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In
the story of creation (Gen 2,7), man is in the hands of God who moulds
him, like clay in the hands of the potter. Then, God leans his face on
the work of his hands and breathes in it a breath of life: thus, His
creature, which is as frail as the clay, participates in the divine
respiration and becomes nefesh, a living being.
These words of the
Scripture are so very familiar to us as we risk of missing its depth and
beauty. Just a few lines, yet they are denser than any treatise on
anthropology and theology. They emphasize man’s frailty, the structural
weakness into whose consequences the Bible will introduce us with the
following chapter, by telling us the episode of the original sin. At the
same time, it reveals one of the tasks par excellence of each creature:
having been moulded like a pot, the human being has been made to
enclose, to contain something. Soon after this, we discover the
"content" for which the human being is modelled like a "container": it
is the breath of God.
A further suggestion comes to us from the exegesis:
in this text we find the same term used by Jeremiah to express the
breathing of a woman when she gives birth to a baby (See: Jeremiah: 4,
31). Therefore, God breathes on man in such a way as a woman breathes
and groans to give birth to her child. With this simple and suggestive
image, we encounter the mystery of man, namely: a being that the
Almighty moulded to the end of receiving the breath of God, Hiss
Life. This is the precious gift, which God thought of in moulding
the human being as a "container": a gift must receive and commit its own
existence.
Called to become co-creators
The welcoming of this infinitely precious reality
implies a commitment and a responsibility. As a created being,
man receives the call to become co-creator, by exercising on creation
and on him a healthy dominion, which must orient the entire existence,
orderly and harmonically, towards an end: communion with others and with
God. His role as custodian of a garden, (Jeremiah: 2, 15),
even of the interior garden, as well as the task of giving a name
(Jeremiah: 2, 19) to the surrounding reality, express God’s request of
collaboration, of participation in the growth of creation, consequently
in the development of the gift which man receives.
With sin this co-operation shatters partially, but
thanks to the Easter of Christ, we are once again fully inserted into
the divine life. Baptism that introduces us into it, entrusts us with
the responsibility of letting it permeate our life more and more, of
seeing that it penetrates intimately all the fibres of our being.
Forming oneself
The task of self-education is not a work in itself
about the personal experience of faith and vocation. In fact, it
corresponds to the specific exigencies of Baptism and, consequently, in
the religious vocation. It is the matter of taking care of and favouring
the growth of the precious gift, which God has entrusted to us. We must
carry on this task with commitment and seriously, because whatever must
mature and develop is much more than a simple dimension of our life: it
concerns the global existence.
The formation of a religious cannot interest only one
area of his personality: knowledge, culture, intellectual or moral
development, competences. It cannot help involving the entire
life, in all its dimensions. This life is a dynamic reality,
like a germ in need of being guarded and cultivated, so that it may go
on developing ever more.
To speak of dynamism, therefore, means to seek
an orientation, a direction towards which we must channel the movement
of the development. To educate oneself, therefore, it is indispensable
to define the finality of our formation journey. In fact, we may
conceive it in different terms. Somebody may interpret it as an
increase of one’s I: in this case the interest of the person gets
oriented towards all that may grant her gratification at psychological
level, such as: power, success, admiration. However, if we know
ourselves as creatures inhabited by the Life of God, the end of our
personal formation must have a link, a connection with this life and
self-formation must find an end capable of transcending the satisfaction
of the single person. Therefore, the way we think of ourselves defines
also the end of the education journey and challenges us about our
orientation. It is, therefore, a duty to ask ourselves about what we
feel to be central and fundamental in this journey: our "I" with its own
potentialities of development, or the growth of the Baptismal gift, that
is, the life of God that the Sacrament communicated to us.
Interrogating oneself
Educating oneself in the art of existence means
interrogating oneself, explicitly or indirectly, about what we
personally consider as existence. It is the matter of a fundamental
question for every human being and, therefore for us religious, whose
theoretical answers may be perfect but also defensive, if we do not
allow the daily concreteness to challenge us, by asking what it means
for us, every day, to live.
Of course, we cannot define the Life of God with our
poor human words. However, in the common dictionary we find terms apt to
evoke something about this mystery: communion, self-oblation, welcoming,
relation, as well as dynamism and movement, provided they are not lived
as ends to themselves, but one with a constant exchange of love.
Self-formation in the art of living implies, consequently, verifying
if what characterises the Life of God can find space and can grow in
our existence. Often we feel reprimanded of bourgeois.
Not only persons who are far from the Church say
this: many times Pope Benedict XVI himself has repeated it, inviting us
to reflection and conversion. A highlighted trait of bourgeois links
with the theme of formation, and we can express it as loss of dynamic
existence. In fact, often we tend to survive, more than to live; we
tend to protect what we are or we have. We configure our resistance to
changes as "no" pronounced against a life, which we do not welcome, and
do it in the name of our fears, of defending personal well-being, of the
difficulty to dilate the heart, synchronizing it with the wavelength of
the Church and the world. .
Favouring the growth of life
There is the risk that all this may be true at
personal and institutional level. In fact, it is not the single
individuals who may, unknowingly, refuse to welcome life and make it
grow. Often we miss the stimuli on behalf of the Institutes which,
perched on its positions finalised to survival, do not stimulate the
communities or the single members to develop dynamics of collaboration,
of exchange, or to reflect on how to welcome and favour the growth to
the "abundant Life" that the Gospel promises us.
We cannot configure auto-formation, above all within
a religious community, as the consequence of an individual initiative.
It gives fruit only if we think in an organic and inter-personal way.
Self-education can never be a duty imposed from above and undergone as a
crushing weight. Neither can it be a fragmentary experience, in which
every single person seeks to develop a given aspect of its personality.
Auto-formation is a coherent and structured experience, oriented to an
end, capable of taking into consideration not only the interests and
ends of the individual person, but also the perspectives of the
community in which the person lives. The interposing of finalities,
different in the intentions of the members from the decisions of the
community or the superiors may create heavy tensions difficult to carry
on.
Let us think, for instance, of all the situations
where the necessary clearness is missing concerning the importance of
professional preparation of a member of the fraternity: sometimes this
ambivalence finishes by clashing against the imperative necessity for
others to keep a structure standing. Self-formation, then, becomes a
choice of which we blame the other or a right to vindicate, rather than
a dimension of the individual growth. A dimension to integrate within a
project of life attentive to read, in the signs of the times, in
personal and communitarian talents, in the charisma, in the orientations
drawn from the Gospel, the indications of particular and collective
choices.
The vows: at the school of formation
The formation act needs, as we have highlighted,
ways apt to guide a journey of growth; however, it needs also
instruments. Religious life, with its structure and its demands
first of all the search for God, puts many of them at our
disposal. For instance, the vows may become privileged means, which
educate us in the art of living. They make us to grow in many fields of
our existence. Out of the many possibilities, I like to highlight a
dimension deeply bound to the mystery of life, as we have described it
at the beginning. In fact, the vows may be for us means to welcome the
Life, the Breath of God that inhabits us. The consecrated life is a high
school of formation that offers us the possibility of receiving the
gifts of God, putting aside the possessive attitude of our way of
loving, the need of holding and managing autonomously our existence. It
offers us this possibility through these three means, capable of making
us to grow and of orienting us towards our full maturity in Christ (Ef
4, 13),
Anna Bissi
Psychotherapist
Basilica sant’Andrea - p.za Roma 35
13100 Vercelli
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