Profile of the 21st Century Missionary - Part 2

Rooted in tradition
A missionary is not a free entrepreneur; he belongs to a life community with which he is confronted, in the same way he confronts the Word of God that he strives to embody.

For a tree to be healthy, it must grow in two directions: both upwards and downwards. In this sense, the missionary is also confronted with a community formed by all those who, from the beginning and throughout the 2000 years, have lived in the apostolic faith, as for instance: the Church Fathers like Jerome, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Teresa of Avila..., and in literature like Dante's Divine Comedy, masterpieces like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, music by Beethoven, Mozart, etc.

Today's missionary loves the tradition in which he is well planted, and sees himself as its continuator, like a runner in here and now of a relay race that began when Christ passed on his testimony to Peter and the apostles. This faith, which is essentially apostolic, is passed on from generation to generation, until the end of times, by the apostles of today, the missionaries.

We detach ourselves from the "sola fide sola gratia sola scriptura solus Christus" of Luther and his followers. First, because the Scripture or Word of God, as the written word, is subsequent to the Church, that is, to tradition. It is obvious that St. Paul's letters to the communities of Thessalonica, Ephesus, Corinth and Rome are subsequent to the constitution of these very communities: in other words, the address exists before the letter and not the other way around.

The gospels came after many of these letters and they are supposed to be the reflection of these same communities. Without the Church there would be no New Testament, just as without the people of Israel there would be no Old Testament.

Second, the dogmas such as Christ is truly man and truly God and the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, accepted by all Protestants, are extra-biblical, they are the product of the Church’s reflection, that is, they belong to tradition. It makes no sense, to accept tradition up to a certain point in time and then to reject it on principle.

Lover of liturgy
(...) I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.  Isaiah 6:1-4

The liturgy and the sacraments celebrate the faith and they are means to grow in faith. Without the liturgy and the sacraments, the people of God would not be a people because they would not gather. Without the Eucharist there is no Church, without the Church there is no Eucharist; only the mystical body of Christ which is the Church can celebrate the sacramental body of Christ.

In addition to celebrating and growing in faith, and forming the community, the liturgy and the sacraments are virtual encounters with God. The great prophet Isaiah found his vocation in a well celebrated liturgy where he felt God’s presence. It is the beauty of the temple where it is celebrated, the beauty of the ministers' vestments, the prayers, the singing, the music, the incense, the silence, the recollection as they all contribute to make our hearts vibrate and feel the presence of God like Isaiah had felt.

Chant your Magnificat
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name... Luke 1:46-55

Being a missionary is, like Mary, to chant the Magnificat of the wonders that the Lord has worked in our lives, of how he has reprogrammed it, reoriented it, and given it a purpose. The Magnificat of Mary, like that of anyone who has experienced the presence of God active in his life, is a burst of joy; it is a "non plus ultra", the realization that God fills us to the brim, that "in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).

The missionary, therefore, is not primarily the one who proclaims the gospel, nor the one who catechizes, or the one who speaks "objectively" of Jesus, of his history, life and miracles; that would be more proselytism than mission. The missionary does not speak "objectively" of Christ, but subjectively, because it is from his experiences and living in Christ that he proclaims the "evangelion", that is, the gospel.

Itinerant
For many evangelists nowadays, the norm is to live withdrawn from social life, confined to a narrow circle of Rectory-Church-Rectory, waiting for the people to hear the bell ringing and calling on the "sparrows to come to the nest", that is to the Church, and feeling frustrated when very few come.

For Jesus, the norm was to go out and experience the life of the people where this was taking place. Only once in a while, especially at night when the people were resting, would He also withdraw to enter into intimacy with His Father. Jesus was like a letter carrier who delivered to each person a personalized Good News and everyone found in Jesus the health-salvation they sought with faith.

Oftentimes the very same evangelist confines himself; at other times, it is the very same people of God that confines him, because they do not look kindly on his presence in certain settings. It is necessary to remind both sides that Jesus entered the houses of sinners, ate with them and lived with women, both reputable and otherwise, and he was not infected by their sins or way of life: on the contrary, all who came in contact with Him were positively influenced by his words, his deeds and way of life.

