Alberto de la Portilla – Page 191 – Comboni Lay Missionaries

Training for Mission

5 February, 2014 by Alberto de la Portilla

A week is not long so we have to take it with passion. Definitely my week in Poland gave a lot of success. This time I wanted to share with everyone about the training time with the international community that is about to leave for Uganda.

We spend three intensive days (morning, afternoon and evening) for training. It was not easy to perform this training in English as it is not the mother tongue of any of us and it needs to be perfected a bit before leaving for mission (they will do so in London from March). However there is no big obstacle when there is will, so we set off. Soon we get the dictionaries of Spanish, Polish and English to succeed in the right word and the mutual aid came immediate. At the end we made it possible (although the head asked for rest at the end of the day for the effort but it was worthy).

I think it was a nice, interesting and necessary week. As the great family that we are, we feel all responsible for this community preparing to break new ground and I think it was important to take time to accompany them. This training time was a time to dialogue and share what it means to be CLM, our vocational call and the dreams that we have as missionaries. To all these ideals that are important to talk before leaving as a community, we added them a good time of deepening and more “professional” learning of our stay and service in the Mission.

To fix the pillars of this community we worked all morning and part of the afternoon of the second day in them, providing all our expectations and confronting specific experiences, doubts and dreams of other CLM.

Then we talked about the importance of inculturation, the knowledge of others and of ourselves to not move European models and to give the time and space to the other, lest we fall into the trap of transferring our solutions to others but to help each person, each people, may have its own voice and find their own solutions.

The last day we talked a little about the importance of approaching and knowing reality in depth, listen and silence a lot to understand well and have enough time to share our lives, knowing first the new environment and its people (what makes up their identity).

And finally ended up talking about our beloved Comboni and what it meant for each of us, the challenges posed to us for being Comboni Missionaries, the style, methodology, passion and commitment of which we are inheritors and debt fidelity. All this things as CLM and as Comboni Family. We want this to be our reference, also there in Gulu (Uganda) where we aim to work from the community, from the Comboni family and from the reality and needs of the people, open to learn every day and contribute the best of ourselves.

Personally it was a very rich time, which also allowed me to better understand this community and strengthen bonds.

I hope they always feel sheltered by all of us. They are sent throughout the movement and as such we will be supporting them.

The laity in the Evangelization

4 February, 2014 by Alberto de la Portilla

During the 24th, 25th and 26th Januarythe laity in training met in the house of Coimbra for another meeting. To this was joined Fr Manuel Lopes, Carlos Barros, Liliana, who recently came to the mission and Pedro, with his family, as a trainer.

The issue on which we have focused our study on which was discussed was “The laity in evangelization.”

In this contemporary, globalized world, the man believes in practice more than in theory. The living testimonies become more credible and attractive for contemplation and faith for a stronger and more plentiful dedication. Thus we show that the laity is so important in the process of evangelization as any other agent, since it is through baptism that we receive this responsibility.

God is not indifferent to anyone. And it is for this reason that in His eyes, we are all responsible for spreading His Word, Fount of Life. When I answer “yes” to Christ, I promise and agree as my Creed presenting Him as my identity and passport to the other. Moved by God, Faith and Love, Lay Missionary hold in their hands the announcement of this merciful, compassionate, fair, good and stripped Christ. It comes with the happy and passionate face of God, the one true God that with all shares without distinction.

Nobody is a missionary alone. The testimony involves the commitment of all believers – “Participation in the universal mission (…) is the sign of a mature faith and Christian life that bears fruit” (John Paul II).

Liliana, fresh from his mission in Mozambique, also joined us and shared her testimony. It was with some excitement and joy that we listen to, allowing us to travel a bit through the memories that she has entrusted to us.

Another moment of equal importance and full of meaning was the call from Sister Carmo Ribeiro. She could not join us at this meeting because of her health status not so good, but humbly offered. Love also brings this dimension of suffering. Suffering, however, with meaning and dignity. This sacrifice comes, once again, to confirm that the work of evangelization requires the commitment of all of us.

We all are grateful for the contribution of this weekend. Thank you very much for the welcome, and for sharing the beautiful displays of Hope, Life and Friendship.

By Marisa Almeida

I sent you to preach the Gospel

3 February, 2014 by Alberto de la Portilla

“God has chosen you to go and bring fruit and that your fruit will abide. Go therefore and preach the Gospel to everyone. This is the cross, your guide to the apostolic roads. This is your help in any danger. This is your consolation in your life and in death.”

