FRATRUM MINORUM - OFM

68 AN. CXXIV – JANUARII-APRILIS 2005 – FASC. I
consumed and committed to the Father and
to us in His death and resurrection.
To live the perfection of the Gospel
means, then, to adhere to the logic of the
Paschal Mystery, which is the very soul of
our life as men, Christians and Friars Minor.
We can only try to become all of this in a
new and original way each day through a
creative and generating response of life in
the world.
Prophecy, it seems to me, resides in the
never resolved question of how to combine
the idealist tension: the response to our vocation
with the history and situation of contemporary
man, a reality in a situation of
exceptional change. Prophecy is certainly
not reduced to a strategic reading of the
signs of the times in order to be more present
and incisive through a mundane mentality
of success and power. It is to recognise
and accept whatever the Spirit might
arouse around us and in us, there where the
reality of man meets the Paschal Mystery of
the Lord through the very joys and hopes,
expectations and disillusionments of man.
Gaudium et Spes powerfully affirms that:
“since the ultimate vocation of man is in
fact one, and divine, we ought to believe
that the Holy Spirit, in a manner known only
to God, offers to every man the possibility
of being associated with this paschal
mystery” (GS n. 22).
The General Chapter of Assisi 2003 said
it with equal force: “One of the essential elements
of the Christian journey is the ongoing
capacity to examine the signs of the
times and to interpret them in the light of
the Gospel (cf. GS 4; GGCC 102 §2; SRS 7;
VC 81). They are events of life that mark a
determined epoch of history and through
which the Christian feels questioned by
God and is called on to give a gospel response.
The signs of the times are, in this
way, flashes of light present in the dark
night of our lives and of our peoples, lighthouses
that generate hope. Whoever does
not read the signs of the times runs the risk
of becoming installed, of repeating himself,
of nullifying the deepest dreams, of losing,
little by little, the contagious joy of faith…
The Lord invites us to listen to His voice in
the events of history, to detect His ever active
presence, in order to announce what we
have seen and heard through word and deed
(cf. 1Jn 1,1; cf. GGCC 89.93 §2). The signs
require, therefore, recognition, reading, interpretation
and judgement on the personal
level and in the bosom of the fraternity (cf.
OA 3; RFF 32)” (May the Lord give you
Peace! n. 6).
Prophecy can explode where we allow
this meeting between the Word, the charism
and history to occur and to transform us,
helping us to change mentality. If we remain
prisoners of existence and do not
know how to imagine anything beyond
what we already are and do, those points of
light which help us to dare more will not be
made clear to us.
Formation is called on to dare more; it is
totally one with the process of fidelity to the
charism in the context of history and cannot
ever repeat prefixed schemes. It is not the
possession of a few who pass it on to many,
it is not a gathering of ideas or of behaviours,
it is not subjected to what has been
given. Its function is to permit us to catch a
glimpse of those “lights present in the
night” in order to open up those intuitions,
to open doors and windows wide to the novelty
of the Gospel, to support our life in an
ever new response to the charism, in order
not to be extinguished in tired repetition.
2. Prophecy of the Franciscan life through
dialogue and the poor
During these days we have chosen to
combine charism and history by going
deeply into the topic of inter-religious dialogue.
We discovered it as a reality which begins
at home, within each one and in that
sanctuary which is the life of the Friars. We
understood that we are really neophytes in a
process which is so demanding, that we are
called on for more imagination and preparation.
I hope we can intuit more that we are always
too far from and outside of the history
and life of present-day men and women, often
even of our own brothers, to be able to allow
the Word find a space of acceptance and
therefore of acting as a force for change.