"Omnia munda mundis", to the pure, all things are pure. Just as for Jesus, for the present-day evangelist there must be no out of bound places. "Where the sun does not enter, the doctor does" – since the evangelist is, at the same time, the Sun and the doctor, if he does not enter as the sun, he enters as a doctor.

Jesus was itinerant, so were Paul, Francis of Assisi, Francis of Xavier, etc. The evangelists of today must also be itinerants. If Jehovah's Witnesses can manage to get proselytes with such a poor and deficient message, how much more could we achieve if we had their daring and zeal.

Jesus chose fishermen for his disciples, not shepherds. Fishermen have no sheep to take care of, they have nothing, they can have fish if they go out with their boats and catch them, as Peter and his brother Andrew did. To catch them, they need to mend their nets, like the sons of Zebedee did with their father, which is to say that today's missionary must be a person of prayer and ongoing formation.

Prayer is not time wasted that could have been spent on evangelization; on the contrary, through it and in it, the missionary purifies the word of God from the impurities that he himself places in it with his character, personality, prejudices, convictions and other beliefs.

In addition to prayer that puts the missionary in contact with the Lord of the Vineyard and the message that the evangelist proclaims, the missionary must also be a man of reflection. You can’t catch flies with vinegar, for each type of fish there is a type of net or hook or bait. The preacher does not preach in the same manner to children, young people and adults, in one culture or another; he must adapt the Word to those who hear it.

Lover of the new Media
The Internet is the sixth continent.  Pope Francis

With social media, the internet is no longer just the new encyclopedia of knowledge where everyone goes to do their research, but it is also a virtual meeting place in real time between peoples of different latitudes and longitudes, cultures, ethnicity and religions. From this virtual pulpit, the Word of God reaches more people and particular groups of people who, for one reason or another, do not attend the Church in person.

It is true that in this domain the Word of God contends with many other words; but, since there is no Good News that is more beautiful, more reasonable and more human than the gospel, one does not even need to be a great speaker to make it yield 100 fold when it is sown. (Cf. the parable of the Sower in Matthew 13: 1–9, 18–23)

Today's evangelist who neglects this new areopagus is not being faithful to the words of Jesus to "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation" (Mark 16:15).

Conclusion – Rooted in tradition, supported by a community, today's evangelist preaches in season and out of season, along the way and out of the way, in all the areopaguses, that is, in all the places where people gather.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Profile of the 21st Century Missionary - Part-1

Having an intimate and personal relationship with Christ - We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life -- (…) -- we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:1,3

Theologian Karl Rahner said that the Christians of the future are either mystics or they are not Christians. To be a Christian is fundamentally to have an affective and effective relationship with Christ like the first Christians, his disciples; in fact, He chose them not primarily to be continuators of his work, but to live with him (Mark 3:14).

Christianity is therefore not a doctrine or philosophy of life; it is an affective relationship with Christ that leads to an affective relationship with all those around us. For today's Christian, as always, the affective must be effective, that is, it must change one’s life and give a sense of self fulfillment and joy to today’s Christian.

The main role of a missionary is to evangelize, not to catechize or do charity work, but to testify to the personal and intimate relationship of love that he has with the Lord and to offer that same experience to others. No one gives what he does not have; if we do not have this relationship, we cannot and should not be missionaries.

The evangelizer who announces the One with whom he does not have an intimate relationship is like a parrot; he talks about what he has learned and, instead of putting himself at the service of the Word, he puts the Word at his service, that is, he subliminally uses it to parade and promote himself.

Gift of the Word
The missionary must be what is known as a motivational speaker -- exciting, full of ardour and enthusiasm. A good communicator can sell even snake oil. Our product, the Word of God, has already proved its excellence and worth for more than two thousand years.

A Word of Life communicated without life disavows itself. We, more than anyone, have reasons to be joyful because we possess a faith that gives meaning to our existence here and now and launches us into the future, full of Hope, with nothing to fear.

