It is beautiful to let these words arouse our wonder, allowing the breath of the Spirit to make us passionate in re-visiting the consecrated life in the light of the event defined as "New Pentecost" Propositio 2), namely the Synod for Africa (October 4 – 25, 2009). It is beautiful to find again an inedited way of inhabiting concretely the present African and world history, to seek our integration in this rich and contentious social context".

Starting from this conviction - clearly emerged during the special Second Assembly in the synod of Bishops for Africa- the Italian Bishops individuated the extent of the current ecclesial situation in the openness to the world and in the missionary dynamics.

We welcome the two instances that the Church in Italy has individuated as categories to re-discover the message of deep challenge that the Church in Africa proposes to us, consecrated women and men, African and missionaries. We recommend the content around a few words in Swahili language^, which symbolise and evoke living realities.

We are surely witnesses of an Africa as gift to humanity that builds up itself on the blood, the sweat, the creativity and the infinite resources of its women and youths.

The final message of the Synod for Africa –a spiritual and concrete message of hope for Africa and for the world- is provocative here and there; it is a message addressed, first, to Africa and to all its ecclesial and socio-cultural components. It tells us that Africa has already changed, does not waste time and does not fall into desperation. The participants in the Synod, clear representatives of the whole continent, have spoken about an adult Africa-Church, about the decided assumption of responsibility, of saint politicians like Senghor and Nyerere, who have worked for the common good.

Rise up, African youths who struggle in the silence of daily life!

Rise up, African women, guardians of life, always ready to walk "grinding miles, swallowing dust, shouldering burdens, cultivating dreams, inventing the future", Sr. Elisa, the Combonian journalist from Eritrea writes.. Sr. Elisa participated in the Synod for Africa as an expert, at the invitation of the Pope.

Rise up, o great crucified and risen people!

Rise up, o women, youths, laypersons committed to changes without getting discouraged before anything. You live daily the blessing of facing and overcoming adversities. You are a people with the gift of parresia, namely with the courage of the truth and the good, aiming at denouncing injustice, lack of solidarity, corruption, hatred, the marginalisation of women, war, famine and proposing the mission consciously: to evangelise, to make man stand on his feet and to grow as well-formed Catholics.

The globalised capitalism is sacking the Planet, while Africa, relying on cultural heritage, can, must and wants to give a more harmonious and balanced vision of the relations between human beings and nature. Those who have lived in Africa have made the joyous experience, in daily gestures, of the culture, of the inclusion, and of the fecund relation among often very different persons

Africa evangelises from the Catholic Church. Though the Catholics form a minority in the continent, yet they are its living, active and committed expression. This minority knows how to dialogue with the other religious presences, with the Protestant churches, with Islam, with the traditional and still vital African religion. It carries with itself the worries, the anguish and expectations of the entire population in the continent: more than 50 countries with almost a milliard of persons.

At the centre of this life, there is the person of Jesus the Lord, the God who says, "Rise up". There is the God who answers the crucial issues of humanity, such as bread and justice; the Saviour who delivers the oppressed with absolute gratuity. In his light, we evaluate our experience as consecrated beings, to be Church today. We use some symbolically evocative words:

I think that our being religious men and women in Africa testifies the challenge of humanisation from below, namely the human process that promotes life abundantly for all men and women. Our consecrated and missionary life finds its meaning in this humanisation from below and the children actualise and practise it through a characteristic rite, which I have often seen in Tanzania. The children, generally between three and seven years of age, greet every adult person by putting their hands on the head of the adult and by repeating several times Shikamoo, which means, "I am at your feet". The adults must lower their head at the level of the children, and by doing this they realise who they are.

Sometimes, he who experiences this gesture may not be fully aware of its outwardly meaningful sense. It speaks to us of our need to become little and to welcome the challenges of the tiny daily steps of our testimony. These steps are sometimes meaningless, but they promote great transformations for all of us, transformations that invite us to wonder and to grow in gratitude and grace.

