Alberto de la Portilla – Page 96 – Comboni Lay Missionaries

The beauty of the Imperfect Mission

29 October, 2018 by Alberto de la Portilla

“The greatness of the mission does not belong to us, but rather to the One who sends us,” Fr. Ivo.

A year in mission. How much time fits in this lapse? How many lives have been held in our own? How many arms were linked with our arms? How many lives have we given? And how many have we received?

We stopped planning our lives to allow life to direct us, to allow God to touch us and the people to meet us. We allowed ourselves to be met just as we are, with our wounds, scars and imperfections.

This is who we are, and this is how we embraced our mission, together and imperfect. We walked in the certainty that “we are all wounded and through these wounds light comes in.” We never wanted to be perfect. Instead we allowed God to touch our imperfections and through them lead us to our brothers, who are now our friends and neighbors. Today they are our family.

The beauty of an imperfect mission is in us, resides within us. Beauty is not in the moment you realize that you and your life are the mission, but rather in the ability to walk on your own little by little without fear letting your wounds, scars and frailties be part of what makes you who you are, an essential part.

Then mission become a solitary journey, with yourself, a journey of two, because you know that you were chosen for a greater love, a journey of three, you, God, your neighbor, in the certainty that the other exists to walk with you.

It allows you to be, to know yourself a little better to let yourself be discovered a little at the time, and join to your neighbor always ready to proceed together. And together, hand in hand with God, we reach the other and the other deliver you in an imperfect, complete fashion.

It is this journey of three that we meet our neighbors, our brothers. They become our home and journey together. They are the people who, in imperfect ways, complete us, make us grow. It is in being imperfect that we keep on meeting others, moving on and growing with each person we meet. This way, mission is not only teaching or learning, but rather growing together, knowing that the union of our imperfections results in the perfection of the whole.

This is the logic of God who made us in such a way that we need others in order to love, be, live and be happy.

Paula y Neuza. CLM Peru

Missioning Mass for Pedro Nacimiento

19 October, 2018 by Alberto de la Portilla

After a great weekend, from the Community of Ervedal, Alentejo, the parish that saw the CLM Pedro Nascimento grow up and today sends him off, our CLM Rufina shares with us the emotions of this special occasion.

Today Alentejo, and more concretely Ervedal, has celebrated.

It was already expected that it would be a success, but for sure it went well beyond all expectations, especially when you take into account such a beautiful church, so well decorated, where they are already the Extraordinary Mission Year, and whose pastor succeeds, certainly as a result of the work carried out over the years, to gather all the parishes under his care to take part responsibly and joyously in the missioning of Pedro Nacimiento to Ethiopia.

Without a doubt, the most important moment was the Eucharist presided over by Archbishop Francisco Senra Coelho with the participation of other invited priests, especially Fr. Francisco Medeiros, a Comboni Missionary from the diocese of Viseu.

The ceremony included also two deacons, relatives, friends and many CLM who, together with Pedro are part of the “Thousand Lives for Mission.”

A reception followed for everyone where lunch in the good local style was served, which we enjoyed a lot.

Pedro, as a CLM and being as well from Alentejo, I cannot forget to thank God for your missioning on this Extraordinary Mission Year, certain that it will be a time of growth and enrichment that will allow you, together with your Ethiopian people, to carry out a mission abounding in love, filled with the Comboni charism and enlightened by the smile the Lord lovingly placed on your face sweetening this soul of Alentejo that is so typically yours, in difficult moments.

As Pope Francis says, “Mission is to go meet the other.”

And how it has been mentioned in the Pastoral Note of the Episcopal Conference of Portugal on both the Extraordinary Mission Year and Mission Month, “Everyone, everything and always in mission.”

Therefore, go, my friend, go.

Let us keep in touch! Happy Mission!

A kiss

Rufina (October 14, 2018)Thank you, Rufina, Thank you, Pedro. Thank you for your commitment

Bread, Beans and Lemonade

16 October, 2018 by Alberto de la Portilla

During this year 2018, we, the CLM community of Guatemala, have been spending mission days in the village of La Salvadora, in Santa Catarina Pinula, located about 15 Km from Guatemala City.

One Saturday a month, we visit the higher part of the village, the one called “La Salvadora 2.”

The program is always the same. We arrive at 8:00 AM, early enough to prepare with care some bread with “something” in it and a drink, to share it with all the villagers who show up. At 9:00 AM we start the program of evangelization, manual work, play, activities and then we leave around 4:00/4:30 PM.

On September 22 we had something special… something that made me feel alive, grateful and happy… a detail that revived in me the joy of being there, of sharing God through simple gestures of friendship, fraternity and generosity. These gifts that no money can buy are a sharing from God.

It turned out that, when we arrived, the children helped us unload the car. As we organized, some of us to start on the bread, which on that day held strained beans, several children offered to prepare it themselves for the first time in the whole year! Others immediately asked for the drink and offered to prepare the lemonade themselves. It was great to see them cooperate, enjoy and, in the end, be happy and satisfied. It was a gift! Just seeing their satisfied smiles for having helped to put together bread, beans and lemonade.

