Extracts from Don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D,'s Meditations. Edition revised, corrected, 1994.

LA COMUNITÀ DEI FIGLI DI DIO

VADEMECUM DI DON DIVO BARSOTTI, C.F.D.

GUIDEBOOK OF THE COMMUNITY OF
GOD'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Summary:

Our Ideals

Our Story

Our Name

Our Motto

Chapter 1

LA COMUNITÀ DEI FIGLI DI DIO


THE COMMUNITY OF GOD'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS

OUR IDEALS

Our ideal is that universality and absolute simplicity of the soul seeking God only, being both of the hermitage and of the city, the monastic life reduced to its essentials, but which in these essentials follows all without compromise. The Community embraces all states and seeks that perfection of love, which is not the same as virginity. Virginity is but one of the avenues for those who are called.

'Be Perfect' was said to all, and therefore it cannot exclude anyone.

The Community turns to all, challenging each to the measure of our ability. And it is the recognition of the universality of this labour of love that we have, inasmuch as God's sons and daughters, been called to live this filial adoption, the greatest mystery of Christian life.

Two things show the originality of our movement amongst similar ones: we do not have a particular mission, we exclude no one. These two characteristics which distinguish the CFD tell of its greater openness. We desire a consecration of all that is profane, all that is secular, we want our association to have the ability to sanctify all human activity. We are at God's service to witness to Christ, to God, wherever we may be. We want all human acts to be consecrated to the Lord, so that each soul, wherever it is, presents this witness.

At our baptism we receive the invitation to perfection and we must respond. The Community desires to give to souls the possibility of this response. It helps them to the measure of their need and challenges them to the limits of their capacity.

It is the secular world that needs consecration: and all human reality in some way assumed into the Word.

In the Community we live as God's children and as human children, The efficient cause of our spiritual life is the Christ the Lord, Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man.

There is no special mission: whoever we are, our life should be lived as a pure showing of God.

This is our Apostolate: to show God, his infinite love, his holiness.

We do not neglect work, service to our neighbour, the humble testimony of a simple, practical, neighbourly deed, but we feel the necessity to affirm that charity cannot have a religious intent if the soul does not first try to make itself an offering to the heavenly Father.

Thus the whole Community is fulfilled in the act where Christ dies on the Cross.

We ought not to do, but to be. We are God's witnesses and now the world can learn to know God and love him.

OUR STORY

The first seed was cast on 13 July 1944 by Father Andrea Zelli, a Dominican of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, a small seed which was entrusted to the faithfulness of three souls (Vittoria Pacchioni, Beatrice Lonzar, Carmelina Di Cara) who were directed by this same priest and who happened that morning to find themselves in church there.

The intention of the Dominican priest was to found 'a new religious movement adapted to the modern world'. These souls united together 'in vowing fraternal love even to death'.

'But the movement which began' - so wrote Vittoria Pacchioni, who was the first Assistant General of the CFD and who chronicled it until her death - 'lacked a definite character'. Rather than being associated with the Dominican Third Order, it was to be an independent movement, following certain practices of piety.

And 'it always remained somewhat vague' - so wrote Vittoria - even when the Dominican priest, because he was leaving Florence, gave the direction of the movement to a Carmelite, Father Tommaso di Gesù, who bestowed on it a Carmelite flavour. But even this direction lasted only a short while because Father Tommaso left on missionary work.

These changes happened within two years, from 1944 to 1946.

Then in 1946, 'the Virgin (for it was the month of May) laid up for us' - so wrote Vittoria Pacchioni - 'a miraculous grace'. The young movement was offered the direction of Rev. Don Divo Barsotti, which it accepted.

Thus the small seed rose up from 1944, but the Community in its well-defined character, in its structure, and above all in its spirituality, sprang truly into being in 1946, when the Father (Don Divo Barsotti) took over its direction, giving it a new face and spirit. We can say that he is the true Founder.

Was it not part of the divine plan that this movement should be neither Dominican nor Carmelite, but a synthesis of all the religious movements coming about then and now in the Church of God, responding to the needs of all souls, of whatever state or condition, through which each soul, caught up in the quest for perfection of love, could reveal God in the midst of humanity? Certainly, it was of divine planning that the Father, who always dreamed of a religious movement according to God's needs in his soul, should give it a personal and original imprint, rendering it unique and particular amongst all the movements which have recently come into existence.

Under his direction immediately came about the firm guidelines to follow: Prayer (which in these first days was the recitation of the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of the day); cultural preparation (what was recommended was at least an hour of study each week); monthly retreats, gatherings, and common prayer.

These firm foundations of spirituality were also immediately expounded: simplicity and interior liberty, harmony with the reality of life, total commitment, constant joy, perfect charity, single-hearted intimacy with God.

On 1 January 1947, Father gave the formula of the Triple Consecration, which the little group of signatories (of which there were now more) solemnly pronounced together with the Father before the altar. They were the first ones to be so Consecrated.

The entire programme was now envisioned by the Director and came to be put in place piece by piece in the frequent encounters: liturgical spirituality; Trinitarian spirituality (proceeding to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit); devotion to Mary, the Bride of the Trinity and the Mother of God; the choosing of patron saints from all the nations to achieve even with these a universal spirituality.

April 1947: The Community Changes its Name

'We became aware' - so wrote Vittoria - 'that slowly the Holy Spirit had carried us rather far from the spirit of battle of our beginnings. Now our movement was turning towards a form of global neighbouring, and suggesting amongst us, with the subtle apostolate for love, the imitation of Jesus as Son of God and Son of Humanity. The name, "Army" (for we were called by the Dominican priest, the "Army of Christ the King - M.R.C".) no longer expressed our spirit or our programme. Therefore we now took up the most beautiful name of the "Comunità dei figli di Dio"', the Community of God's Sons and Daughters.

In September 1947 the first groups were formed and the meetings were established. Now began the daily recitations of the Lauds of St Francis and of the Beatitudes as well as the Lord's Prayer.

On 23 October 1949 we began the charity for missionaries and the charity to help sisters in need.

27 May 1950, Saturday, Vigil of Pentecost, Cardinal Elia dalla Costa of Florence gave his approval 'ad experimentum' to the Community of God's Sons and Daughters. 1946, 1950, 1952 . . . . Everything was in embryo, but we could see what would develop; the originality of the governing, the originality of the organizing into branches, the respect for the substantial unity in a variety of forms. We could see the clear, free and profound formation (this was also original), from the illuminating, continuing words of the Father. An enormous amount of gold panned out to us from the living waters of our spiritual formation.

From that July in 1944 the Community has come a great distance. It is enlarged in numbers (the three became so many sons and daughters, of all ages, states and conditions, scattered over all Italy), but above all it was strengthened and affirmed. Not without effort and work, it is true, but does one measure so God's work?

Now the little seed has become truly a great tree which extends its branches from one end of Italy to the other and which can be found everywhere; a great tree which wants to be planted in the heart of the world because it wishes to give to all and embrace all in love.

'From which, twenty years ago, we began this journey' - so wrote the Father in his Advent circular, 1967, and ' the path, which at the beginning was so humble, has become a King's Highway, always larger, always better lit . . . . Now we are a great family of souls Consecrated to God and challenged to love and to witness to his living presence in all regions of our peninsula and even further away . . . .'

OUR NAME 'COMUNITÀ DEI FIGLI DI DIO', 'COMMUNITY OF GOD'S SONS AND DAUGHTERS'

What does this name mean?

Christians are all God's Sons and Daughters, but we have taken this name to reclaim the sense of our divine sonship more openly.

We are called 'God's heirs' because we wish to live the consecration that we received at Baptism more consciously.

The meaning of our name is to live the mystery of the filial adoption in love.

This means a communion of our life with God, and also the grace of a raising up to the heavenly order which can reveal and express itself in the terms of this adoption.

The adoption - where God becomes my father and I become his son or daughter, his heir- requires a sincere transformation of my nature. I do not cease to be human, it it true, but I become God's heir. We are God's family. And this is what we must understand and live! When we speak of filial adoption, of God's fathering, we speak of what is truly the essence of Christianity, the recognising of an immense distance from him and also faith and acceptance of this immense love and grace with which he has wished to love us as he loves himself, because the Father gives all to the Son and cannot give of himself anything that is greater.

And it is truly this gift which he has given that calls us to participate in his own nature. In fact he has given us himself in the gift of the Son, and in the gift of the Son we are made sons and daughters, and in him we live our filial adoption.

To live this filial adoption is to say we no longer obey our own nature but only that of God's action which dwells in us.

In fact, the process of our sanctification means an indentification, a union that is forever closer with Christ. Thus the Word, to which you listen, is the Word that assumes you, that takes you, that makes you a member of its Body. Thus we can, in the Son, lift up ourselves to God and call him Father.

The mystery of the filial adoption that we, in the 'Comunità dei figli di Dio', Community of God's Sons and Daughters, wish above all to live, requires this listening. this gathering of the Word, because it is in the listening and in the gathering of the Word, the Speaking, that we become sons and daughters and heirs.

We live our relationship with the Father if we live in deep friendship with Jesus, a living intimacy through which we sense ourselves to be his brothers and sisters. We will be God's sons and daughters if we achieve with Jesus a communion of feeling, of will, of love, participating in his very life. The soul which immediately has intimate contact with Jesus lives always before the face of the Father. But we can only live the mystery of the filial adoption if we enter into the mystery of the Trinity through our obedience to the Holy Spirit, which is given to us because, when it flows into us, we are united with Christ, and united with Christ we can contemplate the Father.

Here is all the greatness of Christianity, and here is all our vocation in the Community.

If the challenge of total love comes from the filial relation to the heavenly Father, we wish that this mystery be always present, that it shape all our interior thoughts, that it sustain all our moral strength, that it guide us.

If we are God's children, neither constraints, nor worldly concerns, nor sins, have any further power over us. We live in an atmosphere of light, of salvation, we live the life of God. What do all these worldly constraints matter? For those who live the Resurrection there is no longer guilt. Such is the impetus of joy that invades the world through the Redemption that all other things are cancelled.

