Predicaminata: Texts for reflection
After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them out ahead of him in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself would be visiting. And he said to them:
«The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to do his harvesting. Start off now, but look, I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. Take no purse with you, no haversack, no sandals. Salute no one on the road. Whatever house you enter, let your first words be, "Peace to this house!" And if a man of peace lives there, your peace will go and rest on him; if not, it will come back to you. Stay in the same house, taking what food and drink they have to offer, for the labourer deserves his wages; do not move from house to house. Whenever you go into a town where they make you welcome, eat what is put before you. Cure those in it who are sick, and say, "The kingdom of God is very near to you." But whenever you enter a town and they do not make you welcome, go out into its streets and say, "We wipe off the very dust of your town that clings to our feet, and leave it with you. Yet be sure of this: the kingdom of God is very near." I tell you, on the great Day it will be more bearable for Sodom than for that town».
The seventy-two came back rejoicing. «Lord,' they said, «even the devils submit to us when we use your name'. He said to them, «I watched Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Look, I have given you power to tread down serpents and scorpions and the whole strength of the enemy; nothing shall ever hurt you. Yet do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you; rejoice instead that your names are written in heaven»
Fray Juan José de León Lastra OP
Saint Dominic understood that the preaching of the Gospel demanded leaving the monastery. Therefore it was necessary to institutionalize a way of being religious different from monasticism. Religious that, while living in community, should go out and preach. They would be religious who replaced the monastic religious stability by friars’ itinerancy. He himself chose to leave the stability of canon life at Osma to be a itinerant friar preacher. And so he travelled, in his short itinerant life ‒about sixteen years‒ distances that surprise us. Always walking.
Long walk is an exhausting effort, that involves leaving something of yourself along the way: the fatigue and pain make us feel it. Walking is a hopeful attitude. We go to a place we want to reach. The pilgrimage to shrines has always had a penitential character. "Penitential character" means that you opt for the effort, sometimes painful, to get what would not be achieved without that effort, without that pain: for the pilgrimage, reaching a holy place or a place sanctified by others. And that place preaches.
Before the penitent Saint Dominic in the Cave of Segovia we should arrive doing penance, or at least willing to make it. Penance with sense, allowing us not to be driven by the comfortable, the easy, the things that make us bourgeois, and finding out in what we are what we need, despite the protests of our body, represented by the fatigue, perhaps the pain. Including the penitential dignifies our life, makes us feel better, stronger to undertake various commitments. Even projects that we would believe exceeded our forces. The body itself ends up by appreciating it.
Fray Juan José de León Lastra OP
We are celebrating the Eucharist on the day of the Holy Trinity. The mystery Trinity, in the unity that Christ revealed to us, was quickly accepted by the Christian community. It is the mystery of the Christian God par excellence. It is not intended only to discover a peculiar reality in God, but to manifest what man and woman ‒made in the image and likeness of God, as it is taught by the Genesis‒ should be: people, such as the Trinity, defined by their mutual communication and by their relationship of love. Human beings must be constituted by their search of truth and their opening open to love.
Here in this cave, where Saint Dominic used to pray and to do penance, we remember his figure, according to the story we have received from Jordan of Saxony. I want to remark what he says about his "unalterable equanimity, except in front of human misery." Dominic was a charismatic person who could balance the charisma and the institution, avoiding excesses that could turn into fireworks. So he wanted his work to be followed by others, by his friars, organized as a religious order. His equanimity is a counter example to the "excess" as a characteristic of human beings that abounds in our society: excess of he who needs to shout and to insult to make his ideas or his person known; excessive intransigence of the individual opinions, which prevents the serene analysis of ideas, interests and affections; excess in the need of being surrounded by many possessions, much power, much pleasure, forgetting to enjoy the simplicity of nature, of human coexistence, of friendship, of the fact of being under the eyes of a loving God.
However I want to remark two "excesses" that have a clear positive side. Today we celebrate the pro Orantibus day, a day of prayer and thanksgiving for the contemplative life of monks and nuns. They represent an "excess" of prayer, silence, stability in the monastery, community relationships. They embody the difference from common lifestyles, a difference that makes perfect sense as a cry that denounces the lack of silence in our society, the lack of serenity, contemplation, fraternal life, the lack of presence before God and the others. In sum, the lack of the most deeply human, of that which can fill our lives with meaning and happiness.
The other excess is the "Predicaminata" (preachwalk). Many hours of friendly walking in contact with nature, exercising our body, discovering what is hidden, forgotten, bringing out the joy of nature, so as to feel it as we leave tracks on it, breathing the air and overcoming the heat. In brief, enjoying it and exceeding it as an affirmation of our human condition. At the same time, we live the metaphor of our itinerancy, of our living in the middle of the way, encouraged by the fresh breeze and overcoming the difficulty of sultry air. But above all, we coexist always as friends. Preachwalk It is a cry against a lifestyle that seeks pleasure in the immediate, the banal, the artificial, a yelling against all that disregards what defines us as human beings in our world: walking with difficulty, feeling the other as a companion and not as a rival, appreciating and enjoying the air, the landscape..., fighting fatigue to finally feel the joy of arrival and welcoming. It is indeed "preachwalk".
