It is not always easy to set again on our journey after a deserved period of rest. We have met many opportunities during the summer pause, never missing those, which influence particularly our future choices.

We still hear in our mind the echo of some words from the homily pronounced by Pope Benedict XVI on 24 April 2005. He said that, today, our humanity has lost its way in different forms of desert.

If we, consecrated beings, feel to be part of this wandering and searching humanity, is there any valence in this type of reminder on our fraternity? How does a world in the experience of desert question us?

Desert of poverty, hunger and thirst

As committed Christians, who have assumed in the Church  the mission of making visible in the world God's care for each man and woman, for each people and nation, we cannot remain mere spectators, we cannot decide of living the Gospel in an ideal condition of protected life,  while individual persons and groups, entire populations, die of hunger and thirst.

Let us think of the many people, who in our cities keep on sleeping on the earth even in winter, covered only by pieces of cardboard, deprived of the elementary needs, ugly outwardly,  yet bearers of a provoking liberty, of a humanity that questions us on those Gospel pages which we declaim but do not always live.

At this point, we need to ask ourselves how we are sharing the poverty of our brothers and sisters, above all  the poverty of those who hunger for bread, water, dignity, love, sense of life … If the structures have somehow suffocated the prophecy which the Spirit of God has entrusted to us, this can truly be a time of grace to becomes broken bread, so that others may not live their poverty hopelessly.  He, who lives in misery, needs to meet people who are called to be poor in spirit, to announce every man and woman that each person is precious in the eyes of God. Sharing the life of the poor is a tangible testimony of God's presence in history, by being in it lovingly.

We cannot shut up ourselves into our own Eucharistic "intimisms".  To be convoked daily by God for the memorial of the Last Supper of Jesus with his own, whom He loved till the end, urges us to translate the celebration into gestures of charity, which make us feel to be brothers and sisters, children of the same Father.

The desert of poverty cannot be overcome by a mere sociologic and area survey, nor only by conversations at the table. The one, who is poor, waits for bread and water, for sanitary treatment, for a dignified life, for the recognition of his right to exist in the world. The poor need to meet people who love them, people who seek together the bread to eat and the water to drink.; they need to be with the other in an attitude of listening to: people who make themselves available to walk, not before, but together with them.

The desert of abandonment and solitude

How many monads made up of youths, adult, aged people seem to be revolving around an empty space, without any goal to be achieved, without any sense of life, anything to do.

We, too, consecrated persons, sometimes, feel lost, especially when we miss the centre. After a period of time, we perceive the surfacing of existential questions, which wait for an answer. Who am I? Who am I in the fraternity? Who are we in the particular and in the universal church?

Our fraternities often look like an archipelago, whose members are islands without any link and inter communication.  What is their cause?  After an initial enthusiasm, often we fear of adhering radically to God's call through a self-offering, that knows no compromise.  With the passing of time, the person seems to go on taking back gradually everything, particularly it lives of sacred things, without ever encountering the person of Jesus Christ. When this happens , the person immediately withdraws himself from every relation, to take refuge in isolation.

The solitude in the world is our own solitude, mainly when we invest all our energies for our personal realisation in the community, when we never put ourselves under discussion, when we don't love gratuitously, according to the logic of the Gospel service,  which foresees also to wash the feed of the traitor, as Jesus did with Judas (see Jo 13, 34).

The choice of belonging to a religious family is not all: it is a must that, from the very beginning, we make ourselves available to give up our life till death, according to the new commandment of love (see Jo 13,34).  The initiation to Consecrated life is not a  muffled, privileged, guaranteed time to the end of recuperating what the person has not been  receiving in the past at human level, all that time donated by God, in the gratuity of his love, to the one who is called to learn how to be like the Son. The living in Christ enables man to achieve his personal maturity, whose autonomy, which is not independence, becomes, in the present instant,  the expression of the fundamental Gospel choices.

The reason why many seem not to understand or to refuse CL is to be found in the consecrated men and women  who are unable to communicate the joy of life which derives from the daily and familiar encounter with the Lord.  A heart in love that nourishes itself with silence, that allows itself to be loved by the mystery which crosses it: a heart which never feels lonely and easily opens to relations with others.

When the consecrated persons live their existence at intermittence, they make themselves to be absorbed by a thousand of things which do not favour the listening to any "You".  They cling on themselves and keep themselves busy building defensive barriers, which lead to isolation, forgetting  and deserting the person  at their side, the one who waits for being recognised in the diverse facets of human existence, the one who asks himself about his relations,  the one who expects to see signs of God's love in the daily life.

The solitude, as the awareness of a Presence that crosses life, becomes space and time to encounter the Lord at the very root of one's own existence. In our intimacy, which is not "intimism", we experience the nearness of God, even when darkness seems to wrap up our existence. Today, with their life donated in love, men and women consecrated to God can manifest that humanity is never alone, to all men and women who experience abandonment and solitude: humanity is never alone because God takes care of each creature.

The desert of destroyed love

We live a time in which lasting love exists no more. Let us think of  the many interrupted friendly, family and spousal relations; let us image the building up of virtual relations which keeps on kindling and extinguishing  at the rhythm of the clic of the mouse, the love stories born by chatting.

Are our fraternities following the fashion  of the non-directed relations nourished by the SMS, rather than being visible places of the incarnated love?  Unuttered words, further messages often absorb plenty of energies, which could be utilised  to live the Gospel radically. Called to be witnesses of love, we, at times, add to the destruction of love in the world,  above all when, in our communities, we live competitive and individualistic relations, when we cling on ourselves, when we seek to define ourselves with the received talents, when we live without the awareness of being integrated persons, when we withdraw from non profitable relations, when we identify authority with power, when we do not respect the dignity of the other, when we do not promote the integral development of the person created to the image  and similitude of God.

Notwithstanding everything,  we witness the spreading of a sense of nostalgia for authentic relations through which man seeks the reciprocal recognition of existing.  God, who is love, continues to be  present in the history of humanity. If we, consecrated persons, are losing the taste of fraternal love, we can still fetch, from the surrounding experiences, the desire to bet on the fraternities convoked by God, to be place and time of his gratuitous love for humanity. He continues to be visible in the smile of a child, in the tender love of couples which relays to the Trinitarian love, in those who offer their time with their infinite, voluntary dedication, in those who have encountered the Lord and have chosen to serve their brothers and sisters, in those who make up their mind to share their existence  with the least ones on earth, till death.

While the phenomenon of abandonment  seems to enter also our personal and fraternal life, though in diverse modalities,  Jesus Christ keeps on calling us, not only to give life to our persons with the blow of the Spirit, but also to offer each one of us the capacity to transform every desert into an oasis of peace.