In the Name of the Father
Man in Relation - You should all know what saudade means. It is that particular form of anguished and melancholic nostalgia which every Brazilian feels for the colors, smells and vistas of his land, which are the sources of so much music and poetry in that country.
In this report I would like to use the word "Relation" in order to signify the object of our personal saudade, the deep, dramatic and vital nostalgia for the embrace of God.
The Dehonian lives an intimate relationship of contemplation of the Father. The relationship with the Father is the landscape of the Dehonian soul, its home, its truest and most fulfilling dimension, its profound identity.
John, in the prologue to his Gospel(1) defines the Son as such only in relation to the Father. "In the beginning was the Word... and the Word was God" (And the Word was one with God). In Greek the expression 'to be at one with' indicates a being turned towards the Father, a being face to face with the Father; it means having the Father as the ultimate term of reference, without which everything, indeed the Son Himself, would have no meaning.
Let us go back to the Gospels.
Jesus does everything in the name of the Father, he addresses Him familiarly, in childish terms. He teaches other people to address the Father in the same way. He sings of His mercies, love, intimacy: "The Father loves the Son and has given everything over to him", "I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me".(2)
The Son's behavior is that of a son. The Dehonian man is the one who experiences, prays and lives this relationship of tender familiarity with the Father.
The prophets had already sensed the original meaning of the divine predilection. Leo Dehon is with them when he grasps in love the greatness of this choice.
The entire narrative of the Old Testament is the story of a passionate search for the loved one on the part of the lover. The wonderful lesson of the Song of Songs is valid for everyone. It is not by chance that with its words of love it is the book which is closest to human sensitivity.
However, the pages which sing of unconditioned fidelity, of God's intimacy with man, and of His progressive, anguished attempts to educate mankind to love, are wasted on a people who deny Him and betray Him; a people who are stubborn, as only those who are totally dependent on the object of their love can be.
Perhaps this is the reason why the person who collected the sacred texts made one of the very first images that most beautiful one of God who, after having completed His creation, goes to walk in the garden. It is the image of God looking for man. His cry: "Where are you?",(3) echoes still in the heart of every Adam in the world: lost behind the blazing fantasies of improbable successes, lost behind the apparent satisfaction of money and possessions, lost behind the deception of being self- sufficient.(4)
I think that the task of the Dehonian in this world is to be the person who re-proposes the wonder of a God who goes out in search of man. The Dehonian is the man of the nuptial alliance with God-love, the man for whom nothing has any meaning if it does not intimately belong to that state of being face-to-face with the Father, the man who fulfills his own being in the image of God by becoming the transparent reflection of His glory.
It is under the gaze of the Father that this relationship is fulfilled. It is in allowing ourselves to be deeply gazed at by the One who knows us in our depths; by the One who has a deep knowledge of those areas within us which are the most hidden, even from ourselves.(5)
The blessed embrace of the Father becomes the space for human possibility: everything that we are, we are solely in virtue of this embrace.
Noah was blessed by God, and this blessing served as a sign of of the fidelity of God's commitment to life.(6)
Abraham was blessed by God, and this blessing made the most outlandish hopes come true: from sterility came descendants more numerous than the stars in the sky.(7)
The Dehonian is the person who lives on the blessing of God, clothed with His care and with His solicitude. He is the man of blessing in its double significance: blessed and blessing.
Clothed with the care of the Father, he is the man who fills the world with caring.
Embraced by the mercy of God, he knows how to embrace his fellow man - along with all his wounds and all his poverty.
He is the man who recognizes the source of every life, of every song.
He is the man who daily relives the wonder of the sound of the divine footsteps in the garden.
He is the man who with trust receives the gift which God makes of Himself. And the attitude of faith consists of this recognizing: that faith which allowed Abraham to leave everything and go, which allowed Moses to free, which allowed Jesus to die.
The Dehonian must, like Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, be one who chooses in the Father, commits himself with the Father, and makes himself responsible towards the Father.
He is a man of faith, understood as an attitude which shows the extent of both his intimacy with God and his being turned towards God.
The otherness of God becomes the paradigm of every definition of self.