The 'Comunità dei figli di Dio', the Community of God's Sons and Daughters, conveys this message of joy and life. We live in the world as witnesses of the Risen Christ, like those who saw him, heard him, who accept his gift of peace, of pardon and of love.

We are God's Sons and Daughters if we bear witness to Christ.

OUR MOTTO, 'UT SITIS FILII PATRIS VESTRI'

The goal of Christian life is to be the Father's Sons and Daughters, as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, 'Ut sitis filii Patris vestri', 'Become Your Father's Sons and Daughters', Matthew 5.45.

And we are not speaking here of our dependence upon God as creatures. If it is about this relationship, we ought not to become sons and daughters, because we are so already: we ought not to become children in a figurative sense, but be sons and daughters and heirs in the true sense.

Is that possible?

To become a child of someone is to be born of him, 'But how can a man be born when he is old, Can he perhaps enter a second time in the womb of his mother and be reborn?' John 3.4

Yet the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount answer and undo all our objections because Jesus also says that we who are already born 'of blood, of carnal desire and will of man' (John 1.13), from the moment we take this as the purpose of our life became children of God. In fact, we are born anew, but born of God in the same act in which he eternally gives birth to the Son. We become God's Sons and Daughters in identifying with Christ.

All Christian life is in this birthing from God.

(From 'The Christian Mystery in the Liturgical Year', p. 268.)

Is it not that all our plans, all our desires, all our hopes which God kindles in our depths from the first moment that he calls us to be witnesses to God, reveal his sanctity, his infinite purity, as if being his presence through humanity here below on earth?

'UT SITIS FILII PATRIS VESTRI'
'Become Your Father's Sons and Daughters'

These words conclude Jesus' cadenced sermon on the Mountain of the Beatitudes.

Each divine commandment given to us is only for this: that we may become and be in truth the God's heirs, the Father's sons and daughters. To be heirs and reveal with all our life this ineffable mystery of divine love is our whole programme, because this is also the vocation which we have received from God: in humility, in peace, in simplicity, in purity of a life filled with love, not wishing more than this: to be God's Sons and Daughters.

Jesus' words teach us that humility, peace, and purity are the gates which open into the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is above all Love. Charity: this is what makes us truly the Father's heirs: a charity without limits, to live our life solely to be able to give it, to sacrifice ourselves for all, in evermore forgetting ourselves.

We ought, following the commandment given by Jesus himself, be perfect as is the Father, we ought to know that this perfection is none other than love: a disinterested charity, humble, pure, limitless.

We cannot pretend that charity distinguishes our little Community in God's Church amongst other religious Communities, because charity characterizes all saints. But even this observation requires our vocation: to be of all the saints, to live all of God, to leave all, so that he himself live in us his pure and immense life.

Because of this it is required that we all take the road of humility, disappear: be no more, not seeking anything more for ourselves, not seeking for anything, to be forgotten, based in silence. That he may be, he alone! We should reveal no more but him, being purely for his presence alone, not having any name.

'Ut sitis filii Patris vestri'

The Lord has given us these words as a programme. He is in us himself to the full, He who is the Firstborn Heir, the Only-Begotten Son.

Chapter 2

THE MONASTIC SPIRITUALITY OF THE C.F.D.

Summary

Contemplative Values as Witness in Today's World

The Primacy of Contemplative Values and the Exercise of Theological Virtues

Lectio Divina: Scripture Reading and Contemplation

Liturgical and Sacramental Life

The Value of Liturgical Prayer in its Dependence on Holy Scripture

THE MONASTIC SPIRITUALITY OF THE C.F.D.

CONTEMPLATIVE VALUES AS WITNESS IN TODAY'S WORLD

The Christian calling is essentially contemplative. If this life finds its perfection in the vision of God, it is to this vision that the soul must turn constantly in an ordered pilgrimage, in a continual progress.

There are not two vocations - to the active life and to the contemplative life - ; even those of us who live in the world need to turn towards an ideal, towards a means that will take us more from present things and have us live in God.

There should not be tension between the tasks Divine Providence imposes on us and this ideal, because the only thing that is required is to remain faithful, which is not the breaking of all human ties or the flight from the world; it is rather the changing of all conditions of life, desired for us by the Lord, as means, and as instrument of internal freedom.

We ought to make it so that nothing imprisons our spirit, that nothing keeps it from its pilgrimage to God.

All ought to be the way, nothing other for us ought to be the goal.

And with this the relationship with other brothers and sisters, with this the task, the responsibility of one's work, which distances the soul from its selfishness, which releases it, which liberates it from its passions, making it ready for God, to respond to the divine calling, to be carried in divine grace in a direction that knows no other end than God.

Our Community's character is Contemplative. It is from the present moment that we live in the midst of people that we ought to live so that the active life take away nothing from the duty of pure praise to the Father and that the life of praise take away nothing from our brothers and sisters.

We live always for God, but in continuous contact with humankind, without sensing that anyone is alien to us, wishing to gather all to us, participating in all their life.

This is our way of understanding our mission and our vocation and it seems that thus the realization of our religious movement can be justified in the bosom of the Church.

Our Task is Monastic. Even before Vatican II we have always insisted on the monastic character of the Community, because our brothers and sisters from the beginning have recognised and emphasized the prophetic and charismatic character of our religious movement, while other religious congregations have insisted above all on their legal character.

Monasticism is Prophetic. Because it manifests itself in the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church, as an active presence of God in the hearts of people and of the Church, and even anticipates the heavenly life.

Each religious movement, and thus also the Community, should manifest an active presence of God in the our hearts and in the hearts of religious families, and ought to anticipate that character which is the celestial life. In this sense our community has a prophetic character to the measure in which we speak to others in the name of Our Lord and in union with the Church. We are prophets inasmuch as the word of God in us comes alive; we ought to incarnate the Gospel, to make it come alive, rendering it present in our own life.

We ought to incarnate the humble requirement of a complete and ready answer to the word of God. 'Follow me' says the Gospel. What Jesus presents to all is the first word, the other words coming later.

Thus on our part it is needful that our life be a generous response, quick, decisive, to a call, to an invitation by God, but implying also a constant attention to this word. The primacy of the contemplative values, which is the basis of the community, implies the need for all of us to experience the divine presence, the reality of God.

Even the contact with others will prompt in such a soul, desiring to be faithful to God, an intense contemplative life, because the others await this witnessing of God.

The greatest gift that can be given to souls is to give them the sense of divine transcendence, before which all the other values cease to exist. We wish to live in the divine presence, we feel a need to have this sense and to give it to others.

Certainly the presence of God does not destroy as much as it assumes them. In this it becomes them. He only truly is, He who, through each one of us, speaks, expresses himself, reveals himself, loves, is made present.

If we do not affirm this primacy in our life, with the force of our soul, if we do not give to the soul this sense of God, we have no reason to be, notwithstanding our life in the world, notwithstanding our desire to remain faithful to the time in which we live. Jesus does not divide himself from the world, he is not distant. We need to be present everywhere and present as brothers and sisters.

And you must bear witness to God.

When, from the beginning of our movement, we have said that we wish to affirm the importance of contemplative values, we do not mean the contemplative life in the traditional forms, in which we neither can nor even should live it. But even we are called to bear witness, wherever we are living, that God should be the first duty, that God is the supreme reality, living and present.

God is and the world ought to know it in my life, ought to recognise from my testimony and from the authenticity of my monastic life that authenticity where I, in the most careful, most solemn, most firm way, wish to put God always first. This is not in solitude, in silence; these are not ways that can serve and not serve; what is required above all is the firstness of God and that that is recognised before God truly, all the rest being nothing.

But those who recognize with perfect humility that what they have accepted is that God is all, and who then themselves must witness to him are truly nothing except in that witnessing of God.

The contemplative is the soul whose life is truly God, a soul for which God is not a discourse, not an idea, but a reality from which one lives.

The contemplative lives from God and makes Him present who transcends all and is pure and complete spiritual freedom. This is the first image of God which the world awaits.

But not only this. The Community ought to bear witness to God also because, communicating through all conditions and all classes, it has already spoken of a freedom from social conventions, from biological make-up.

But one thing which is needed is for us not to copy the contemplative Orders. The Community does not wish to be half the Carmel, or half the Camaldolese Order, or the Trappist Order; the Community wishes to be what it is. As each contemplative order learns from its saints how to answer God, so should the Community respond in a new way, which corresponds to the culture and social ambience and human relations and economic and sociological structure which are appropriate in the modern world.

It is enough that this life today should express itself spontaneously and come to fruition, bringing forth from the ambience in which it needs to live, the forms and the means that God himself gave it in the culture in which life can flourish.

To live a contemplative life today implies that we live in the heart of situations that are not only ecclesiastic but also worldly. The contemplative should not be closed in oneself, should not immerse oneself in one's little world, but, especially because one is a contemplative one should acquire a measure oneself of divine charity and give it to God, drawing with oneself all the human world in which one lives. The solitude of a contemplative soul is the bosom of God in which you ought to place the universe.

The mystery of the divine Incarnation knits together the unity of the two natures in the person of the Word and knits together for us our union with God, being necessarily also the union with all the Church and with all humankind.

Our monastic life, inasmuch as it participates in the mystery of the Incarnation, is truly a participation in eternity, while living in time: in this time, in this day, in this hour. And this now ought to be for me filled with eternity and in this I ought to meet within my soul God's eternity and the present moment.

We need to be monks and nuns! The Community achieves nothing if it does not have a community of prayers, of adorers.

We must live the teaching of our adoption as God's sons and daughters, in which sentiment of infinite reverence that fulfills the soul of Jesus before his Father's face, in this feeling of love which transports the Son of God ineffably into his Father's bosom. First of all this then: praying souls.

Unalterable peace of soul which lives in the presence of God and in this presence remains in purity and simplicity.

We need to bring back to the world the sense of the sacred which the world has lost and to go amongst people as witness to Christ.

How can we bear witness?