Know the Bible
‘Therefore, every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’ Matthew 13:52

 
The evangelizer of our time must be a good connoisseur of the Sacred Scripture. He must also be able to bring reality to the Scripture in order to find enlightenment, answers and solutions in it or bring Scripture to reality so that the Word of God is embodied in attitudes, behaviours and concrete actions.

Many Christian sects and the Copts in Ethiopia place the New alongside the Old, giving equal importance to one and the other. This is wrong because the New Testament, the New Covenant, cannot have the same value as the Old; if that were the case, we would not need the New. The New Covenant came to replace and fulfill the old one. The Old Testament must be read from the perspective of the New and to the extent that it agrees with the New Testament.

The Old Testament contextualizes the New, so one cannot understand the New Testament without understanding the Old; just as one cannot understand the Old Testament without knowing and understanding the history of the people of Israel.

Knowing our culture
Christianity begins with Christmas; the missionary is the one who brings birth to Christ, that is, he embodies the Word of God in every moment and in every place. To this end, he needs to possess a deep knowledge of the culture, the historical moment and the existential situation in which the people is living. He must have "the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other" as the great Protestant theologian Karl Barth used to say.

To embody the Word is to know how to find salvation in it for the "here and now" of a people; that is, the answer to the questions and the solution to the problems of the present moment. In this sense, the missionary is called to be a prophet, the man who knows how to read the signs of the times; "the man of the year", the natural leader, a Moses who can guide the people along the path of salvation, that is, of full spiritual, physical, mental and moral health.

Conclusion – As the bishop says at the ordination of a deacon as he hands him the Gospel, so should a missionary be today: "Receive the Gospel of Christ, which you have a mission to proclaim. Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and live what you teach".

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Rejecting the Church is rejecting Christ

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. (…) When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’ (…) Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. John 6:56-57, 60, 66

It is the refusal of the Eucharist, not eating the body and blood of the Lord, that caused some followers to no longer accompanied Jesus, to no longer be his friends and his disciples.

Sadly, this is still the case today; whether or not one participates in the Sunday Eucharist distinguishes a practicing Catholic from a non-practicing one. Of the non-practicing Catholics, some think they can belong to the Church without participating in the Eucharist; others think they can reject the Church without rejecting Christ. Something like what many Protestants do in thinking that think they value Jesus more by taking away importance from Mary, his mother.

It is not possible to love Christ while hating the Church he founded. If Jesus of Nazareth is the historical Christ, the Church is the presence of Christ in history. Jesus said to Phillip: "I have been with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? (John 14:9). If Christ represents God the Father, the Church represents Christ, whether well or not, she is his mystical body. This representation can be at times good or bad, close or far, but it is always a representation.

The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ - pluribus unum
Just as our body consists of about 37 trillion cells and each is a distinct unit with its particular role, they are all united in a single body because although they are many and very different, they have something in common:  their genetic code, their DNA.

In this same way, we Christians, who are more than a billion, are very different from each other. We live in different latitudes and longitudes, we speak different languages, we come from different human groups, cultures, nationalities, we have different idiosyncrasies and personalities, but we all have something in common: faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. This makes us one community, one body, one family.

Christ, in physical and human form, could only live and die once. However, the patent salvific action of his whole earthly life was not only for the men of his time and the place he lived, but for men of any time and place. The Church was founded by Him to extend His saving action to all times and places. The Church is Christ in time and space; the Church is Christ here and now. In Israel, two thousand years ago, Christ existed without his Church; after his life on earth, neither the Church exists without Christ nor Christ exists in time and space without his Church.

The Church, as the mystical body of Christ, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the voice, the heart, the mind, and the hands and feet of the Lord in action here and now, in every time and place; it is the same saving action that Jesus performed from year zero to 33 AD in Israel.

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. John 14:12

The Eucharist, the sacramental body of Christ
A club, a company, an institution, a people that does not gather together cannot exist as such. The Eucharist, the sacramental body of Christ, is the reason why the mystical body of Christ gathers together. In the same place, the same Christ instituted the Eucharist and the Church, so that one does not exist without the other.

