Rodrigo Garcia Torres
Introduction
Thank you for your invitation. It's very meaningful for me to share my experience from my own culture.
Before I begin, I would like to invite you to reflect, for a couple of minutes, on two questions - first:
How does my culture influence my own prayer?
How are the values of my culture reflected in my prayer?
When I talk about culture, I am referring to the essential values of each country, its language, what it cherishes, the way people relate and communicate and what motivates them. This gets us in touch with our roots, with that which gives meaning to our lives.
To do this we need a new language because what is left unexpressed has no existence, does not even begin to exist.
On the one hand, we don't know how to talk about God in our contemporary culture and, on the other hand, we are saturated with words. We need action and words but at the same time we need to make the Word our own: Jesus is action in self-giving Word. Action without words could be ambiguous, and word without action could be empty. Our world uses and manipulates God in order to justify its choices. We are creating new idols.
Some characteristics of Mexican culture
It is a communitarian culture with a popular religiosity centered on Our Lady of Guadalupe. Mexicans recognize that Mary, mother of the true God for whom everyone lives, is present to us and invites us to develop those values that embody a deep sense of life's meaning in the midst of a death-dealing culture in order to show us the way and the place of the Good News of Jesus Christ in our country and continent1.
The Cross, suffering and death hold an important place in the lives of the Mexican people. Mexico is a multicultural reality in which the silence of the indigenous people, who represent a significant proportion of the population, speaks more loudly than words.
Research shows that religiosity in Mexico is searching for new forms of expression largely as a result of pressure from the government which, over many years, has tried to eliminate religious expression from public life and so confine it to the private domain. Now for Mexicans the priority over and above tradition and popular religiosity is family values — that is to say, to preserve the sense of religion and its communitarian practice within the intimacy of the family.
So, if you made a graph to illustrate Mexican religious values today, the trends that are in the ascendancy are
- Religious heritage expressed within the family
- The search for God
- And communitarian celebration
The trends that are in decline are
- Tradition and popular religiosity
- Ceremonies and rites
- Symbols and symbolism
- The expression of gratitude
- Marian devotions
It's important to underline the change of religious culture which is coming along with the new generations affected by technology, migrations and globalization. This gives us an idea of the context in which the Mexican culture is developing.
When I was thinking about my experience of prayer rooted in my own culture I thought that contemplation has a very important place.
What does contemplation mean today?
Contemplation is that which we cannot get hold of — it's beyond our grasp.
I live in Mexico City. 24 million people in a basin surrounded by mountains, it is hot, busy, the most polluted city in the world. You may think that it's not the most obvious place to go for contemplation! But I am convinced that we are called to find the presence of God in the midst of this busy, fast moving reality; that we have a call to contemplation in the city.
In the Metro on which I travel daily along with four million people. I contemplate, as if from a shop window, the reality of our world today full of contradictions: where affluence and misery, opportunity and marginalization, coexist. In the metro I meet all types of people; I touch the joys and sufferings, the longings and hopes of humanity.
In the metro at rush hour, I can contemplate tired faces, sleeping workers returning home after a day's work or going to the factory to start a monotonous shift of work. I see young people and children whose hope and enjoyment are contagious. I see students and adults who, if they have a seat, take the opportunity to read a book or newspaper. This for me is contemplation, in the bowels of the city, a place where I meet God.
Dialogue with the culture of the Society of the Sacred Heart
We have to relate our culture with our own spirituality and the culture of the Society of the Sacred Heart.
- This finds its source in contemplation of the pierced Heart of Jesus; in a contemplative outlook on the world and in the love which brings people to birth
- A spirituality that is rooted in the interior life
- With a call wherever we are to be close to and on the side of poor people
- Present in the world of young people
In the General Chapter 2000 we tried to deepen more about our spirituality and the only meaning that we came through was:
“We are convinced that our lives, given in love,
are the strongest expression of our spirituality”
It's a very clear and simple definition of who we are now, but is not easy to understand and it has a very divers expressions.
Do we recognize that our style of life radically influences and conditions the possibility of spiritual experience? A certain way of living can block the possibility of an experience of God. In other words, there are ways of being and there are situations that facilitate the experience of God and there are others that make it very difficult.
What are those situations that facilitate the experience of God?
- To have made a fundamental option for God and to live it coherently.
- To be committed in the present moment.
- To be in contact with people who are made poor and to let ourselves be touched by them.
- To recognize the challenge of our reality.
- To develop a capacity to contemplate reality and to wonder at the presence of God in that reality.
What makes the experience of God difficult? I leave you to think about that.
