WORD OF GOD - INDIAN RESPONSE TO THW WORLD

Our response should spring from our radical commitment to the Gospel, which is often called prophetic.  Hence their role as religious in the Church should serve as pointers to the rest of the Christian community indicating the directions for a new way of being Church in this country.

The Indian Society is plagued by the evils of social and economic injustice, exploitation and oppression.  How should the Gospel become good news for our people?  How should our radical commitment to the Gospel be articulated in such a situation?

Responding to the call of Gospel makes two demands on us: in the first place, the evangelizers must allow themselves to be entirely conditioned by God’s Word.  In other words, the religious persons must be evangelized.  Once this happens, the second will naturally flow from it, namely, to live constantly with a sense of mission, that is, to be full time evangelizers, wherever they are found and in whatever circumstances or condition of life they live.  We shall now reflect on these two aspects of our response.

Today religious are called to a renewed listening to the Word of God.  The effect of this can be none other than their own conversion, not understood only as turning away from sin, but as a force that gives a new direction to their life.

It is total and permanent self surrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations ….

A person is religious only in the measure in which he or she has become capable of listening to God.

This conversion will lead to a genuine commitment.  Commitment is not the same as promises.  It is to allow one’s person to be conditioned by the other person.  Religious profession is not a contract, but a consecration.  The persons, who are converted, are in a state of active passivity, and allow God to enter into their persons.  The Paschal  Mystery becomes a living reality in their lives in such a way that from then on they live like Christ, by giving their lives totally to the others.

We need to review our religious life and our formation to religious life in the light of conversion and commitment.  When this really happens, our religious life will become a symbol of divine presence in the world.  It will be permeated by a love that takes away all types of discriminatory tendencies from our lives; it will be impelled by a love that makes us live only for the other like Christ: man-for-the-other.  If this does not take place, our commitment will be coloured by selfishness.  We can even do actions of God without communicating His relationship to the people.

Every commitment necessarily leads to mission.  The vocation to religious life should begin with a sense of mission because the call to disicipleship can be expressed in no better way than by becoming an apostle. “All the biblical vocations are related to the messianic vocation of Jesus, which was revealed at His baptism in the Jordan (Mt. 3, 13-17).  His vocation was defined in terms of the depth of His divine Sonship (Mt. 3, 17) and his anointing by the Holy Spirit for mission”. 

Our sense of mission should begin with the need of bringing this good news to all the people entrusted to us. 

Finally the sense of mission has its centre in the love of the Father for the world.  We can say, therefore, that the sense of mission comprises four elements: consciousness of being sent by Christ, awareness of the bad news around us, capacity to love those to whom we are sent and the readiness to give ourselves to the others unconditionally. 

Our religious communities are the visible manifestations of the presence of Christ with His disciples in the midst of the world.  They are primarily communities of relationship, open communities. 

This will take place only when they have assimilated the Word of God into their personal ethos.  It is not always possible to determine this by fixing a particular number of years of formation.

The ultimate aim of our evangelizing mission is the formation of communities of communion.  Our spirituality should be at the service of this mission or better, should be the result of the effort at building up communion.