SYNODALITY AND SPIRITUALITY OF THE INCARNATION
By: Msgr. Ubaldo Santana FMI
(COMMUNITY DAYS FMI CHAVAGNES-EN-PAILLERS)
INTRODUCTION
The call to pastoral and missionary conversion, one of the energizing nuclei of synodality, involves all sectors of the people of God. The consecrated life is part of that people, it walks within it and it is within it that it bears witness in the world. In summoning us, the Pope bases his urgent invitation on the same motives that the Second Vatican Council used to urge the renewal of consecrated life. Both yesterday and today, it is the entire Church that is called to place itself in a state of renewal. It is a question of returning to the freshness of the Gospel, of centering the entire reforming process around the person and message of Jesus Christ, (EG 26). This renewal the Council saw in turn as a permanent reformation of itself out of fidelity to Jesus. It is both about "ressourcing", that is,returning to the origins, and "aggiornamentoarsi", that is, adapting our language and our options to the new signs of the times to enter into a true dialogue between ourselves, with the other sectors of the people of God and with civilization in full gestation.
This call to ecclesial conversion must be taken into account by consecrated persons because this ecclesial sector is indebted to the spirit and letter of that event. In clerical institutes came the disease of clericalization. The clergy were sacralized, the associated laity were clericalized, authority became vertical and imposing, and he moved away from his vocation of service. One would have to wonder if this departure from the evangelical lifestyle influenced the drastic decrease in consecrated lay people, called lay brothers, and caused their disappearance and why in several religious institutes male lay brothers asked to be admitted to the diaconate.
Also for the consecrated life, novelty must be sought first of all in the gospel itself and not in structures or methods. Returning to the gospel must be the generating nucleus of our conversion. Similar he said; "We all have to start over from Christ" (A 12). To this path of return to these fundamental sources Aparecida gave the name of pastoral and missionary conversion, integrated. The third part of this document has an entire segment dedicated to this topic under the title “The Life of Jesus Christ for Our Peoples” (NN 365-372). There it is said that "no community should excuse itself from entering decisively with all its strength, in the constant processes of missionary renewal and from abandoning the outdated structures that no longer favor the transmission of the faith" (365).
We see then that the participation of consecrated life in this ecclesial movement of renewal is decisive, not only because it is involved together with all the other members of the Church, but also ,and above all, because it has something of its own and indispensable to contribute to the updating of the pastoral care of communion, since its fundamental presuppositions are needed at this moment: to follow Jesus Christ in radicality from the Beatitudes, to assume the evangelical way of being and living Christ from the poor, to give personal and community witness to Jesus Christ, to contribute to the transformation of society using the charism received.
It is up to him to communicate the joy of the gospel by discerning the new signs of the times, to keep pace with its pace of renewal with the rest of the Church and particularly with the laity, being part of the people of God and giving his irreplaceable contribution in working side by side with others so that the laity become subjects of evangelization and place themselves in the front line of the transformation of earthly realities from which a more just, freer and fraternal world emerges.
It is up to him to contribute so that the Church moves from a pastoral of mere conservation to a missionary pastoral. Their witness must show the way for the Church to effectively become the home of the poor, of the simple, of the workers, of the peasants and of the men and women of the immense belts of misery that vegetate on the peripheries of the big cities. So that the Word of God is returned to the simple people and they learn to read it from their own realities and find in it the light and strength they need, to be generators of unity, hope, work, fraternity, in a more just and supportive society.
They must be more directly and creatively involved in the elaboration of diocesan procedural plans, based on reality and the word of God, designed, elaborated and executed so that the "proclamation of the gospel of Christ reaches people, shapes communities and has a profound impact through the witness of evangelical values in society and culture" (A 371). They must be sensitized and attentive so that, in the elaboration of these instruments, the laity are taken into account in all phases: they are consulted, listened to, participate in discernment, in decision-making, in planning and execution. They must be frontline witnesses so that the plans are open doors and windows that allow us to welcome, build relationships, fraternize and learn from those who do not share our faith.
WHAT CHARACTERIZES THE CORRIENTESPIRITUAL OF THE INCARNATION?
