Provisionality is one of the more peculiar characteristics of the Community Animation Service for a Better World. Without any doubt, this particular characteristic has greatly influenced our vocation and mission, our people and our work. It should not surprise us, therefore, that changes can happen within the Promoting Group.
Category Archives: Sharing Life
Did you say “exercise”?
Everyone, no matter their age, recognizes that exercise is good. If we stay strictly withthe meaning of the word exercise, from Latin “exercitium”, it has to do with “the art of regular or repeated use of a faculty or bodily organ or bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness”. These verbs refer to the practice of an activity, an art form, a job or a profession. I recognize that I have been hard to convince of its more profound meaning, maybe because I am an active person, maybe due to the “activism” of Western society, or because of my own education. I was taught about prayer, but I wasn’t taught the exercise of prayer. I studied plenty theology, but no one helped me to digest it… The truth is that in my own pastoral service, during quite a long time, I have studied a lot, and garnered a lot of information in order to transmit this knowledge in an active pedagogical manner. Recently I have gained consciousness regarding my conviction that I must first “exercise” that is, to take on whatever I learn and internalize it, in order to later transmit this knowledge to others. Continue reading Did you say “exercise”?
The Itineraries: an experience
To learn to LIVE, is the constant rain shower produced by the Itineraries to soak my whole life… It has been an unexpected gift, with which I am able to be aware of the presence of the Spirit of Jesus. Continue reading The Itineraries: an experience
Spirituality Prevails Over Pastoral
Usually, the idea of an ecclesial renewal begins with any number of pastoral activities. Our service in Movement for a Better World, has contributed, in the past, to the renewal of the Church and has fostered projects for a more just and fraternal-sororal society. In the mid-eighties, last century, the Promoting Group, made an option to design projects to renew the pastoral in a global and integral manner, first of the parish, then religious life, and later youth and family. Later, the dioceses as a whole were included among the renewal projects.
Telling stories enables encounters and fosters personal development
It’s taken a long time to discover, little by little, that the events that have happened in my everyday life, become clearer, more organized and more significant insofar as I have stopped, reviewed them and then written them as a story or narrative. Continue reading Telling stories enables encounters and fosters personal development
Experiencing our own “daily life”
What does “daily life” have to do with the Signs of the Times? What does it have to do with God? What does it have to do with who I am and what I do and want from life? What does it have to do with the reality that our country is experiencing at this moment in time?
If we just answer rapidly, we would say that “nothing”; that our “routine” or what we experience “day-by-day” is one thing, and that the rest of what we go through is something totally different. That was my first thought when I experienced the Itinerary of the “Signs of the Times – A shared listening of reality”. However, with each one of the itineraries (this one and others), I realize that “daily life” does have a lot to do with everything.
Discerning the Signs of Times
One of the things that most caught my attention when I arrived at the Better World Service for Animation was “The Reading of the Signs of the Times”. Those were the first years of my priesthood, my mind still full with “theologies”; it was a true novelty to feel myself included in a group to read reality from a critical consciousness. I still remember the dynamics: gather facts and happenings, organize them in groups of events, carry out a prophetic discernment in light of the Word of God, and finally make a commitment.
A city that cries … and rescues itself.
Dead men walk scattered among living men.
(José Carlos Becerra)
It’s a city that cries. It’s [Wednesday] September 20, 2017, and it’s six o’clock in the afternoon when the rain begins; It’s a day after the earthquake. And yes, it’s Mexico City that cries.
Surprisingly, it was almost exactly 32 years ago [with only six hours difference] that the same tragedy repeats again. There is nothing so spiritual as to dive deep into those unanswered questions that allows us to encounter with the profoundly humane aspect within ourselves.
Every Mexican heart opens up and is available to react and respond to such misfortune in their own being– the human and the spiritual. Continue reading A city that cries … and rescues itself.
Highlights from the experience of the itineraries
A person in the first phase of the fourth stage of life realizes that events are not as fortuitous as they seem at first glance. This is what has happened to me when wanting to share some highlights of the experiences of the Itineraries which we have adapted from the original Exercises and which, in these past years, I have accompanied in various groups.
How did this adventure of updating the Exercises come about?
If I remember correctly there were certain anniversaries and other significant events that ignited within me the need for this updating.
Continue reading Highlights from the experience of the itineraries