The day one ends, the other ends too. As before in the time of Jesus, the rejection of the Eucharist was the reason why they stopped walking with Him; in our times, this continues to be the reason. Whoever abandons the Eucharist, abandons the Church and vice versa. Whoever abandons the Church, abandons Christ and vice versa.

Many grains of wheat make one loaf of bread; many bunches of grapes make one bottle of wine; many Christians make one mystical body. Christ chose Bread and Wine to symbolize and signify his sacrifice for us; the Eucharist is the memorial of the Lord's life, passion, death and resurrection.

It is the Church that celebrates the Eucharist; the Eucharist is the Church’s reason for being, because it is the Eucharist that brings Christians together in response to the Lord's mandate, "Do this in memory of me" (Luke 22:19). The Eucharist gives the memory of the Lord and makes present the saving action of Christ. By participating in the Eucharist, we collect the fruits of redemption.

Christ is the body handed over and the blood shed for all mankind; Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Redemption is available to everyone, it is for everyone, those who take part in it are saved. God feeds the birds of the sky but He does not put the food in their nests, the birds have to get out and look for it in nature. Same thing with the Eucharist, it offers salvation to all, so come and get it.

So, Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.’ John 6:53-55

The Eucharist is the heart of the Church. In the human body, the function of the heart is to be the motor that moves blood from the cells to the heart and from the heart to the cells. In the same way, the life of the Christian is a shuttle between the Eucharist and the world. When the Mass was in Latin, at the end of it the priest would say "Ite missa est" which meant "you may go, the Mass is over", but it also meant "the Mass is over, the mission begins".

The Eucharist is to the Church and the Church to the Eucharist as the chicken is to the egg, and the egg to the chicken. In fact, both the Eucharist, born on Holy Thursday, and the Church, born on Pentecost, took place in the same Upper Room. The Eucharist was the moment of conception of the Church and Pentecost was the moment of her birth. The mystical body of Christ meets to celebrate the sacramental body of Christ and to communally feed on his body and blood, and his Word.

When one disappears the other disappears also. Therefore, he who being part of the mystical body of Christ that is the Church, ceases to participate in the Eucharist, he abandons the Church, and when there will no longer be people celebrating the Eucharist, there will no longer be a Church. The day the Eucharist ceases to be celebrated, that very same day the Church will also cease to exist.

If ever this happens, Christ dies in the history of humanity without ever resurrecting again, because it is the Church that preserves his memory and celebrates the Eucharist in his memory as He commanded (Luke 22:19). When there is no longer anyone in the world who celebrates the Eucharist in remembrance of Christ, He ceases to have on earth a physical body, the Church (his hands, feet, heart and mouth) to carry on the works of salvation, from one generation to the next.

I believe in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church
Protestants do not understand how Catholics can include in the Creed, faith in the Church right after professing faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We believe in the Church because she was founded by Christ and represents Christ, and through her, Christ makes his salvation present in the world even today. For all this, in her essence and through her founder, she is holy. By saying "I believe in the Church," I affirm that I believe in all that I have just said.

Saint and harlot, said a Catholic theologian. Yes, the Church is both holy and sinful. Holy in her essence because she was founded by Christ, sinful in her existence because she is constituted, since the beginning, by sinful men and women. If man, as St. Augustine defines him, is simul justus et peccator, at the same time just and sinful, so is the Church. But I don't reject her because she's my mother, no one rejects his mother because she has flaws.

Solus Christus, sola fide, sola scriptura
Luther's grave mistake was to throw away the Church. As we said earlier, today without the Church there is no Christ.

Solus Christus
It was Christ who founded the Church, this means that Luther rejects what Christ founded. It was Christ who gave life to the Church and still gives life to the Church, but it is also the Church that gives life to Christ because she represents Him here and now, because she makes real here and now the same thing that Christ made real during his time – it is for this that Christ founded the Church. Therefore, Christ gives life to the Church, and the Church gives life to Christ.

