Great news!
This last Tuesday, the Spanish CLM Teresa Monzón arrived in Portugal. She is in Braga going through an experience of community with the CLM Cristina Sousa. They are both studying in Braga, but dealing with different languages: Portuguese for Tere and French for Cristina.
We welcome Tere with great joy and we feel united also to this community. Let us pray that in it life giving fruit will rise, “life in abundance.”
Welcome Tere. We are together!
CLM Portugal
To arrive at the mission is to arrive home. Not the one that saw us being born, but another that now welcomes us, where we now sleep, grow and love. To arrive at the mission is to reach the people. Not the one that saw us being born, but another who receives us with open arms as if we were its daughters coming home. To arrive at the mission is to embrace another people. Not the one who saw us being born, but the one who receives us with open arms and prepares to grow with us. Each person is a world and has a world to share with us. In each person we meet God and it is this God and this world that today we want to show to you. It is in this panorama where each day we awake with hope and fall asleep blessed. This mission is not ours, it belongs to all and we hope that you will walk through each day and each story with us.
Paula y Neuza. CLM in Peru
Thursday, August 10, 2017
It’s 5:00 in the morning and the movement inside the plane suggests that the landing in Mozambique is near. Some people, however, are still sleeping. It’s turning out to be a quiet trip with time for everything: resting, watching movies, getting bored, wishing you could stretch your legs… It’s all happening! The gentleman in the window seat at my left opens the curtain. Wow! It is dawn, a real blessing: the first miracle I am witnessing in this new land is the dawn. Magnificent. I can only see a framed painting in vivid colors. It is impossible to remain indifferent to so much beauty, and the colors fill me with joy and warmth. I would love to be landing already.
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I am in Mozambique! I reached Maputo. It is hot and the smells are more noticeable due to the heat. The colors clash, while the blue of the bay seems to blend with the sky. There is a new soul here and life seems to run at a singular speed. People are smiling and inquisitive. Fr. Pabro, a Comboni Missionary was waiting for me at the airport. He was holding a copy of Audacia, and laughed readily at how I recognized this “code of localization/identification.” “less is more” and “for a good observer, few words are needed.” He took me to the provincial residence and showed me a few things along the way. I stayed the morning in that community of Maputo. After lunch I went to the airport and, God willing, by late afternoon I will be in Nampula with Kasia.
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We were about half way to Nampula when six-year old Samuel started running back and forth from one end of the plane to the other. The cushion he was playing with fell near my seat. I picked it up and stretched my arm to give it back to him.
We played and talked for a while about a lot of things. Then he volunteered: “I am going to see my brothers and my family. And you?”
“So am I,” I answered without thinking.
I realized later that I had answered, “so am I…” May God will it and help me to make it so.
I landed in Nampula in the late afternoon and it was already dark. I was still waiting for my luggage when Kasia entered the hall… How nice to be welcomed and received with such enthusiasm that made her “invade” this area to come meet me!
From there we went to the Sisters’ house. We ate, talked and rested. On the way to my room I fully realized the novelty of what was happening: there was a mosquito net over my bed. No doubt, it was really happening!
I dropped in bed happy and grateful to God for all the graces he has granted me so far, at least until today. For the rest, let it be as he wants.
Friday, August 11, 2017
This afternoon Kasia and I resumed our journey to Carapira, our mission and our home. During the trip I enjoyed the scenery. My first, or ‘major’, impression of Africa, of Mozambique, is space – space as far as the eye can see, where all the journeys are long, where there is a silence that enters into you. It is a scenery without end which requires patience and gives time for contemplation. I think it is impossible not to be lifted up by this poetry pervading the world with its immensity, God’s horizon.
In the evening, after supper, we welcomed into our home a couple of local lay people, the teachers Martinho and Margarita, the Comboni Sisters Clarinda, Eleonora, María José and Teresinha, Brother Luigi and Fr. Firmino. It was a joyous and beautiful time of getting together that affirmed, once more and above all, the meaning of the hospitality we practice here.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
I woke up last night thinking that it was almost time to get up. The lack of light, both outside and inside was telling me otherwise. I took the lamp, shone it on the clock next to my bed and the hands confirmed that it was night time, deep night time. There were still three hours before the first signs of day. I couldn’t sleep. I sat up in bed with my back to the wall and rested in the special stillness that we experience in those hours. “What peace!” I though, while I remembered that beautiful thought of St. John of the Cross – “the night is the time of the silent house.”
Thursday, August 17, 2017
This morning for the first time I walked through the neighborhood, visiting the community. On the way back, my heart was full of joy. I played with the children. I could not understand those who were talking to me in Makua and they could not understand me. But we laughed and played, and with this childish joy we were able to establish some non-verbal communication in spirit. So far it has worked with the children… As I was walking by the door of the school there was a woman talking with Sergio. We exchanged greetings:
Nothing more. If it had not been for Sergio’s help, I would not have understood what she wanted to tell me. On the one hand, I was grateful: for the woman who, while she understood that I needed a word-by-word translation, did not desist from talking to me and ask me about my health and my family; for the person who stuck by me and patiently translated the conversation. On the other hand, I was embarrassed because I could not understand what she was saying (this happened not only in this case, but during the entire morning and at other times during the week like, for example, during Sunday Mass celebrated in Makua).
“To depend on translations requires patience and humility… kneel down, Marisa, become little and grateful,” I consoled myself.