I cannot speak of myself if not in the Father.
I cannot love, suffer, speak, work, if not in the light of this relationship which defines me.
Only then do the things I do become a sign of God, an allegory of love made living and vital in the flesh of time.
I think this is the meaning of the Kingdom which Jesus brought to us.
I also think this is what Leo Dehon was talking about when he spoke of abandonment and unconditioned trust as being the response to divine faithfulness.
It is the very necessity of love which guarantees the fact that we will let ourselves be carried along.
God cannot but love, for that is what He has chosen: and that makes us certain of His tenderness.
The Word illuminates us once again: "I am calm and quiet like a weaned child clinging to its mother".(8)
But it is not an abandonment which we find very accommodating.
The freedom of God, which is committed by love, is the very thing which makes our freedom committed to love.
Leo Dehon understood abandonment as having a free and aware availability towards the project of the Kingdom. He quotes an extract from the Letter to the Hebrews "You did not ask for sacrifice or offerings, instead a body you prepared for me... And so I said Ecce venio..."
The Ecce venio of the Dehonian must remain sculpted into his very flesh, for only flesh authenticates love. Basically, that is the logic of the incarnation.
The relationship with the Father will not then be one of consolation and reassurance. It will, instead, be that which the experience of Gethsemene and the Cross teaches us, living through great solitude and through lacerating doubts, but also offering an opening of horizons of unthought of commitment, striding along ever new roads of solidarity.
Since it is precisely in the apparent absence of tenderness in Gethsemene that the Father reveals the infinite liberating power of his tenderness.(9)
Man of Reconciliation- There is a particular attitude, one which in recent years has roused certain difficulties of comprehension within the Dehonian spirituality, that finds its place and meaning at this point: Reparation.
Leo Dehon, in a manner which was so typical of the way he thought, reassessed this dimension and cleared the field of the misunderstandings which had arisen because people were basing their interpretation of expiation on the model of penal justice: Jesus died in that way because there was nobody else who could satisfy the offense that the man of Eden had done to God. Original sin could only be expiated by He: the One who possessed those divine qualities that would make the expiation valid and everlasting.
It is as if God were thirsty for revenge rather than for love.
If man lives within the relationship with the Father, divine benediction will make him a reconciled man.
The Dehonian is the man of reconciliation, rebuilt by the joy of God, he feels at peace with himself, he feels blessed by His tenderness and benevolence.
Re-creation, produced when God looks upon man with eternal love, has the very same sense as the profound sense of reparation. It is the love of the Father which reconstructs that which was fragile in humanity, repairing the deep divisions of the heart, removing the fragments of sin, restoring to man that original image of a creature who is both loved and loving.
And once again Genesis comes to our aid "Then God said: 'Let us make man in our image...".(10) I think that reparation, consists in the work of re-making, of the reconstruction of this original identity.
Reparation is therefore the reconstruction of man.
It is the process of "humanization" which involves us in the first person with our availability and our solidarity(11) towards every man.
Let us re-make ourselves as men in order to re-make mankind.
This is the urgent need of our time, ever increasingly tangled up in the meshes of technological "scientism" which takes the deepest expressions of humanity and empties them of meaning. It is enough to mention the latest idea in the clinical field: the artificial womb.
But there are thousands of examples that tell of how the individual is degraded: they appear daily on the pages of the newspapers or on a television screen, or we experience them personally. Think of paedophilia, of violence, of the dishonesty which is so widespread that it already possesses the confirmation which makes it totally acceptable.
You can extend the list ad infinitum.
In my opinion, the Dehonian of these times must be the man of the beatitudes, of the deep peace found in God; he must be the reconciled and reconciling man, a co-worker with the Father, his every moment involved in the re-making of mankind.
Once more the Word is rich with sources.
Ezekiel guarantees God's commitment: "I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all your impurities, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart... taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts".
And again: "...See! I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life. I will put sinews upon you, make flesh grow over you, cover you with skin, and put spirit in you so that you may come to life and know that I am the LORD".(12)
The relationship with the Father transforms us radically, restoring to us form and beauty, skin and nerves.
Let me point out how the Word insists on a very concrete dimension.
