“You will show me the path of life.”

2011-2012 beginning of the year retreat in Perugia

We met for the beginning of the journey retreat at the Fonte Angelica Hotel, a beautiful place full of greenery and water, in Nocera Umbra. It is the former seminary, now run by a cooperative. A Saturday and Sunday where we prepared for the new journey, officially started the community year and welcomed new novices and allies.

Saturday’s celebration was presided over by H.E. Bishop Giuseppe Chiaretti, who greeted us with much affection and warmly invited us to engage in the new evangelization. “I have long known,” he told us, “that the witness of fervent communities is the most effective in attracting to Christ those who do not yet know him.”

Three catecheses, two moments of sharing, two beautiful community prayers, a night of adoration, the presentation of new novices and friends… What was needed to start the year. Massimo Roscini, Moderator General, gave us the “review” on the meaning of belonging: to an experience of the Spirit, charismatic, to the Community, to the Fraternity.

To belong means to want to bind oneself to something: but ours is a bond of love, to cherish love, not because we are a social group or because thus “we are many” and show something; but to be part of a divine work, permeated with wonder and gratitude, filled with the respect that is due to beautiful and precious things. Paul Bartoccini, on Sunday morning, gave a beautiful catechesis (a bit long, actually :)) on the Holy Spirit, the engine of our spiritual life (when we have it, that is). On the track of the Veni creator we went over the Pentecostal experience that generated us. This will be the path of 2011-2012, a song! And Vincenzo Genovese spoke to us about freedom, about the courage needed to defeat the “giants” that still dwell in our hearts and bar the path to the promised land.

The Lord spoke to us in prayer about rebirth from above, about being children being led:

Ps 16:11 You will show me the path of life,
full joy in your presence,
endless sweetness at your right hand.

We concluded with Sunday’s celebration, presided over by Fr. Luca Bartoccini: one of those short homilies that gets to the heart, on the Gospel of the parable of the vinedressers (Mt 20:1ff). God’s “injustice,” which is unfair only when we identify with the workers taken for merit early in the morning; but how fair does it seem to us, this injustice, if we are the last, those who enter the Kingdom of God by the skin of our teeth.

Happy walking to all!