Workshop on the Passionist Charism
Las Presas. July 2006
From july 2nd until july 8th in the Passionist Community of Las Presas, Cantabria, religious, nuns and lay from the Passionist Iberian Family met. We were nearly sixty people, participating in the "workshop on the Passionist Charisma " Father Octavio Mondragón, a Mexican Passionist priest, directed, encouraged and motivated this workshop. The days went by with an atmosphere of reflection and celebration, showing and sharing life, its worries, its inquiries, together with the discoveries or rediscoveries that were raised as we went penetrating in the charismatic dimensions that wrap up human history and constitute our most radical existence.
The dynamics of the workshop had a conductive thread which was proposed by "Centro-Forum" of the Congregation for revitalizing and deepening. It was the road of knowledge and experience. Father Octavio with great vivacity, pedagogy and proximity, was offering keys so that we could accomplish this road at personal and group levels, by participating and interacting, so that we could rediscover and expirience the origin that configures our minds and hearts from the Act of Revelation and Donation in which God consists. The happenings of these days had as matrix the biblical experience from the creative act to the great revelation of God in the Crucified Messiah going through the biblical paradigms of Abraham, Isaiah and Jeremiah. All of them showed us the evidences of the God of the History that in his Act of Happening recreates, renews and puts in front of us a new existence that consents to His ineffable presence, overflowing and holy.
With great unity during the day, the moments of exposure filled with lived intuitions and synthetic presentations, together with moments of personal work, of reflection, community sharing and celebration the day culminated. The celebration of the Eucharist, at the end of the afternoon, allowed us to express all that was worked during the day evidencing our been summoned by the Word of the Lord. that at this time constituted us, again, as individuals before him, invited 'to see and to hear' and to correspond with the welcome and the readiness of those called to be 'new creation.'
The itinerary proposed from Centro Forum consists of these four stages: 1.Contemplative glance of reality that takes place in silence, solitude and prayer; 2.Contemplative reading of the Sacred Scripture with the key of going out to the encounter of the Living God; 3. The revelation and contemplation of the Living God in the Crucified Messiah and 4.The charismatic dynamics that God causes in the history of human kind.
This whole formative or conforming process seeks to be an invitation to recapture the 'arjé' as the origin that constitutes us, the source that offers in all its purity, its fecundity and uniqueness, the absolute Generous Act and Gift that God is. Allowing ourselves to be shocked by this origin our contemporary status is shown with the paradigms of the revelation that culminate in Jesus, Son of God, Crucified Messiah. And again we attend the re-creational possibility of the Spirit of God that shows us He who made of Pablo Danei Pablo of the Cruz.
Life as Creation in Act and Contemplation as an answer. This has been the first tract of our itinerary in this workshop. The linguistic and symbolic universe formed by the words contemplation, silence, solitude and prayer have presented us the attitudes or ways of existence that provoke the perception of reality as creation. This is said in an unspeakable way, it shows its overflowing gratuity, and it is pronounced from her inviolable sanctity. And the human being welcomes from the astonishment, the reverence and the respect, preparing to distill humanity in an unique act of surprise, reception and affirmation of the greatness and inexpressible of life. A new perception of existence is born here as an event new and gratuitous, origin of the most surprising and sublime creativity. Silence raises 'more inhabited' from which words arise, always at infinite and at the same time necessary distance, as witness of the ineffable and of He who is Ineffable. The solitude abandons the solipsism to perceive the first communion and the plenitude that anticipates, making each encounter a fertile invitation of the Spirit. Prayer ceases to be a mere activity or a set of acts to become the conscience of the petition of He who being Presence summons making us and claiming for our participation to Continue his Ineffable Act of Dynamic Donation. That’s how a new human being is born, one who has been made Responsible Today of the permanent Presence that makes eternal time, history of salvation
The encounter with the Living God happens to us. In some sense, the discovery of reality as creation claims for the Living God. However this is not a mere process of simple and flat continuity. He assumes and offers himself with 'paradoxical' features. The perception of knowledge of this pedagogy has been the second tract of our route. The people of the Holly Scripture is constituted by this Paradoxical Presence of the Living God. Their history will always be the answer to the permanent happening of each changing circumstance of today. Abraham's history, in the successive readings and re-readings carried out in the biblical experience, shows the process of believing in the diversity of situations before a surprising and paradoxical God that opens unforeseeable roads, lacking of secondary supports and making it possible to be and to live from 'its dreams and projects for humanity.' To be located, to allow to be located, in this fascinating, startling communion and dynamics inaugurates a new way to be human.
