Comboni Lay Missionaries

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Spirituality

To walk in the footsteps of our Founder

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Comboni

St. Daniel Comboni was born on March 15, 1831, in Limone sul Garda, Italy. At the school of the priest don Nicholas Mazza, in Verona, he discovered his basic qualities: sanctity, search for truth and missionary zeal. He founded the Institutes of the Comboni Missionaries and of the Comboni Missionary Sisters who are now spread around the world announcing the Gospel among the poorest and most abandoned people. Ten years ago, Comboni was proclaimed a saint. We publish a celebration outline for the Comboni Family to help us walk in the footsteps of our Founder.

COMBONI PRAYER

March 15, 2014

We celebrate the birthday anniversary of Comboni during Lent, when everything in the Word of God calls us to conversion, to awaken from sleep, to dedicate ourselves to the works of light. Comboni, a man of faith, certainly knew how to be awaken and enlightened by Christ, and how to arouse the world around him with his tireless and passionate mission promotion.

Today, in the context of the tenth anniversary of his canonization, we join in prayer with the Comboni Family, so we invoke the God of light on each of us and on all the people living in the “shadow of death” on account of war, injustice, poverty and oppression. With Comboni, we ask to awaken from sleep.

Song

From St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians (5, 8-14)

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore, it says: “Awake you who sleep, rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

This is the Word of God.

From Comboni’s Letter

I am with you, I experience the thirst for living water and the desire to regenerate. I pray with you.

“Awake, you who sleep, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

Yes, it’s time to wake up, to allow ourselves to be awaken by the Risen Lord, who always walks ahead of us even in our days and shows us the dawn of new horizons. Let us wake up, open the doors of our lives and let in the life of God through the life of humanity.

Awake from  your sleep, put our feet into the footprints that our people are leaving in the groove of life to harvest the hope of Eastern season and which, with wisdom and in a thousand ways, continue to show, witness and share with us. Awake to the song of hope that they always have the courage to sing even in the darkest of  nights.

Awake from the slumber of mediocrity to let resound in the history of the world the echo the joyous good news of Isaiah, a prelude to the Gospel: “Don’t remember the former things, and don’t consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing. It springs out now. Don’t you know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43: 18-19).

Awake to the cry of the impoverished, oppressed, excluded, forgotten, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, those who have not yet met with the Hope announced by Jesus Christ.

Awake to the breeze of the wind to open your ears and understand the echo of the wisdom of your people who sustain you in your daily life, the echo of your local Churches which vibrates with a new life, the echo of the faithful and suffering witness of many sisters and brothers of yesterday and of today. Be alive, like the seed that dies under the ground and which has in itself the power to generate life.

Remain awake and attentive like the women of Easter morning, the only ones who went to the tomb, moved by the courage of a faith that is able to see beyond the stone that blocks life.

St. Daniel Comboni

Writing n. 162 – Comboni to his father: “Now there is not an hour or an instant that are you absent from my mind’s eye, that I do not think of you. … O dearest one, for allowing me to follow my vocation!”.

Song

Question for reflection:

From which lethargies do you feel that Comboni asks you to awake from so that you may carry on his work with passion, joy and enthusiasm?

Brief silence

Sharing time

Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Our Father…

Thank you, Daniel (Prayer said together)

Thank you Daniel, because you believed in your dream.

You teach us that it is possible to see Africa through the eyes of God.

Thank you because you saw and you remained fascinated

by the African people, seeing them through the pure ray of faith,

with the attitude of a brother and not of an imperialist or a slave trader.

You believed in the human capacity of the Africans,

and you already saw Africa as the protagonist of its process of liberation.

Your dream was the dream of God. You believed in it

and thought us to believe as well.

 

Your life tells us about two important encounters:

The first with God and the second with the Africans.

You were a courageous witness of the exploitation

going on in Africa and you did not remain indifferent,

did not take refuge into a desperate conformism

but felt inside the flame of liberation

and wanted to do history with the Africans,

so much so that their cause became your cause.

 

The Spirit whispered to you a wise Plan:

The regeneration of Africa by Africa itself,

and it was spring time, it was strength,

it was passion, it was total liberation.

 

Thank you because your dream enlightens us today

against the neo-imperialist projects

which continue to widen the gap between North and South.