From contact with Him, with joy that He has given us his word, with a restlessness that we have uncovered in the meeting with Him: joy that derives from his closeness, restlessness that comes from that hunger his contact leaves in us. To the measure that others see our hunger and our joy we shall be missionary souls, bearing witness to Him.

It seems that the Community should return to the conception of Early Christianity which, while not ordering holiness according to hierarchy, yet recognised the distinction between the two orders, to recall to people who wished to Consecrate themselves to the Lord the duty of sanctity, not burdened with preaching, with action, but with the duty of personal sanctity, across which the holiness itself of the person could bear witness. The unique apostolate of the monk or nun as such is that of witnessing, which is the revelation of God in one's own life.

For this the Community excludes from its end purpose any particular mission.

The soul pursues particular goals not required in the religious Consecration, but of a vocation preceding that religious one: a human vocation and also Christian, such as human work through which to live in the world, and for the priests a priestly calling that brings with it a dependency on the Church's hierarchy.

We ought to avoid the peril of believing that the contemplative life excludes us from all service, though prayer could be the exclusive content of our day. If we were to believe we could live a contemplative life, in this day and age, dispensing ourselves from all activity even for the good of others, we would in practice justify the accusation the world makes, of contemplatives being idle.

Therefore, what distinguishes our Community is a decision of the soul to turn to the Lord yet not excluding these things, but doing them in such a way that all the soul is set in the direction of God, that for Him it is done, that it should be united to the Lord.

Our Community can truly embrace together those who live in the world and those who live in the hermitage, because what ought to unite us is not the apparant life; it is the interior intention, it is the fundamental choice that guides us to God.

Each Christian who truly lives the vocation is a presence of God, is a monstrance of Christ, revealing the Father.

For us in the Community of the God's Sons and Daughters this function is primary. We Consecrate ourselves to God in the Community precisely to live the Lord's Epiphany: not only for us to see Christ, but to make Him be seen in us.

What do we mean by speaking of the Triple Consecration? That we wish to be saviours of the world, together with Jesus Saviour of the world, that we wish to be the revealers of the Father, together to Jesus who is revealer of the Father. This is our primary function. People should see God in us. Our Consecration binds us to this.

We should not be aloof to other expressions of life, above all of the monastic forms, because in each experience of life we find an element that ought to be assumed by the Church to render the manifestation of its universality more rich and full.

We wish to carry not only a message of salvation, but we wish to gather all that which people can give us to transfigure them, bringing them into Christ, making them, in our midst, Christian.

We must do this: to know and love what is good, though not yet Christian, but sound and therefore redeemable, capable of being made Christian, in all the world's thought, in all human experience.

To go amongst others as testimony of Christ.

But how can we remain faithful to this turning to God, to this practical recognition of the supreme values?

The Community is very simple in the means that it offers. Because it wishes to embrace all and turn all towards this supreme good, it is needful that it not wish to tie itself to forms that cannot be for all.

Certainly, we cannot neglect prayer and it is for this that the fundamental duties of our communal life are of prayer, in the exercise of the theological virtues.

Exercise of Faith, because prayer implies a relation with God and therefore requires, on the part of the soul, achieving what is believed.

Exercise of Hope, because prayer here below for us is always a prayer of asking and therefore it hopes in a God who will come and respond to what is asked of Him.

Exercise of Charity, because we cannot long remain faithful to prayer if we do not love.

The fundamental mean, therefore, that comes to be offered in the Community to the souls who wish to live this contemplative life is faithfulness to prayer.

THE PRIMACY OF CONTEMPLATIVE VALUES AND THE EXERCISE OF THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES

The primacy of contemplative values, for us, is not other than the practical recognition that life is never the peaceful possession of a good, but rather the quest for a good, a pilgrimage toward that possession.

Naturally, to the measure that we live this contemplative life, even the future life becomes in some way present and we ought there, in such a contemplative soul, anticipate the heavenly life.

This, also, is one of the motives of the monastic life that we ought to present in the religious lives of Christians; inasmuch as we live so much is Heaven made present in our life: the life of the love of God, the vision of God, becoming our own life.

So it is said: we wish to bring back monastic spirituality, as it was at the beginning in the bosom of the Christian community.

What distinguishes the CFD is precisely that: we are monks; but we are fathers of families; we live in the professions, in schools, in banks, in shops, in fields, wherever, because this is truly Christianity: to be the leaven which will raise all the lump, the Kingdom of God which is built in this present reign.

We are - or better, we wish to be - the future world truly hidden in the present world, but not going into the desert nor shutting ourselves up in an enclosed monastery and in perfect solitude: we want people to meet with God, meeting with us. That is all.

Our contemplative life to the measure that it is the exercise of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, is also pure joy, but like the life of the Eucharistic Christ, it must be carried in the bosom of the Father in order to live amongst men through being eaten by them.

To live the divine life as Jesus lives it in the Eucharist, in the humility of a presence amongst people, He who is present in cathedrals and even in cabins, wherever He comes to be Consecrated, through giving Himself to each one. This ideal that we propose to ourselves can be summed up in few words, 'Gaze on me in the Eucharist'.

The Christ must make Himself present to the world through us. This is because the contemplative must live in the midst of the world.

We are the presence of God on earth, this is our mission, this is what our Christian vocation and our Consecration which we make in the C.F.D. requires of us.

This is the witness that the Lord asked of us: not to will, not to ask, not to be anything. Only to be a voice announcing the presence of Christ, a sign of the presence of God.

It is necessary that each who sees us can say that they have truly seen the Lord.

Not that we should count on this, but this presence of the Lord should be in our humility, in our peace, in our sweetness, in our joy.

This the Lord asks of us, and this we ought to live: in this we do not wish to affirm ourselves because our life will be known by the Lord.

The Lord does not call us to a direct apostolate, at least not as a Community. Single individuals can do this but the CFD is not called to this; it is called to be a witness that is possible only to those who have known the Lord.

For us to be Christian is to witness that the supernatural life is essentially a life of faith. 'Without faith' said St Paul, 'it is impossible to please God'

In fact without faith it is impossible to think of any other virtue on the supernatural level. It is true that Charity is superior to Faith, but it is also true that we cannot have Charity without Faith.

All have in faith their beginning, their growth and their perfection. Without faith there is no possibility for anyone to establish a relation with the Divine, of living our communion with God.

But Christian holiness does not just mean that Faith alone dominates all one's life, but that Faith itself becomes each day more perfect, perfect in such a way that there can be a continuous pilgrimage that carries us in the Faith of the simple to the beatific vision of the holy.

This continuing pilgrimage is our present life.

We ought to hold to a Faith that is continually becoming more luminous and to accept that the contemplative life should be the beginning and end, 'radix et fundamentum', 'root and foundation', of our human pilgrimage. And we ought to live our present life as a pilgrimage that from faith brings us to this vision.

It is right that because we insist on this primacy, as the goal of the Christian life, for us all working tasks, all service missions, remain secondary. To Christian missionizing we reply that it will be far more effective when we remain faithful to the pilgrimage of perfection in faith. God first of all wants that of us.

The religious life is essentially the exercise of the theological virtues, because these obligations raise the spiritual power of people to a supernatural level through revelation and through grace; and they bring to a total purification through revelation that illumines the intellect through faith, through grace which transfigures human activity into divine charity.

It is necessary for us to live the theological life, recognising that it is first of all God who commands us in the internal act which is always an adhesion to His truth and in obedience to His will of love.

The spiritual life, therefore, first of all is the exercise of the theological virtues; therefore one can say that the love is first of being, as in God: He is Love, Charitas.

We are as much as we believe and as we love, because being, for us, would speak of being God through participation. Now, God is in us to the measure in which through faith and through charity we make ourselves ready for this divine presence.

We do not live according to the nature which we possess, but we will be what we have lived. Through the theological virtues we live an act that forever overcomes the nature which has already been given us by God. That nature by itself can never carry out an act of faith or an act only of charity. In each act of faith, of hope, of charity, one overcomes oneself.

This, therefore, is necessary for us: to live continually the overcoming of our being in the theological virtues, which truly transform us.

Faith would have us adhere to Him who is above all that we could think.

Hope would have us hope in Him, trust in Him above all human hope.

The exercise of hope is theological when in one's passing away, even in death, hope remains. One lives above all beyond oneself and this entire universe and regains God precisely in this solitude, in this absolute transcendance of one's being.

And one does not even live in grace, if one does not have a degree of charity at least appreciating the sum total, if not intensively all of it. It is intensively in the saints, and should be appreciated even among sinners who will to live in grace. That is to say that the sinner should be disposed to renounce even life in order not to lose God. But we can never equate God with sin; there is always an absolute choice, God against your life, God against your relatives, God against your wealth, God against your health, God against others' esteem, God against everyone and everything. In fact, concretely, God almost never requires this sacrifice, but the internal disposition should be exercised in all of us.

And therefore above all none of us can ever be sure of the truth of the exercise of our theological virtues. Even in the last depth of our being we cannot succeed in seeing whether our choice of God is sincere, whether, that is, for me this act of faith has not leaned upon rationalization, whether it seems so to me or through what was said to me, rather than upon His word for the fact that it is He who says it.

I do not know if my hope is a true hope, whether I truly believe in God, not in things, nor in what could come to me from Him, but in Him. There is no proportion between human hope and theological hope and we cannot know if we have this hope.

At least we know whether we have theological love, which truly implies a disposition to supreme sacrifice. We cannot request it, because within charity should be truly ready for God's choice without any defense.

All Hebrew tradition, all Christian tradition sees the sacrifice of Isaac as the measure of supernatural faith, of hope and of love. Abraham had to believe that God could take from him the proof itself of his faith: he had to hope and this hope could not ever be reconciled to his object; it is a naked hope that remains eternally. Therefore, when he was believing that God had already answered his prayer, that God had finally fulfilled his promise, then he had even taken from him what he had been given: the son, the promise.

To love God what thing would one say through Abraham! Who was this God who asked everything from him and who gave him nothing and left him alone!

Choose God! Remember that this choice is placed on all and not when we are saints, but at the beginning of the journey and continually during the pilgrimage. God wants all from humanity. If you wish to be saved, if you want eternal life, 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength'.

