«Do not ask us the word that may scrutinise, up and down, our shapeless soul, that may declare it in letters of fire and may shine like a saffron in a dusty prairie. Ah, the man who walks secure,  friendly with himself and others, and whose shadow does not mind that the height of the sun prints it on an unplastered wall! Do not ask us the formula that worlds may open to you, yes some crooked syllable and dry like a branch. Today we can tell you “what we are not, what we do not want”: it is with this poem by Eugenio Montale that we would like to set out to discern our interior world in front of a time that forbids us to have clear words about each one’s identity, sustaining dreams and project without any further question.

We must openly confess our deep uneasiness in an epoch that, slowly and inexorably deprives the religious soul of every old security: our dearest words do not find a resonance box in the heart of most people, especially of the youth; our symbols can hardly be recognised and anyhow they are not able to lead us to their own significance; our convents and houses appear always emptier , thus some of them are destined to be closed sooner or later; religion itself, the one for which we vowed our life, is no longer perceived as an element of support for the human happiness, but rather as a hindrance against the free realisation of our contemporary fellows.

Surely, we must not be afraid of recognising in us the signs of this spoliation that this time causes, yet, perhaps just for this, we too, like the poet, do not know how to say or to say again who we are; we do not know how to bring to light what we want, what, in the days of our youths, looked worthy of nothing less than our entire existence.

Poverty and mystics  

However, it is valueless to fight against the time, not even against this time, which the scholars define as “post-modern” and describe as a radical mutation in the media sensitivity of men and women in Western Europe.

This is why the first interior tension to be activated is that of discovering and throwing away every tiny resentment for what may happen to us and which has almost naturally nestled in us. We must rather recognise, give name and voice to what we are undergoing and suffering. Let us chase away from us every dream of impossible going back to the golden epochs of Christianity; let us rather accept to live, up to its depth, the poverty which our today compels us to live and we shall discover again in it a genuinely characterising note of our faith. It would suffice to think of St. Francis and of its crib, of St. Dominic and the order of mendicants, of St. John of the Cross and the dark night, of St. Theresa of Avila with her dialectic  of the “nada-todo”, to reach Mother Theresa and the thousands of missionaries spread as poor among the poor.

Well, poverty that has been thought of so far, above all, as a practice of ascetical type (to free oneself from the burden and bond of this word in order to be open to God), now it is imposed on us by this world, which takes away from us the security of a well-defined role, a mission appreciated by everybody, a language understood by all men and women, a straightaway recognised prestige and service necessary for the community life. However, to avoid that all this might become an occasion for depression and wounded disenchantment, a new mystical attitude is required.  Yes, a mysticism of poverty able to read the subtraction as liberation, which allows us to confess in our “no more possessions” the origin of our religious choice: not the world, not others, but “totally for God”. In the poverty that the world hands over to us, we renew the discovery of God’s primacy. 

An attitude of authentic joy should and could be born from this mysticism of poverty: I miss nothing if I possess God, even if I have nothing; as well as a new sympathy for our God and our contemporary brothers and sisters.

Our God himself is submitted to the destiny of forgetfulness, of anguish, of abandonment and poverty: man had learned naturally how to live with God; our contemporary men now have started to be self-sufficient, without God; above all the youths: this is the first generation orphan of God and, consequently, of God orphan of us.

Hope and prophecy

Perhaps it is in this last observation, (namely in realising that we are before women and men the “poor of God”, of a God made “poor of men”), that we could find the common wound that may return weight and sense to our words and to the things we do.

In fact, if man does not have God, he has nothing, even if  he lacks nothing. Above all, he misses hope: in the grey heaven of God’s absence, the breath shortens, the sight has no longer any lucidity and strength, the space of egoism and individualism emerges, life loses savour and colour, many little idols pillage the human heart, sucking its blood and the seismographic joy for the interior movements of our contemporary men and women, reading the fatigue of freedom behind and within their suffered smiles and their vexed faces, a fatigue of freedom which, unhooked from God, every day must invent the reasons of life and of sense.

All this requires the prophetic dimension of consecrated life to come to light together with the taste and such connatural things which are truly valuable, as to render our existence illuminating for the life of our brothers and sisters.

This is what man needs today: he needs a prophetic word to remind each person that this world is not paradise, that life is not worthy because of the things we have and even less for the things we do not possess; in other words, he needs a word reminding him that life is worthy only for the love we are capable of and which may convince that nobody of us is God and that it is only by welcoming our finitude that we could convert it into the blessing of the life given to us.

Community and future

Obviously, it is not the matter of a simple journey, but the specificity of Consecrated life given also by community life, by the fact that no one is left alone to himself, but each person is accompanied and sustained by prayer and by the presence of others.

It is truly important to give a new vigour to this specific aspect of being together, which does not concern the simple external organisation of an Institute, but touches deeply the truth of the human being.

To bet again on the force of communion -this also costs- even when we do not do it spontaneously, is decisive exactly in order to the testimony we must give to a world which tends to divide, to separate our destinies reciprocally: a thing that goes on getting disinterested of millions of human beings which could reasonably curse their ill-reduced  existence,  submitted to scarcity of hygiene, of medicines, food and peace.

The future grows where we shoulder one another’s burden, particularly that of the youths and the most disadvantaged people. To do this we need to invent life-styles, which may get inspired by a paradigm of unity and by the communion of mankind: our communities, then, should become “houses and schools of communion”. The first step is always to be made in our own soul. 

Conclusion

After exploring some passage of the soul’s landscape, where we must live at present, we would like to go back to the daily fatigue, accompanied by the words of another poet, rather of a poetess, Nelly Sachs, who in an extra-ordinary fulguration writes, “If the prophets stole through the doors of night and looked for a ear as motherland, would you, men’s ear clogged up with nettle, know how to listen to?”

We do not know where we are taking our world, or indicating how and when men’s ears may come to be “opened” for the prophetic word of consecrated life.

However, we know that the Spirit makes His ways along the paths of history, shells a point in the panting and dusty streets of our world. We ask Him that our trust may be stronger than any possible resentment and that our testimony may find, even today, such formulae as they may be capable of opening for God the heart and the ear of this world. In fact, he who lacks nothing, but is poor of God, lacks everything.

Matteo Armando
 Ecclesiastic National Assistant of FUCI
c/o Casa of Assistants, Via F. Marchetta Selvaggiani, 22
00165 Rome