Prayer and Contemplation
“Prayer is that moment when we remain in what is. Prayers more or less wild, may come and go, but our union with God is in the truth of our situation”.
Prayer is a meeting which has its own process:
TO LISTEN, WELCOME, INTEGRATE AND ORIENT
Prayer nurtures values. The art of prayer is to gather what moves us and welcome it with the wisdom that our faith gives us.
The Chapter about prayer in our Constitutions is a jewel.
"In prayer we come to Jesus with everything that touches our life, with the sufferings and hopes of humanity.
We learn to remain in silence and poverty of heart before God. In the free gift of ourselves we learn to adore and to abide in His love”. (Const. 20)
We learn to contemplate reality and to experience it with His Heart, to commit ourselves to the service of the Kingdom and to grow in love: “Have this mind among yourselves which was in Christ Jesus”. (Phil. 2.5)
Often we have this question in our life:
Who is the God I pray to? For me my question now is: which is the image God has of me? Deepening this question is a source of freedom and is life giving for me.
Spirituality that transforms
This Forum is about Spirituality and it's important to share with you the meaning of the spirituality that transforms.
In number 21 of our Constitutions says:
The Spirit dwelling within us gradually transforms us, enabling us through His/Her power to remove whatever hinders His/Her action.”
Our challenge is to unveil the image of God hidden in our midst. How to do this? Which what words? What gestures and actions? Unconsciously we can veil the presence but that presence is already unveiled since the rending of the temple veil with the death and resurrection of Christ.
Spirituality is to capture the movement of our world, its dynamism, the presence of the Spirit in all things. And in the Bible, the Spirit is not tranquility, it is a gale force wind, it creates, it deconstructs the established order and invents a new one. To live according to the Spirit is Paul's definition of the Christian life.
The Spirit is life and everything that opposes this life is death. Everything that brings forth life, everything that defends life is spirituality. Understood thus, we see that spirituality is deeply rooted in life.
Called to be women of reconciliation, compassion and communion, all our action is spiritual and contemplative, that means that we pray with all our being.
After this reflection I want to share something about the Dalai Lama.
He was once asked “What is spirituality?” and he gave this very simple answer:
"Spirituality is something that produces interior transformation in the human being.”
Somebody who did not understand this answer then asked another question: “But if I am practicing religion and observing all the tradition, isn't this spirituality?”
The Dalai Lama replied:
"It could be spirituality: but if it doesn't produce an inner transformation, then it's not spirituality.” Then he added: “the blanket that gives no heat is no longer a blanket."
The person questioned again:
"But does spirituality change or is always the same?”
The Dalai Lama replied:
"As the ancients said, times change and persons with them. What in one epoch was spirituality doesn't have to continue being so today. What in general we call spirituality is only the memory of ancient ways and religious methods."
And he concluded:
"The blanket has to be cut to fit the person - it's not the person who has to be cut to fit the blanket."
What we learn from this dialogue with the Dalai Lama is that spirituality is something that produces an inner transformation in us. The human person is in continual transformation, nothing is ever finished, rather the human person is continually in the making, physically, psychologically, socially and culturally. But there are transformations and transformations. There are transformations that don't alter our fundamental structure because they are superficial and exterior, or merely quantitative.
But there are transformations that are interior, capable of giving new meaning to life or of opening new fields of experience coming from the depth of our hearts and touching the mystery of all things. It is not surprising that such transformations take us into the realm of the transcendent.
"Today, the particular characteristic of our time resides in the fact that spirituality is being discovered as a profound dimension of the human being, and is leading towards the full manifestation of our individuation as a space of peace in the midst of conflict and social desolation.”2
The good news of Christ constantly renews life and culture. (GS. 58 p.4) Before concluding I want to take the 2000 Chapter about culture:
From Meeting to Dialogue of Cultures We are called
- To respond to God present in the heart of the world
- To expand our understanding of what it means to belong to a multicultural community
- To learn to live interculturality among ourselves, with others and in all that we do
We need to deepen more in our knowledge of what it means to belong to a multicultural Society moving to interculturality.
I was part of this group during the General Chapter and it has been significant to start the calls with the presence of God in the heart of our world. Isn't it is a calls to contemplate with our hearts rooted in culture as very important part of our prayer?
Prayer rooted in culture is incarnated prayer in our reality as Jesus lived and related with his own reality. But Jesus is the incarnation of the word.
Patricia García de Quevedo rscj
Superior General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1994-2000
Talk given at the workshop on Spirituality of the Sacred Heart
Notre Dame, Indiana
July 2006
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