Our spirituality and consecration

OUR SPIRITUALITY


Both Charism and Spirituality are properly dealt with in the book “On the footsteps of Don Orione”, and so I invite you to refer to that for a proper formation. But what is the difference between Charism and Spirituality?


Our Charism, as we saw above is a free gift from God. From God it comes, God shaped it and entrusted it to us. Now we are called to act upon it to implement it, to make it alive in the Church of today. The way we do so is called Spirituality.


We call it spirituality, because it reminds us the word “spirit”. We would think immediately of something outside the world, something opposite to practical or material. This is a wrong way of thinking. The practical and the material are fully involved in it. We speak of spiritual because all our activities have to be “informed”, shaped by the Spirit of God, only then, we can be sure they will be right and “effective”.


Just a word about the distinction between “effective” and “efficient”.


By efficient we mean somebody who does well his job, somebody who works hard. The stress of the sentence is mainly of the person itself and how it works. When, instead, we speak of effective, we put the stress on the results. So a work is effective only when it achieves the goal it was made for.


If we apply this principle to our institutions we see the real consequence of it. Our school is efficient when it has good staff, well done timetable, good equipment. But this does not take in consideration the final results. Will the students pass well the exams? and even more: Do the students receive a valuable education (which is much more than the knowledge learned in the books); do they achieve those values necessary to go through life, and not just through a career? Do our students experience the love of God for them and do they feel the desire to give an answer to such call from God?


To say that an institution is effective it means to achieve all these points, regardless the fact that the school may be poor or rich, may have equipments or may not. In a word we could say that the efficient stresses on the material aspects, the efficacious on the globality of the person, a great part of which is spiritual. The big temptation for the religious, in a society, which is highly competitive, is to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness, because it is more visible and can easily raise praises.




Consecration


Article 5 of our constitutions has already introduced us to the topic of consecration. Now the chapter 2 helps us to go deeper into it.


What is consecration?


This word comes from the root “sacred” which means “holy” and the preposition “con” which means “with”. So literally it should mean “to be made one together with the one who is Holy”.


We already mentioned that the meaning of our consecration is to be found in the twofold aspect of “unity with God” and “fellowship of Christ”.


We come from God and will have our final fulfilment only when we go back to him. This is the main aim of all religions. St Augustine starts his book “The confessions” with the sentence: “You created us for yourself, o Lord, and our heart will not find peace till it rests in you”. But if the aim is the same in all religions, the way of achieving it is substantially different. In Islam the person has to follow all the rules prescribed by God himself in the Quran, In Hinduism the person has to perform all the rites prescribed for the different divinities; in Buddhism the person has to achieve the inner peace through a process of purification of the senses and detachment from passions.


For us Christians this union with God is basically a gift from God himself, an offering done through “kenosys”, the lowering of himself of Jesus in the Incarnation. If on one side God is so high, unreachable by our nature ruined by sins, now in Jesus who came to free us from sin, this union is made possible. And here comes the second aspect of our consecration: the fellowship – imitation of Christ.


Indeed our religion and, even more, our religious life would lose their meaning without Christ. Jesus said: “If you want to follow me, renounce yourself, pick up your cross and follow me” (Mt 16:24). The Art. 10 of our constitutions says that we answer to the gift of God through our life in common and our vows. Community life and vows, which with prayer and apostolate form the foundation of religious life, are our way of following Christ, and so a way of renouncing to oneself. They cannot be separated from the mystery of the cross. Community life and vows should never be a way of achieving an easier or more comfortable life, nor apostolate a way of achieving a successful career.


The union with God is our final goal, but is not something far away, achievable only after death. In theology we study the formula of the “already but not yet”. We have not yet achieved it fully but by the grace of God we are already living it and our way of living it is exactly our “sequela Christi”, the fellowship of the one who is “the way, the truth and the life”.