Sola fide
When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Luke 18:8

It depends on the Church whether Christ will still find faith on earth when He returns to judge the living and the dead. It depends on her because it is she who passes on faith in Christ from generation to generation, like in a relay race the testimony is passed on.

This is because it is the Church that is the depository of faith in Christ. This is because our faith is apostolic, that is, the faith that Christ rose from the dead is apostolic because we believe in the testimony of the apostles: they saw, heard and touched the spiritual or glorious body of Christ. After them, no one else saw, touched, or heard Him as they saw, touched and heard Him (1 John 1:3). Just as today there is no Christ without the Church, nor Church without Christ, there is also no faith without the Church, nor Church without the faith.

Sola scriptura
The Christ we have is the Christ of the Church. It was she who gave birth to Christ for the world after his death and resurrection – if we think that the New Testament was written by Christian communities, it is Christ who holds the copyright. The group of apostles was already the Church, their preaching gave rise to new believers, and some of these faithful gathered in small Christian communities and wrote the gospels.

The apostles’ letters, especially Paul’s, were authentic letters because they had a sender, St. Paul, who addressed them to the small communities in Corinth, Ephesus, Thessalonica, etc. Therefore, as far as the New Testament is concerned, there is no scripture without the Church.

Unus christianus nullus christianus - St. Augustine, the founder of the religious order of which Luther was a member, said, "one Christian, no Christian." Christianity was born into community and can only be lived in community. Without community, there is no Christianity. As all animals have a habitat where they live and thrive, so a Christian can only live and thrive within the Christian community.

Conclusion – Whoever ceases to participate in the Eucharist, abandons the Church, and whoever rejects the Church rejects the One who founded her as His mystical body, for she represents Christ in the here and now of history, from generation to generation. As He said, “the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18) because “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Christ and the Religions of the World

The idea that all religions are equal and worth the same is widespread today; for non-believers, they are all bad; for believers, they are all good as they all lead to salvation, each one can choose the one that suits him the best or the one that culturally best adapts to his idiosyncrasy.

It is true that every culture has its own particular way of conceptualizing and worshipping God. We see this even within a single religion like Christianity. In Europe, where it emerged and flourished, the East became Orthodox and the West remained Catholic for a while until the rupture. Afterwards, the North became Protestant and the South remained Catholic.

However, today with the increasing globalization of cultures, differences or nuances in living and acting have become small, because of the one human nature that does not vary in time or space. Proof of this, and for the topic that occupies us, we can organize all religions, present or past, into three major categories: animists, polytheists and monotheists.

This is possible because since there is only one human nature invariable in time and space, there is also only one model of development. In other words, there is no alternative model of development to the one we have today, which involves the discovery of electricity, the automotive movement, the discovery of the printing press, the radio, the television, the internet, etc.

Evolution of religious sentiment
As soon as the human being became aware of himself, it was as if he had awakened from a great dream, and when he looked at the reality that surrounded him, the first belief he had was that everything around him was also aware of itself, that each had a spirit, an anima. This is how animism emerged as the first stage in the evolution of religious sentiment.

Animism
A bit like magic, animism is based on the belief that the world, both in its entirety and in its parts, has a soul or spirit; even the air we breathe is populated by spirits that are impersonal forces that can be invoked or summoned and manipulated by shamans, mediums, magicians, sorcerers or witches using formulas, rituals and magic spells.

Despite it being only the first stage of the evolution of religious sentiment, it is still practised today by indigenous tribes where these still exist: in both North and South America, Asia, Africa, Australia and the Pacific Islands.

Furthermore, in the modern world, all forms of superstition and divination, such as astrology, cartomancy, witchcraft, sorcery, are remnants of animism that have a huge popular acceptance. Objects that bring good luck and objects that bring bad luck, rituals that conjure good luck and rituals to avoid bad luck, continue to be part of our daily life such as entering with the right foot, believing in the power of rabbit’s foot, four-leaf clover, horseshoe ...

