DownloadTOWARDS A PROPHETIC COMMUNITY
By Paolo Archiati, OMI, Vicar General
I would like to continue
my thoughts on community,
the first call to
conversion from our
last Chapter. Fraternal Life in Community,
a document from the Congregation for the
Institutes of Consecrated
Life and Societies of Apostolic Life which appeared in 1994, addresses
the topic of
common life regarding the difficulties it has
to face in our day, especially that of
individualism. The religious community
is defined as “the place where the daily and
patient passage from ‘me’ to ‘us’ takes place, from my commitment to a
commitment entrusted to the community, from seeking ‘my things’ to seeking ‘the
things of Christ’.” This patient passage is
a daily task and it happens in a balance that is sometimes
difficult to find
and maintain, “between respecting the person
and the common good, between the demands
and needs of individuals
and those of community, between
personal charism and
the communal apostolic project.” The
enemies of this balance are, on the one hand, fracturing
individualism, and on the other, stifling communitarianism.
If this passage is done with balance, the religious community becomes “the place where we learn daily to take on that new mind which allows us to live in fraternal communion through the richness of diverse gifts and which, at the same time, fosters a convergence of these gifts towards fraternity and towards co-responsibility in the apostolic plan.”
We might note here that the community neither suppresses nor replaces the “me”: the “me’s” who form the community are the starting point: without individuals, there is no community; at the same time, the community goes beyond them, or better, it draws them to go beyond themselves so as to find themselves in another arena of action and mission -- the community itself.
This helps us to avoid what the document called “stifling communitarianism”, which suppresses freedom, initiative and individual talents; it is a question of a call received from Jesus who makes of those he has called a community with himself and invites everyone to go beyond self in order to arrive at a higher level, namely, that of community, of family. The mission is given, at the same time, to each individual and to the community. That the individual aspect not be overwhelmed by conversion to the community is well expressed in the first of the nine calls to conversion: “That each Oblate reflect on the witness of his religious life, living the vows in a prophetic way so as to share these values with the world, as an invitation for others to join our Oblate family.” The subject of this invitation is “each Oblate.” The starting point is always each of us as a person; here we are asked to reflect on the testimony of our individual Oblate life and to live the commitments of the evangelical counsels in a prophetic way, so that the values which they represent might be communicated to the world and so that other persons, through this testimony, might receive the invitation coming from the very one who called us: to join our family.
A special invitation is addressed to each superior and each community: when we say “each community,” we imply that each community, within the whole of the Oblate Family, plays the same role that individuals play in the local community. That would be an interesting point to develop further.
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