Your dream is guiding us and makes us take up a stand

when confronted by money that is considered to be a god,

when confronted by an idol which dehumanizes people.

 

Today we are immersed in a lost and weak humanity,

and you invite us to believe again in this humanity,

to proclaim Jesus Christ with passion and credibility.

It is not easy to live in an alienated and often divided world

But you showed us that love conquers all.

 

We ask that you keep us united to You and united among ourselves,

We, your sons and daughters, to remain faithful to God’s dream.

May our differences become a source of wealth and creativity.

Thanks, Daniel, for having believed in your dream.

Pope Francisco Message for Lent 2014

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Lenten 2014Pope Francis has released his message for Lent this year. The text offered by Francisco, which takes as its theme a fragment of the Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians – “He became poor to enrich us with his poverty” (Cor 8.9) – the Pope reflects on the “poverty that enriches “from the point of view of Christ, and the different forms of poverty that humanity suffers at the present time.

The poverty of Christ is for the Pope a poverty that “liberates and enriches” and shows “unlimited trust in God the Father”. “It has been said that the only real sadness is not being saints; it could also be said that there is one true misery: not live as children of God and brothers of Christ,” said the Pope. In this text, Francisco also warns against three kinds of misery: “material, moral and spiritual misery” that afflicts the human been.

According to what the Pope tells us in this Lenten message, God is not revealed through the power and wealth of the world, but through the weakness and poverty. And Jesus, the eternal Son of God, equal to the Father in power and glory, made himself poor so that we feel brothers of all who are suffering, the needy, the latter, which are the favorites of God.

The Pope invites us in his message to remember that Lent is a time to divest, to ask how we can deprive ourselves in order to help and enrich others with our poverty. Not forgetting that true poverty hurts: a wreck would not be valid without this penitential dimension. Distrust of almsgiving that does not cost and is painless.

Full text of the Pope’s Francisco message for Lent 2014

From Silence

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Retreat Centre

Maggie and I took time away recently for a 10 day silent prayer retreat at Galilee Retreat Centre, which is set on the edge of a volcanic crater lake in the highlands of Ethiopia.  We not only remained in silence from other people; Maggie and I were accommodated in separate cabins at opposite ends of the property, in silence even from each other.  This was to be my first ‘directed’ retreat of such length where I would break silence just once each day for a 30 minute meeting with a spiritual director who would help guide the movements percolating within my own prayer.

On day one, my spiritual director, Fr. Wolde Meskel, an Ethiopian priest, asked me what my aspirations were for the retreat time and I shared a few things all related to wanting to be closer to Jesus.  Next he completely caught me off guard – he asked me to pack away for the rest of the retreat all the spiritual books which I had brought. What? Not even glance at them?  He assured me that even if the books I had brought were filled with great insights, busying my mind cerebrally reading about God is not the same as getting to know God, from experiencing him at work within me.  Instead Fr. Wolde would give me a very short biblical text so that I might simply sit in silence with God.

I left our meeting wondering how I could sit for 10 days in silence with only a few words from the bible. For two days I was squirmy and restless and swung some punches into the air of silence.  I guess I had a pre-conceived notion about what my time with God was going to be like – I was dictating the terms.  I came to realize how much I felt the ‘need’ to feel productive even in my prayer time.  By the third day I was able to detach myself from my previous retreat plans and I finally surrendered.  And so my real retreat began.

What did I do those days? Practically, I did nothing. My silent days unfolded by following a routine of one hour meditations throughout the day based on only a few verses at a time, the beatitudes of St. Matthew’s Gospel consuming most of the week.  I found that I am quite uncomfortable with silence.  I am cultured to the craziness and busy pace of our modern society and accustomed to the noise, sensory stimulation and distraction, but in this background it is very difficult to hear the gentle voice of God whispering.  I am afraid to be so alone because it forces me to confront whether I truly love and accept the person I am spending all my time with.  It forces me to confront my weaknesses and past, and sit exposed before God in a way where I cannot hide my greatest faults or the ways I lack faith.

In the first days I really had to fight my need to be more productive and efficient, but then this need somehow melted.   After a few days, I was savoring every moment of solitude.  In reality what I did those days was simply waste time with Jesus – to learn about his life in those few verses; to ponder his personality; to contemplate his interactions with people; to soak up his words; to perceive the way he loved.   In gazing on him and letting my preoccupations with myself go, I was able to enter that place within me where God resides and to where he is inviting me to come, to stay and to be with him.