'LECTIO DIVINA': SCRIPTURE READING AND CONTEMPLATION

Our contemplative life is much inspired by the Bible itself because our interior life depends upon 'hearing' what the divine Word brings to us.

The divine Word has its maximum guarantee in the Holy Books which are the Word of God spoken to all the Church and spoken to each soul. Through this Word God communicates with you personally because the Word of God in the Bible has itself this characteristic: while it is directed to all the Church it is also directed to each individual.

The Word of God can be truly nourishment for all. The C.F.D. ought to give to all the possibility of access to the Bible, but each should find a way to it appropriate to their own needs and capabilities.

We ought to form a Biblical mentality, paying heed to the themes which are contained in the sacred story, of the relationships between one book and another, of the revealed teaching. . . Slowly what seemed at the beginning a tiring, fruitless task, will reveal itself instead as of great worth.

A Biblical formation gives a more true content not only to prayer but also to our interior attitude, to our relations with others, to our work.

Biblical formation ought to permeate all by itself, transforming our intellect, our feelings, it ought to teach us how to work, how to do politics, how to do housework; it ought to teach about the most humble things.

'Lectio Divina' [Sacred Reading] has always been considered the greatest nourishment for monks and nuns; and so we ought to make Holy Scripture the constant food of our soul. We ought to learn and listen to God if we wish to respond to Him.

We cannot do without Lectio Divina. Not even the contemplative can pretend to not hear God anymore, because he is himself identified with his Word. No, our unity with Christ cannot become greater except at the instant of our death; only then shall we be dispensed from reading Holy Scripture, from hearing God, because only then shall we be speaking with him.

We ought therefore to listen to the Word of the Bible. And this reading should strengthen in us the greatest respect for the word that is also human, because it is through these that God communicates to us his Word.

How to read Holy Scripture?

It is clear that this reading requires the greatest attention. One should read it in such a way that one uses all one's intelligence and in the spirit of that faith that makes one live in communion with God who speaks to us through the Holy Books.

Bible reading everwhere and in all ages is a means for prolonging our union with God, living constantly in listening to His Word.

Read calmly, serenely, with simpleness of heart, with purity, with humility and in peace: in great humility and peace Mary Magdalene remained at Jesus' feet listening to his words.

Keep yourself in that humility and simplicity of heart with which Samuel turned to the Lord saying: 'Speak, Lord, your servant is listening', the reading that the Bible undoubtedly works in us.

If the words do not seem to say much to us, we ought to hold that we have not wasted the time that we have spent on this reading: it also is a listening to G od believing that God truly speaks to us. Whatever he may to saying to you, you might never be able to gather plainly. It is not so much the intellect as much as it is humility that makes you ready to receive God.

Our prayer should have the dimension even of our meditation, and meditation requires careful and loving study, a reverence, a profound love for the Word of God. In the Bible comes about our encounter with God. He is the Word who speaks to you and the meeting will happen if you listen. In the Sacrament is fulfilled that union, manifesting the transformation, but the transformation is fulfilled to the measure that you have listened.

Because the first meeting, which establishes the degree of the union between you and God, is in part from having listened to him and in part from having responded to him.

The study of Holy Scripture, therefore, and of the Sacred Tradition. We ought to enter into this tradition: it is a world of which we are a part.

The Tradition is not something added to Scripture, but is as the explication of what the Holy Scripture contains.

The Tradition is none other than the Word of God made living and present in the Church.

There are not two sources of divine revelation, but one source only: the Word of God entrusted to the Holy Books is assimilated slowly, becoming alive and present in its explication, through the work of the Holy Spirit in the bosom of the souls and of the entire Church, down the centuries, through us, because even we are bearers of tradition: the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts.

First the Word of God became flesh, became the human word in Holy Scripture, which is in a way the beginning of a divine incarnation.

For us this relation with the Word of God is essential because in the Christian life, in the supernatural life, the initiative is from God. The first thing required through us is faith and faith depends upon listening to God. 'Fides ex auditu', 'Faith from hearing', said St Paul. First of all, then we ought to listen to God, living in a humble dependence upon his Word.

The faithfulness of our calling and our response to the Lord are determined by this study of Holy Scripture that should never be abandoned, but instead become more assiduous and profound so that we can each day more effectively nourish our interior life.

But for me as a Christian, for me as a Catholic, Holy Scripture cannot be separated from the Liturgy. We ought to see clearly and understand what is the connection between the Bible and the Liturgy: the Bible is through the Liturgy and the Liturgy is the fulfilling of a Scriptural beginning. All the story of Holy Scriptures turns on it being alive, present for me, through the Liturgy.

The Bible brings us into living a Sacramental life.

LITURGICAL AND SACRAMENTAL LIFE

The Community insists upon liturgical piety. It requires through us a participation that is ever more intimate with the liturgy of the Church.

In the liturgy Christ is made present through giving himself to each one and the soul listens in a more authentic way to the divine Word; in participation in the liturgy this divine Word returns to be for the soul a creating Word. It is in the liturgy that God ones himself to you, transforming you in love, assimilating you to Himself, He who is Love.

Our monastic life depends upon liturgy. But what is Liturgy?

It is the act when God inserts himself into time and unites present things to those of the past and the present things become the efficacious sign - 'sacramentum' - of his presence and of his action.

The liturgical mystery is always the real presence of Christ: It is He, in fact, who prays, it is He who sacrifices Himself.

Christ through the Liturgy is totally present for us, but under a sign which conceals Him.

I ought to live my union with God and realize my monastic life in union with Him, accepting this 'sign', living my contact with Christ through this 'sacramentality'.

My life is dependent on the liturgy, but in a more extended way one can say in dependence on the sacraments.

The true and right liturgy is the complex of these acts which most directly are sacramental; but become a liturgy, then, even of all human life and of all Creation for the Christian who knows comes to see all human things as sign of the divine presence, not independently of the Church but in union with the Church, which can be used in these ways, can subsume these things and as a sign of a presence of God and as an instrument of one of his actions.

In the mystery of the liturgy is present also the entire universe, at least symbolically: all is gathered about the liturgical act, or rather the liturgical act itself gathers all together for the fulfilling of that which the liturgical act achieves: if it be praise, praise; if sacrifice, sacrifice.

The liturgical act thus becomes the act, so to say, not only of God but of creation, the act which achieves ultimate perfection, the final perfection of the entire universe.

All the Church lives only the act of Christ and the act of Christ is all the Church; and this act is never surpassed, never past and, being perfect, never can end. It is an act which lasts always.

This is the mystery of the Church: a Church present in liturgical prayer like the assembly of all, not only those living but also those who lived five thousand years ago; of those who are on earth and of those who are in heaven; all one, because they are all one Christ.

Certainly, the liturgy is explicit through us, who are still mortal. Always, through our presence not only is God made present in his inaccessible greatness, but also the entire Church and above all the Church Triumphant.

The Church on earth is like a mysterious entrance in the visible world to the invisible world, it is the mysterious possibility for us to enter the divine world; it is the passage, it is the Easter: the passage from visible reality to invisible reality, from present reality to future reality.

Not only therefore the being physically present in a liturgical act is important, but also the passage from the visible world to God's world, where the saints already are, is made present for us, the Church.

Because the presence of the Church which is achieved in the liturgical mystery, after having first made God present, it also makes present the saints because in these God is communicated: this, because God and the saints are the Church. And here you also are mysteriously present with them: a society of love to the measure that you believe, to the measure that you love.

The Church on earth is the atrium to the Church of God, it is the entrance, the door. Without this door one cannot enter. But to enter is to be part of this society: God and the saints.

In the liturgical act is made present all the Church of heaven: God, the Virgin, the Angels, the saints, the apostles: the Church in heaven is made present in the Church on earth.

For the soul that lives in the Church's liturgy, in every instance, in every place, the divine immensity and the divine eternity opens itself.

In the liturgy truly we overcome our loneliness, conquer the inertia of space and of time, break the strict bounds within which we are confined, enter into communion with God, live this communion with God from the immanence of the created world which imprisons us. Only the liturgy can free us, only the liturgy can save us. What saves us, in fact, is the mystery of the Cross, which is the supreme liturgy.

Participating in the Divine Liturgy

The Liturgical Constitution says that in liturgical prayer it is the Church which prays, and it is Christ Himself who intercedes for us and praises God.

No ecstasy can overcome in dignity and grace a conscious participation in the liturgical life. Objectively liturgical prayer surpasses all prayer whatsoever. All the life of the Church is consumed and expresses itself in the liturgical life.

The liturgical act, which is the prayer itself of Christ, is infinitely greater than our participation: it is up to us ourselves to enter with an ever purer participation.

No one act is more beautiful, more worthy: it is the act of Jesus made present as praise and intercession. This act which consumes everything, which expresses all life present and future should always become ever more our act.

Let us therefore participate in the liturgy, but with a true, authentic participation. And through this let us come together to be conscious that that which we do in the liturgy is not our act, but is the act of the whole Church, of the mystic Body, it is the act of Christ totally.

Active participation in the liturgy implies that we are the instrument of an action of Christ.

Whenever the liturgical group comes together - we ought to know this - Christ is present in all His reality as Son of God and Saviour of the world: present in His glorious resurrection, present in His mission as Saviour.

To live the liturgy for a Christian is not to live a norm, but to enter into the 'historia salutatis', into the final fulfilling of this story of salvation which the liturgy makes present. But it is impossible to live the liturgy if we do not seek first of all to form ourselves as a Biblical spirituality.

The Bible is the key to knowing and penetrating into the mystery of salvation, into the fundamental stages of its story; and if the liturgy is present, this story of its fulfilling, in the humility of the mystery, the Bible illumines the content and the greatness of that which the liturgy makes present. Such a deep bond ties together the Bible and Liturgy.

A true liturgical renewal presupposes, therefore, a Biblical renewal: the active participation and this reform movement, which distinguishes the Church of today, requires a great love of the Word of God, a study of Holy Scripture, a profound and wise knowledge of these divine pages.

