The exigency within the call to religious life is the tension to holiness; we are called to be leaven, sign and prophecy of the holiness of the Church. We are called not only to be holy, but also to be seen as holy: "Nobody lights a lamp to put it under the bushel. No, it is put on a lamp-stand so that people may see the light when they come in" (Lk 8,16). Therefore, we must not only be holy, but also be seen as holy. If we are not visible women of God, we contradict the nature of the "sign". The religious are seen as men and women committed to all kinds of social activities. In a more common language we can say that they are seen more for what they do than for what they are. It is true that the habit does not make the monk. In fact, what matters is their life-style. Now their essential style should be such as to let them be leaven and prophecy. However, to understand what it means to be a prophet is not as easy as to understand what it means to be leaven.

To re-think our history

The prophet is one who interprets history. The cross of history generates the question on its significance: the intentions and falls, the re-assumptions and new beginnings pose the unavoidable interrogative about a possible sense of all this. "In the ultimate analysis, the interpretation of history is a tentative of understanding the sense of man's suffering in it"¹.  Prophet is he who knows how to ransom the dignity of history through the deep transformation of human life: history, just as it is, with a lot of evil and violence, with things that do not evolve as we had thought they would.  We have nothing to do, but to get reconciled with this history, that is, helping one another to love it deeply. We need to learn how to say the famous expression of the Song of songs, "how beautiful you are, my beloved"; we must help one another to realise that this humanity, apart from its wounds, is the unique humanity of God. This God whom we love and profess, whom we celebrate as deeply present in our histories, is to be sought there.  In our life we have no shortcuts: its take-off post is the daily life. We must seek God there, in history, not in the images we have of him. What do we mean by God?

It is necessary to change the image of God. The image we have of him is temporary and functional in our journey of faith and hope. There are some philosophers who underline and radicalise this fact, however, we cannot deny that every image we have is only projective. It contains a component, which comes out of the exigencies, out of cultural models, out of the modality of interpreting the life of each person and epoch.  This is why the great mystics have insisted on the need of detaching ourselves from the images of God in order to find God and to live authentic relations with Him². All the mystics constantly repeat that we can encounter God only in total silence, namely in quitting all the words and the images, because every word, every human image is a mediation, that is, it stays in between the reality and our mind.

If things go on like this, we must reconcile ourselves with history as something really important, as the unique place where God has taken face and abode.  There cannot be any incompatibility between the mystic relation with the Risen Lord and the commitment of following Him on the traces of the Kingdom of God,  in the knotty events of history, in the struggle to defend the right of man to full life, namely the right of satisfying his real needs. We religious have been formed in a type of faith and spirituality, which slows us down because of the reason.

This spirituality is frozen in the philosophy of the to be, which is no longer actual because of the urgency of building an ethics, which means life relation, not reason. Lévinas defines this reason as numinous, namely invisible, such as to justify the fact of not assuming the full responsibility of the Kingdom. We are expected to simplify the religiosity and to make it more sensitive to the needs of the poor. It is too invisible, too mysterious. The orientation of religious life seems to prove that holiness has its epicentre in the life to come, in the invisible, in a charity more prone to the alms than to the responsibility and commitment to build a more just world.  "Seek the kingdom of God and his justice", the Lord said. Where?

To know the signs of the times

 The Kingdom of God, centre of the preaching of Jesus, accompanies us to the capacity of discerning the signs of the times, of understanding the time in a prophetic way, rather than in a pragmatic way,  on which the reprimand of Jesus to the heads of his time and to the heads of all times, falls.

"In the evening you say, 'It will be fine; there's a red sky', and in the morning, 'stormy weather today; the sky is red and overcast', You know how to read the face of the sky, but you cannot read the signs of the times" (Mt 16, 1-4).

Not in line with the Council, which wanted a pastoral project for a secularised world, the religious life has followed a spirituality orientation parallel to that of the secularised world. The intimation of seeking the signs of the times has been betrayed. The religious life has gone through a spiritualising and radically clerical process. The testimony of faith is, to me, the best way to go back to the prophecy.  The religious life must be an expression of the Christian faith, the faith expressed by Jesus. We must express a faith, which is salt, light and leaven, rather than idea and concept. It is urgent for the religious to be aware of the fact that we are passing from an epoch dominated by the concept and idea of the to be, on to an epoch of facts, of reality. Religious life is challenged by history to bring the sense of incarnation to its extreme consequences.

