ID of a Comboni Priest (1)
I will propose 4 elements in the coming days that can be seen as important in our experience as Comboni priests. For each of them I will try to reflect briefly on the challenges that come from our world, the demands of ministry and how each particular element is shaped by our own Comboni identity and life.
Leader-Companion
We reject a style of leadership based on pure authority, the good leader is the one who walks together with us, not the one who commands from a distance. Religious guides who pretend to shape our lives with eternal universal truths, with words and concepts hardly translatable into the language of our experience, cannot expect to be easily accepted, let alone followed. The truth that will guide us is the one that we are helped to discover in our own experience. Only the one who shares in the darkness and pain... the light and enthusiasm of our own search can lead us. Leaders will need to diminish what they do for us and greatly develop what they do with us!
The demands of ministry are not difficult to guess ~ the priest is one of them before being seen as one for them. Vatican II document, Lumen Gentium Ch.1 speaks of the basic identity of the Church as the People of God; priests are first of all members together with other members. The specificity of our service as priests comes after our common identity and belonging through baptism. Vulnerability is the first word that comes to mind. As a priest I am not exempted from the common struggles of all other brothers and sisters in the ecclesial community. I experience that same weaknesses and the same need to be strengthened and comforted. Common to all of us is human fragility and the mystery of evil that afflicts everyone: we too can hurt and be hurt and need to forgive and be forgiven, to heal and be healed...
The shepherd who smells of the sheep leads not by elevation above the flock, but by walking wounded among them.