What is important above all for the goals of a liturgical renewal is that the Word of God never become only the teaching of a doctrine, but that it continues to be, for us who listen, a story and a prophesy; a story of what is to come, a prophesy of that which ought to be fulfilled in us.

The participation in the liturgical mystery would be a shabby thing if it were only a response to a priest or a listening to a word that is now become more understandable because it is read in our national language! True participation is a gathering into oneself of the Word, letting ourselves be modelled by it, an abandoning to its divine force. The liturgical mystery is neither a spectacle nor even a school; it is the act in which is consumed the life of the world and in which our destiny is achieved.

The act of Christ completes God's plan in the death on the Cross; the Christian liturgy makes present that act which becomes now your own act. The fulfilling of a sacred story which ends in Christ is made present now in you to achieve your own salvation.

The liturgy is the act of faith. The future is fulfilled also outside of the liturgy, but in the liturgy you listen to this Word because in fact, objectively, it produces a descent of God into your world, an entering of God into time, into the reality of created things: the Church promises you this.

God is always with us, but you do not have a guarantee that is so full as that in the liturgical act.

God makes Himself present: This is the Liturgy!

The Early Church could well say: 'Leave this world and enter into grace! The Lord comes!' because they were living in the exercise of the liturgy this encounter with the Absolute. The encounter is immediate, as you know, He it is who is here and who speaks to you.

If the Community were to give to the world the testimony that we know to pray and to tell the others that we truly enter into communion with God, perhaps we could have given the highest and most efficacious testimony that is right for the C.F.D.

Let the liturgy truly be our prayer. Let us make it so that the Church becomes our own prayer and that the same Spirit, which renews the Church, be that which moves us to prayer!

THE VALUE OF LITURGICAL PRAYER IN ITS DEPENDENCE ON SACRED SCRIPTURE

In the reciting of the Divine Office we represent the whole Church praying 'with the same words of God'.

If the Community has as its goal the witnessing to the primacy of contemplative values, prayer necessarily is the most direct expression of this our life.

We ought to live for prayer, we ought to live prayer.

And we know also what prayer we ought to live (our Rule says it): it is the Liturgy.

All the life of the Church is taken up with and expresses itself in the liturgical life. It is essential for the Christian and particularly for us living the liturgical life.

The liturgical act, which is the prayer even of Christ, is infinitely greater than our participation: it is up to us to enter into a participation that is ever purer. No one act is higher, more worthy: it is the act of Jesus made present as praise and intercession.

This act which consumes all things, which expresses all present and future life, becomes ever more our act, as it is that of Jesus.

The reading of Holy Scripture and the Divine Office are our greatest prayers.

Holy Scripture eliminates at the root an equivocal mysticism. Christian mysticism always recognises the abyss between the creature and the Creator. The abyss is overcome only by God. It is He who comes to you, it is He who always overcomes the abyss. He gives Himself and in His gift you are rejoined to Him.

The reading of Holy Scripture makes you remain faithful to the concrete sense of the monastic life, liberates you from all false rhetoric.

Holy Scripture often has a crude and harsh language, but it is what is wanted for us. It does not deceive. We often seek not to see too clearly because we do not know we could bear the clear vision of who we are. Above all then Holy Scripture is the Word of God. The reading of Holy Scripture is a sacrament; across the letters the soul communicates with the divine Word. Certainly, God revealing Himself and giving Himself to us in Christ and in the Eucharistic Communion is above the reading of Holy Scripture; but after the humanity of Christ it is the word of Scripture that communicates God to us. Therefore, after the Sacraments, there is no more efficacious means for grace.

The Divine Office is the prayer itself of Christ; and as the priest when celebrating the Mass acts 'in persona Christi', so it happens to those who say the Office; we are promised in saying the Office our mysterious but real participation in the praise of the Word.

The Liturgical Constitution says that in liturgical prayer it is the Church which prays, it is Christ Himself who intercedes for us and praises God.

In the Divine Office we associate ourselves in a mysterious, but real, way with the angels, with the saints, and we participate, as much as we can participate as human, created beings, in the praise itself of the Word.

Certainly we ourselves can participate badly, but no ecstasy is greater in dignity and grace as a conscious participation in the liturgical life.

The Divine Office remains the hinge of our daily life. It gives to all of our activities a meaning, a soul, the value of adoration and of praise.

The prayer of the Church cannot be other than that of Christ. He has thus made us participate in His life which is one in the prayer of Christ and of the Church. And the Word of the Church, in its prayer, is the pure Word of God, the inspired Word.

How great is the dignity of prayer! Not only in the saying of the Divine Office are we praying but so is it the entire Church which prays through us: the prayer that we say is the word even of God!

The Word of God multiplies itself for us in so many words, but in reality it is only one Word and requires us through it to return, to become one: across all the words we in some way live that which the priest lives when he offers not bread and wine, but the Body, the Blood, the Soul and the Divinity of Christ to the Father, because the word is the Word, is Christ.

The content of all Sacred Scripture is not other than Jesus. Through the inspired words, as we listen to Jesus and gather him in us, so now 'we say' Him to the Father. It is as if he gives to us the re-arising of the source, the fountain.

Chapter 3

LIFE IN THE DIVINE PRESENCE

Summary

LIFE IN THE DIVINE PRESENCE

PRAYER

It is one's supreme act. Only in prayer are we before a God who is eternal, infinite; only in prayer therefore we are no longer part of a whole but become all before God. This is personal contact in which we are newly saved.

The life of the Community is a life of faith, because what unites us is not a shared mission, not age, not even equal human experience. It is only God. But this life of faith presupposes prayer, presupposes a personal, living encounter, with a God who loves us. Our life if we live this encounter with him, has a dimension which trascends time and space.

The meeting with God: what an undertaking, what an adventure! The thing which most shapes us as human, by which we are raised to the supernatural, being no longer a being in nature, is precisely the exercise of prayer. Who does not know how to pray renounces being human and as such renounces being Christian.

Prayer truly gives the greatest fullness to our life. But a true prayer, not a ritual, not a gesture; a true prayer is a dramatic relation: you with God, you with the Absolute. This gives a sense of greatness to life, and what greatness!

The meeting with God: this is the first thing which distinguishes those who live the Community. In fact all the encounters with others can be lived on the social level, not with fraternal charity; but if we live truly in relation to God, then we are pledged to the utmost, through life and through death, to this relationship, living and achieving the greatest profundity of human existence, the highest dimension of being created.

The relation with God is that which most greatly defines religious life and the true dimension of this life. Without a relationship with God one does not have the religious life. It is from this that prayer has importance in the monastic life. Our prayer is an act through which the mystery of the Redemption, the mystery of the Cross, continues in the world and in time, because it is in Christ that we pray.

How to live prayer? The soul does not succeed in reaching a relationship with God, a personal conversation with Him, unless it raise itself up. But this lifting up of the soul to Him implies already a divine conversation, because the soul could never be raised up to Him if first God had not descended. It is this conversation that makes the elevation possible, it is this personal relation of God with me and mine with Him that immediately transforms my soul and raises it to God. In this conversation He comes down even to me, is made Word, is made Man to be my brother, comes and lives and moves on my own level. But in this conversation even I, in turning to Him, am raised up, above my limits and, as He has entered into my world, so do I enter into his.

This is, first of all, prayer: a sacred conversation between the created one and the Creator, between the soul and God.

Our personal prayer is always, in the Community, dependent on the liturgy of the Church, whether it be through the reading of Sacred Scripture that we prepare our meditation, or whether placing ourselves in the presence of God and meditating on the Christian mystery, or whether it be through particular prayer, the Office and the participation in the Mass directly involve us in prayer.

The bonding and the dependence of our prayer upon the liturgy is evident, is substantial.

Just as the priest at Mass is the representative of all that is the Church, so is each one of us in prayer to feel, when presenting ourselves to God, of not ever being alone, but of being raised to the Lord in our prayer, in our supplication, in our intercession through all souls that are, to sense that we adore God through all that is on earth, to sense that we praise Him through all that is creation which, through us, prays and adores its God.

But the anxiety of seeking God, the desire for God, the aspiration for Him, the simplification of all acts, external and internal of the divine vision can never become separated, in the Christian, from the sense also of our own human fragility, of the misery of the body with its needs, of the misery of the soul which is not capable of controlling totally its own senses (fantasy, imagination) so as to reduce this continuous wandering of the imagination behind the fantasies which are not of God; the misery of the intelligence that does not endure in full force; the misery also of your spirit that cannot live with danger this continuous tension of all your being toward God; the misery of the will. For our human will is too weak, because human things, impressions, bodily needs make it constantly vaccillate; so that it is a continuous picking up of ourselves again in this pilgrimage of the soul seeking God.

In prayer we ought to feel as if God wills to live for us his ineffable and immense life, constrained however by our limits, suffocating in our poverty.

It is necessary that all human activity find its complement in prayer, that all life in Creation tend towards this meeting with God, to fling itself into the divine abyss, to throw itself into the Trinity's bosom; and in our prayer this meeting, this precipitation of the human world into the divine world is really achieved.

What is important is to consider that prayer is not something just at the margins of life, but that it is the life itself of the world.

Prayer ought to be the supreme act of our day. All our life, as if turned to God, is thus turned to prayer in which is found its perfect act, its final justification, its definitive worth, its most true content, that we cannot find effectively in one who does not seek to achieve a personal encounter of our soul with God.

To Live in God's Presence. This we ought to do always, but above all it is the effect of prayer. Therefore we ought to pray constantly.

Our Work is Prayer. This is our task and our service, because we live in the heart of the Church, in which we always wish to live life more fully, which is the life of Christ; and the life of Christ is his death, his sacrifice.

The Heart of the Church is Truly the Mass.

Of importance in the life of the C.F.D. is the time that we dedicate to participating in the liturgical life, that is in the reading of the Divine Office, assisting at Mass, at the Eucharistic Communion, at our own personal prayer.

It would be best if in our daily life if the moments of the liturgical life, of the Offices, etc, did not c lash with the time we ought to give to study, to shopping, to housework . . . But these should not take anything away effectively from the moments that remain at the centre of the day.

