Monday, July 21, 2014

Revitalizing a real community: with different persons of different ages and different cultures.


  1. The following points i found in a book called "Community Life Seminar" by Piarist Fathers, Madrid

    1.We that arrived in the community before yesterday, those that came yesterday, those who have just arrived and those arriving tomorrow have the same rights and needs. They dream of the same evangelical community of followers.
  2. The community needs to express and live, n ot just to function. The functioning conditions the prophecy. They are functional times and for them, what we are doing is structuring, organizing and coordinating... Thus, we forget that what the community needs is to live.
  3. The“inter”communityisasigninitself.Itisstrikingandisacounter- cultural sign. It evokes the Kingdom, but its climate and location must be the adequate. The leap is given to the “significativity” when they change and transform presences in accordance with the today of God. There is no “inter” community when our occupation is, only, to take care of the heritage of the institution.


  1. The “inter” community does not have to share histories, it has to share feelings because this is, truly, what communicates the connection point of each generation and culture with the others.
  2. The “inter” religious life is not governed by the principle of justice which is most unfair that consists in “the same thing for everybody”, but to each one what he needs according to our dependencies that we want to express.
  3. The community oxygenation is possible whenever we are conscious of our age. Wanting to do as if anything goes, or is useless or is not important is to be conditioning the real possibilities of what we call community.
  4. The inter thing is not a signature to be given or approved. It is the reality in which consecration is embodied. It is also the real possibility of what is given in the future, above all, when older people are not slaves of the past.
  5. Being a “inter” community is embracing the present. There is no need to be afraid of different accents, needs or sins. Only from the founding experience of encounter and reconciliation, our congregations can mean something in this fragmented social context.
  6. For the “inter” community to exist, there must be open minds, which is a sign of vocation. It continues being ambiguous that we apparently offer an open and free life of the vocational pastoral proposals and these are transformed into ties, conditionings and prices as we live together in community. In reality, the weakest aspect of our religious life lies on the runways of hosts that do not lighten the community rhythms, nor overcome the temptation of “creating processes”... The actual community situation is depending, largely, on the style of pastoral of vocations which is more proactive than vital.
    10.Finally. This era needs clarity and that we spend time on what needs more time and that we make relative some efforts that more than generate life today, are wearing us out. The pedagogical and therapeutic task of the “inter” community has three fronts: one is the encounter with God (silence, contemplation and interiority), the community does not grow neither with dynamics, nor with exercises of apparent understanding of the reality, but with God lived in this time; two, the translation of our community to this reality, above all, to the wounded by life. And three, recreate an aesthetic of fragility and poverty. I believe that we need these three principles, all ages and cultures need them, they unite us and above all also provide us with missionary life that now seems threatened. 

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