by Fr Francesco Pierli MCCJ
Introduction
Moving towards to the end of these reflections we might feel challenged on how to steam up and to fuel such a complex and multifaceted ministry of JPIC. It touches upon styles of living, ministerial initiatives, collaboration and networking, running the risk of threats to one’s life and forceful advocacy. Hence a strong spirituality is called for, of which we are going to present a few basic aspects here.
Disciples of the historical Jesus: the good shepherd by the pierced heart
The first aspect would be to meet and internalize more and more the historical Jesus. He understood his ministry as he presented it in the synagogue in Nazareth where he chose the famous passage from Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good tidings to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind and to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim a year acceptable to the lord (Luke 4:17 – 19).” Jesus sees himself as the catalyst of the process whereby the jubilee is actualized according to the historical circumstances peoples live in. At the core of this actualizations are the promises of God through the prophets of the Old Testament dealing with the liberation from all types of slavery – blindness, death, prison, debt and to make available a year of full shalom. In the jubilee, the religious and the social dimensions are not separated; they are strictly interconnected according to the biblical anthropology and cosmology. Moreover the passage of the prophet Isaiah quoted by Jesus is nowadays at the centre of a renewed vision of the missionary theology and activity; in this way the mission is better framed against the backcloth of the Kingdom of God and less on church building as in Mt. 28:18-20.
Attention to the historical Jesus is moreover the prerequisite for the Comboni spirituality of the Heart of Jesus, which is impossible without retrieving the historical and humanized Logos. It is to be projected in the great vein of the history of Christianity which retrieves more and more the historicity and the humanity of Jesus which include the crib of the great Franciscan tradition, the Jesus of the great mystics of the middle age such Saint Matilda of Magdeburg and Hildegard of Bingen, the historical Jesus of the Jesuit Movement of the sixteen and seventeen centuries against the Jansenists who were belittling the mystery and the logic of incarnation. Vatican II extols the humanity of Jesus with the following famous words of Gaudium et Spes (22) “for by his incarnation the son of God has united himself in salvation with every human being, he worked with human hand, he thought with human mind, acted by human choice, and loved with human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary he was truly made one of us, like us in all things except sin”. It is the Jesus strongly portrayed in the Social Teaching of the Church and highly identified with the poor.
The Kingdom of God: the triune God
The historical Jesus is totally Kingdom of God oriented. Let us quote Mark (1:14, 15): “After John had been arrested Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. This is the time of the fulfilment; the Kingdom of God is at hand, repents and believes in the gospel”. Jesus felt that the Kingdom of God was becoming present in a unique way in him and through him. In other words the Kingdom of God is highly Trinitarian. Such a Trinitarian dimension underlines the dynamisms of fraternity, solidarity, interpersonal relationship, mutual acceptance, pardon, reconciliation, dialogue and non violence in solving conflicts and all relations. Let us not forget that the biblical concept of justice is centred in sound, or right, relationships: with God, among all human beings in solidarity, with creation and with oneself as son and daughter of God.
The concept of Kingdom of God is amply elaborated in chapter 2 of the missionary encyclical Redemptoris mssio, where the Church is presented as “seed, sign and instrument” (RM 18) of the Kingdom and at its service. A Kingdom of God oriented spirituality calls for deep attention to history where God manifests himself through the sign of the times. A history where the mystery of evil is deeply entrenched in personal sin, social sin, and in sinful structures; structures spreading death, exploitation, corruption, pollution, all types of slavery – particularly nowadays sex exploitation of children and women – together with all type of exploitative aggression of natural resources such as forests, water and minerals. Such a spirituality calls for denunciation of all types of sins and calls for personal and social conversion, personal and social reconciliation.
The Kingdom of God brings a deep transformation of historical reality: different kind of power relations and human relationships, which also influence social structures. But the Kingdom of God is ushered in through the lived experience of the Paschal mystery: a spirituality of JPIC requires letting oneself going through such experience in history, for real in one’s own life. Comboni is an emblematic example of this, and left us some clear points of reference, a sort of road map to guide our ministerial journey:
= Cross: our personal experience that it is at the “foot of the cross” that the most radical transformations take place the first pillar of our spirituality of JPIC as Comboni Missionaries.
= Confidence in God: this is another basic attitude that sustains our journey in the face of hopeless situations, when we are – not rarely – confronted with events, forces, and conditions that in fact go far beyond our capacity to cope with and change.