I will now present in this second part, in a very generic and succinct way, some notes that outline the spiritual current called the Incarnation as it has been configured since the end of the nineteenth century.
I start from the following assumption: the goal of the Christian life is participation in Trinitarian communion, which is the very essence of God. This is the principle and foundation of the Christian vocation: the Triune God Himself. And it's not a theory. This experience has been lived in the Church for more than two thousand years. There were times when other spiritual currents took hold. But with the spiritual renewal that arose in the wake of Luther's Reformation and the Council of Trent, it emerged with renewed strength in what is known as the French school of spirituality with leading figures such as Cardinal de Bérulle, Charles de Condren, Jean Jacques Olier among others. Our founder Louis Marie Baudouin would belong to this spiritual current. And in these last centuries they were lived and updated by exemplary figures such as Antoine Chevrier, Charles de Foucauld, Madeleine Delbrel.
This fundamental vocation was fully revealed and manifested to us, when the times reached their fullness, with the incarnation of the Son of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The great patristic currents of the Eastern Church, with St. Gregory of Nyssa and the West, with St. Irenaeus and St. Augustine, have not ceased to repeat that the Son of God became man so that man could become a son of God. That faith and following Jesus of Nazareth is the way to learn to live from this earth the only and decisive truth: Trinitarian communion. The Trinity incarnated (in his second person) in a man so that men could “incarnate” in the Trinity by, in, and with Jesus.
The Christian life thus becomes a process of permanent conversion to Christ or process of "Christification", not only as a material imitation of the life of Jesus, but as full and total communion-participation with Him. In the Gospel of John this certainty is repeated in many ways: "As the Father who sent me lives and I live through the Father, so he who eats me will live through me... If anyone loves me he will keep my word, my Father will love him, we will come to him and live in him" (Jn 6:57; 14:23).
Through Christ we have known that God in his essence is love. He has told us this with his life, his Gospel, his gestures, his signs and above all with his death and resurrection. Thanks to him we know that love is not something but "someone": It is Christ. And we have known that love and we have learned that we have been created by a God of Love, in his image and likeness, that is, capable of participating in that trinitarian love.
The incarnate Son of God is the only ladder to access the intra-Trinitarian life, he is the only door. Only through him is our only vocation possible: to live in Trinitarian love. The only condition therefore is to follow him, to live as he lived, to love as he loved. I come to the Father through the Son, who became man like me, and from that condition the Spirit of love communicates to me. The Christian ideal depends entirely on being able to access and participate in that love not only in its earthly incarnation but in its originating version in the bosom of the three Trinitarian persons.
Love is only one, but the manifestation of that love needs to be communicated in three directions: it needs to have towards whom it communicates that love; a direction "from"that receives in turn the correspondence of the love manifested; and a direction "with", product and fruit of love given and received. In an analogical way, we could say that the first dimension is identified with the Father, whose source love overflows and goes out looking for communication. The second direction would be proper to the Son "beloved of the Father". The third (shared gift) would correspond to the Holy Spirit.
I have dared to make this elementary sketch with the desire to show, not the Trinitarian circumincession itself, divine grace that can only be experienced in heaven,but the way in which the communion of love existing in the Trinity and revealed by the incarnation of the Logos, is in reality the true paradigm of Christian life both at the personal and community level and the model of every evangelizing and catechetical process.
From this vision are also derived the main virtues cultivated by the spirituality of the incarnation. The Father, in giving his beloved Son to the world, in letting go of him to send him into the world, identifies himself with poverty. The Son, who obeys his Father and strips himself of his divinity to make himself equal to us in everything except sin, identifies himself with obedience and humility. The Holy Spirit, being a joint gift of love shared by the Father and the Son, identifies with the mission in permanent departure to give and communicate salvation through the practice of love.