The religious life has spiritualised the words, which God addressed to humanity. God speaks to humanity not only through the word, but, above all, through the decision of becoming the neighbour of man, to make of him a collaborator of creation, inspired and guided by love. History, which in its Biblical meaning is the narration of this proximity, has become the place where man can exercise his virtues to prepare himself for eternity.  For the spiritual man, history is the element in which the life of the spirit moves. Moreover, we have put the spiritual life within an individual history of salvation, of redemption and purification, whose result depends mainly on grace, on the help that comes from above. Thus, the religious have turned their life into an occasion and a preparation for heaven. We pray for a revolutionary change in our communities. The grace of freedom, that Christ has offered us,  is not freedom from matter, from the sensible things, as a spiritualistic philosophy attempted to teach us, but a freedom within things, within history.

 The Spirit does not free us by separating us from what is material, as Platonism teaches us,  but frees us by assuming its reality, which implies a being with others and a being with things: to taste deeply the "everything is yours" which Paul speaks of: all is yours, because nothing is mine. The spiritual man is he who has reached a relation for which our face is constantly open to welcome the messages of pain, of joy, of need, of help and protection, which the faces we meet keep on sending us.  This means to love beyond the selfish erotic emotion. This can be attained not in isolation, but in concrete relations.

 This is why I am ready to state strongly that holiness, first of all and at the same time, is ethics.  We cannot think that God, through historical events, "the signs of time", shows us a different journey, a different way of being holy. "Holy -Plato said- is the one who is liked by the gods".  The question "Does God like me?" comes back to us. Have you resolved never to harm anyone with your living? They speak about Jesus as of a man who went along doing good: to whom? To God?  He has no need of it. To the other! You have done to me whatever you have done to the other. To say "you have done it to me" is not a shade. In fact this deed of ethical justice is a religious deed, it is, intrinsically an act of love to God.

We are to overcome the ethic dualism of relation. The true atheism shows this separation of God from the human reality. It is not a matter of denying the transcendent. We need to reach the transcendent by passing through the human reality, more explicitly, through the ethical reality. In this word we include the responsibility towards others and towards the world. We cannot accept  saints who possess a collection of all the virtues, except the responsibility of others and of the world.  Saint is the Samaritan caught by compassion for the man, who had fallen into the hands of the brigands. Compassion is a very strong term, whose Greek root relays us to the feminine uterus, to the bowels of tenderness, which change our criteria, our way of thinking and acting. It fulfils the historical face of Easter: God who comes near man. Brother Rénè Voillaume had prophesised it already in the year '50, when he wrote:

"Perhaps we shall enter a historical epoch of mankind, a time of compassion, in the impotency of finding the solutions of the set problems.  It will be necessary, more than ever before,  to offer ourselves in intercession and communion with the sacrifice of the Lord, immersing ourselves into His Eucharist³.

The Eucharist disposes and generates man to the "here I am" before God, like Jesus, His only begotten Son. The presence of God is conditioned by the "Here I am" of man. Have you never lingered on the deep sense, on the sun-like clear consequence of the word "here I am", pronounced in history by two human beings? "Mary said:  Here I am"  (Lk 1, 38). To the Father, who is tired of the form of prayer used by man, Jesus says, "Here I am! I am coming to do your will" (Hebrew 10,9). "Here I am" is the attitude, which establishes the relation between Jesus and the one who is called by Him.

The only bond, which truly matters in the logic of the Kingdom, is the relation of the disciples. The religious must be disciples afresh. What does it mean to be a disciple? It is something that takes place in the intimate being and involves the intentions of God, which are difficult to be explored. It is not just the episode in which Jesus meets somebody and tells him "follow me", but a full and immediate involvement in the reality of the Kingdom. Jesus is not a man of the law: he is a man of relation. Whenever He calls a man, he calls him to a deeper sharing of his event. To follow Jesus puts into play the whole destiny of the disciple; it invites him to discover the fascination of the Kingdom. Yet, though it charms and shakes, even if it changes the existence deeply, the Kingdom of God does not hypnotise, but questions.