The missionary crosses, which three CLM from Poland received- Ewa Maziarz, Joanna Owanek and Monika Krasoń- will accompany them in missionary work in Uganda, where they were sent. They answered “yes” to Christ’s call. For the love to Him, they will service among the poorest and the most abandoned, who are waiting for them in Uganda. Their sending to Africa to preach the Gospel of Christ is a very important event not only for Comboni Missionaries but also for the whole community of the Church. Not everyone can go on the mission, but others can go there on behalf of us. And Ewa, Asia and Monika will serve our brothers and sisters on behalf of us in Uganda, sharing with them the Christ’s faith, hope and love.

The sending of our Comboni Lay Missionaries was very solemn. The whole community of the Church in the parishes of missionaries- Zarzecze and Łaziska Górne- prayed for CLM. We prayed for strength and perseverance for them. The pastors of the Church of the Archdiocese of Katowice and the Diocese of Sandomierz blessed them and gave the missionary crosses. Monika was sent by Archbishop Viktor Skworc and Ewa and Joanna were sent by Bishop Christopher Nitkiewicz. Misionaries underlined that they are aware of the hardships of the mission in Uganda, but the believe that their work will be fruitful. But, the “fruit will be abundant” if we will pray for them and for their work. And our CLM asked us for the prayer.

Let request of our missionaries will be an encouragement for us to pray for the missions, because each of us is called to be a missionary.

CLM Polish group

New CLM international community in Krakow

31 January, 2014 by Alberto de la Portilla

This is what it means to be a missionary, be able to accept the changes with joy and hope wherever they take us and with the brothers and sister you find. And it’s much easier when I discover with enthusiasm, that also in Krakow I feel at home and like a family member. The community has welcomed me with love, and the meeting of my new companions for adventure has made only increase my desire to get to Africa. An international community, three Polish and one Spanish lady, speaking English and with the intention and desire to learn quickly the Acholi.

We are Monika, Ewa, Asia and Carmen, and despite the cold Polish winter there is a very warm feeling in our hearts and all willingness to walk this path together as a community. We don´t know if it is the desire that we all have but we have connected really good and the atmosphere we breathes is wonderful.

We continue with the training process trying to assimilate and internalize things as necessary as knowing who we are (Comboni Lay Missionaries), our history and what it means to integrate and enter in a different and unfamiliar culture, that we want to approach with the utmost respect.

I think we’re a team that is going to complement quite well, where there is much freshness and the joy of living the Gospel and the Mission, as Pope Francisco is reminding us and that we will try not to forget at any time in our experience in Gulu (Uganda).

It could not have been more positive beginning of this year with my family, the Comboni family, with the Polish laity and the Comboni Fathers in the community of Krakow. Together they manage to transmit the idea, that we all dream, of unity and enthusiasm for a common goal: to follow Jesus next to the last.

Carmen Aranda Arnao. CLM

The Plan of Comboni

30 January, 2014 by Alberto de la Portilla

“During the first days of 2014 we began the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the “Plan of Comboni for the Regeneration of Africa” with suggestions for reflection that the General Council sent to all the confreres and there are other initiatives in the pipeline intended to help us to live this moment as an opportunity to come closer to, and make our own, the great missionary intuitions of St. Daniel Comboni.

In Rome, as in the Provinces and Delegations of the entire Institute, there will be celebrations, meetings for reflection and work and moments of mission promotion in order to come to know better, not just the text of the Plan, but above all the spirit to be found in those pages, written in a short burst by Comboni, with great missionary passion and enthusiasm.

With the passage of time, those pages were rewritten no longer with pen and ink but with the lives of the many men and women missionaries who, with great generosity, accepted the legacy of the mission as conceived by our Father and Founder. Consequently, the Plan is not just something that belongs only to the past but is like the blood in our veins, always with us in the present.

The celebration of the anniversary gives us an opportunity to understand better how up-to-date the missionary content of the Plan is, and how important it is to translate into the language of our day the intuitions discovered in the past 150 years.

It is a question of keeping alive the memory of a gift received a long time ago, to discover the relevance today of a missionary spirit and strategy that are valid in our time and for our humanity, forever needful of the encounter with the Lord.

During discussions on the proposals for the celebration of this anniversary, there emerged a desire to foster a journey that may help us to avoid the temptation to perform a simple act of remembering a moment in our history and seek, above all else, that which enables us to make our own what the Holy Spirit made Daniel Comboni understand, as the way towards a new mission, capable of responding to the urgent needs and challenges of his time.