It is therefore not surprising that the spirituality of the Incarnation lived and spread in recent centuries bears the stamp of a Trinitarian spirituality, and that the attitudes and virtues privileged by all those who have experienced and communicated it are the following of Jesus poor, humble and obedient, the total surrender and absolute abandonment in the hands of the Father and the life given and sacrificed to others as a total gift of love, following in the footsteps of Jesus of Nazareth. Without wanting to force the bar or establish artificial parallels, it seems to me that many of these characteristics are present in Luis María Baudouin's devotion to the Incarnate Word. The celebration of the Incarnation bears a markedly Trinitarian seal and rhythm. The poverty, austere life, obedience, humility, and sacrificial offering of the followers of the Word are also the most salient virtues in his many letters and writings.
And if we now look at the Second Vatican Council, we realize that the main documents have bring a totally Trinitarian introduction, and not the theological trinity but what the church fathers called the economic trinity. The Church is presented as a universal sacrament of salvation and of the communion of men with each other and with God. The figure, the message, the Passover of Christ Jesus regains its centrality as a way of salvation and pneumatology, animates the whole emergence of the renewal of all Christian states and the ministry of the Church.
At this point, I think we are in a position to answer the question we asked ourselves at the beginning: What is the contribution of the spirituality of the Incarnation to the whole renewing, reforming and missionary dynamic of synodal conversion? Let me in this concluding part rather adopt the tone of meditation.
As we outlined in the first part “Synodality expresses the life and mission of the Church. This new Castilian word has as its background the Greek verb συνοδεζω (synodeúō), which means "to go with", " to be on the way together", "to accompany". In the present participle it designates the "companions", like that group that went with Saul on the road to Damascus (cf. Acts 9: 7).
I wonder, who walks with whom? In a first response we can say God walks with man. But for God to walk with man they must first meet. In the first testament God walks with a people through other men. In Egypt and in the wilderness he walks with Israel through Moses; in the conquest of the promised land he walks with the tribes of Israel through Joshua and further before the judges. In the time of kings he walks with Israel and Judah through David and his successors. The Wisdom books describe the time when Wisdom will pitch her tent in the midst of men.
It will be in the fullness of time when God himself, through his Son, the Logos, will meet man in person. That encounter occurs at the moment of the Incarnation. The wonderful moment, before which there is no other attitude than admiration and adoring silence, in which God becomes man in the womb of a virgin named Mary. It is the moment of the Incarnation: The Word becomes man and begins to walk with and in the midst of men. God had to humble himself, lower himself, reduce himself in order to be able to meet the human creature again.
In reality, God was in search of man from the very moment the first couple crossed the threshold of Eden and the access door was closed, guarded by a fire angel. But also on the other hand the human being was also in search of God from that very moment. But it was God who put everything he had to do his part to get to where his creature lay, the one he had made of clay and the breath of his breath. In order to walk with him, it was first necessary that he go down to look for him where he lay.
One of the articles of the Creed, our fundamental profession of faith, reads thus, in Latin: Passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus et sepultus, descendit in inferos. He descended into hell. What are those "hells" into which Christ had to descend? It is all those realities of personal and social sin that were moving man further and further away from his true dignity and condition. When I was asked this question in the final exam of the Gregorian, I did not know how to answer it. Throughout my life and my pastoral ministry I have discovered first in myself and then in reality and in the world what those "hells" are.
And all of us who are here who have gone through a part of the twentieth century and what goes on in the twenty-first know what those hells Jesus has to go down to and those who follow him to meet man and his miseries, his fragilities, his littleness, his outpourings of greatness and power. The hells of the death camps, of the gulags, of the ghettos, of the increasingly destructive chemical wars, of those mutilated by anti-personnel mines, of aborted human beings, of the clinically murdered elderly, of the stateless displaced, of the migrants who are shipwrecked in the Mediterranean, of those summarily executed for their religious beliefs, the millions of children subjected to all kinds of slavery.
To what hells under Christ Jesus? a. How many hells, throughout our human history, has Christ not ceased to descend with his cross and his wounds to redeem them with his blood? How many of the hells of our repeated, inveterate sins has he not come down to get us out of them, one by one, with patience, with mercy, with great compassion? “Christ will be in agony until the end of the world; there is no sleeping during this time” (Blaise Pascal, Thoughts).
