In a time when certainly there is a shortage of experts in education, professional trainers and even "trainers of trainers", the claim to exhaust the subject offered by the subtitle is dismissed at the outset. The following reflections would be rather a matter for reflection, which may indicate some elements that seem urgent in reference to the formation of consecrated life in today's cultural and social context, without claims to be exhaustive, but rather with the intention of "giving to think."

     The exhortation Vita consecrata reaffirms the end of the consecrated life as “a configuration to the Lord Jesus", expressing the goal of education as "gradual assimilation of the mind of Christ" (VC 65-66). Taking seriously these claims brings a number of implications, from the synthesis of Christ’s event as it is offered by John: "And the Word became flesh" (Jn 1.14). In the incarnated Logos the corporeality is assumed by God as unsurpassed vehicle for communication and revelation’s expression/event. The progressive conformity to the Lord Jesus, Word made flesh, asks in the first instance to take seriously the body, as a moment of revelation, and at the same time of training.

  
The body: original training instance

     Defined by John Paul II as "primordial sacrament" the body - "created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God"[i]  - is support and foundation of spiritual life, preferential place of manifestation of the divine, and therefore essential and privileged moment of encounter with God and with brothers.
From the outset it is a place where one experiences the otherness and place of alliance; not only of the alliance between man and woman (cf Gen 1.21 to 23), but also of the alliance with God, written in a tangible way in the flesh of Abraham (Gen 17.10-11).

     In the words of the prayer of Psalm 139.13-16, the body, embroidery weaved from the Almighty in secret of a womb, turns a story of a care and love’s tale, the story of a "you to you" personal and intimate with a God who is Father, who manifests in the history his paternity through a shaped body (cf Jer 1:4-5).

     It is therefore in his own body that man experiences the imago Dei, " because it is in the body that man finds himself embraced by the original love around him while it is in the world".[ii] A direct consequence of this experience is the opportunity to capture the same image of God in the face of our brethren. If, on the one hand, the body defines the boundaries of the individual designing the form, at the same time is in the body crossing from the self to the other, immanent or transcendent. That's bodily because with all his expressions turns out to be a decisive moment of formation, essential for the consecrated life.

A donated body

     The possibility that the body is the image of God’s certification, a place of experience of His paternity, is fulfilled in the person of the Son. Through his flesh, the passion of God for man knows the highest expression, is through his flesh that those "feelings", expressed in Vita consecrata (No. 66), do not remain pious wishes and yearnings of the heart but come to expression most radical and compromising as possible: that of a donated body.
"I am the living bread, which came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread will live forever and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world "(Jn 6:51). The use of the noun flesh (sarx), suggests a deliberate reference to the Prologue of the fourth Gospel, the Word who "became flesh" and dwelt among men. Besides this, the promise of the gift of this flesh ("I'll give”), binds the Incarnation’s event to the gift that He will do with his death.

     The flesh of the Word is a gift so that the world alive. This is the donated food: in this meeting and in this communion with man, Christ gets involved totally, enclosing in this food all the parable of his experience. The food He offers is a synthesis of the whole experience and who eats this food tastes the life that comes from this experience, entering into it, by communion with it.

      Not only all his experience, but also his whole person, in his integrity: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you" (v. 53). These expressions contain no doubt a reference to the future death of Christ. But flesh and blood in the Scriptures refer to the integrity of the person, in all its aspects; here in this relationship with the believer is involved throughout the experience of the incarnate Son and all his specific person (flesh and blood), in a radical way.

The desire, soul of the gift

     The total gift of self, which involves the whole person, is supported by a burning desire: "I have longed to eat this Passover with you" (Lk 22:15); is an intense longing that animates and sustains the gift of his body as food. We would go back to Christ as the man of desire to rediscover the strength and extraordinary formative value of this experience.
Speaking of desire is to speak of a lack’s experience, of the search for a fulfillment that wounds and drags the person out of himself to another and from a apart from, gradually opening to life. The desire has to do with the stars: de-sidera (Latin) "stars" distant (de-) for the observer, but at the same time closer because they evoke nostalgic yearning, bringing with them a promise (cf Gen 15.5 to 7). That desire has "the size of the vigil and waiting, and opened and stellar horizon, of the positive warning of a lack that pushes the search" [iii].
Who more of the Word made flesh could ask for? He himself, flesh of the desire of the Father, insistent prospector of man in his ways (Jn 4.6), in his vigils, in His compassion (Mark 8.2), experiencing for himself the tearing distance away from the Father, shouted on cross: "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" (Mk 15:34), the devastating word is in contrast to the voice of the beginning: "Thou art my Son, the beloved" (Mk 1.11).

The shapping desire

      Being conformed to Christ and his feelings depends upon the experience of desire, fully lived, in all its nuances. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus declared blessed those who hunger and thirst (Mt 5.6), ie those who want; and this is the bliss that holds the consecrated life, the life of women and men trained in the school of desire, taught to feel the deepest yearnings and recognize them, people in attendance of themselves to capture the radical aspiration and profound of sense, the original power of a creature formed in the image of the Creator. So consecrated people are driven by this thirst, a longing not appeased, but grown up to become anxiety provoking and fascinating, encouraging you to try: "You have made us reaching out to you, and our heart is restless until it stilled in you'.[iv]

     At the desire’s school  we learn the discipline of silence, of absence, of the distance; to the school's desire is learned the subtle art of listening, it sharpens the sensitivity and hearing. At the school's desire touch becomes more sensitive: scratchy camera becomes caress, tender embrace that supports. At the school of desire, the eye is penetrating, able to look away, to pierce the horizon in hope of the return of a child. So, gradually the desire through the body, changes it and  teaches it to love, writing in the holy flesh in the form of a generative and welcoming love, a love which through body will find concrete expression gestures and words.

     Only those who wants becomes too desirable and attractive, because he becomes a witness of the infinite that he saw, certification in the history of in the presence of a beyond, of a Love that transcends and is worth to be trying. It is the secret of a meeting’s testimony, which goes far beyond the waves that carry full words, sounds and colors accompanying exceptional events: the evidence is written in everyday consecrated person, soul and body, whole and loving, desiring and hunting.
      Conforming to Christ and his feelings, therefore, urges us to reconsider two formative instances, original and decisive: that of the body and that of desire, by which to live and to witness concretely to women and men of our time the passion of God for man.
 

Benedetta Rossi mdm
Biblista
Via dei Lentuli, 62 -00175 Roma