The docility to the Holy Spirit

Each of us and our communities have the unalienable responsibility of cultivating in ourselves the attitudes which strengthen our tension to the Trinitarian communion; premise, context, consequence, orientative criterion of docility to the Spirit, hunger and thirst of our good, of our obedient love to the Father.

To forget that the human reality is not justifiable without a reference to the Creator (MND. No 26) -though it is a diffused phenomenon, empowered by the temptation of reducing the Mystery to our dimensions, rather than opening ourselves to its dimensions- is a deceit which narcotises the journey of religious communities and the obedience to the Father. He wants us to be fervent in sharing his mercy for us and for all. In His Spirit, He enables us to walk in Christ, the Way. These situations interpellate us deeply.

A person does not drink, unless he is thirsty; but if he does not drink, he dies of dehydration.

The indifference, inertia, uneasiness in which most of us spend our life, is a very serious phenomenon and a demanding challenge. It imposes the evaluation of our coherence with sincerity and with the quality of our sharing the will of the Father, who wants all of us saved in the faithful knowledge of the Truth (cfr. 1 Timothy 2,4).

To multiply the diagnosis of this phenomenon is a sign of spiritual health only if accompanied by the therapy shown by the divine Persons in our life.

The sitio of the Cross, the action of the Spirit, the testimony of our founders demand a sincere response to the Lord's questions: Why do you weep? Whom are you looking for? (cfr Jo 20,15). Do you ask this of your own accord, or have others said it to you about me? (Jo 18,34).

 When we say: I seek You, Lord, I am yours, we are sincere only if we act according to what he enables us to live with the grace of Baptism, of vocation and profession in the community life. Everything is donated to shake our inertia, to make us witnesses to mercy and compassion (cfr Mt 15,22). Vocation does not tolerate compromises.

The proposal of a Year for the Eucharist is a also a gift destined to shake the indifference,  the carelessness of our good, of relation with the end of our existence  and history, of curing the 'old personal and communitarian evil': the oblivion of God and trusting the human self-sufficiency (Mane nobiscum, quoted in Mnd. No.26).

The coherence with the Christian identity of our life, the managing of our power of nature and grace, the faithfulness to the resurrection in Christ through the Spirit is the gift which the Father expects from us and which we make to ourselves if we live in Him.

The celebration of the Eucharist

The celebration of the Eucharist is a decisive dimension for the life of a community,  which, conformed to the thirst of Christ, in his obedience to the Father, wants to heal and to empower the decision of practising the beautiful and sincere initiatives which touch the sleeping hearts, heals the faltering wick and the crushed reed (see Mt 12,20).

This waking up does not happen mechanically. It works in, with, for the community which, born from the Eucharist, becomes Eucharist and grows in the desire to co-operate with the tension to the good, which the creating Trinity wants for us. We cannot grow in communion all alone, and we can't be in communion with the nostalgia that all the persons called to the banquet may wear the wedding garment (cfr Mt 22,11), that they may be joyful and free to partake, according to one's own condition.

The desire of God is written in the human heart, which is created by God for God. Its development and dynamism are not automatic, but human, intelligent, loving, coherent, responsible. Without an awakened and seconded nostalgia, the person could not welcome the gift of God (CCC. No. 36),  to which the fulfilment of its disquieting search of happiness is linked.

God reveals and offers himself to the human person in revealing his Mystery, his design of benevolence, pre-established from eternity in Christ. It is universal, not selective. Even if the son forgets his father or his mother, the Lord does not forget the creatures of his love. To redeem them, He offers His beloved Son.

Faith is not an isolated act. Nobody can believe all alone, just as no man comes to life by himself. No man has given faith to himself, just as nobody has given the existence to himself. The believer is like a ring in the long chain of believers (CCC, No. 166).

The Church, our Mother, gives a response to the Father on behalf of all His children. With her faith,  she teaches us to say: I believe, we believe (167). "The faith of the Church precedes the faith of the believer who is invited to adhere to it. When the Church celebrates the Sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles (1124).

The union of God with humanity had its supreme actuation in the fullness of time (cfr Gal 4,5) with the Incarnation of Jesus. During his life, He became for us Way to the true Way. He continues to exercise his action with and on us through the Eucharist.

To enjoy the fascination, which he exercises on us, to want Him,  as Way to the Father, fountain of oil for the lamps during our pilgrimage (cfr Mt 25, 3), means to work so that all those with whom we share our journey, may want to be on the Way of peace, performing initiatives to persevere in it.

