REDESIGNING PRESENCE:

CRITERIA, PERSPECTIVES,RESTRUCTURING.

1. Some preliminary remarks.

The formulation of the theme and its place in the sequence of papers are an invitation to be practical. The doctrinal presuppositions have already been stated. It will be sufficient therefore to offer one or two remarks to put the question into focus.

The work manifests immediately the identity and vitality of a form of consecrated life. It is its visible realization. At its beginning the charisms made their characteristics clear through a certain kind of work and almost within it. From it arose the charism’s appeal and the attraction towards it of new followers. For this reason it is said that charisms are not spiritual doctrines but events of the Spirit, experiences and not only explanations.

At the present day we still tell the story of our origins, a thrilling story, and then we try to put in order the ideas from which it draws its inspiration. The same thing happens at times of reform or re-foundation. When Saint Teresa set about living the Carmelite charism in a different way, she left the old convent of "La Encarnacion" where there were 200 persons between nuns, resident women and girls who were there to be educated, about a hundred of them from noble families of the city and began to live a different style of life in the convent of San José with four companions and a possible total of thirteen. Exodus, seeking, pilgrimage and a new style of life are at the origin of renewals.

The "presence" or work involves many elements. In fact it is the point of convergence of all the fundamental aspects of the consecrated life. It is influenced by the individuals involved, the tone of their life, what they believe in and on which they have staked their lives, the options they have made in face of the alternatives presented by our culture, what they aim at being and what they manage to communicate. The charisms of their bearing and the way they made their mark became collected into a "personal" experience. Always prominent around the founder there were individuals endowed with creativity and capable of being true followers. This is of importance to avoid the risk of looking at the works, when it comes to reshaping them, only in terms of institutions, activities and structures.

Similarly the "presence" includes the life of the community: its style of relationships, its welcoming ability, its participation and involvement in the local context, its closeness to the people, and the manifestations of its choice of God perceptible by those people. The community in fact is a sign of fraternity, of ecclesial communion, of the presence of God in the human Family.

The image which the presence gives depends on the kind of service it is intended to offer, on the manner in which it is put forward, on its place in the cultural or social context, and on the means. In the process of discernment for the reshaping of the works, priority can be given to some of these aspects in particular, because of their relevance to the charism (e.g. fraternity, mission, etc.), or because they are likely to give rise to new attitudes, relationships and mentality.

The local "presences", when gathered together, provide an image; they become the expression of a form of consecrated life. We live in a time of ample intercommunication. Images and messages become widely spread, they are compared with one another and build each other up. Initiatives mutually complement each other and become integrated. If they are to be incisive they call for synergy and team work. And so nowadays it is indispensable to consider the broad range of the presence of a province in its own territory, that of the Institute itself against a wider background, and perhaps of the consecrated life itself taken in its totality, at least as regards the adopting of stances and attitudes. This opens up some particular perspectives.

It is a common impression, and maybe also an established fact, that many of our foundations or works express the charism with less immediacy and liveliness, not only by comparison with the time of the founders, but also with more recent times when religious values had an importance in society, or when the services of men and women religious had an evident social function. Some of the urgent needs to which their various services of charity responded are nowadays less pressing or they have been correctly taken over by other entities. The common mentality does not easily link such services to the message we want to give. And so our work does not immediately convey the sense of the consecrated vocation.

There is a situation of absence of communication which affects precisely the substance of our message. Secular environments are little inclined to recognize the value of choices and motivations which extend beyond what is functional and practical for the moment. Pluralism attributes to subjective preference what we intend to be linked to an objective value. All our efforts with regard to the great phenomena of our times seem apparently inefficacious: loss of the religious sense, ethical disorientation, the kinds of poverty which increase and become ever more extreme, the many forms of discrimination, the conflicts which degenerate into continued violence. It all goes to confirm the impression of the scarce capacity for attracting vocations, especially where the prevailing concerns are rationality, wellbeing and development.

On the other hand there is no shortage of challenges to charity and the Christian sense. Some are new and others old, but they appear in quite different coordinates. The poor are no longer the orphan children of a society based on natural solidarity and organized in line with human dimensions. The situation is now one of globalization, with the world divided by different rates of development, and a dominant economic system. The same could be said of the "sick" and the "non-evangelized", not to speak of the young and of education. In this sense Vita Consecrata repeats that the Spirit "calls consecrated men and women to present new answers to the new problems of today’s wold".

In this era of ours, marked by social communication, it is particularly necessary to render "visible" the charism, to make the message bright and clear, and to transmit with directness and spontaneity the reasons for our hope and the sense of our choice.

The process of discernment leads then to the discovery and identifying of the elements which in our own particular case create a separation between what people feel and imagine about the meaning of what we say, and our kind of presence, life and work. We must, in fact, be sufficiently close to them to make ourselves understood without playing down the "differences" which characterize consecrated life.

What is important is not only what is done materially, but also what is prompted or awakened, what is hinted at to raise questions, what provokes flashes of thought, what is pointed out, the challenges which are launched. It has been said that consecrated life must not only respond to challenges, but must itself create new ones. We must enter into dialogue with the prevailing mentality, but at the same time insert in it elements extraneous to its normal way of thinking.

This confrontation is not easy, because the desire to express oneself does not always meet with complete success; it is part of the experience of the believer and of religious. We find abundant indications of this in the Bible. The Psalms express it in the form of a painful invocation when they relate the challenge of the sceptic: "Where is your God?" In fact the presence of God and the experience it provokes in man cannot be reduced to a purely temporal vision, and its signs are to some extent extraneous to human perception: they are wrapped in mystery and require faith and grace.