I never tire of repeating those words of Benedict
XVI which take us to the very heart of the Gospel: “Being a
Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the
encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a
decisive direction”. Thanks solely to this encounter…with God’s love,
which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our
narrowness and self-absorption. We become fully human when we become more than
human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest
truth of our being. Here we find the source and inspiration of all our efforts
at evangelization. For if we have received the love which restores meaning to
our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?
Echoing these words of Pope Francis, our own Constitutions remind us that it is only if we prefer nothing whatever to Christ will we be happy to persevere in our life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.
Evangelium Gaudii, par. 7. Detail of early Spanish-American corpus from the Abbey hermitage. Photograph by Brother Brian.
Evangelium Gaudii, par. 7. Detail of early Spanish-American corpus from the Abbey hermitage. Photograph by Brother Brian.
