Renewal
Course, Passionist Congregation Forum Center
San Giuseppe, Monte Argentario.
20th – 24th October, 2004
The Passionist Congregation’s
Committee for the
Father Octavio’s course, as was
stated in a letter written at the time it was being organized, was arranged
around the following four points:
1.
The
recovery of an attitude of contemplation and awe accessible to and necessary
for everybody.
2.
Discovery
of the living God, the God of the Scriptures, as He manifested himself to the
Hebrew people of the Old Testament and to the Church of the New Testament.
3.
The
Christological moment, centered on the Paschal Mystery and contemplation of the
Crucified Lord.
4.
How
to maintain and call to mind the Memory of the Crucified Lord (the Passionist
moment.)
Given that the Forum Center does not
intend to merely be a forum which provides doctrinal documentation on the
Passionist charism, but wishes to also be a place for renewal, both
experimental as well as theoretical and practical, the course, facilitated by
Fr. Octavio, was shared by all those present and was received by everyone in
the richness of its provocative nature, faithful to theological and biblical
tradition in stunning harmony with all those values which constitute the foundation
of the Passionist charism.
The course was likewise successful
thanks to the pedagogy and art of the facilitator, who managed, almost
maieuticaly, to evoke in those present a sense of amazement at the basis and
unquestionable outlines which both motivate and contribute to what is
specifically Passionist.
A novelty was the fact that the
participants, both religious and lay, felt themselves drawn toward the present
day beauty and richness of the Passionist charism, experienced in the
contemplative awe evoked by the Word of God within which the Verbum Crucis is
contained.
In so far as that the task of the
Forum Center is presented as that of the Passionist Family as such, it was easy for those
present to feel a need to discover at an ever greater depth the charism of St.
Paul of the Cross and thus follow it once more in accord with its original
lines of intuition and structure, especially in Passionist formation, be it
among men or women religious or members of the laity, as well as in a renewed
formation of the Passionist community.
The course which was the original
idea of the
The course consisted of four
formative moments, always well grounded in an intelligent and competent reading
of Scripture.
1 - A first,
contemplative moment, dealing on reality, God and his Word led to an inevitable
recovery of strategic knowledge of our charism, to wit:
A rediscovery of the value of
SILENCE in order to better LISTEN, leading to SOLITUDE, which serve to extract us
from the mediocrity and triviality into which
religious life has managed to sink in these modern times! Is this not
perhaps the very premise posited by our founder in order to enter in sym-pathy
into the knowledge of God and the God of the Cross? Perchance do not silence in
order to listen and solitude
constitute the supporting pillars which our founder recommended
pedagogically to his sons? Only thus can a Passionist listen to what is
ineffable: to the ineffable voice of God and even more so to the ineffable
message of the Cross and the ineffable history which, in its shadow, is ever more a
symbol which alludes not only to God but, above all, to the Cross itself, which
defines God in the course of human events. In all truth it is only in silence
that one can prepare oneself to react to the cross of history, and to God’s
Cross. This is the grateful memory of our Lord’s Passion as both therapy and
salvation, offered to the crosses of humanity and history.
Silence leads one to a sense of
amazement in confrontation with the universal symbol, it allows one to listen
and it causes one to desire the “sonorous” solitude, a nuptial solitude which
fills one with God and his readings and salvific interventions in history, even
that of the third millennium. The silence of listening and the solitude will
cause one to enter into that amazement which fills one with the perfection of
gratuity. We are nothing (POVERTY) and live poverty as another form of silence;
one opens up from one’s nothingness to what is wholly GRATUITOUS... and so
comes to discover the living God.
2 – The second moment, that of the encounter
with the living God, had helped us not only lo look upon God, but also to
accept God’s gaze upon history through the experience of the faith-history of
the people of
Thus was a triangle revealed whose
three terms are inseparably united: God offers himself not only to the gaze,
first and foremost, of the individual, but also of the people, of that
community which receives the individual in its midst, and presents to the
people of God his gaze upon history. This is to say that God, people and
history form as it were a
triangle whose points impinge upon one another in an indivisible
manner, which is called Love. The God of love reveals himself to the people in
the course of history and leads them to love that history.
Jesus is in the midst of this
triangle and draws together all the points, because God has become the people,
has become history. Therefore Jesus has come to tell us that God is Love in
himself and bears in himself the connotations of intra-doctrinal Kenosis. Jesus
takes charge of the people and he saves history through love.
God does not save through worldly
power; rather, entering into the chaos he saves through the weakness and power
of love. Thus cyclical time is broken; time can only be paschal,
which is to say determined, in a direct line, by a sharing of the Cross.
Anyone contemplating God will
therefore do so as community, as Passionist Community, and as community he
absorbs the criteria of weakness in order to descend into the chaos of history.
This means that the Passionist, with his contemplative gaze set upon the God of
the Bible, cannot help but assume today the very same intuition of
The Passionist community and the
Passionists within their communities bear witness through their existence and
apostolic culture to a mentality which is at the antipodes of the arrogance of
the world.
3. The third moment is
that of contemplation of the Crucifix.