Our work is prayer. But what sort of prayer? Whether one lives in the First, or Second, or Third, or Fourth Branch, one cannot ever live prayer as work unless one comes to live in true prayer, a prayer which is continuous throughout one's life. It is not a momentary prayer that achieves the direct contact with God, the conversation with Him, that cannot ever occupy one's whole life and cannot ever be the one act of our existence. The needs themselves of the body and of the necessities of a certain amount of rest for the mind require that we do not demand too much; prayer in this sense would easily and often weary a soul.

But if the actual prayer cannot be continuous, certainly virtual prayer should be: it is a constant attention to God, in humility, serenity, a sense of the divine presence which accompanies us in whatever we do. Not even things, human tasks, work, can take us completely from an atmosphere of silence and of peace, from this intimate light of a divine presence! Thus all our life becomes prayer, not the prayer that is only an invocation, a pleading, but the prayer that is instead an intimate participation in the divine life, a constant receiving of God, a continuous aspiring to Him, but in such a way as to make a path to join us together, an aspiration that already has flung us into his bosom, where already he establishes us and roots us in this reality of ife that is the immense, infinite love of the Father.

Our charity should be expressed above all, more than in service, in a prayer which unites us always more intimately with God and which places us in the service of our neighbours. We should wish to live our service to others through the service of prayer.

Prayer is our most efficacious act, because God will not resist prayer and concedes all to prayer. We feel ourselves obliged above all to this, especially when encountering so many wordly needs. As debtors to all humankind, we feel ourselves able to respond to our obligation of love, of being able to pay off this debt, of absolving this responsibility, that the Lord has given us, only with continual prayer that in our union with Him does not have us forget our brothers and sisters. Not a prayer, therefore, that draws us away from humankind, which divides us from them, but which even more greatly unites us to all those in need, those in suffering, those in poverty, those who sin.

In prayer, we wish to achieve the unity of the soul with God, with the world, with all humankind of today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Our prayer has no boundary, it wishes to embrace all time itself that begins and ends in God. It is an act in which the soul desires to rejoin the infinite, wishes to raise itself to God, and which cannot raise itself to Him unless it stretches itself to embrace everything.

THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL PRAYERS OF THE C.F.D.

What distinguishes the religious soul is its prayer, and so what distinguishes the C.F.D. is precisely its prayers.

We live the Eucharistic Mystery with all the Church; we live the participation in the praise of God; the Divine Office; we live the participation in listening to the Word of God, the Bible.

But what distinguishes us from others, even while all of us belong to the one Church, are the four prayers required of all of us due to our Consecration.

The Divine Office is recommended but not required for all, while the four prayers are mandatory for all belonging to the Community.

The life of the Christian is essentially prayer: not as an act that achieves something, but as an act that pleads for God's final intervention, such as at the Apocalypse, all life in the universe, all the life of the Church being consumed in the invocation, 'Come, Lord Jesus, Maranatha'.

We do not ever detach ourselves during the day from what we have said in the morning: it is these formulae of prayer which a soul ought to give to the entire day. They are to be for us a programme of life that really brings all our strength to live in constant contact with God: a dependence upon the Father for all that we receive, of love because of all the Father brings to us, of joy because we live this relation as a true relation of love.

We are not ever alone: 'Hear, O Israel', says God to the soul. And the soul says to God 'Our Father'. God speaks to you, but you are not separated off from the whole Church, the new Israel to whom He speaks. You speak to God, but you are not separated off from the whole Church in whose name you speak. God does not ever speak to you as if separated fom others and you do not ever speak to God as if separated from the human community, from the community of believers, from your religious community.

We remember that our proper vocation, that wishes to affirm the primacy of contemplative values, can more than all other forms of spirituality be tempted to an evasion that compromises the purity and truth of that same religious life, because here on earth, and tomorrow even in heavens, you cannot live uniquely for yourself.

Isolation is not ever the religious life. Jesus himself lived his relation with the Father in the fullness of will that forced him into confrontation with his brothers. In his humanity he lived his relation with the Father through the Virgin, the disciples, the crucifiers and even through the rain and the sun, the lake and the countryside. His was no evasion of the world, of the universe, of history, of people in the midst of whom he lived.

When you wish to listen to God directly you always place yourselves in danger of delusion. Delusion is more likely where you have the need to do something requiring others' help; to the extent that you assume it is for your sake, you are fooling yourself, you close yourself, and only do what revolves about yourself.

We need things and we need to know that things do not distance us from God, but are means through which God comunicates with us.

Listen to God himself in human relations and in relation to the things that weave your life.

We ought to throw away not things, but ourselves: our egoism, our presumption, our radical impurity which prevents us from welcoming the Lord through humankind and through the world.

This is extremely important for us, that we are called to live a testimony of the contemplative life in the world and more than others are required to recognize the voice and the face of God in the creatures with whom we come in contact in the little happenings woven into our day. If this does not happen, all our life is but scattered. We ought to live everyday reality in such a way that he become for us transparent.

{THE 'SHEMA'

Listen. This is the prayer that begins the four formulae and states the contemplative character of the whole Community: we are not called to do but to listen to God. The first obligation on the part of those who live in the C.F.D. is this listening before the Lord who communicates himself to us, who speaks to us.

Required therefore of the souls of the Community is a certain interior silence, a certain collectedness for living this waiting for a Word which will come to be communicated to us.

Silence and recollection come about from an expectant listening. And this requires first of all a living faith in a God who is present, who communicates to us, who wishes to establish a relation with you before you establish it with Him. For this He speaks first.

And it is truly a very important thing that our formulae begin with listening to God rather than with speaking to God. Our life therefore cannot but be a reply to His word, the fulfilling of His will, of his commandment.

The word 'Listen' not only says that the basis of all our religious life is the faith (faith which gives to the soul the capacity to listen and to keep it in a humble waiting on God) but it says even that our spiritual life is dependent on a divine calling, a divine vocation.

We note that Israel, which knows and says the 'Shema', does not respond to the divine Word. Israel receives God's command, receives the divine call, but does not have the capacity to respond to divine exigencies. The Law given to Israel only makes Israel more conscious of sin but without giving them strength, the grace to do what the Law commands.

The 'Our Father' is truly our reply as humans to God's Word. This is because we united the Shema to the Our Father.

With these two formulae we wish to be the heirs of all the Old and New Testament and we wish to affirm and live intensely the continuity of the two Testaments.

God, speaking to us, generates us as sons and daughters; in speaking to us he gives his Son who is the Word, unites us to his Son, teaches us, and that teaching is the beginning of a filial adoption.

The word of God is a law, the reply of humans is a prayer.

{THE LORD'S PRAYER, THE 'OUR FATHER'

Our second prayer formula is the Lord's Prayer. 'Hear, O Israel, Listen, Israel', says God to the soul. And the soul says to God, 'Our Father'.

If the 'Hear, O Israel' is the formula which distinguishes Hebraism (and which can be ours because we are the new Israel and it is the form which essentiently distinguishes all the Chosen People of the Old and of the New Testament), the 'Our Father' instead is the formula which distinguishes only the new Israel, Jesus' disciples.

To clarify this concept we ought to turn again to the Bible. Just as 'Hear, O Israel' is a fundamental text in Dueteronomy, so is the 'Our Father' a fundamental text in the Gospel. As Deuteronomy, recalling the Covenant of the Lord, wished even to be the vademecum, the guidebook, of the pious Israelite more than any other book of the Bible (and it is in Deuteronomy that we now find the primitive and fundamental texts of Hebraic liturgy), so at the beginning of all liturgy proper to Christianity remains the 'Our Father'.

And this is well to stress for making the importance clearer that we ought to have throughout our life this prayer, whether public or private, the 'Our Father'.

But we ought to say more: that is that Our Lord himself wanted to give it to us, according to the Synoptic Gospels, and in particular in the Gospel of Luke, the 'Our Father' being a badge of recognition amongst his disciples. In fact Jesus made the gift of the 'Our Father' in response to the disciples who were about him and who had seen him pray: 'Teach us to pray'.

They were asking him, as John the Baptist had given his disciples a form of prayer, so even He should give them a formula. And the 'Our Father' became the distinctive sign of Jesus' disciples and Jesus gave it Himself as a sign of the faith that they had in Christ.

What distinguishes Israel is the listening to God, for man cannot yet speak to God, is not entering into a true communion with him. The Israelite says the psalms, it is true, but what distinguishes him is the listening to God who gives a Law.

What distinguishes a Christian instead, redeemed and entered into divine life, is the conversation, the dialogue, the close contact. God listens to you, you can speak with him, you are his son and daughter.

The slave may not speak: he can only accept a law, obey and remain silent. Now, instead, we can enter into communion with Eternity, we can turn to Him, as his sons and daughters, and establish with Him a more intimate relationships. 'Father!'. We, when we turn to God with the prayer of the 'Our Father' recognize an ontological binding, a union, a communion of blood.

'Our Father Who art in Heaven' The soul carries itself impetuously into dizziest peaks of the divine life.

What is it to say 'Father'? It is the recalling to the life of the Trinity, because one does not say 'Father' to one God; one says 'Father' to the Person of the Father to whom my prayer turns.

To say 'Father' is to say to live the life of the Son of God. In fact the Son of God is pure and eternal relation of love to the Father, as the Father is relation pure and eternal to the Son. He says eternally: 'You are my Son', and the Son 'Father'. Thus the life of the Father is the generation of the Word and the life of the Son is the aspiration to the Father.

No higher thing than this can exist, I say not in this life only, but even in the other; I say it not for humans but even for God, because the life itself of God is consumed in the generation of the Word: 'You art my Son' and in the aspiration of the Son, 'Father!'

To say this word is to be all Paradise, to be all eternity, all one's life, all the life of humankind, all the life of God, the life of the Son of God: 'Father!'

'Hallowed be Thy Name'

The soul, so raised, should live this divine life in all its power and in all its expression in human life, first of all in a realizing of the Kingdom.

