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"Wherever you go, I will go,
wherever you live, I will live.
Your people shall be my people
and your God, my God".
(Ruth 1,16)
The story of Ruth 'stands up' in the Bible as an icon to the many refugees, mainly women and children, seeking a new life, a new identity, hence integration with a new people. This word, integration, means to combine into a whole, complete, bring or come into equal participation in, or membership of, society... It comes from integritas... the idea of integrity, meaning: moral uprightness, honesty.
The Pope mentions our founder Comboni (with St. Therese of Lisieux) in his message for the 2004 World Mission Sunday as a saint integral to the mission. The whole meal brown bread is integral because it contains also the husks. Comboni is integral because he discarded no one a priori for the contribution that he or she could give to the mission.
On my way to Lisbon, where I attended the annual meeting of coordinators for JPIC, I was privileged to preach a retreat to the Scholastics at Elstree. I presented them with the religious vows as a call to act justly (poverty), love tenderly (chastity) and walk humbly before God (obedience) as well as a task to build up a spirituality integrated with one’s own, God’s given, personal identity. Jesus’ call, to live in a community but also to be sent to the world as evangelizers, echoes Comboni’s dream of a cenacle of apostles ready to make common cause with the poorer and most abandoned. Medicine explains the two movements of the heart as an integrated system. 'Systole' is a contraction of the heart when blood is pumped into the arteries and 'diastole' is the expanding of the chamber of the heart when they fill with the blood. How much in our vision of community we are continually recalling one of this aspects and missing completely on the other?
Arriving in Portugal, I met with the representative of the other 4 provinces of Europe: the Frs. Rebelo from Portugal, Mora from Italy, Martinez from Spain and Fr. Schmidpeter from Germany. The two provincials of Germany and Portugal were also present. Fr. Zolli in his introductory talk made a reference to the latest events: the unwiseness of the preventive war which has politically unsettled Iraq, the bombing at Madrid station on the 11th March, the killing of Yassir and his deputy in Palestine, the enlarging of Europe to 25 state members from the 1st May. We spent a whole day to hear the reports of the work of JPIC in the provinces: the general impression is that JPIC is providing the prism for the new vision of mission today in Europe. Further contribution came from Fr. Vincente Reig on the challenge of immigration and Fr. Justino Martinez on a Comboni missionary spirituality. Fr. Justino is author of a book suitable for a popular reading of the Bible, and has asked to have someone ready to translate it into English. Is anybody ready to help out there?