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I returned home. I was putting some things in order when I heard a young voice:
I opened the door and a young woman was waiting for me with a smile. Darn it! I am alone in the house… if she is asking for my help for anything, I do not know how I will answer because I know nothing…” I was thinking while walking outside…
Then we talked for a while. “Time…” Here people converse and “spend” time with each other – without worrying. This introduction was another lesson. Marisa, learn. As she left she said something in Makua. I did not understand and I could not answer. “I must learn something in Makua… I feel it is the least I can do for the time being, to show my gratitude for the hospitality of the people,” I told myself as I reentered the house.
And so it is… despite the discomfort we feel when we do not know something, knowing “nothing” also involves some inner health and creativity.
Marisa Almeida, CLM in Mozambique
The 11th formation session of the CLM took place on July 7-9 At the Comboni Missionaries House in Viseu.
On Saturday the 8th, we had the opportunity to carry on the “evaluation” by the candidates, or better… a conversation between each one of the people in formation and the formation team over the steps that are being taken in this journey of discovery of the life of the CLM.
The two years formation offered to the candidates who accept the invitation to know what it means to be a CLM is not limited to these two years. It is a formation leading to life. It is life itself. It is a journey of forward and backwards steps that, now and then, needs attention and evaluation by each individual or within the community, sharing “points of reference – on where I am headed as CLM.” At the end we embraced in a wonderful welcome the CLM Neuza and Paula, recently arrived from the community of Granada. They shared with us their experience in the community of Lisanga together with the CLM from Spain, Aitana and David. They also told us about a project – the project they will be developing during the two years they will spend in mission in Arequipa. This project will have as a background the social pastoral where they will be involved in situation of domestic violence, drawing people to the health center, and the formation of leaders, with the help of those who are already working in the parish.
On Sunday we were able to welcome our families and friends and together celebrate the family we have. Again Paula and Neuza spoke of their experience in Lisanga, but this time not only for the CLM but for the families and friends. The Eucharist followed, then came lunch and an afternoon enriched by music, games and dancing.
We wish to take all who took part, both physically and in prayer. It was a very nice day in which we felt the unity that St. Daniel Comboni proposed to his followers. It is a source of pride to belong to such a family. We are together in and for life.
With love,
Carolina Fiúza
On July 16 in the community of Viseu, in the parish of Rio de Loba, together with her family and friends we celebrated the missioning of our CLM Neuza Francisco. She will soon leave for our mission of Arequipa, Peru. We share with you her feelings, following this great day of celebration.
I talk about a Yes which has nothing easy about it, but means availability, a Yes which is full of commitment and love. It is a “Yes” given from the humble condition I am in, and from what I have within me. It is a Yes full of perseverance, in the certainty that “God does not choose the most able, but enables those he chooses.” (Msgr. António Couto).
This Yes that I am telling you about involves leaving everything, family, friends, and the comforts of a life that for me it had no meaning. It is an attitude of detachment, because only through it we get to experience a personal relationship with Christ, without the dependency and the securities created in the course of a lifetime. I trust in the call that he gives me to be happy here of wherever he will lead me by the hand. It is the certainty of journeying more and more within my very self, to know myself, to be able to touch others, in a relationship which is only possible with the conviction that, walk wherever you walk, God leads me by the hand.
Today I have this deep trust that Comboni walks with me in God’s dream for us and that I, too, am also one of the thousand lives for mission.
Today, He calls me once more to leave my boat at the shore and with him look for other seas. I go, I follow, but I am not going alone. I take along the prayers of all those whose paths I crossed and sowed in me small seeds of a deep love that germinated, and continues to do so, here within my heart. I go, but I do not go alone. I take with me all the hearts I met on my journey and taught me how to love more and more. I take with me all those whose life’s history intertwined with mine and helped me to get to know a merciful and compassionate God.
I hold in me the hugs given along a fruitful and fertile journey, I hold the outstretched hands that, despite the many falls, always helped me get up. I go, but I do not go alone. And, like my grandmother often used to say, I “go with God.”
At this time I am called to Peru. I feel that once more He invites me to love, to share, to be, to offer myself, to trust, so that together with the people to which I am called, we may be one. He calls me to go to the poorest and most abandoned in the outskirts of Arequipa. He calls me to be me and to let the treasure I carry within me bear fruit with others. I embrace the mission of Arequipa, like someone embraces a dream, experienced since forever. It is a dream to which I have given myself, and continue to give myself every day. I am not talking of utopia or of something unreal, but rather of the dream of being totally connected to the reality I have embraced.
I go, not because I want to save the world, but because I, too, want to be part of the open wounds of the world, wounds made of flesh and bone people who in a faraway world carry within themselves fragments of God. I want to be with them, I want to see the face of God in humanity looking for a meaning, with my feet on the ground and my hands filled with nothing. I want to see God in the spontaneous smiles of those who do not know love, but live daily to give praise.
I walk in the confidence, commitment and joy of knowing that I am following Christ, I bring Christ and will always meet Christ. I walk and every step I take, I take it freely in the knowledge that I will always be in his merciful arms where I will take shelter at sundown, and He will be my hope who will make me get up at each new sunrise.
I leave in the name of a community, in the name of the Church, in the name of Jesus Christ, to announce the Gospel of Love. And in this deep growth in myself, in God and in others I ask you: Pray for me.
With love and gratitude,
Neuza Francisco
