Going to the roots to build the today

7.      The first step to take in a period of transition --- or if we prefer, of exodus--- is to go back

to the origins of our life, in light of which, and in dialog with current realities, to examine and “explain clearly” our identity and the specific tasks entrusted to each one.  This means to verify the solidity of the foundations of our house, renew our own choices, revive the criteria of discipleship in order to be able to look at the unfolding of history with the penetrating eyes of love, in the realism that this requires, with full trust and with inexhaustible creativity, or if you wish, with “the fantasy of charity”. ¹⁴

What are our pedagogic roots?

            The formation process/program, we know, depends on our vision of the human person, his/her destiny, his/her tasks and responsibilities toward self, society, creation and toward the future. Our “pedagogy” is based on the event that has marked history:  “The Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14), in light of which, as the Council states, “the mystery of man takes on light”. (cf. GS 22) The event is to be read in a Trinitarian perspective.  In Christ, the Father reaches out to humans: he attracts them to himself with bonds of love (cf Hos 11) In Christ Jesus, in his life, in his death and resurrection, the love of the Trinity is revealed and we are made sharers in it through the work of the Holy Spirit.

            John writes in his Gospel: “..to all who did accept him he gave power to become children of God” (1:12), that is new creatures generated by God. (v. 13, cf 1Jn 3:2; 5, 18) The expression “children of God” defines human persons in their dignity, brings out their potentiality, details their tasks and goal: destined for fullness of life: “holy and spotless in his sight,…in love” (Eph 1:4), a “mystical” description of the full maturity of the person and of the community of believers.

8.      It is a fact.  Our condition, therefore, is that of “new creatures” born in the sharing of

the Paschal Mystery of Christ, in baptism. (cf Rom 6:1-11)  The purpose, in face of the Word’s incarnation “is the gift of divine sonship to men ”. (Cf Gal 4:6)  “Adoption as children does not cancel the weakness of the flesh, but help comes in the power of the Spirit who animates the Christian from within, in his prayer and his existence. Did Christ not ask: “Holy Father, let the love with which you loved me be in them?” Sonship, in practice, is a “living under the regime of the Spirit” (Rom 7:6), a living and a walking “according to the Spirit”. (Gal 5:25) Often, also in believers, the flesh still wins, but the Christian anthropologic principle is the filial Spirit who, enabling us to say: “Abbà”, also enables us to accomplish his works.” ¹⁵

            It is an objective, dynamic fact, open to the future (the  “not yet”). It is the constant point of reference, by which all formation directors try to be enkindled, and from which they draw inspiration and dynamism to cooperate with the Spirit’s action and to learn to read the signs of the Spirit’s action in persons, youth and adults in current history. ¹⁶

            The person is not built “in solitude”, but in relationship with the Father in Christ and with others, as a member of the People of God, Body of Christ, “living stone” of the Temple of the Holy Spirit. ¹⁷

            Being in Christ is the new way of existing, “a way of the Trinity” (identity, otherness, communion). Christian pedagogy, consequently, is intrinsically bound to the salvation event which introduced the human person into the life of the Trinity, in whom she finds her true face and mission.

            Therefore, subject and center of formation is the person redeemed by Christ, become member of his Body, co-responsible in Him for the Father’s plan of salvation, co-citizen and builder of a new humanity, the “human family of God”.

            The person, created in the image of God who is Love, bears, like all creation, the Trinitarian imprint; his dynamic-relational structure is Trinitarian.  Image of God-Trinity the person can, therefore, be realized only in communion. ¹⁸