It is absolutely true that it is "in the flesh", to use the biblical expression, that the Spirit of the Father remakes us men.
The Dehonian is therefore invested with the task of remaking, and making live again, in the flesh, those human cadavers which populate our time.
This means rethinking and vehemently re-proposing an ethic in the service of man which is liberating and appeasing.
But it also means rethinking the family, politics, social relationships, work, education...
Let us try to pick up the Gospel again and see what idea of man animated the work of Jesus, what man did He go out to meet, towards what humanity did He want to lead that man.(13)
In the Name of the Son
Man of the “Sign” - The commitment to reparation leads us to the heart of our reflection.
What is the place in which the relationship of the Son with the Father becomes real for us?
What is the measure of His compassion...?
The Evangelical accounts are all focused on this event: the Cross.
It is the Cross of Jesus which is the "sign" of His filial relationship with the Father.
It is the Pierced Heart of Christ which is the opening which still today makes possible our meeting with God.
Leo Dehon chose this sign as a mark of his spiritual physiognomy and he has left it to us as our inheritance.
For him, the source of his untiring activity was contemplation of the open Heart.
Taught by that drama of tenderness, he was able to teach the men of his time
Therefore the Dehonian is the man who lives this double power of the Cross: he lives as a part of the sign of Christ's dedication, fixed forever above every human Golgotha; he lives as an active witness of care and solidarity for the world.
In-structured and marked to in-struct, to be a living sign of His instruction.
This is the specific characteristic of the Dehonian.
In this sense then, we are men of hope.
It may seem strange, paradoxical, that we speak of hope precisely where the Son's cry of desperation still re-echoes, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?".(14)
But it is the Son Himself who, in the abyss of the absence of the Father, rediscovers that total, unconditioned, dedication which makes Him live as the Son: "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit".(15)
It is in the most tragic moment that the relationship is re-established, that Jesus the man, victim of man's inhumanity, regains His at-one-ment with the Father and is restored to His filial dignity.
The thrust of the spear does no less than rend the veil of the temple, revealing the true face of the Almighty.(16)
If one is to seek the Father, it is to that pierced side which we must look: "Whosoever has seen me has seen the Father...".(17) Leo Dehon understood this: "My heart is the center of my humanity; to come to my heart is the way to posses me wholly and, at the same time, to posses God, because I am the Man-God".(18)
His contemplation of the Word had made him understand that only there is everything made clear.
It is there where the God of the Old Testament lived His last ephifany. In one of his lectures Fr. Duci emphasized this: "The pierced side of the Crucified has become the fountain promised by God for the last days of time, open at the culmination of the story of salvation, at the top of the mountain, in the very breast of the Messiah. That thrust of the spear, which put the final seal on the elimination of He who had been sent by God and on the end of His work, brought about instead, against all expectations of human calculations, the opening for us of the source of the Life of God. It was certainly not the soldier who opened it...it was God who opened it, from inside, in the torn side of His son. He opened it to let the Spirit come out, gift of the Trinity to the world.(19)
There the whole life of the Son became penetrated with the purity of the light of God.(20)
It is only there that the life of every man can finally rethink itself.(21)
The hope of the Cross is nothing other than its characterization as prophecy, understood as the look upon man and upon the world which starts from the Heart of the Crucified.
Only from the height of the Cross is it possible to understand history.
Only by seeing things from the point of view which is the open Heart and reinterpreting every human event, every aspect of the economy, of the social traditions and of the politics of our world, would it be possible to be able to say something about mankind.
The Dehonian is the man of hope and of prophecy because he is qualified to speak by his frequentation of the Cross.
Living in the Heart of the Father gives man a kind of divine understanding of things: in this understanding, which is at the same time love and transformation, lies the prophesying to which we are called.
All this is possible, however, only through adoration.
Eucharistic adoration has always been characteristic of Dehonian spirituality. It was ardently desired by Leo Dehon himself and he understood it precisely as the contemplation of the gift of the Father given in Christ on the cross and focused on the pierced Heart.(22)
The wound of the spear is not only the sole way to reach the Father, but it is also the only path which the mercy of God wished to travel in order to reach man. And it is the only one which He will continue to travel.
