“New” routes of  research

In that sense, formation is among the most demanding challenges for future years, an “open worksite” which solicits a need for finding “new routes” for searching and realization.

One of these “new” routes, perhaps still unexplored by a systematic and articulated reflection, is precisely the identity-culture-vocation relationship. Because it is at the crossroads of many expectations and perspectives, the topic of identity seen in relationship to culture and vocation can offer a contribution toward the formation of new syntheses, which translated into operational terms, will be able to facilitate the process of inculturating the charism and the formation of vocation identities able to face change, in the joy of being what we are called to be in the present European context. Some basic questions that are crucial to this will be reconnected, like that of the charismatic identity, inculturation and interculturality.

The question of charismatic identity is central. Rethinking identity and its relationship with the charism in a universal context, but also particular, means necessarily facing the topic of fidelity and, therefore, the response which, on a personal, community and congregational level we would have to give to go back to charismatic roots, not as part of a past, albeit glorious, but as utopia of the future. That is, it is a question of nourishing a fidelity that tries to be redesigned in the heart of history with its needs and challenges. And all of this involves the courage of continuously examining oneself on our “direction”: “Where are we going? Why and for whom be formed and form?” To continue to keep or manage the “status quo” is not possible; it can become stagnant, so that the renewal called for and the refoundation dreamed of risk being transformed into pure adaptation which is unable to look beyond. Flexibility and ability to change as a response to fidelity to the future, before fidelity to the past, seem to become more and more rare. They require open personalities, flexible and sufficiently stable to face undeniable crises deriving from restructuring and the many exoduses required to live one’s vocation, here and now, in history. Actually, quite a few problems, also personal ones, must  be retraced to the uncertainty of the historical transition we are going through, in which cultural pluralism and globalization have disputed identity, making the formation processes for personal and cultural identity more problematic, especially in the young. The gift of new, culturally diverse, vocations which enter our religious families, if on the one hand constitutes a challenge that touches everything—spirituality, formation, community, mission, government, economy—is also a job that needs to be built from scratch. New vocations bring with them a new cultural and ethnic sensitivity and the charismatic identity necessarily is subjected to processes of discernment and change.

The development and continuity of the charism over time are connected to the secret of an effective generational passage of vocation values in local communities and through identification processes that generate enthusiasm and belonging. That presupposes, above all in the area of ongoing formation, learning to continually elaborate one’s vocation identity, through processes of maturation and re-appropriation in different cultural contexts.

The process of inculturation, genuine kairós for the Church and for the congregation, is another key aspect. The complex  work of inculturation, as the Pope calls it in Vita Consecrate, is being carried out very slowly and not always in ways that are effective and consistent for the fruitfulness of the charism.³ There is no lack of opportunity nor of risk, therefore, there’s an urgency of a serious reflection and constant evaluation in an attitude of seeking and discernment. It is an inescapable process because on it depends the ability for renewal of religious life and creative fidelity to the charism. All formation, in its itineraries and processes, has in view the task of assuming the prophetic dynamism of the charism to translate the originating intuition of the founders into the concrete reality in which we live and work. Fidelity to the  charism must become the ability to accept a “consignment” which is continually enriched through the personal and community lived experience and in facing evangelical and cultural needs.  The vocation experience lived joyfully and fully by preceding generations, made visible by a clear and meaningful identity of life, thus generates new shoots which will continue in their turn to draw up new routes of identity building, “in faithfulness to the grace of the vocation received and with attention to history”, ⁴ always more with the color and face of the individual cultures and the diversified contexts in which they live.

The knot of  “interculturality” in our communities.   The dense network of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious societies which has grown up in the present world, is by now an unstoppable process that calls for the development fresh of modules of co-habitation and a new way to do education and formation, even though on the level of subjective processes the logic of the “monoculture” has difficulty disappearing. Suffice it to think of the return of strong identity tensions, of nostalgia for belonging, of the small fatherland, of local cultures that are making mutual tolerance and co-habitation ever more difficult between populations of the same cultural area, but marked by different traditions, values and customs. One of the most stimulating objections apropos of this is that intercultural dialog can damage individual cultural identities, that pluralism leads to relativism or to the loss of meaning and values systems. Pluralism and dialog do not lead to the loss of identity, but open to otherness and therefore to the richness of diversities.  That demands waysof intercultural education that promote the recognition and re-appropriation of one’s own identity in order to know how to interact with other identities.

The planetary dimension in which we are immersed opens to an ever broader “worldwide-ness” of which internationalization and interculturality are the most eloquent expressions. And that is no longer just “utopia”, but constitutes a call and a task for civil societies, and also for consecrated life. The religious community then can become prophecy, if it is able to live and witness the utopia of a planetary culture and identity, the possibility of encounter and dialog between diverse nations and cultures in a peaceful living together of peoples and religions. Each community that accepts the challenge of interculturality thus becomes paradigm of communion, where it is possible to integrate specificity and universality, worldwide-ness and localism, identity and otherness, sameness and difference, unity and diversity.

Before such questions of a polymorphous and dynamic historic-cultural density,  the nodal point is formation. The task for formation, in fact, is a priority strategy, a solution key for the new challenges put to consecrated life.  The question that accompanies us and concerns us in this time is: “what kind of future for formation?” The experience of these years makes us ask ourselves seriously if the formation models existing until  now are able to respond to such challenges, or if instead a rethinking and quality leap are necessary.

How is the situation of internationality and interculturality of our communities experienced, and how is it managed so that it really be “formative”,  that is, so that it helps toward growth in a mature “identity” capable of assuming one’s culture and be integrated with other different cultures, without losing one’s roots, being enriched by the contribution of values coming from the encounter with diversity?

Do vocations coming from different cultural contexts, nations or ethnic groups take on their own cultural identity along the journey of formation in vocation identity? What are the most frequent difficulties or problems in our communities, now more and more multi-cultural and multi-ethnic? And what could be the formation courses that will make all of that possible?