the initial Event: it proposes the authentic Christian point of view. The Christian Event persists in history, and with it persists the origin of the new judgment" (38).
• "Remaining in the position of origin in which the Event brings forth the new knowledge is the only chance for relating to reality without preconceptions" (38).
• "In order to acquire this, a work is necessary. 'For the mentality to be truly new, it's necessary that out of its consciousness of "belonging," it continually engage in comparison with present events. Since this new mentality is born of a present place, it judges the present. Otherwise it doesn't exist: if it doesn't enter into the experience of the present, the new knowledge doesn't exist, is only an abstraction. In this sense, not to make judgments on events is to mortify faith'" (39).
• "Faith grows in this way, risking it in reality and challenging everything with Him in our eyes. This is why it's not a matter of learning a discourse by heart and repeating it, but learning a gaze, says Fr. Giussani" (39).
  
• "How can we learn this gaze? 'It's a matter of staying before the event encountered': it's the precedence given to the event, to what happens, to what He does" (39).

3. Witness, the task of life:

• "Mission can be nothing other than a more acute awareness of what Christ means for life, because only to the degree that we live this newness will we feel the urgency of mission" (40).

Advent Retreat 2008

Beginning Day, which was only two weeks ago, startled me a bit. I had thought of this previous year as a time when the School of Community I attend was a bit stuck, not yet being publically announced, and not being missionary enough. But at the Beginning Day, I saw that despite my feeling stuck, things in this area have been moving — like the blooming of a flower shown in fast forward.

On Saturday, I attended the Advent retreat, which was up at the Abbey Crypt Church at St. Benedict's Monastery in Atchison, Kansas. Fr. Meinrad led us. I saw Daniele, Salvatore, and others. As usual, Salvatore said a couple of words that really cut through to the core of what I need to do. I saw Francis again and met Michael, two students at Benedictine College. Listening and taking notes have become something ordinary, a continuation or a heightening of the work done during the week or at School of Community. I appreciated the way that Fr. Meinrad brought in lines from the liturgy of this time but also what he has been reading, Mother Teresa's Secret Fire.

I pondered a bit the Messianic secret of St. Mark's Gospel: Jesus tells those cured to say nothing, but they can't help but announce what God has done for them. And, I thought a bit about St. Joseph, who is depicted in a chapel below the Abbey Church. Joseph is holding a mallet in one hand and a nail in the other but he has no tension toward that act. Instead, he watches with care as Jesus the toddler imitates the act with an earnestness. How did Joseph witness to Jesus? He too guarded the Messianic secret, and yet how could it have been kept from anyone that Joseph came into contact with? Jesus is here with us as He was with St. Joseph. Witness begins with a changed humanity and culminates in the explicit announcement, but only after the straining of every sinew has witnessed first.

We do things to tell others that we have done them (observes Pascal), but what is primary is that we take the journey of knowledge first. In Mark's Gospel, the parable of the sower comes a little bit after the pharisees chastise the disciples for picking grain on the Sabbath. Did Jesus see grain fall on the ground at this point and wonder at the destiny of every seed? that one will feed the birds and that one will sprout and die, but that other one will fulfill itself and produce more grain. But this is also how the birds are fed, and man also in more ways than one. So, Jesus would seem to say, the main thing is not first of all telling what happened, repeating to others the impression one had in a moment. Instead, look at what happens, ask what is the ultimate source, meaning, and teleology of it — abide in what happens first of all, for yourself, as an awareness of who cares for you in this way — and then, when you can't hold it in any longer, you may share it with others.

at The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, Rimini

Burundi "Angel" Tells of Rescuing Children

African Testimonies Impact Rimini Meeting

By Antonio Gaspari

RIMINI, Italy, AUG. 28, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The hope-filled eyes of children helped the "angel of Burundi" find God in the midst of Burundi's civil war that cost some 200,000 lives over nearly a dozen years.