This moment was taken up by a
discerning reading of I Corinthians which reveals the essence of St. Paul’s
culture, which saw in Christ the one and only focus of Christian and human
attention, showing that the Crucifix, rather than forming part of the theology
of the Cross, forms part of the cross of every theology, of every spirituality,
of all human conduct. Absent this focus on the Crucifix we remain with but
opinions which in turn are preludes to divisions. Unity is acquired through a
contemplative gaze of the Crucifix. And it was brilliantly underlined that
Jesus’ Passion is above all else his Father’s Passion. The Passion of the
Father, the pathos of the Father, is the only power by which God comes in touch
with the world and history. Before Jesus, it is the Father who suffers (here we
are far away from the term “Father-Passion!”) and if Jesus indeed suffers, his
suffering is part of the work of his Father which Jesus assumes in himself (cf
Jn
Meditation on the Passion is
therefore translated as “Pro-vocation,.” which is to
say a vocation to share in the Compassion of God the Father. Jesus suffers,
lives the chaos of history and presents it to the Father for salvation. A
Passionist is called to resurrect, in a very decisive way, a theology of
vocation, at the base of which is a sharing of that original sharing by Jesus in the
pathos of his Father! Once again we stress that moment of contemplation of our
Passionist life we need to urgently recover, lest every effort at restructuring
and inculturation be sterile.
At this point, precisely due to the
triangular logic: God, people and history, in the midst of which is Jesus
Crucified, the Passionist community cannot afford to be absent from an urgent
reflection on the lifestyle of a community, and it simply cannot but desist
from the sarkikoi mode of thinking
and living (i.e. carnal and mundane,) so as to be able to assume a pneumatic
conformation in accordance with the Spirit. And this is where the pneumatic
anthropology of I Cor 2 comes to our aid which follows on the theology of the
Cross of I Cor 1:17-25. Only by following and witnessing to a pneumatic
theology of our own communities it was said, can one become a home to others,
an alternative space to that of worldliness and the beginning of an evangelical
world. Passionists, prior to putting things into effect, should represent an
anti-worldliness through their modus vivendi.
Those present at the course were
glad at meeting one another again and seeing the progress, albeit in a somewhat
generalized sense, of our community.
4. The forth stage or
moment was that reserved for the consequences of the previous three, applied to
the Passionist charism.
Accompanied by abundant biblical
documentation, this dealt especially on John’s Gospel and was based around the
key category of our Passionist charism, which is that of discipleship. Whoever
follows Jesus as a disciple will come to the origins, the very arkè, which is
the foundation of everything and the unifying center of our identity. John’s
Gospel seems to be characterized by the category of “substitution,” e.g. the
By means of the seven signs given us
by John we see Jesus leading his disciples into “seeing” through listening and
believing.
The Passionist charism therefore is
a gift offered to all the Passionist community in the measure in which we
attend his school, become a school for disciples of Christ who learn from Him
how to recognize his Father’s ways and how the Father saves. The community is
not a mere sociological category, a group of persons trying to get along together.
The community is a school for disciples searching for the Father’s road, the
same one he has shown us in the Cross of his Son.
At his farewell supper Jesus left
his friends his testament of love. And love is to create a new life space which
will also allow others to live. In other words the disciples, through Jesus,
have discovered the ontology of the Father. The ontology of
God, which is to say his compassion for mankind. In the Passionist
community, at a high level of contemplative concentration – which was precisely
why our founder recommended spending a long time at the foot of the Crucifix
where every kind of science can be learned – one comes to learn the ontology of
God’s compassion, as one also learns the pathos of God, as was expressed and lived
by Jesus on the Cross. Once again, it is keeping close to Jesus on the Cross
that broadens the confines of our culture and contributes to our own creativity
as we too give our bodies, as did Jesus before us, to the pathos with which God
loves men and desires their fundamental salvation, not simply categorical
salvations (cf Jn 3: 16).
A conclusive image is provided in Jn
15, the parable of the vine and the branches: Jesus being the vine, the
disciples the branches. The fruit is a sign of the new life, the salvation
wrought by God’s compassion which was shared by Jesus’ disciples.
It is possible to produce fruit
according to the charism of God’s compassion for a world to be saved, through
the memory of the Passion of Jesus, our lives being essentially grafted onto Jesus and living in
Jesus. We can be assisted in this spiritual and cultural operation in Rm 12: 1-2 : a community which becomes a living and holy sacrifice,
pleasing to God while shunning the ways of the world. In this way we contribute
to our own freedom and the freedom of everyone else, as well as to that of
creation itself. An anthropology marked by the sign of the Cross produces a
contemplative and culturally operative gaze upon things, upon creation and upon
history. In fact creation itself is groaning for the freedom of the children of
God and the consequences of our Passionist charism (cf Rom 8).
However, everything depends upon the
beginning, i.e. the contemplative gaze upon God, on the anthropology of God’s
compassion which is poured out upon history at the key point of the crucified
love of his Son.
In the course of these days the
rediscovery of prayer in our Congregation has surfaced! Our Passionist Family
wishes to be and to move in this spirit.
This then is the urgent
restructuring to be carried out, even before that which is being presently
mooted, i.e. a geographical, numerical and territorial restructuring within the
village in which even we Passionists, the whole Passionist family, live.
The atmosphere during
this course has been one of simplicity and familiarity. There has been a
wonderful and sincere amount of fraternizing between the divers
participants. Interest was especially keen during the talks which were
pedagogically very efficient. A negative note might be that community prayer
was confined to the evening celebration of the Eucharist. However it is also
true that the time spent listening and sharing together following the
suggestions that were made was also perceived as prayer!
The course, which lasted four
intensive days, would be worth going over slowly, allowing for at least a three month
process of assimilation. But this could
well be the duty of our
Fr. Gianni Sgreva, C.P.