The human being is called to friendship and intimacy with the Father, who wants us to be providence for ourselves and for others, and joyful in His beatitude.

The truth which gives orientation to the journey is the end for which the Father wanted humanity, wanted to open a covenant with it, and wanted the covenant to be full, new and eternal in the paschal event: the more we love this covenant, the more we follow it.

The Catechism of Pius X proclaimed that God created us to know, to love and to serve Him in this life and to enjoy Him eternally in Paradise.

If this end does not attract and does not vivify our desires, these become vague, lost, deprived of a criterion to evaluate our being in history.

The Paschal mystery unveils the original and ultimate end, which the Father, supreme source and giver of life, wanted in communicating his life to humanity, in which He founds the amazing, adoring, grateful acknowledgement of the action of grace and of his mercy.

One body and one Spirit

The beauty of the communion with Christ, who,  incarnated in the womb of the Virgin Mary more than twenty centuries ago, continues to offer himself to humanity as a source of divine life (TMA 55), is the hidden treasure (cfr Mr 13,44) whose beauty and precious value can be tasted only by those who are ready to sell everything in order to buy it.

In the Paschal mystery, Jesus reveals his Father, who loves humanity in and for His own humanity. He welcomes it into His life as Head of the Body and first born out of many brothers (cfr Ro 8,29). With the communion we join the Body of Christ and with faith we receive the immortality.

The praise to God and the thanksgiving flow out of the covenant which God stipulates with his people (cfr Genesis 24, 1-11) and which has its testament and supreme realisation on Easter day.

Jesus Christ offers to humanity his Body and his Blood as nourishment, thus inaugurating the new condition of communion with God, namely the power of becoming children of God, of founding an unbreakable friendship,  thanks to the love of Christ, which the Father returns by giving a new, immortal life with the Resurrection.

The Easter memorial is ordained to nourish and to favour the growth of union with the Father, the thanksgiving and praise of his glory, and enables us to generate our final perfection (Gregory of Nissa).

This configuration does not happen mechanically. The Lord acts in, with, for and through us; he wants us to co-operate with Him in the achievement of the good He wants for us.

The edification of a just and fraternal society, as well as the sharing of some miseries which torment the world, require a concrete commitment to contemplate the Eucharist with loving intellect, to appreciate the daily celebration, particularly the Sunday's, to stay in adoration before the blessed Sacrament of the altar.

The community exerts an influence on its members and nourishes the desire of authenticity, of persevering to journey on the highway, namely the Lord who lives in the Church. As we cannot grow in communion by living all alone, similarly we cannot even be in communion without the agreed participation in the capacity of each person.

The Eucharist, font and climax of faith working in love

There are many events which recall the centrality of the Eucharist in Christian life: the Encyclical letter Ecclesia Eucaristia, 2003; the year of the Eucharist (October 2004-2005) called with the Apostolic Letter Mane nobiscum Domine on 7^th October 2004;  the National Eucharistic Congress, May 2005, in Bari,  the synod of Bishops, October 2005, etc.

Everything aims at anchoring life to the Mystery, which is the root and the secret of the spiritual life of the faithful (Mnd. No. 5). Everything induce us to verify how we live our faith in the Eucharist, the real presence of Jesus and our availability to witness to it throughout our life (MND No. 18).

The Risen Lord loves us and wants us to be saved. He regenerates us in the celebration of His mystery which radiates in all the manifestations of life and, from Easter to Easter, attracts us to the participation in His glory.  The conversion to His call,  the faithfulness to the grace of the Christian initiation, passes through docility to the maturation of a new mentality of faith, in which a global attitude is rooted for ourselves and our salvation.

Jesus in the Eucharist joins us to himself in the most intimate way; "He is the source, the epiphany of communion and newness of life (MND. No. 4).

The mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ turns us into a "visible Sacrament" of the sanctifying presence of Jesus in history.

The Christian man works for what he is, namely for the One with whom he is united and who, in the Spirit, obeys the exigencies of the human growth of reality, just as he understands it, with the strength he possesses.

To live conscientiously and faithfully the sacramental celebration of God's gift means to learn how to grow together, though differently, how to re-generate the community relation in, with and for the Church, who prepares for the coming of God's Kingdom; it means to be permanently converted to Baptism.