To us is given the challenge to find a way to make relevant today the life proposal contained in the Plan that the Lord has today for us and for the brothers and sisters entrusted to us in service to the mission.

This year we have a special occasion to discover, not only the Plan of Comboni, but to write our own plan, the plan that the Lord inspires in us in so far as of the urgent needs, the challenges, the dramatic character of our time and the unceasing concern of God for his children.

Not long ago, during the last General Chapter, we took on ourselves the task of making the journey that leads from the Plan of Comboni to the plan of the Comboni Missionaries. Now, in 2014, is, perhaps, the time to ask ourselves what point we have reached, at the personal, provincial and Institute levels.

What is the Plan?

There are different ways to approach the Plan and I want to share with you just a brief reflection that may help us to try and draw up our personal plan, or at least to begin what may be a first draft.

We all know that, when we take the text of the Plan in our hands, we are faced with a work that lasted for years and that in the end was captured in just a few pages, insufficient to express the strength, sentiments, courage, hope, joys and difficulties which, though enclosed between those apparently cold and unfeeling lines, contain a spirit which reveals the greatness of what was written therein.

The Plan is not a textbook; it is life hidden within the words, thoughts, intuitions, dreams and the desires that were the motive power able to move the hands of Comboni to leave traces of the Spirit he tried to express, which goes far beyond the ideas and strategies that will somehow become the response to the cry that assails the ears of God to stir up his mercy.

I like to describe the Plan as the mediation offered by Comboni which, pervaded by the Spirit, helps God to carry out his missionary project; it is an open door that allows God to enter the history of his children who are in need of Him and thus realises his missionary dream.

Before ever becoming a written document, the Plan was a dream and a passion, an uncontainable power in the heart of Comboni.

It is the expression of love – source of the mission – for the poorest and the most abandoned, that becomes real and achievable. It is the concrete response to a reality that can neither be ignored nor forgotten since it is comprised of people with names and surnames, of tragedies and urgent needs, of promises and gifts that did not allow any delay in Comboni’s involvement – in his days – and that do not allow any of us, today, to postpone our response to a tomorrow that may never come.

Seen through the person of Comboni, the Plan is the complete availability to pay the price personally and never withdraw, even if this may continually turn our lives upside down, and to give our lives inch by inch, since making common cause with the poor never brings profits or earnings to be amassed.

The Plan is the missionary passion that cannot be contained by borders or diminished or discouraged by problems or difficulties, because it is a matter of the power of God who avails of human fragility to manifest his great love.

In the pages of the Plan we find ourselves faced with the desire of God and the dream of Comboni which intertwine and merge to become a single passion, quenched only on the wood of the Cross and the cry: “Africa or Death”.

It is an experience of encounter, profound communion of such powerful intimacy that the words may vanish and the text disappear, but the total self-giving remains as witness to a covenant whose only passion is the mission and the poor.

In the depths of the Plan there is the dream of Comboni of Africa open to God and his redeeming plan. The dream of seeing the African peoples respected as to their rights and dignity. The wish to see a continent illuminated by the light of the Gospel which does not tolerate deceit or injustice, or rejoices in violence or death.

What is required of us today?

As we approach the legacy of the Plan, none of us can ignore certain questions that seem to spring up before our eyes when we try to take seriously our being missionaries and Combonians. Can they be of help in visualising our plan? We could not wish for better.

What are our passions? What stirs our hearts as we contemplate the missionary situation of our time? On what is our enthusiasm centred and what absorbs all our energy today? Where is the encounter between the desires of God for humanity and our availability to live solely for the mission? To what degree does the love for the poorest and most abandoned provide us with the energy that makes us ready for anything for the sake of the Kingdom of God? Where are the dreams that may help us to create that plan that God expects from us for humanity within which the mission continues to be the great challenge for those who call themselves disciples of Christ and a fortiori for us who have received the missionary vocation?

It would be wonderful if, at the end of this year, we were able to formulate a new plan, albeit modest, for the mission that challenges us as Comboni missionaries. A plan that would show how the charism of Comboni is still relevant, alive and fruitful.

A plan that would help us to grow in the confidence and certainty that the Lord continues to work together with us to bring about new times that will make us once again experience the joy of the mission, despite our poverty and fragility.

How do we dream of the mission in our times and what are we prepared to do to collaborate with the Lord in carrying out his plan for those he loves with all his heart? Surely the cries and sufferings of the many brothers and sisters in all corners of the world will be of great help in our efforts to give our response, even if a modest one.

May St. Daniel Comboni accompany us in this dream.
Fr. Enrique Sánchez G., mccj
Superior General