English – Page 46 – Comboni Lay Missionaries

America Your Life Is Mission!

2 December, 2021 by Alberto de la Portilla

It is with great joy that we write again, with a heavy heart for leaving Brazil, a beautiful community and generous people, but with enthusiasm and hope for returning to Guatemala.

Through reunions with family, friends and friends of our communities and parish we feel welcomed and loved, through long distance calls and messages with our dear friends “mineiros”, we began our process of reinsertion; despite being our country of origin we have been resettling, recognizing places and people, being amazed by the changes in the children and young people and they also by ours.

Today we return with a heart full of many learnings, of moments lived full of love and mercy of God, but especially with a personal purification that we know still continues. We come with much strength and energy to work for the Kingdom of God, to tell everyone what we have seen and heard, all that God has taught us.

In that joy our CLM community of Guatemala organized a mass and a welcome meeting for us, they “threw the house out the window” as the good Guatemalan would say. It was a very comforting welcome and the most important thing to recognize is that we have a community that has been supporting us at all times, with its difficulties and challenges, but it is a certainty that this work of God is nothing more than a work done in community with the hands and knees of many.

Today, as we begin our life again as a family, with a different way of seeing things and realities, with a heart that asks for justice and peace. We entrust ourselves to your prayers, we also unite ourselves in prayer to all those who are about to leave or who are on mission, so that all together in this unity, we may meet the true face of Christ and have the same feelings.

May St. Daniel Comboni continue to intercede for the needs of all missionaries and continue to be so active at the Lord’s side that more religious and lay vocations may be rediscovered and directed.

Long live the mission, long live the family, long live St. Daniel Comboni!

Camey Figueroa Family, CLM Guatemala

Prayer Intentions of the Comboni Family December 2021

1 December, 2021 by Alberto de la Portilla

That Our Lord Jesus Christ may grant to all missionaries whom he has called to follow him, fidelity and constancy in the mission entrusted to them. Lord hear us.

May our joy be your joy!

9 November, 2021 by Alberto de la Portilla

The Community of Comboni Lay Missionaries of Central America Province are happy and grateful to the Lord Jesus under the intercession of St. Daniel Comboni because on Sunday, November 7 at Casa Comboni in the Eucharist we prayed to God for the period of Formation and Mission of Mercedes and Maxi, who will live their Community Life Experience for 6 months in the Parish of Santo Domingo de Guzman in the Municipality of Santo Domingo Xenacoj.

An activity full of blessings and where the CLM shared why this Community Life Experience is important with the family, friends and CLM community of our sent ones.

To Mercedes and Maxi we accompany them with our prayers and may the Holy Spirit be their guide and teacher and may they keep in mind the Comboni Identity and Charism and always remember this beautiful writing of St. Daniel Comboni “My missionaries must always keep their eyes on Jesus Christ, loving him tenderly and trying to understand better and better what it means to have a God who died on the cross for the salvation of the world”.

Miriam Herrador

CLM Guatemala

Sending celebration for Linda, destination: Kenya!

8 November, 2021 by Alberto de la Portilla

On Saturday, the 23rd October, during the Mission Sunday Vigil prayer in the Cathedral of Bologna, Linda officially received the blessing and mandate as a Lay Comboni Missionary in Kenya from the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna Matteo Zuppi, the director of the Diocesan Missionary Centre fr. Francesco Ondedei and the whole diocese of Bologna. With her, Katia, a missionary of the Immaculate-Father Kolbe, also received her mandate for Brasil.

With Linda and Katia, today, “we all receive a mandate”, said the cardinal, thanking them for their brave choice, which “encourages us, in turn, to take action, showing us that indeed it is possible, that we all can give our lives so that the Gospel may reach all corners of the earth, with no boundaries”.

It was a very intense moment, not only for Linda but for the whole group of Bologna, which has accompanied her during these months of preparation and discernment. Significantly, our friends the missionaries of Villaregia, the community where Linda lived for a few months this year, were also present and took an active part in organising the same Vigil Prayer. And the words of the cardinal well reflected our own feelings and visions, as he continued: “Mission is all about being concerned not with my own sake, but OUR sake, caring for others, even those I haven’t met yet (…) Mission starts when, full of His Love, I can feel the scandal of too much suffering and injustice, and I testify Jesus’s love by living it myself and talking about Him.”

And also: “At the heart of every missionary’s life is brotherhood”… the exact opposite of what we experience in our daily life: individualism, everybody thinking only for ourselves and their own needs and fears… However, continued Zuppi, “if we are waiting to find all the necessary reassurances, the most right, undeniable truths, the tools to understand ourselves and to understand each other, these will never be enough”…

The cardinal reminded us that our mission does not begin only after we have found all the answers, but when Jesus’s Love, which we have seen and experienced, does not let us remain silent or quiet in the face of all the suffering and injustice we see!

Linda, too, in front of the assembly, explained in a few words what motivated her to make her choice to become a Lay Comboni Missionary, in spite of the fears that often hindered her path towards discovering her missionary vocation. She recalled some significant moments in her journey of discernment, like when, in the capital of Sudan, Khartoum – where she was working as an English teacher – in her free time she used to give literacy lessons to a group of young refugees from South Sudan, as a volunteer in a parish that was run by the Comboni fathers. Seeing these adult students slowly becoming able to read and write, and getting better jobs as a result, was a source of great joy and satisfaction.

Through Linda’s words and enthusiasm, we could almost feel that very joy that she said she experienced when she came to realise, at some point, how immense Jesus’s love for her was. And this joy was so extreme and overwhelming that it slowly melted all fears and finally gave her the courage to decide that she wanted to donate all her time and serve the Lord totally. This, and the strength she finds in the Lay Comboni Missionaries as well as the whole diocesan community, through the mandate she was given today, is what will keep motivating her in this vocation.

As we rejoice for Linda’s decision to leave her home and family for a greater good, we hope that, through her, new common projects may develop, projects that may unite our community in Bologna and her community in Kenya, building new bridges of hope.

In the words of Saint Daniel Comboni: “Courage for the present, and especially for the future!”

CLM Bologna

CLM African Online Meeting

6 November, 2021 by Alberto de la Portilla

Last weekend we had the opportunity to hold an online African meeting.

Technical difficulties were not lacking, as we all know how difficult it is sometimes for the internet connection to reach correctly to many places of our beloved continent. Sometimes we even had to make up for this difficulty with imagination, there were those who made themselves present through WhatsApp audios that we were later able to share.

We also had the challenge of overcoming the language barriers, but with patience and collaboration from all of us we were able to understand each other.

But the effort on the part of all had its reward.

We were able to dedicate the afternoon to listen to how each of the groups is living at this time, the dreams, hopes and difficulties of these times.

More and more African CLM groups are present, where there are still some CLM coming from Europe or America.

With the Dream of Saving Africa with Africa, more and more Africans are taking the missionary path, not only to help their closest brothers and sisters, but also with the will to open themselves to serve other countries, to collaborate all together in God’s mission for the world.

We ask the Lord to send African missionaries to his harvest, that with their good work they may help us to understand the Lord from their own culture and particularities. Likewise, may He help us as CLM movement to know how to accompany and support these vocations and that as a family we learn to collaborate together for the good of our sisters and brothers most in need.

Alberto de la Portilla, CLM Central Committee