Every person becomes alive in Christ and in the human family, a new creation through the help of others and, above all through the help which promotes the growth of our responsibility for the common good.  Gregory of Nissa reminds us that "every person generates its own final perfection". Nobody can grow to perfection in our stead, but we cannot be perfect, if we are not in solidarity with the whole creation, if we do not share the maternal and missionary solicitude of the Church, who wants us to have a foretaste of the joyful union with God.

The gift demands acceptance and thanksgiving, lived in our daily life and oriented by contemplation, which it re-translates into works on the Way which the Father shows, so that we may live in Him and in the Holy Spirit.

This newness of life leads us to re-discover the Sunday celebration. On the day He rose, the Lord gathered the community to attract it to the participation in His glory near the Father, to unite it to himself, to free and to strengthen in it the desire of eternal life in the Blessed Trinity.

To this end, He regenerates it, conforms it to His life-style and educates it so that, in docility to the Spirit, it may co-operate with the formation of each person in the community and of the whole community in his mission, in history, by living in friendship with the Father. "The Body of Christ and Holy Scriptures are extraordinarily necessary for the faithful soul" (Imitation of Christ, book IV c. 10).

The belonging to Christ and the incorporation into the Church are the immediate and specific effects of Baptism (Ro 6, 1-11) and become perfect in the Eucharist, which presupposes the ecclesial and baptismal communion (EdE 35).

The baptismal priesthood is exercised in it, and in it the vital relation with Christ grows.

The Eucharist is a pledge of the future glory, of God's vision, and the resurrection of the flesh will be its ultimate effect, when God will be all in all (1Co 15,2).

The mystagogy¹ for the vital participation in the Eucharist

The exigency of a re-education to the mystery, to its coherent and lived celebration is of a primary importance, in order to live the invisible reality of the Mystery through the rites.

The on going conversion is to be nourished, above all, in the solicitude of not ignoring the visible aspects of the celebration and of not stopping at them, in order to dwell in the communion with the actions and sufferings of Christ, Way to the true Life in the Father.

The Christian mystagogy is constituted by the fact that Jesus himself, in His Spirit, is the principal mystagogous of the Father; his actions and his words reveal him. Manifesting himself to the twelve, He opened their mind to the understanding of the Scriptures (Lk 24, 45);  he reveals himself as an exegete of his mystery channelled by them and confers to them the power of opening to Him, above all through the sacramental expressions of His work, and now through the words and gestures of the Liturgy.

He leads to experience (ex perire), to walk in the mystery and to catch the celebrated reality through experience:  he is a living and vivifying way to the Mystery.

Faith goes from the celebrated mystery to the union with the Living One. The act of the believer does not end with the enunciated:  the source of living water (Is 49,10) unites him to Himself, empowering his energies and enabling him to contemplate and to live Him in the liturgical celebration,  as source of the celebrated life and of the spiritual senses which makes the existence of the believer fruitful and diffusive. These senses flow from the habitudo, which the sanctifying grace founds and vivifies in the human spirit. They express themselves in the theological virtues and in  charity, which is the utmost virtue.

The celebration of the Eucharist, in its main phases, educates to contemplate the invisible present, subtracts us from the tyranny of the sensitive world, empowers the spiritual senses : hearing, sight, touch, word; asks to represent the true mystery of the celebration, to relate life to it; it re-generates the desire of dwelling in the Father and of bringing to completion the work, which He entrusts to each person in his mystical Body (parable of talents, see Mt 25, 15 …). This happens:

- In the consent to the convocation to participate in the celebration. In it, the Holy Spirit draws us out of our solitude and disposes us to listen to the Word, unveiling all that the Father has said on the human mission, on dignity and on the use of power.

- In our community and self-offering, while presenting the fruit of our work, for the transformation of the city, so that it may be worthy of God's designs;

-          In the Eucharistic prayer, the Father in, with and through the Church, vivified by the

Spirit, turns our gifts into food and drink of salvation for the faithful; He makes of us other "Christs" who co-operate for the coming of the Kingdom.

-     partaking in the permanent solicitude of the visible Church: the memory of the teaching Church; the memory of the dead; the imploration for the sharing of glory.

-          At the end, the Eucharist urges the participants to be always what they have become, that

is, it urges them to commit themselves to the propagation of the Gospel, to the animation of Society and of culture, so that every Christian may assimilate what the Eucharist arouses through the personal and communitarian meditation (MND No. 25).

* A Dominican priest, liturgist

1. From "mueo" (he doesn't know how to speak, he cannot express himself), and "agogia" (to begin). To walk on the way, which leads to personal conversion, to the mystery in the people whom it gathers and vivifies.