When we move with openness towards grace, towards the spirituality of consecrated and missionary life, we discover the true fathers and mothers in the Church.

As founders and foundresses of the congregations we belong to, they wanted to offer and to receive grace (rather than things, services, etc.). They wondered joyfully before persons, before the welcoming smile of a child, before the silent weeping of a mother, before the deep humility of old women worn out by a simple and sacrificed life, shikamoo, blessed by the children and the poor.

We can live, remember and share our faith with many brothers and sisters. To remember means to do Eucharist, namely to establish bonds humbly, to build and to re-build up encounters with persons, churches, nations, peoples.

"We live in a world full of contradictions and crises. Science and technology make gigantic steps in all aspects of life, furnishing humanity with all the requirements to turn our planet into a wonderful place for all of us. However, tragic situations of refugees, extreme poverty, deceases and famine keep on killing thousands of people every day. Africa is the most affected by all this. Challenged by the various contexts, by the new Areopagus of announcement in the African continent, transformed by the life example of many persons, in deeply religious and spiritual humus, each of us has surely recuperated spirituality as essentiality, as a necked and deeply human life. Spirituality has a thousand fingerprints; therefore, it is not equivocal.

They are multiform paths, journeys lost among hillocks and mountains that we must gather in their diversity and that we can understand only when we move along them. The experience of our consecrated and missionary life is probably a constant starting again without anything, with the attitude of him who patiently learns how to recognise the beauty of persons. In our communities, we have certainly experienced the fascination of our strongly passionate brothers and sisters who have gathered most patiently even there where others would say that there was nothing to be gathered. For instance, in the solitude and misery of the slums, among the affected by AIDS and the little abandoned orphans, among women who resist against desperation, among voiceless minorities, in a field of refugees at the boundary of war…

The ecclesial community, which Benedict XVI spoke of during his homily of the Eucharist closing the Synod for Africa, is the community that "works with a personal and communitarian conception, in order to orient the process in terms of relations, of fraternity and sharing".

It is the grace of serving the work of God: we do not make things (even the blessed ones… we build up, organise, bring development, get busy…), but enter a great passion; we enter the dream of God: living and serving a dream.

This means that we consider history as a case, as a sacred place, serving it and doing politics. Our presences of communitarian life become alternative social places, something like "political places". It is a matter of soiling the hands of many consecrated and laypersons in working together, entering reality, touching it, catching its limits and errors and letting the historical events enter their personal and community life.

Only small steps receive light and not the whole picture. Sometimes the light is very deem illumining just one step, and one does not know what comes after..

Nyumbani is the call to be present with prayer in the current history of Africa as well as of Italy etc. We pray a lot in syntony with compassion. This is not a mere epidemic and transient sensitivity, but a commitment to the decision of not escaping the suffering of history, which the Synod Fathers have penetrated with a vision of faith. "We address a supplication to the great powers of this world: Treat Africa with respect and dignity. (…).

Many conflicts, wars and poverty of Africa flow mainly from unjust structures. […]. A new and just world order is not only possible but also necessary for the good of humanity (…) ".³

This is a deep provocation: perhaps we shall never know how to answer the immense personal and social sufferings of the people entrusted to us by the provident design of the Father. Let us never abandon history. Let us not think that we must only eliminate or silence evil. We can pluck and carry it without fear, like many women who face and overcome adversities. We meet them in the market, near the well, at Soweto and Korogocho, in the refugees-camps, in prayer. In this human aspect, we see the aspect of mystery: it is the history of God, though sometimes we do not understand it.

It is the mystery of salvation realised in our human history. How many times we have neared the other, the sufferer, the poor, the capable person and have been compassionate (from cum-patio), have shared the anguish, have entered, nyumbani, the house and allowed passion to touch and transform us from within!

