To Feel with the Church
"The personal encounter with Christ is the decisive moment of the missionary's vocation" (from the Comboni Missionary Rule of Life).
The Comboni Missionaries are known for being men of action, though a trend that is emerging more and more in the Church has encouraged us to visit anew the other side of our Comboni charism that is every bit as important and certainly has never gone away though maybe not mentioned as often, that of the mystic experience of our personal relationship with Christ. This is what shaped St. Comboni's awareness and made a unifying synthesis of his thoughts.
The Vatican II document Ad Gentes concludes by speaking of organizations and activities, but immediately the center of gravity is moved from doing to being. In Paul VI's Evangelii Nuntiandi Mission is Witness. One of his sentences in particular has become renown: "Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses." A few years later, John Paul II speaks in Redemptoris Missio of the urgency of Mission. In chapter two it identifies the Kingdom of God not with a concept, a doctrine, or a program but with a person who has the face and name of Jesus of Nazareth. It concludes with a chapter about missionary spirituality which is characterized by openness to the Spirit and by self-emtying.
In the words of St. Comboni, speaking about his missionaries, "They will develop in themselves his most essential disposition ~ the spirit of sacrifice ~ by keeping their eyes fixed on Jesus Christ, loving him tenderly and seeking always to understand more fully the meaning of a God who died on the cross for the salvation of souls." It is necessary to continually renew ourselves in the paradoxical truth of the Christian mystery ~ the truth of an unpredictable God!
"Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives to life a new horizon and a decisive direction" (Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas est,1).