Moses and the Prophets are located before this God that in the first place is Action and Act. Specially the prophets, Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah, captured and in some sense seduced, they are snatched by the 'pathos' of God, for their passion made of love, justice, suffering, burning proximity and begetting dynamism. The historical and social situations evidenced with meridian clarity all human intent to put resistances to the provocation of Yahvé. The Prophet will read reality in the way of God and will pronounce his word, mere verification of the Word for which he has been constituted, aware of his responsibility overcoming the resistances that besiege him.
In the Act of revelation of the Father happened in the Crucified Messiah.
Contemplation of the Crucified. This third stage more than a chronological step added to a series is the radical act and fusion of the Father's Presence in History and in Creation. In him God is made, in some sense, the God of the History and of Eschatology showing on what consists the Act of Donation and Generosity .We consent to this environment guided by the texts of Paul, especially 1ª Cort. 1, 18-25; 26-31. The "logos of the cross" in front of the Greek knowledge or the Jewish signs introduces a new configuration that is shown as alternative to other visions of the world, mainly those that have as root the power, the knowledge or the prestige. The 'Logos of the Cross' that sprouts from the Crucified Messiah shows the Father's Act and his Passion for humanity that here makes and it re-makes the whole humanity. It is the act of the new creation that assumes the whole humanity, through love he is able to undo the old man giving sense and creativity, constituting witnesses, opening a fissure in the established order, allowing and facilitating an alternative community that begins with what doesn't count, for the last thing and therefore it’s inclusive. To contemplate the Crucified Messiah, the Son of the Living God, is to attend the Father's Dynamics that constitutes the Son as New Creation carrying out in him the assumption of the history of humanity and creating witnesses that seeing and hearing become the presence of his same dynamism. The apostle Pablo is very aware of this new action and of the presence of the Spirit that now energizes from the interior the happenings of history. The communion of Father and Son in all their history, with the dramatization that implies, in the cross becomes also trial and accusation, provocation and commitment, gestation and reconciliation. Claiming for charismatic communities inserted in the passion of God and therefore compassionate and Samaritans, environments where the scream of victims can resound and the affliction and the stupor of this world that denies in practice the paternity of God and the fraternity carried out in Jesus Christ.
The charismatic action of the Spirit as historical dynamism. It has been present in the whole journey but pedagogically it was the moment to approach it directly. The people of the Bible was constituted by the permanent act of responding to the irruption of God, for the action of its 'ruah.' That’s how this midráshic way of existence that consists on welcoming the revelation as a creative moment that it is expressed by saying and making the presence of Yahvé permanent. John’s Gospel was presented as the interpretive and paradigmatic key of the acts of God that Jesus incarnates opening up in the seventh day to the action of the disciples.
The happening of the Spirit puts us in our today provoking the readiness, the following of Jesus and the cooperation in constructing the New Community that springs from the Act of the New Creation that the Father is permanently offering to Humanity. Again we are located by the contemplation in the origin of which we sprout and where we are. The Alliance is renewed and as People of God by the Father's Act in the Crucified Messiah we are correspondents to History with the force of the Spirit. This dynamics makes of Passion of God the first and fundamental charisma, the origin of all peculiarity.
With prophetic sense we were invited to point out our today's peculiarities, to confront ourselves with our resistances to the Act of God Father and to explicit the characteristics of our contemplative existence as caused by the Passion of God through the Crucified Messiah. Our journey made during these days culminated in an act of welcome made prayer and confession, commitment and healing , readiness and trust, placed before the God that gives himself in History and the New Creation in the Son.
The evaluation of the encounter was very positive. The road in which the congregation is immersed was highlighted to say the charisma again, as correspondence to the gift of God; the presentation carried out was valued insisting in the creative moment in which we were introduced and the rediscovery of the original and peculiar that must accompany all charismatic options. We Confessed in faith that astonishment and veneration took place, silence and contemplation, impact and readiness, for God Father who is a loving happening, dynamic and gratuitous in its Son, Crucified Messiah, and Creative Force in its Spirit.
José Luis Quintero