How many times we have experienced with joy the passage from the dialogue with persons on to the dialogue among cultures and finally to the culture of dialogue. Sometimes we have found ourselves between a reality, strongly proposed, and the faithfulness to the dream, which we signed with tears: to tell the Lord of life that, sooner or later, a change of history will arrive and we ask Him to hasten it!

The participants in the Second Special Assembly for Africa have proposed a rather "political" message. They say that our action is never neutral. According to this line, the denunciation of unjust and oppressed situations is a saving announcement. These words unmask, without any compromise, our sin of omission, sometimes in the name of our being consecrated women and men. We breathe this complex reality and receive the call to choose the ministry of closeness.

Karibu, is intensely lived in many Small Basic Communities, where it is possible to realise the active participation of the people of God, of the laity, women and youths. Our sensitivity for the wounded life and the commitment to fight against injustices on the welcoming and service side reveal history’s power of conversion as well as the involvement in a critical vigilance. All this form the sentinels of rights, whenever powerful persons deny and trample upon them. Moreover, many lights flow from our consecrated and missionary history, as the true place of learning, of experiencing fraternity and uprightness, at times through a journey of purification

Yes, the poor, symbol of a fragmented society waiting for their death because they cause a disturbance. "The negative consequence of this is in front of the entire world (….). How can one be proud of "presiding" such a chaos as this? (….). This Synod proclaims it strongly and clearly: it is the time of changing habits for the sake of the present and future generations".4

Along the journey of love, experienced in the service of consecrated life, we have surely met as subjects (not as problems) the poor and have been their companions of journey. A more missionary reality is born from the evangelical criterion of weakness – harambee. The Church in Africa is aware of the fact that the world is deaf, for which she has called all the members of the Church to the unity of internal forces, "all the members of the Church –as well as of the other churches and religions- must be mobilised to work together in "unity that is strength". The African proverb, an army of well-organised ants can defeat an elephant, provokes and encourages us.

This means: here we are –with all our being- all together! The pamoja tuko evangelises, gives initiatives and identity. It makes us experience the joy not of just speaking on behalf of the poor or of being their voice, but of causing the poor to speak, of opening the mouth of the dumb or of the realities that society has made what they are.

To return the word into compassion and grace is a balm. The man feels well in re-discovering his dignity; the time when they treated him as ignorant, needful only of material things, is over:: he is a man, she is a woman and he is a child or a youth. The identity of the other is too precious to neglect it or to consider it only as a poor or mendicant. It is a proposal of grace, but also of consolation in the true sense of the word. The African nomads teach us how to be itinerants who walk and walk with restlessness, picking up fragments and knowing that something is born if they put those fragments together: they become the Gospel of Jesus, the way, the truth and the life

Helped by our people, we understand always more that, instead of relying on big programmes, we can set on journeys that open up wherever there are faithful persons who, day after day, make some steps; reconciled persons, workers of justice and peace; salt and light in the society of men and of nations. During the Synod for Africa, moving testimonies have shown us that, even in the darkest moments of human history, the Holy Spirit is at work and transforms the hearts of both victims and persecutors, so that they may love one another as brothers and sisters.

Helped by our people, we educate one another to assume a non-violent and meaningful attitude; the intercession, which we do not perceive always because many persons, mainly women, live it secretly, carry it within. It is an attitude that meets history and is deeply ethical: only free persons intercede for the others.

Helped by the reflection of the synod Fathers, we go deep into the method of "seeing, and judging" in contemplative attitude, to the end of discovering in reality the inedited God who reveals himself as He likes. He turns us into a reconciled community, into powerful yeast of reconciliation in each Country and in the entire African Continent. This is the committed mission of the consecrated men/women, in the heart of the Church, pilgrim in Africa of third millennium.

1. The Swahili is an African language, most diffused and spoken in the world, prevalently used in Eastern Africa.

2. Message to the people of God nn. 4-5.

4 Message to the people of God, n. 37.