There is no God beyond that which is revealed in the Cross of Christ.
There is no Father if not in the open Heart of the Son.
It is as if the Dehonian, by contemplating the drama of this relationship of love, is absorbed within it, and it is from within the very Heart of God that he is made capable of prophesy and concrete witness.
In listening to the Word made flesh, man becomes capable of words which express in profundity the meaning of human effort.
The cross is the seal with which the believer is marked forever, branded in the heart, so that he can no longer do without God.
Jeremiah expresses this very well: "You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped...it becomes like fire burning in my heart, imprisoned in my bones; I grow weary holding it in, I cannot endure it".(23)
It is time we went back to expressing the urgency of the Cross and of love.
With force.
We must no longer be afraid to speak the Word of God to men.
It is the Word which shatters our egoism, certainly.
It is the Word which digs abysses of restlessness in our spirit, surely.
But it is the liberating and accomplishing Word which restores to us the original face of God, the companion of man, our being made by Him and for Him.
Man of the Word - The Dehonian must therefore be the man of the Word.
Not those insignificant and empty words, like all those which often fill the mass-media or indeed our conversations.
But the Word that carries valid meanings, and authentic answers for the world of today.(24)
Leo Dehon was a strong communicator and, from among the many other possibilities, he chose communication as his style of apostolate.
He opened schools and founded newspapers; he took an active part in the cultural debate of his time in order to be an authentic voice among the voices, a meaningful word among words.
We cannot withdraw from the need to speak.
Let us return to talking about man.
In the way in which God thought him.
In the way in which God wanted him.
In the way in which God loves him.
We are the ones who receive an announcement which calls upon our responsibility to be in our turn senders of clear and loud messages for contemporary man.
And it is not a question, note well, of adding blah blah to what is already in circulation.
We live now in an era of globalization, where internet and satellites multiply words and reports. Man has never spoken so much as in this time. And yet, and it is paradoxical, never as much as in this time has he betrayed one of the prime tasks which was entrusted to him by God when he was walking in the garden: that of giving a name to things.(25)
The Dehonian is the man of new words, the man of names; he is a poet in the full sense of the term. He is the one who creates with his word, in the way that God spoke and things were.
It is not an empty word, that of witness.
It is not hot air.
It is reality which is made in history and which acquires, because of this, the profound identity desired by the Father.
In the same way that the first Word of God gave form to the unformed and reality to nothingness, the word of the Dehonian has the task of restoring form and human likeness to disfigured man, of restoring life to situations of death, and of doing so through words which tell the lost man of today what his vocation and destiny is.
And as the first Word was uttered in the abyss,(26) every word of ours must be nourished by silence.
It may again seem a paradox, but the story of Jesus testifies that the most important words are born from long silences. He, who was the Word of the Father, often went off alone to the mount and withdrew in silence.
Ungaretti wrote a poem to tell the news of the poet's word: "The poet arrived/ and then returned to the light with his songs/ and dispersed them/ Of this poem/ there remains for me/ that nothingness/ of an inexhaustible secret".(27)
The word is born there where man has the courage to go deeply into the secret abyss of life. From there he reemerges, loaded with meanings for man.
The inexhaustible secret of the Dehonian is nothing other than the mystery of the open Heart.
From there, from the silence of this contemplation, spring the words of our witness which can still give meaning to contemporary man.
For Jesus, this must have been the experience of Nazareth, so dear to Leo Dehon.
Thirty years of silence.
Thirty years of immersion in the Heart of the Father to emerge with words of hope for the men of Galilee and of Judaea.
Thirty years of being steeped, certainly of suffering, in the silence of God, in order to be capable of pronouncing the only word which had no need of sounds: oblation to the Father on the cross.
"Behold I come to do your will..."
Word which is flesh and blood, commitment and struggle which spares nothing.
Word which is, finally, life unrolling along the highways of mankind, in families, in the workplace, everywhere; descending into the relationships of today in order to bring to all the same Word which the Father eternally pronounces: the man Jesus, and in Him every man.
