By now we are all oriented towards the Congress on the Consecrated Life, that will be celebrated in November, and we already perceive that the event will be a passing of God through the history of the consecrated persons. It will be a favourable time for the consecrated human beings to re-think of their meaning, in this historical context, and to find out significant tracts in a world marked by indifference. Do we feel to be part of this world so much wounded but, at the same time, so much charged with humanity?

If man experiences, today, the fragmentary, fluid and inconsistent character of life, if he structures his existence according to the exasperate consume of the superfluous, so much so as to narcotise the deep desire of the essential and the search of sense,  we consecrated beings, loaded with the same  burden, are called to re-think our history in order to live by the side of today's man, to sow seeds of hope in the daily life.

We are called to witness that we love man's history today, since, entering the contemplation of God's time, we see His presence in our history.

It is the constant encounter with Jesus, living in full communion of life with Him, through the contemplation of his Word made flesh, that allows us to enter the Trinitarian circuit and, simultaneously, the historical furrows of mankind,

Today's world needs to meet living people who remain in Christ  (Jo 15,9),  as the unique reference of their existence, assuming his sentiments in the daily life, speaking of him and of the Father's love through the incarnation of values; justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, tenderness, freedom, joy, respect, gratitude, sharing and love.

The passion for Christ and humanity passes through the authenticity of a lived experience that becomes evangelical because it is deeply human, and of a lived experience that becomes human because of its being deeply evangelical. To wake up from his indifference, today's man needs to see, in our life, the narration of the experience of God to be translated into passion for mankind.

In the difference accepted not as a threat,  but as a richness of the diversity, looking at the Gospel life of the consecrated people, man is enabled to see the evangelical life of the consecrated brothers and sisters and may ask himself about the beauty of our existence, about the uniqueness and originality imprinted by God in the depth of each creature, where the unrepeatable God takes form in the human face.

Man needs to listen to silence, to resume the contact with his life, which seems to have lost its value, to feel the running of his own existence, the passing through of God and of all his brothers and sisters.

In a world where solitude is lived as the evil of living, the consecrated woman or man can visualise that solitude is a constitutive element of the human existence, the place of a continual presence of God who reveals man his uniqueness by putting love in his heart.

In a world where the other is manipulated, the consecrated man and woman meet the Other and the others in their privileged relation with God, where everything acquires a sense. In the present instant, they remain anchored in God who becomes the daily determining soul of their existence.

In their existing, and in the being of God in relation, they recognise the space, they learn how to define the boundary between God and themselves, between themselves and the others. In this gymnasium, the consecrated man, or woman, learns to accept himself just as he is, overcoming the illusion of omnipotence, the need of power and of being a protagonist.

By putting himself in the attitude of listening to every brother, he recognises God in his life and incarnates the endlessly gratuitous welcome experienced in God, in an attitude of non-violence and of a constant self-donation without any preference of persons.

A community of consecrated people (that makes the presence of the Holy Spirit visible in history, where the consecrated people choose to possess nothing and to visualise in the ordinary things their total trust in God), witnesses the closeness of God to humanity to those who seek deep relations.

Freed from structure or acting without being conditioned by them, the Gospel fraternity invites today's men to trace together with the Lord a new journey, which realises in history the today of God by building a world of justice, peace and joy.

By living in the awareness that the Spirit is present in the heart of every living being, whatever the nation, the people, the language and the religion, the Gospel fraternity favours evermore the interior unification of every person,  a condition that allows the diversity to be harmoniously composed in the unity of spirits and in a style of reconciliation.

An evangelical community that vibrates near the brothers and sisters and donates itself to them gratuitously, makes visible the love of the Father for each person, above all for those whose dignity is trampled upon.

Through faith in the Lord, the evangelical fraternity reveals that the faithful God takes care of humanity, even when the darkness of history might let us think that He does not exist or that he has forgotten the men and women of our time.

Today the world needs persons whose life speaks of God, persons who remind today's men and women that the Lord continues to weave a never interrupted love history with humanity.

 A few questions

 Is this a time for us sisters to be lived in God's silence, without any more agitation for the things which have been done for the Lord, so that each may authentically go back to the roots of one's own charism?

 Is this perhaps a favourable time for important questions that open new ways, where the hero of life par excellence be Jesus Christ?

 Is it possible for all of us,  consecrated beings, contemplative, missionaries, apostolic life, laity, to reach the Congress with the awareness of being present or representative only because we desire to go back to an authentic Gospel life, at the side of other men and women, in the faithfulness of our specific vocation, to be visible signs of the hope that comes from God?

 How much all of us, consecrated persons, feel questioned in first person to re-think our life, to be cenacles of love, easily comprehensible among the men and women of our time, who live with fatigue and wait for their rising?