The commentary to the 'Our Father' can be understood throughout the Gospel: 'I have made your name known and will make it to be known again'. The knowing of the Name is the sanctifying, the hallowing, even of the Name: God is glorified to the measure that you recognise and live your rapport with Him as Father.

God makes himself present in his own intimate life through your life, in as much as He generates you as son and daughter of the Son, and inasmuch as you, as son or daughter, turn yourself to Him. Here is the extreme glorification of the Name, 'I have made your name known and will make it to be known again'.

This is the intimate life of each one. But this is not all life. From our sanctification and glorification in God, from the hallowing of created being, comes the ecclesial community, the Kingdom of God.

After the individual, the community, as indeed is already implied in the initial invocation, 'Our Father'. These two words are heightened, are exemplified, are explained, are said, in the first two requests: the hallowing of the Name in as much as we are sons and daughters, and glorify him as Father; the coming of the Kingdom in as much as this sanctification is not for the one so much as for the community as such. The 'Kingdom' implies a people, a nation, a community. The coming of this kingdom is the concluding purpose.

But how can we attain this?

Thy Will be done.

Joined to this Kingdom is the fulfilling of the divine Will, inasmuch as God's plan can be realized.

'Thy Kingdom Come' is to seize part of the possession of God by all humanity, of all creation. The way in which this comes about is the fulfilling of the divine will. And this implies a transfiguration of the whole of human existence.

Divine grace does not bring to the contemplating upon God just the intimate summit of the soul, but invest the entire human nature and implies that no human activity is drawn away from being hallowed itself. First of all the 'Give us this day our daily bread' would say the physical bread: and it also would say, spiritual food.

The whole person is sanctified by God, invested with his grace. From the summit of the soul the grace joins even to our physical nature and provides all, sanctifies all, invests all with itself.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

The union with God implies the union with our neighbour. The pardon which God gives to humankind and which you beg for comes from yourself, as his counterpart, the pardon that you ought to give to others: the community is achieved through a reciprocal giving and forgiving.

Even the union amongst us could ever not be possible without a neighbourly pardoning. We ought to pay these debts. How could union with God be possible - we are not the only begotten Son - without imploring for pardon and obtaining it from Him, such could not ever sustain a union amongst ourselves if not through an answering patience, which is even a neighbourly forgiveness. Our love ought to be essentially bound to God's mercy which ought to pardon us and also to the mercy which each one of us ought to have towards the other. Never rigid, never arrogant.

The Community establishes itself, creates itself, across these exercises of mercy of God towards humankind and of humankind towards brothers and sisters. Goodness, pardon, patience, acceptance of the other; thus is established the Kingdom, is carried out the divine will.

'Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil'.

Carrying out the divine will implies not being led into temptation, being freed from evil, because evil is truly the non-fulfilling of this will. So that at bottom the first three pleas of the 'Our Father' that ask the glorifying of God can be realized only to the measure that we live the other three pleas.

God and humankind are ineffably joined, so that the glorifying of God is impossible without human liberation from sin, from evil, from not loving one's neighbours enough. The first three pleas are, thus, conditional. They descend, but without ever separating themselves, from the height of divine life, from the aspiration to the Father, in which the soul realizes its own hallowing in its soul and body.

The 'Our Father' is the whole programme for Christian life and the whole of divine life lived in the human.

The realization of the divine will implies that we are already a little in the divine life; and there is already a being of us in God.

The 'Our Father' is explained with the words of St Paul who in one place says we ought to clothe ourselves in Christ, and elsewhere says that we ought to put on Christ.

Thus in the first part of the 'Our Father' we live the whole life of God, in invoking him as 'Father', in the need to exalt his Name, to realize his Kingdom, to fulfill his will; in the second part we ask to be freed from evil, to exercise mercy towards our neighbour, to receive nourishment from God for the soul and for the body so that it may realize his reign, sanctify his Name, fulfil his will.

This in essence is the 'Our Father'.

It ought to be, this prayer, our whole programme of life and our badge of recognition, first of all as Christians and then also as members of the Community.

It is beautiful that the Community of God's Sons and Daughters wishes to realize what is only the proper vocation of the Christian.

Our Father!

But we ought to say it well, as we ought to seek to realize this word in order to live here and now on earth the life of heaven!

{THE PRAISES, THE LAUDS, OF GOD

St Francis of Assisi's Lauds suggest to us a constant disposition of the heart which should be fundamental to our religious soul.

What disposition? That of a prayer which is admiration of the Lord, which is praise, which is the vision of God: to live in the divine presence, to contemplate God.

This seems to us to be the first teaching that comes from St Francis' Lauds of God. It is a formula which recalls us to the duty of a total forgetting of ourselves to focus ourselves in the pure light. In the Lauds of God we ask for nothing for ourselves: we ourselves who speak forget ourselves, as if we were not. God only appears to us, God only is before us, filling our entire vision. To give testimony to the vlue of contemplation we ought to consider that God ought to be not only the beginning but also the end of our existence: to Him we ought to turn in love and in adoration, fixing ourselves upon him. The fundamental disposition is to live in this presence, eliminating all other considerations, all thoughts, all anxieties, all remembrance of ourselves even of our sins. A disposition to live in this presence not to benefit to ourselves, but rather that it destroy us and that we live no more but in the praising of God, in the vision of his holiness, of his divine beauty.

Consecrated souls ought to live this praise, but we are living in the presence of God as much as the other things fall through leaving no place but for Him. Only in front of idols things are needed: before God nothing more is can subsist. If we live in the presence of God we have no more anxiety, no worries about our health, or finances, or work, and not even the worries about our sins, not because we are not sinners, but because he frees us from them, consuming them in his heart.

To live in this divine presence is, through the soul, not to see ought but God, not to taste ought but Him, not to possess ought but Him, He who is mercy, He who is love, He who is life.

Let us look at St Francis' Lauds; from top to bottom this formula of prayer is nothing but 'You, You, You . . . '. Here is only God, not praying to him for ourselves, but through this to say that He is. You ought not to pray to God, except for this thing: that He is. That He be, and already is, all your beatitude, all your life.

But certainly things cannot press upon our lives. What ought we to do? Bring the anxiety and the worry before the love of God: then that flame will burn all. It is impossible that we do not feel hunger when we are hungry; that we ought not to think of our work if we ought to work; that we not think of our sons and daughters if we have them; but we ought to prevent these thoughts from tearing us from Him, that paralyze our soul from being touched by this pure vision of God.

If we would present our worries and anxieties to the Lord, we will have fulfilled our duty, that is not to neglect the will of the Lord for us day by day, but to fulfil it with simplicity, with serenity, because all, in the divine vision, will lose all anguish, all burdens and we will sense as if all things are held in the light of God.

We ought to live the life of heaven. This is the whole of our life as souls consecrated to the Lord.

What does St Francis Assisi say of God that ought to become the unique content of our life of faith, of our religious life here on earth, through thus being the unique and eternal content of our future life? He says to us that God is a 'You, you, you'; how marvellous! 'You are holy', is a You, a person to whom we turn, with whom we enter into a personal and living relation and not just a light into which we become lost, an immensity that fills us and satisfies us.

We ought to pay heed that the content of all our life is God's presence and that, just as God is a person, our life is essentially a dialogue of love. In the Lauds of God, the word most repeated is this 'You'.

'You are holy, Lord God, the only one who does wonderful things. You are strong, You are great . . .

We live in the presence of One who speaks to us, who watches over us, who loves us.

Francis' prayer is as a recognition of divine greatness, of the holiness of God. The soul completely forgets itself, fixing itself into the infinite light and contemplates God. We cannot but confess our own misery, our own sin and ask pardon; but we who recognize God cannot but confess his holiness, his own fullness of divine Being; and this confession is praise, is a Laud. In ecclesiastical Latin the word that expresses the humble confession of human misery and the repentence of the soul is the same with which the soul adores and praises the Lord: 'Confiteor'. 'I confess to God almighty', is said first at the Eucharistic celebration and at Compline. This is to say in praising him; this we all do in the Community with saying the Lauds of God.

We rightly feel ourselves Christian inasmuch as not only in the works we could do, but even the exercise of every virtue, all which we could bring, are pure condition for the praise which continues as the fundamental and final duty of the Christian: the praise of God.

For this the prayer of St Francis of Assisi more than any other expresses the spirit of the Community, such that it should be the constant aspect of a soul consecrated to God in the Community.

The saying of this prayer is thus most important: and in fact the recognition of our coming consecration. But on the other hand, the recognition of the divine perfections can only be expressed in a task of holiness, which is expressed through each of us with the realization of the Gospel laws, that is with the Beatitudes.

In fact St Francis of Assisi's Lauds of God could be renamed the Beatitudes and require that we present them as a programme for our lives.

That the Lord makes us live this programme of life should be held to every moment and repeated each day, to oblige ourselves anew to live and to pray to the Lord always for the force and the grace to be able to realize them according to his love and to his will.

{THE BEATITUDES

The Beatitudes are our programme of life

We have this programme present before us always because each day we recite the Beatitudes.

The seed of the whole Gospel is in these words of Jesus; but in a particular way they define what our life ought to be, what is our task, what is the purpose of the C.F.D.

What are the Beatitudes?

Human activity, life, has a purpose that transcends it: God. Humans are not disinterested: for one to be disinterested is only a sign in that person of pride. He does no good for the good: all is desire, aspiration to God, because in us ourselves there is only poverty, extreme misery. In God alone we find our peace, our life.

Blessed! This is what the Gospel teaches us. The Law has ended, it was not a good in itself, but is followed in order by the blessedness which is God's possession, the kingdom, the ineffable joy in the presence of the Father. Unless we fulfill our journey which leads us to God, in ourselves we shall only be empty, miserable.

We cannot close ourselves up, our lives are needed by God, and he opens in the soul a passionate desire for peace, for a joy that comes down only from above.

Blessed! The paradoxical nature of the New Law! The Gospel Law is above all the announcement, the promise of a happiness.