In the Name of the Holy Spirit
Man of Relationships - And so we come to that which makes every word true: life.
We started from the relationship with the Father which makes us men, we have arrived at that which, as men, we live every day: the thousand relationships of life.(28)
We can reach to the Other, to God, only by passing through the others.
We are men only through man.
We realize our humanity to the full only in reference to our brethren.
A great amount of the philosophy of this century also confirms that the other is the category which defines us.(29)
But it is enough to read the Gospel: "Love your neighbor as yourself".(30)
And again: "Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me".(31)
John comments thus in his first letter: "Whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother".(32)
After Jesus we can no longer speak in the singular. The Christian discourse is the word of fraternity and community.
It is a voice which becomes concrete among the thousand voices of mankind.
It is the living example of communion and dedication.
The Dehonian is the man of charity that becomes history.
He is the man of the Word that becomes action, work, family.
The primary relationship with the Father, lived in the contemplation of the Heart of Christ, must be translated into the relationships experienced with man.
Woe to us if we forget man.
Current times demonstrate what barbarity is produced by choices which do not start from man and are not directed to man: fundamentalism, biotechnology, armaments, all too familiar distorted politics...
The Dehonian must accomplish a revolution today: in a society dominated by over-exaggerated individualism, he must re-propose the we as the only human and vital space for man.
Nostalgia for God is nothing other than nostalgia for man.
To restore dignity to every human being is the challenge of the millennium which is approaching.
It was the challenge of Jesus.
It was the challenge of Leo Dehon.
It is the challenge of the Church today!
We are trained in this by the Spirit of God which moves us along the paths of mankind, we are called to be men of the Spirit, who live according to the style of God, nourished on the Word which was made flesh in Jesus.
Realized by the tenderness of the Father, we must realize, that is make real, the world as God thinks it.
The pierced Heart is God's plan for men, as Leo Dehon made it his own.
Our duty is to make it flesh on the earth and in the mud of daily life, putting ourselves at stake, taking on our responsibilities in all the situations that we live.
With that spirit of trust and abandonment present in Mary who, when called upon to collaborate in God's design, responded: "Ecce ancilla domini...according to your word".(33)
Men of the Spirit who become guides, teachers or, better, companions of the man in the street, who lead him from competition to compassion, from fear to intimacy, from exclusion to the fecundity of life.(34)
Men of the Spirit.
"Matutinal" men, able to bring the freshness of the solidarity and the fidelity of God into the world, like morning dew.
Men of pardon, of neighborliness, who claim the favor of the Father for themselves and for the others.
Men who, in the Spirit, lead men to come to terms with pain, with loneliness, with death.
Not out of a taste for the macabre or for masochism, but to redefine, for our times, the limits between which we play out our responsibility.
This is also being faithful to the Incarnation.
Picking up everything which is ours, including the wounds.
We will never be able to heal man if we do not accept to be healed of our own wounds.(35)
The awareness of our fragility is the indispensable premise of every service of love. We will never be able to truly understand and pardon our brethren if we have not experienced the Father's pardon of us.
Only by coming face to face with our personal misery, with sincerity and courage, do we become capable of receiving the grace and the mercy of God and, therefore, of growing in the gift to our brethren.
The Dehonian receives man in his entirety, he loves him and he accompanies him, because he knows that in this closeness the Father's special care for each and every one of us can shine through, because he knows that he has been precisely chosen by God to give himself to men.
The Dehonian must have the courage to be with men, he must not be afraid to dirty his hands in making the world, he must not refuse the responsibility of risking to the utmost.
In the schools, in the offices, in the families, there where we are, of course. But let us not forget the sidewalks, the old people's homes, the suburban slums and all the places where suffering humanity often lives.
To be a Dehonian is a choice with no going back.
Dehon himself expressed this, adding to the vow of poverty, chastity and obedience, that of being a victim.
There are no limits to giving oneself.
There are no confines to love.
Being Dehonian men means choosing a relationship with the poorest of the poor.
It is listening to loneliness.
It is being company in the human night.
It is feeling with and soothing wounds.
It is comforting desperation.
It is light in the abysses of silence and fear which often dwell in the hearts of our brothers.