In order for synodality to take place, to walk with, to walk together, the incarnational encounter with the last of the last must first take place. That's what Jesus did. That's what the Church of Jesus has to do. That is what it is up to us followers of the Spirituality of the Incarnation to do. For there to be synodality, there must first be "incarnationality". For this we must go down like Jesus all the steps, to the last, to the most remote of hells. No one can be left out of the search to invite them to go out and embark on another path, the path of a dignified life that leads to a full life.
That is why the men and women who live this spirituality, live it from the little ones, the impoverished, the discarded, the unaccounted for, the disqualified, the dehumanized. The spirituality of the Incarnation teaches us to seek, find and walk with the most forgotten. And he walks with them taking into account all the dimensions of their lives (the personal and the social-community) and seeks not his own protagonism but to make present the person and the message of Jesus, particularly the Gospel the Kingdom of God.
Its primary target group are the poor, and from them its invitation becomes universal, it summons all human beings, in whatever situation they find themselves. Only by giving Jesus Christ in this way and by giving ourselves with him can we know him and experience the profound and inexhaustible mystery of his redeeming love. As Paul says, in him are hidden all the treasures of knowledge and knowledge and only he with his own life has opened the door so that we can "understand together with all the consecrated the breadth and length, the height and depth, in a word, that we know the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge, so that we will be filled with the fullness of God" (Eph 3:17 -19), which is none other than the fullness of Love that becomes the Trinity of God.
The walk of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ with man is to be translated in turn into a learning of walking together. With Jesus we learn to abandon the egotistical and individualistic "I" and to discover the attractiveness and strength of being a "we", a community. This is the experience that the Church, sacrament of communion, Church, faithful people of God, Church, body of Christ, Church driven and inhabited by the Holy Spirit that makes it ministerial, diaconal, servant, Samaritan, wants to communicate to us.
Finally, the Incarnation of the Son is an encounter with the human being, with the whole human being, with all human beings and with the human and cultural contexts where the men and women of the world develop, work, build, advance, progress, grow. The Incarnation is the most daring, unusual and daring missionary "outing" in the history of humanity. With it opens the door to hope for all human beings of any condition, reality. The dialogue that has begun with the assumption of the human condition by the beloved Son of the Father forces us all in the Church to become apprentices and students of the School of the Incarnation. The school of the Incarnation is the great school for learning ecclesial, missionary and human synodality.
What is given in the Mass is paradigmatic and is to be given throughout the believer's life. The human couple was entrusted with the garden of the universe. It is precisely in this original identity reflective of God in man, which gives full meaning to human work. At the moment of the offering, the priest does not present to God wheat but bread, fruit of the earth and man's work; he does not present bunches of grapes, but wine, fruit of the vineyard and human labor.
This collaboration, these united hands and heart, is what Paul calls reasonable worship, the true worship with which we praise, worship, and bless God in time, on the way to eternity (Rom 12: 1). Everything must be the result of an encounter between human weakness and divine grace, between human effort and the divine presence. Each man, with the work of his calloused hands, with the sweat of his brow, is an incarnation, in his respective profession or trade, and will be all the more person the better this alliance is given between his hands and his understanding, between his loving and wise Creator and him. Charity must be the principle that animates and sustains the testimony of each moment lived. Only what is done with the love of Christ has eternal value, whatever the condition and provenance of the person.
Il y a una phrase de Térence que le Pape Saint Paul VI aimait faire sienne : " Je suis un homme et rien de ce qui est humain, je crois, ne m'est étranger ". Nous serons disciples de l 'Incarnactionet de ses divines suites et compagnons de route de Louis Marie Baudouinet disciples quand nous serons capables de faire synodalité non seulement entre nous, ce qui est deja pas mal, en Eglise, ce qui est mieux sans doute mais aussi avec toute l'humanité, ce qui est parfait. “ C 'est ainsi que nous deviendrons les fils de notre Pere , qui est aux cieux, car il fait lever son soleil sur les méchants et sur les bons e tomber la pluie sur les justes et les injustes ” (Mt 5:45).
Merci, fréres, de votre attention et surtout de votre patience.