Marguerite Barankitse was one of three African women who gave their testimonies at the Rimini meeting organized by the Catholic lay Communion and Liberation movement. The annual meeting is under way through Saturday.

Barankitse saved thousand of people, both Hutus and Tutsis, during the country's civil war.

She explained that her humanitarian work began when she took refuge with Hutu and Tutsi children, and Hutu families in the bishop's residence in Ruygi. The residence was attacked and the refugees were killed before her eyes.

"They were my friends; people I wanted to save. They left me alive because I am Tutsi, but they beat me violently as a traitor," she explained.

When the assailants readied to kill the 25 or so children in the house, Barankitse offered them all her money so they would spare them; the assailants accepted.

So began what today is known as the "Shalom Home," in which over these years Barankitse has taken in some 10,000 children. Today many of them are married and are professionals who continue to cooperate with the mission.

Barankitse has been awarded several international prizes for her work, but she said that in Burundi, many call her the "madwoman."

"But I say this is the fruit of love," she said.

Barankitse affirmed that at first, she wondered why the God of love would allow such things.

"I saw in the eyes of children a hope that was not extinguished and began to understand that God was answering me through their gaze," she said.

Fighting AIDS

The other testimonies were given by two Ugandan women -- Rose Busingye and Vicky Aryenyo, founder and collaborator, respectively, of Kampala's International Meeting Point, an institution that cares for AIDS patients and their families, especially orphaned children.

Busingye, a nurse, explained that she found "in the infinite value of people" the strength to oppose so much evil.

"It is the recognition of the other that creates the reality, and that is present in the company of the Church," she said.

Aryenyo, a volunteer at the Meeting Point, said her life changed when she discovered, during her third pregnancy, that she had contracted AIDS from her husband. She said she wanted to die and rejected all help.

"Rose went to find me to help me and to convince me to be healed," Aryenyo said. "I kept rejecting her, until one day she said to me: 'Give me the child, because he has a life ahead.'

"We know that Lazarus is resurrected. If you haven't seen a miracle, it's here, it is me. It all began with a meeting, and this meeting has resurrected my life. In Christ, Rose has given me a person on whom to lean."

The Task of the Vacations

We would like to offer to you this "wish" that Father Giussani gave to some university students in the summer of 1991:

The Task of the Vacations

“Every step of discovery along the journey in our companionship is like arriving in a new land," says Pavese. If you remember what we have said in the work that you do during this summer, then your life will produce the only flower of the tree of life: mission. Communicating the truth to the other, is more than the act of generation of a mother when gives birth to a child. Mission is generating man. As the Pope said, mission means above all communicating to the other the reasons for the experience of your own conversion. So the real challenge is memory. To say, "the reasons for your own conversion" means discovering something that has changed in your own life as regards happiness, gladness, gusto, and truth; it means discovering something that has changed and for this reason can be met. It's something that is already there, it's the "physicality" of an event, because it is something that has changed. My wish is that this summer produces in you a greater wonder for the truth and therefore more awareness of yourselves and of your belonging, more happiness or gladness and a greater missionary impulse. The missionary impulse is not a plan or a program, but is a person who is changed for having acknowledged the fact of his belonging. What is important in us is an Other.”

We would like to stress a couple of points that marked the way Father Giussani taught us to live the vacations.

1. The purpose of the vacation is to educate us to become familiar with the Presence who "dwells among us". Therefore, a great emphasis must be given to the beauty and the unity among us. The beauty of nature, the beauty of the place where we stay, and the beauty of every gesture (from eating, to singing, to praying, to playing). The schedule and the various activities must facilitate the common life.

2. The highest moment of this familiarity is the common prayer in the way the charism taught us. In every vacation the day together should start with the Angelus, morning prayers, and a couple of songs in which we ask, above all, to be made happy for the day by His Presence.

• Published July 2005 in "The CL Monthly," Volume 1, Issue 3