= Common cause: in a spirituality of transformation, and of the Paschal mystery, the option for the poor is not an “option”, but a necessary requirement. As Brueggemann vividly demonstrated in his seminal work The Prophetic Imagination, prophecy entails two movements: a radical critique of the domination system, of oppressive social systems, and a radically new proposal of a different possibility, of untested feasibility. Both such realities, Breuggemann explains, need the experience and perspective of the oppressed, those who are suffering dehumanising injustices. It is in them that the Spirit unveils the false claims of unjust systems, justifying and rationalizing their own basic assumptions and phoney promises: because the poor live in their own flesh the contradictions and exclusion produced by domination systems, their experience and suffering reveal the lies on which societies may be built. Likewise, the prophetic imagination in the biblical tradition builds on the struggles of the poor for a humanised world to reveal new possibilities and social order in history based on life giving relationships.
= Cenacle of apostles: a ministry for social transformation cannot happen in isolation. In fact, it requires evangelising communities and collaboration with all people of good will, in which the signs and values of the Kingdom are already lived and anticipated, and where serious discernment takes place.
Contemplation and incarnation – beyond all dichotomies
Let us quote the famous sentence of John Paul II in Redemptoris missio 91,
the missionary must be a contemplative in action, he finds answers to problems in the light of God’s word and in personal and community prayer. My contact with the representative of the non-Christian spiritual traditions, particularly those of Asia has confirmed to me in the view that the future of mission depends to a great extent on contemplation”. Unless the missionary is a contemplative he cannot proclaim Christ in a credible way. He is a witness to the experience of God and must be able to say with the apostles that that which we have looked upon….concerning the word of life….we proclaim also to you (I John1:1-3).
In the context of integrity of creation, contemplation expands and deepens in the light of the biblical glory of God: creation is God’s glory. The invisible God is present in creation which is his manifestation and revelation. Hence creation is sacred, something which is present in all religions. The theology of sacraments in other words reminds us the same thing: that all creation has a sacramental value that reveals and conveys the mystery of God in us.
Sacredness is lost to a certain extent when creation becomes an object to the scientific mind. The industrial revolution, the scientific revolution have turned creation more and more into an object where human beings address their attention to in a kind of aggressive way in order to use and exploit it. Right now it is high time to rediscover the sacredness of creation. To be reawakened to the fact that nothing is profane and to the message from all religions and from cultures which have a deep respect for creation and its sacredness. That is exactly what the Psalm (8:4-5) says:
when I see your heavens, the works of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you set in place what are humans that we are mindful of them, mere mortals that you care for them, you have made them little less than a god come into glory and honour.
Through contemplation, creation becomes the manifestation of God, with at the top of it human beings, as Jesus as well asserts (Mt. 25:40): “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did to one of these least brothers of mine you did for me”.
Contemplation allows us to live and to see the world as the temple where God is present. The historical elements become the manifestation of the eternal, the earthly is inhabited and led by the spiritual reality and reveals it. Thinking in dualisms such as divine and human, eternal and historical, natural and supernatural, profane history and history of salvation among others is due to Greek influence; the Bible, instead, has a holistic and complementary approach very important for a ministerial spirituality.
From ownership to stewardship – from being consumers to being co-creators
The spirituality we talk about calls for a rediscovery of the biblical concept of stewardship vis-à-vis creation. Over the last 500 years, since the inception of modernity, the scientific and eventually the industrial revolution have sparked an aggressive consumerist, market and profit oriented competition with an attitude of domination towards creation. The sacredness spoken of above was dashed away. The northern world displayed more and more an attitude of absolute power over creation accountable to nobody. The passage of Genesis: “God bless them, saying to them: be fertile and multiply. fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and all living things on the earth” (Gn 1.28) was quoted as a supportive reference. Now with the deeper knowledge of the bible and reading this passage in the context of the whole bible we understand more and more that these words are to be interpreted in the context of stewardship. Some see that God has entrusted creation to humanity so that we may continue the process of creation in covenant with God not against God. Humanity is seen as proceeding in a historical journey, towards the fullness of life and the fullness of creation and in solidarity from one generation to another.
In the Christian vision, we are stewards of creation, accountable to God, and accountable to the human community. In all traditional societies and cultures, there is nothing as individual ownership. These values are to be retrieved and reinterpreted with the awareness that an individualistic approach to creation is very negative and in the long run self-destructive. In the Social Teaching of the Church the universal destination of goods is one of the basic principles. Hence the spirituality we are proposing has to match with a sober style of living. The religious vows themselves are to be reinterpreted as concrete expressions of this spirituality highly counter the culture of consumerism, maximization of profit, hedonism and violence. In fact, they are for the promotion of a civilization of love, strongly advocated by Paul VI and all his successors.
