Following our GA of the Belgian Conference of Secular Institutes and after having participated in the process on synodality in the Church of Belgium, we deepened and moved forward on the question of our place in the Church of tomorrow as consecrated seculars.
For several years now our societies have been experiencing a crisis: there is a break between the civilization of yesterday and that which is emerging as best it can today. We are convinced that this crisis calls for new responses and radical callings into question.
We have to look for ways out, for keys leading to something else. The question is no longer to be optimistic or pessimistic, but to know how to experience changes by finding meaning in them, for us personally, but also for humanity.
How should we look today at an uncertain changing world and at our contemporaries? Is it a gaze that sees only the obstacles and the difficulties in life? A look at what is collapsing in our societies? Or a look that focuses on situations, events, a look that opens up a future for humanity?
In our today, hope is no longer self-evident. This upsets not only our human hope but also our Christian hope. However, hope is part of the human condition: we cannot live without hope, because our existence extends between a past, a present and a future. We can no longer intervene on the past; the present is fleeting and disappoints us because it escapes our grasp, however, we can try to make our mark on the future.
The crisis is not only economic or cultural, it is also a crisis of the system of the explanation of the world. To hope is to bet on the future, it is to consider that a future is possible for a person, for a society.
But, if hope is no longer self-evident, this may mean that it is of the order of a choice, a personal decision, an act of the will.
Our Christian faith does not tear us away from our human condition, it is part of our fundamental attitudes as consecrated people. Even more, Christian hope requires us, members of secular institutes, to live the fight for charity and justice in the midst of the world. Hope, therefore, is not demobilizing, but it becomes a stimulus to act. (GA, National Conference of Belgian Secular Institutes, October, 2022).
For us, Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate, we must be sowers of the charity of Christ, to be another Christ, according to Father Parent. Our spirituality must mobilize all our cells, the five evangelical attitudes must become integrated norms in the making, in order, like the disciples of Emmaus, to be pilgrims.
We are immersed in the world where we must let ourselves be joined by the Unknown, Christ. We have to go through all the stages, without stopping on the way, or making a U-turn. We need to stop at the “inn” to share our experiences, to listen to each other and look at our miseries, our successes so that our being becomes a witness of Christ.
Francoise Lequarre
Belgium – Europe
Pictures:
World: Gerd Altmann de Pixabay
Dove: Ian Henderson de Pixabay