Mission does not consist in accomplishing great feats, but rather it is built from detail to detail, from stroke to stroke, from joy to joy.

So great, lasting, persevering and delicate is the love of God, the love we share with those who suffer discrimination, who are marginalized, those who have no opportunity to receive education and health care, those who need to receive the proclamation of the good news of Jesus who died and rose again.

It is not important if over the years these children will have forgotten these Saturdays… when some missionaries were coming to visit, and perhaps they will forget the day when they, themselves, prepared the bread, the beans and the lemonade.

I trust that in their hearts there remain a trace of each sign of love and closeness, and that in due time this memory will be transformed into a true encounter with Jesus, and they will be adults who will love him deeply throughout life. Only in this fashion will the world be transformed in a better place for all.

St. Daniel Comboni, pray for us.

Lily Portillo

Celebrating the memory of the birth of St. Daniel Comboni

9 October, 2018 by Alberto de la Portilla

TO GIVE LIFE SO THAT ALL MAY HAVE LIFE

Solemnity of St. Daniel Comboni

10 October 2018

“I am the Good Shepherd; I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for my sheep. And there are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, and these I have to lead as well. They too will listen to my voice and there will be only one flock and one shepherd.”

(Jn 10:14-16)

Dear Confreres
Celebrating the memory of the birth of St. Daniel Comboni introduces us into the great mystery of the life of the Good Shepherd with a pierced heart who gave his life so that all may have life and life in abundance, especially those who do not yet belong to the table of Christ’s body, the poorest and most abandoned, so that all may become one flock under one shepherd.

We Comboni Missionaries, faithful to this tradition, to the charism and pastoral practice of our Founder, are invited to renew ourselves in this missionary commitment every day to be “at the margins of society as witnesses and prophets of fraternal relationships, based on forgiveness, mercy and the joy of the Gospel” (CA ’15 No. 1).

The mission at the margins of society required from Comboni the ability to remain firm in difficult times and fidelity to the price of life itself, because he had his gaze fixed on the pierced heart of the Crucified One, a vision of faith of the events and the embrace of Africa with a heart marked by divine love. An incarnate holiness that runs through the paths of poverty and human marginalisation, welcoming the other, the different, the poor, in an embrace of communion and dialogue; a holiness that is the divine passion present in a human heart.

This is what we have tried to express in the reflection and prayer of the Intercapitular that we have just concluded. We have been constantly attentive to the voice of the victims, the marginalised, and the great multitudes of human beings whose life is threatened by a heartless system that causes the predictable and violent death of the weakest.

This reality continues to prophetically question our presence and the quality of our missionary service, as it has questioned Comboni in his time. To respond, however, to these challenges, we need to approach each day, to the mystery of God’s love, revealed in Jesus Christ, with the spirit, gaze and heart of Comboni, with an open heart overflowing with love and the mercy of the Pierced One and, like Him, let us also be pierced by so many situations of poverty and neglect.

For St. Daniel Comboni it was clear that the contemplation of the mystery of God, crucified for love, had as its purpose to lead his missionaries to a definite way of doing mission: to witness a life lived in ‘spirit and truth’, fruit of a vivid and convincing prayer, to practice humility and obedience, as signs of a deeply Comboni spirituality. That is, to irradiate with one’s life the mystery of God Crucified in order to bring to Christ, the source of Life, all those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.

It is with these feelings that we wish to celebrate this solemnity of St. Daniel Comboni as a Comboni Family. Enter into this mystery of the Good Shepherd with a pierced heart and drink the lifeblood that renews us, that makes us look at reality through the eyes of faith, hope and charity, that heals and humanises us, that makes us become mission, “cenacle of apostles”, gift for others. “I make common cause with each of you, and the happiest day in my life will be the one on which I will be able to give my life for you” (W 3159).

May St. Daniel Comboni intercede with the Father for each one of us, for the whole Comboni Family and for the missions that are presently going through difficult situations: Eritrea, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic.

Happy Feast day to all.
Fr. Tesfaye Tadesse Gebresilasie; Fr. Jeremias dos Santos Martins; Fr. Pietro Ciuciulla; Fr. Alcides Costa; Bro. Alberto Lamana.

New CLM in formation in the NAP

3 October, 2018 by Alberto de la Portilla

We have a new CLM taking the formation course in the NAP, preparing himself to go to mission.

Darrel J. Vandeveld is a lawyer and retired Army officer who graduated from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

He comes from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he raised his four children and served as the head of the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office in Erie, from which he recently retired.

After September, 2001, Darrel served in the US Army in Bosnia, Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He retired from the Army Reserve in 2015 as a Lieutenant Colonel. In his final assignment for the military, Darrel was assigned to a capital murder trial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State.

Darrel has served as an elected member of his local school board, and has served on the boards of non-profit organizations, including the Pennsylvania Artists’ Collective Alliance, an organization dedicated to providing local artists with performance spaces and other resources.

He is a member of the St Joseph Bread of Life Community in Erie.