Riflessioni ad alta voce

Ideas for creativity: The landscape with the horizon. It is beautiful, colorful, green and blue and with a lot of light. I am living now a wonderful moment made of joy, rest where everything seems to be in place. The horizon is far away, well marked, the clear division between the earth and the sky. There is where I want to reach, the idea is clear, there where the earth ends into the sky. It is far but seems near. The sun is bright, we cannot look at it directly, who could possibly look straight at you o God, and bear your gaze? It is better to look at all the beautiful things here around. After all they all live because of you and are beautiful because of your light. Night will come; they will be there, meaningless, dormant, longing to receive your light again. In the sky there are birds flying happily around, as if without any purpose. Where do they go? They are like my ideas, always roaming around, now here, then there, without order: maybe looki...

Some nice suggestion from Don Orione From the writings of Don Orione Authority Here are the 10 Commandments of a good Superior: 1. Be a physician and not an executioner: be a father, and not a master to your brothers, that is, try to find a remedy for their faults with all the gentleness of a father; and if you have to administer punishments they must not be felt like the cruelty of an enemy, nor the coldness of a stranger's heart, but they should rather show that your heart suffers and is distressed at having to punish. 2. Perfection in ruling is contained in these five words: Vigilance, love in the Lord, forbearance, forgiveness and feeding in the Lord: feeding on the sweet and divine food of the Doctrine or Truth of Jesus Christ, of the Charity of Jesus Christ, who is portrayed by the Sacred Scriptures as a Lamb. 3. A good and perfect Superior must be an enemy of vice and a physician to those caught up in vice: he must be vigilant over them, seeking out every method of giv...

The service of Authority This is a small chapter, small in size but not in importance. It is addressed to the superiors rather than the novices. From our personal experience we understand very well how the character of the superior influences the life of the community. A few years ago Vatican issued a document called “Faciem Tuam” on the task of authority today. When we priests speak to families we are very good in giving recommendations and suggestions on how they should understand each other, love the partners even if unfaithful, forgive the children even when rebellious. But if on one side we are good preachers, on the other side we fall often short when we have to apply them to our community life. Superiors are called to guide the community and this is not an easy task. They are called to be fathers but without falling into paternalism; They have to take the final decisions but without falling into authoritarism; they have to listen to all the confreres and mediate am...

From the writings of Don Orione Keeping Ahead of the Times We are not politicians: our only policy is great and divine charity which does good to everyone. We do not look to anything else but the saving of souls. If we must have a preference, it will be for those who need God the most, since Jesus came for the sinner rather than for the just. Souls and more souls! That is our whole life; that is our cry, our programme, all our hearts and souls: souls and more souls! Yet, in order to succeed more in saving souls, we must know how to adopt certain methods, and not become fossilized in forms, if these forms are no longer liked, if they become, or have already become antiquated and disused … Let us make the lives and the souls of the orphans, the young, and those entrusted to us, Christian: this is what God and the Church ask of us. Let us use all the holy skills and arts, which are most accepted and used, to achieve this! Even those forms, those customs which may seem to us a lit...

Apostolate as it was done in the past Most of the congregations were founded as a concrete answer to a concrete need of their time. A war had created many orphans, nobody was educating girls, the health system was very poor etc. The bishop would gather some young ladies, entrust unto them the work and little by little this small group of ladies transformed into a congregation. Even Don Orione started with the oratory and then with a small seminary because these were the needs of Tortona at his time. Most of the foundations, houses came into being as answers to the local needs. A peculiar aspect is that in all those houses our religious (priests, brothers, sisters) were doing the whole work from teaching to taking care of the handicap or elderly, bathing them, feeding them etc. In the last thirty years a threefold crisis struck all the congregations: Government requires now that all the staff in the institutions, have proper qualifications (which most of us do not have), and de...

Apostolate in Don Orione See the two passages in Restless apostle pag. 121, 132. In our founder apostolate is not the goal of life but the result of his union with God. Don Orione was so much united with God that he was feeling the same thirst for souls, desiring that not a single one would be lost. Christ offered himself fully to save humanity. Don Orione felt the need to be one with Christ in this work so all could be saved. As a consequence the more a person is away from God, the more he is in need of love and so he is the privileged target of the apostolate. To say “the least, the most abandoned”, means not only the most sick or the poorest but also and especially the most sinner, those who refuse us and fight against us. We should love them most. If apostolate is union with Christ, then the way of doing apostolate, is to climb Calvary and the cross, so apostolate is not matter of success, not to have the most prestigious, modern schools or hospitals, but those str...