It is giving guidance to those who have lost their way.
It is a hand held out to those who are falling.
It is love of the flesh and the earth which builds, with infinite and constant patience, that Kingdom of tenderness in which we are called to collaborate.
Conclusion
Our attempt in these years is precisely that of finding positive paths for the expression of a sensitivity of the spirit which belongs to us.
Angelo Bramati fervently desired our Association to take a turning in this direction of deepening our reformation in conformity with the Dehonian charism.
Various groups who were present at the last Congress are studying how to achieve a possible avenue for lay people in this direction.
Let us not fall behind.
Let us act so that the memory of the past, and our finding ourselves again, may not be only a cause for rejoicing and thanksgiving, but may also become a conversion of the heart, towards greater fraternity and sharing for a renewed daily life in the Spirit.
NOTES
1. cf. John 1:1ff.
2. Jn 2:35, Jn 17:23. Also cf. Lk 15:11-32, Mt 7:9-11, Mt 6:12, Mt 6:14-15, Jn 1:14-16, Jn 17:24-26.
3. Gn 3:9.
4. An interesting reflection arising from the above verses of the Bible is proved by M. Buber, Il cammino dell'uomo, (The Journey of Man), Qiqaion, Magnano 1990.
5. cf. Jer 1:5; Ps 139.
6. cf. Gn 9:1-17.
7. cf. Gn 15:1-20.
8. Ps 131:2.
9. On the trinitarian significance of the Cross, cf. F. Duci, Dio trinità d'amore, introduzione alla spiritualità del Sacro Cuore (God Trinity of Love: an Introduction to the Spirituality of the Sacred Heart), Bologna 1995/96.
10. Gn 1:26.
11. On the meaning of solidarity, cf. F. Duci, La solidarietà in Dio, (Solidarity in God), Bologna 1996.
12. Ez 36:25,26; Ez 37:5,6.
13. For example, the accounts of the cures worked by Jesus are revealing.
14. Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34.
15. Lk 23:46.
16. cf. Mt 27:51 and Mk 15:38.
17. Jn 14:9.
18. L. Dehon, Si all'amore nel cuore di Gesù (Yes to Love in the Heart of Jesus), Milan 1985, p.35.
19. F. Duci, Il cuore del Salvatore (The Heart of the Savior), Bologna 1997, p.15.
20. In Lk 23:47 the centurion exclaims: "This man was innocent beyond doubt". And Mk 15:39 echoes this: "Truly this man was the Son of God!".
21. cf. the "It is finished" of Jn 19:30.
22. "We do not see Jesus, but He is there...we have the faith to perceive Him and our heart stretches out towards the Heart of Jesus, which has become more than ever the heart of a brother and of a friend" (L. Dehon, Si all'amore nel cuore di Gesù (Yes to Love in the Heart of Jesus), Milan 1985, p.238.
23. Jer 20:7,9.
24. I recommend here the reading and study of Dei Verbum.
25. cf. Gn 2:19.
26. cf. Gn 1:1-12 and Jn 1:1ff.
27. G. Ungaretti, Il porto sepolto, from Vita di un uomo. Tutte le poesie (The Buried Port, from The Life of a Man. Collected Poems), Mondadori, Milan, 1969.
28. A poetic, spiritual reflection of the original dimension of the relationship is to be found in M. Bellet, Incipit o dell'inizio, Servitium, 1997.
29. This is the lesson of authors of the 1900s such as Heidegger, Levinas and others.
30. Mt 22:39.
31. Mt 25:40.
32. 1Jn 4:20,21. Also cf. 1Jn 2:9-11; 3:10 and 3:14-17.
33. Lk 1:38.
34. In this context the writings of H.J.M. Nouwen are illuminating. Vivere nello Spirito (Living in the Spirit), 1995, Nella casa della vita (In the House of Life), 1996, Nel nome di Gesù (In the Name of Jesus), 1997, Invito alla vita spirituale (Invitation to the Spiritual Life), 1998, all edited by Queriniana.
35. cf. H.J.M. Nouwen, Il guaritore ferito (The Wounded Healer), Queriniana, Brescia, 1992.