What do the Beatitudes teach us? This: that we tend to God and ought to aspire to Him with an ardent desire. God gives himself to us, but what can we give? If God descended to become Man, now we ascend to God, but ascend - contrary to what mystic Platonism taught - through grace, through God's force of love that urges our hearts, raising them up.

In our desire for God is God himself who lifts us up, God who first comes down to us and gives himself for us. We ought to ascend to God. All our life is an ascending, a climbing up to God that will fulfil all our insufficiency. It is to possess God, to the Beatitude that the Gospel calls us, and the Gospel is the announcement of the Beatitude, is the Good News.

But we will go to God only if in the awareness of our misery, of our nothing, we aspire to God, if we have the desire, the hunger for Him. All life is a race, a flight towards the Lord. But the soul ought to free itself from all bonds, to be able to leap up, to raise itself, stretching itself to whaere is its true prosperity, What raises us is God, but God raises us as much as we free ourselves of heaviness.

To the extent that we are satisfied with ourselves, sufficient to ourselves, not desiring, not loving, we do not tend towards God. The weight of the soul is always love: 'My weight is love', says St Augustine.

Undoubtedly the ideal which Jesus proposes is such that it cannot be fully realized here below. That page of the Gospel therefore has a clearly eschatalogical quality. If a soul does not wish to live here on earth the life of heaven, it cannot realize in itself this page; on the other hand it cannot fully realize that except in heaven.

The Beatitudes require therefore first of all an entirely free spirit, not to be tied to the conditions of the present life but already immersed in the atmosphere of God, lost in God. If we do not take account of this the Beatitudes cannot become an ideal of life.

Another thing to note: the purpose of life is not in duty. Christianity is not like classical Stoicism or Kantian philosophy. The Beatitudes do not express a command requiring obedience, they are not expressed in legal language, they cannot be an ethical ideal, for they are not imposed like a law upon the soul. They are not duty for duty's sake. The Beatitudes propose as ideal, blessedness, joy, life. Morality should be the condition of this life but law does not identify with divine life. It is enough to go from law and from morality to live the divine life, to possess it and embrace it in us.

Another character is that of a irreducible opposition to the spirit of this world. For one lacking the spirit of the Gospel, who is a stranger to Christ, this page of the Beatitudes can only appear an irony. How can one be happy who weeps, who is the servant of all, despised, persecuted? The opposition to the spirit of the world is an essential quality that assumes the passing over into the world of God who is opposed to this world.

Speaking of the Community it is said that the first law is joy. In this we wish above all to distinguish ourselves: serene joy, luminous, which fills the spirit and makes it transparent and allows God to shine into our soul. If anything ought to distinguish us it ought properly to be this joy, this light which ought to appear in us. Joy is certainly the character of the 'God's Sons and Daughters'. God is infinite blessedness and his sons and daughters who possess this life rejoice in an immense joy, without end; not an intermittent joy, provoked by human events, but a joy in physicial suffering, in anguish, in not understanding . . . Our joy has for motive God and therefore can remain the same through all happenings, as if a communication of divine joy. Suffering cannot lesssen this joy that is God's possession, infinite and immense.

But what is this joy?

It has as its condition the poverty of the heart, the purity of the soul, the divine purity, the contrition that is peaceable and profound, the peace . . .

Blessed are those who are detached from the world, negated, having no name on the street, not having roots anywhere. These are the poor in spirit, the 'humble', those who 'suffer', the 'pure', the 'persecuted', those who are empty.

Each attack impedes the natural desire for God, but when the soul is free, set loose, then all the life of the soul becomes a flight, an ascent to the Lord, because, as said St Gregory of Nyssa, the soul possesses God only to the extent it quests him.

The possesion of the Lord is already a beatitude.

And we because we are blessed already now to the measure in which the soul, loosed, liberated from all ties, begins and is consumed by the sole desire for God.

We are tied to too many things: interests, status, profession, all ties which hinder the journey . . . We are tied to our little life, to habits, to self respect, to vanity, to things . . . 'Loose yourself of them and fly' said St Francesca Saverio Cabrini. Let us loosen ourselves and soon we will fly to God. Let us become pure, without weight. Let us strip the soul of all ties that would make it unable to fly, turning to Him from which it was created.

This is our task.

The Beatitude is already given to us. The kingdom of heaven is already ours, we can already now enter into the measure of our purity and of our free interior. We possess already the joy, the treasure, the beauty: it is the Lord, who has already given this to each one of us.

Are not the Beatitudes, even for us, the life itself of God? But with one condition: that we live as sons and daughters in the Only Begotten Son in a pure relation of love to the Father the transport of ineffable love that eternally carries the Only Begotten in the womb of God from which he is eternally born.

The transport of the soul is no more than a flight of love. What our soul begins, fly! Let us free ourselves of everything! Yes, liberty, purity, peace. Then the Community will truly be an image of celestial life, then God will be in the midst of us and God will be our life, our eternal and complete happiness.

May the Lord help us to realize this life in ourselves! Thus the Beatitudes will not only be an announcement, but the revelation of what has already been fulfilled: and we shall be sons and daughters of God, already blessed in the beatitudes themselves of the Father, already blessed in the possession of the Kingdom!

THE MORNING OF THE RESURRECTION

Each prayer should be the expression of a state of grace that we possess.

If the C.F.D. makes its own the 'Morning of the Resurrection', the 'Matins of the Resurrection', from the Orthodox liturgy it is because this prayer responds to its spirit, through the character of its spirituality, above all through its joy in the Resurrection. So many times we have said that joy is a virtue, a Christian duty, but much more for us who belong to the Community. All the other virtues, sweetness, peace, humility, cannot but be the expressions of an interior joy that we possess in God. Our prayer should express the character of that joy that we ought to possess.

The Morning of the Resurrection is not only a prayer which the Orthodox recite: it is a liturgical jewel which gives us a teaching, it is a code of life. Each prayer is resolved in a law of life that pays particular attention to interior attitudes; it is for us to meditate the Morning through living it, through incarnating it within ourselves: it can be a food which ought to feed us if we know how to assimilate it.

It is divided in two great sections: in the first what has the greatest emphasis is the 'Canon' or hymn of St John of Damascus. It is a song, an explosion of immense joy that hymns the Resurrection of Christ: it is preceded with a litany.

The second part gives us a full prayer - the Psalms - which are not only more than the hymn of a saint, but the prayer itself of the Church, which with these Psalms wishes in a special way to praise God.

The Hebrew people sang these Psalms accompanying them with the harp, with cymbals, with dance . . . The prayer requires even that the body participate in praising God. The Psalms speak of a crowd clapping its hands, and records all the musical instruments which were used then to give to God full and perfect praise.

Liturgy today is stripped of these harmonious instruments; today it is no longer sung, nor danced as did David before the Ark. Also the Mass in ancient times was always sung: a read Mass did not exist. In the song of the Church it is as if we leap over all creation in the praise of God.

The joy of the Psalms ought to be our joy: in reciting them let us take hold of the fullness of joy.

After the Psalms we take up the 'Canon'; then it is the Sermon of St John Chrysostom.

And as it began with a litany so does the Morning end with a litany. These are the principal parts of the 'Morning of the Resurrection'.

At the beginning and at the end of this great prayer - as we have said - are the two litany prayers. It is enough to note that the true and proper 'Morning', which is an outburst of Easter joy, is preceded and followed by a penitential prayer which is recited while kneeling. One cannot forget that this is our condition: first, to enter into contact with God, we must humble ourselves, submitting ourselves to his mercy, 'Christ, hear us', 'Kyrie eleison', 'Lord, have mercy', is the sob of the soul which begs and abandons itself in God.

It is important the the Morning should exist between two litany prayers: one cannot begin without a great sense of penitence.

We will live our consecration if we live our prayer, therefore let us begin to analyse the first three verses of the first Stasimo of the 'Canon'.

'It is the day of the Resurrection: People, we are radiant with joy!'

The Community requires of us that we live the Easter, in relation with the risen Christ. Christ is no longer subject to death but is infinite life and joy. All Christianity lives the Resurrection of Christ, lives the eighth day. Easter is the conclusion of God's design. The story is finished: the story is only through souls the immersion in the presence of the Resurrection of Christ and of his victory. The last day we shall enter totally into the glory of the Risen Christ, but we shall enter before then, because already we are made part of eternity.

'Who has brought us from death to life, from earth to sky, to heaven'.

We live in the world, but we do not belong to the world; thus we belong to two worlds: this present one and that to which the Resurrection of Christ has carried us. We have made this passage from death to life and we can sing with immense joy the glory of the Resurrection.

The Church sings that Christians are the emulators of angels and saints. In fact we live with them the same life when we are in grace. Grace unites us to the saints more than does blood to our carnal brothers and sisters who may be in mortal sin.

Nothing can destroy the fact that we are resurrected with the Lord Jesus. We are in the fullness of joy, because we possess God. In truth we can sing the 'Morning of the Resurrection'.

But what is required for living this passage into Easter joy. 'Let us purify our feelings and we shall see Christ resplendent in the inaccessible joy of the Resurrection . . . '

The Risen Christ was not seen except by the apostles and by the disciples. Yet while he was alive everyone could see him, even the evil ones who had had such power over Him; Risen, he was only seen by those to whom He chose to reveal himself, such as the disciples of Emmaus, the apostles on the Sea of Galilee, the Magdalen in the garden who would not have recognized him if it had not been Himself who revealed himself. Thus, all before the Resurrection were able to see him and after, not, the 'Canon' telling us that to see the Risen Christ a great purity is required: that if we free ourselves from pride, from envy . . . from all impurity, we shall then see the Risen Christ. The soul which would be perfectly pure, would have rejoined holiness and thus entered the infinite light of the glory of God.

St John of Damascus tells us that we will 'see clearly' He who is 'inaccessible' to carnal mankind.

The Resurrection works the unity of all: the joy of earth and sky is but one, of men and of angels. All life is the Resurrection of Christ.

It is enough to make present the great virtue, which is as with the apostles, the power of the Holy Spirit, this testimony of life that is all in the Risen Christ.

We have said that the 'Morning of the Resurrection' is for us a teaching regarding the wa