What happened that retreat week was actually indicative of a change that has been brewing in me during these last years.  Silence is slowly transforming me.  More and more now I crave it, because what I want is Jesus – close and unfiltered.  In silence, I find him, revealing himself to me.  Life here in Ethiopia is busy and most of my days feel just as demanding as life back in Toronto.  But slowly, I am becoming a hermit, right in the middle of the world.   I am still focused on carrying out the hectic work of each day, but I cherish the times when I follow the voice of God and sit with him in all his splendor, even for a moment.

– Mark

Maggie, Mark and Emebet Banga, Comboni Lay Missionaries, Awassa, Ethiopia

Love in Practice is a Harsh and Dreadful Thing

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Catholic Worker

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement once said: “Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.  Reality continues to confront our dreams, our hope and our ideal vision”. Day knew this well because she gave her full life to struggling in solidarity with the poor.  Loving the poor is a difficult thing. Even when we come with a sincere desire to “serve the poor” we cannot help but have a certain romantic vision of who the poor are and what we think they need. But the daily practice of this is far from romantic and I am surprised at how many times I utterly fail to love the poor when I am precisely trying to do so. This has been part of my journey as a lay missionary in Ethiopia.

But there persists a single core source of inspiration -> Matthew 25:40: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Jesus describes in Matt 25:31-46 that the inheritance of his Kingdom is based on something quite simple and attainable. Once again Dorothy Day sheds some clear light when she comments: “If Christ himself had not said it, it would seem raving lunacy to believe this. But he said that a glass of water given to a beggar is given to him. He made heaven hinge on the way we act toward him in His disguise of commonplace, frail, ordinary humanity.”

Matthew 25:40 remains both a big challenge and encouragement to me. By seeing Jesus in those around me, I begin to appreciate and care for their sufferings as well as their joy, hope and the gifts which they contribute to the world.  I begin to realize my own poverty too, accepting that as people we all share a certain brokenness and sense of loss, rejection and unfulfilled needs. I see that the real challenge is having trust in the “Jesus” in others even when I cannot see him.  Believe me, there are moments when I am rubbing my eyes to see Jesus but all I see are mistakes and disappointments.

I am also learning that contained within the act of loving the poorest is the total sphere of human virtue – patience, forgiveness, empathy, hope, perseverance and courage.   The entire demand of God’s message of Love is summed up in the obligation to love the poor because of the implicit call to authenticity and openness of heart that is demanded in practically carrying out this task in daily life (when the romantic filter is gone).

When I ponder all these things, it makes me believe that at the end of time when I am face to face with Jesus, I will only be asked one question: How did you love the poor?

– Mark

Maggie, Mark and Emebet Banga, Comboni Lay Missionaries, Awassa, Ethiopia

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The one thing necessary

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Open HandsOne of the most difficult parts of this “missionary” life for me has been accepting all that I am missing out on. In my lowest moments, I think about missing my family, my close guy friends (it is so hard to make authentic peer-to-peer friendships here), my god-children, career development, saving for retirement, my familiar culture, and things like this.  It’s taken a few years to come to terms with all that I need to give up in order to be authentic to God’s invitation for me to become more loving, which at this present moment keeps me in Ethiopia.  Now, most days I feel at peace, which is a logical effect of voluntary sacrifice.  But I have learned that the most important effect is an opening of me to others, a widening of my horizons away from myself to the needs of others.  Thomas Merton’s writings, particularly from “No Man is an Island” have been a great inspiration:

“One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off and more at peace than one who has or experiences much more but who worries about all he may be missing. For we cannot make the best of what we are, if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not.

The relative perfection which we must attain in this life if we are to live as children of God is not the twenty-four-hours-a-day production of perfects acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.

One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless love is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people. We can only rid ourselves of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, visit everywhere, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us – whatever it may be. If we are too eager for everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.

This type of authentic happiness consists in finding out precisely what the “one thing necessary” may be in our lives and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.”

– Mark

Maggie, Mark and Emebet Banga, Comboni Lay Missionaries, Awassa, Ethiopia