Jesus demands a total availability. This is possible through the attitude, which the Gospels, with a figurative term full of ambiguities, call a dying to oneself and which the Christian tradition will call abnegation, but which is, above all, freedom from human schemes and securities.  It is also freedom from self, because the self-centredness, the refusal of self-offering and of risking are rooted in the fear of losing or of losing oneself. The disciples of Jesus are persons who love life so very deeply as never accepting to make it banal.  If they are called to say, like Jesus, "Let your will be done, not mine", it is not to refuse life, but to make it more valuable, to witness to God before human beings. They can accept also to die for others, but never for the love of death. It a matter of refusing not life or happiness, but hypocrisy and compromise.

A prophecy is prophecy when somebody fulfils it

We need to encourage the religious life towards a prophetic-historical commitment today, when, new forms of religious life grow near the old ones, whose stay is not yet clear in history. They seem to disregard the prophetic-historical commitment to pacify and console the person. B. Secondin observes, "We have shifted from a social-historical Messianic reality to an individual one, which does not permit to take position in history." Actually, the historic communities need the new ones and viceversa. The first ones are called to confront themselves and to re-dimension their heritage. The others are called to elaborate the original inspiration and to get it integrated with today's kairos.

"The legacy of a prophet, the "mantle", which Elisha has picked up from Elijah, is a symbol of the datus that religious life is not invented, is not created out of nothing: we receive it and are generated by it  in the obedience to the Gospel and to the voice of God present in history" (Enzo Bianchi).

We need to start a fraternal Dialogue with openness to the Spirit. We must knock down walls, get free from the ghetto of our mentality, from our little or great belongings and widen our horizons. It is important to enter the dimension of belonging to life, to dissolve our fears and our resistance against bringing together the old and the new, the passion for Christ and the passion for humanity, while sharing the common thirst for life.

Before the temptation of clinging to ourselves or of looking behind, the answer is of moving there, where the Word of God resounds, where the memory of Jesus is made, the places of the alternative, where to dream of a different life. We need to be aware that life is deeply inhabited by the mystery. A Dominican theologian, Antonietta Potente, names this dimension "the religiosity of life" and sees the reversal of religious life in it, to give everybody the possibility of a new familiarity with the mystery. In fact, we are not as familiar with the mystery as we think. We are familiar with the religion, with our religious ideologies, with our styles, our ways of living the religion, but not with the mystery.

The mystery is Christ, the announcement of the human life. To live the Gospel with simplicity and few things is a mystic and political choice, which consents to encounter today the Lord of life. Then "the night is also a sun" (Beata Angela Foligno).  If the times are sad, they are the times of hope, not of fears. Fear has marked too much our relation with the world and with the others, because they have told us that "man is a wolf to man". Religious life, instead, should restore the human being to the possibility of brotherhood as its very root, because "man is for man".

If religious life wants to know a new re-launching, it must find again its anthropological thickness, its statute of charismatic marginality and flexibility; it must be able to intuit the new needs and to invent forms of aggregations on values. I think that it is not up to the religious to sell bread: the religious is supposed to be the leaven,  and to have its room in the dough: we need to inhabit this new history without living in the bushes, worried in our own particular affairs, perhaps on the basis of projects dictated by fear and by the neurosis of surviving anyhow.

Note

1. K. Lowith, Significato e fine della storia, Milano 1989, p. 23.  (back)

2. Meister Eckart, un mistico domenicano del XIV secolo, quando predicava alle monache domenicane della Germania, di cui era responsabile, diceva: “Se volete trovare Dio, abbandonate il vostro Dio”. Dio lo si ritrova oltre ogni nostra immagine: “Quando l’anima giunge nell’Uno e vi penetra con totale rigetto di se stessa, trova Dio come nulla”. Meister Eckart, Sermone Surrexit autem Saulus, in Sermoni tedeschi, Adelphi, Milano 1985, p. 205. Oppure  anche Idem, I Sermoni, a cura di M. Vannini, editore Libri, Milano 2003.  (back)

3. R. Voillaume, Charles de Foucauld e i suoi discepoli. (back)