The New Age religion, which pretends to be the synthesis of all religions, has much of Neo-paganism or animism. If we wish, even the Franciscan spirituality can be seen from this perspective, in calling the wolf and the sun brothers, and the water and the moon sisters, St. Francis was giving back to these realities the soul they once possessed.

After the rain of materialism that has been increasingly falling since the Renaissance, today most people realize that a material object cannot have spiritual power. Only a spiritual being has spiritual power. However, there are still those who are superstitious, always reminding us of the animism of our ancestors.

If we compare the evolution of the notion of God with the maturation of man, animism corresponds to childhood - children do indeed have the tendency to see everything around them as having a soul, they talk to their dolls and toys, they live in an animated world of fairies, witches and boogeymen, and they believe in Santa Claus and magic; Walt Disney, in his films for children, knew well how to explore this side of childhood fantasy.

Polytheism
As the human being comes to know and therefore dominate his environment, the latter becomes materialized. All the realities that the human being knows, controls and dominates lose their soul and the power they have over him. The one who knows, exercises his power and control over the known reality. In this way the realm of the spiritual world outside the person is reduced.

There are, however, certain realities that the human being does not master with knowledge, where he still feels powerless and helpless, where he is at their mercy, these realities he calls them gods. Thus arises a god for each reality that the human being does not master: the god of war, Mars; the god of the sea, Neptune; the goddess of love, Venus, etc.

Monotheism
The prehistory of monotheism takes place when the human being groups all these gods and gives them a leader – Zeus in Greek mythology, and Jupiter in Roman mythology; they are the father of other gods. The first human being to proclaim that there is only one god was a pharaoh from Egypt named Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV, who reigned in Egypt in 14th century AC. The idea did not take hold among the Egyptians of that time, but was embraced years later by a people, in slavery in the land of Egypt – the Jewish people.

The discovery of the Hebrew people, in this sense, is that of a personal God who concentrates within himself all human aspirations, whatever that is good and perfect. Since the Jews were nomads, and nomads cannot have local gods, and as they move from place to place, it would be very cumbersome to carry their idols around, they then thought of a concrete reality that was everywhere. They looked up and found him in heaven.

Sedentary peoples tend to be polytheistic; nomadic peoples, on the other hand, are monotheistic. The Turkans, a nomadic people of northern Kenya, have the same word to designate Heaven and God. The Mongols, Turks and Tatars worshipped a common god called Tengri, the god of blue sky.

Christianity is no longer a religion, but God’s revelation
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.  Hebrews 1:1-2

It is true that all religions worship the same God and aim to humanize man. For this reason, the Church no longer presents herself to the world as the only plank of salvation and recognizes in all religions "semina verbum", fragmented pieces of truth. There is, therefore, salvation without the Church, but there can be no salvation without Christ, because he being God made man, is the fullness of truth and therefore valid for all times and all places.

Like the Old Testament prophets, the founders of all religions were the revealers of God's will and the longings of the peoples at a certain point in their history, leading them along the right path.

Christ, more than a prophet or the right man for a concrete moment, is the right man for all times and all places. He did not come to evangelize the Jewish people so that they would be faithful to their faith, nor did he come to purify the faith of the Jewish people. True, he was born among the Jewish people, but he did not come only for the Jewish people; as the prophet Isaiah prophesied so well, Christ came for all peoples.

Religion designates all the effort human beings have made over time to attract God’s blessing, through sacrifices, rituals and liturgies. Religion is, therefore, an initiative of the human race. Revelation is a divine initiative; it is no longer man making his way to God, but God making His way to man. You did not choose me but I chose you. (John 15:16)

Since Christ is no longer just a prophet, so in relation to the other religions, Christianity makes a qualitative leap and, in this way, all religions are to Christianity what the Old Testament of the Bible is to the New Testament.

At the individual level
“No one goes to the Father except through me”, Jesus said in (John 14: 6-14), and “whoever knows me knows the Father (John 14:7)," which is equivalent to saying that whoever does not know me does not know the Father. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6)" which is equivalent to saying that there is no alternative way, truth, and life. Whoever does not gather with me scatters, he also said.

At the social level
Jesus of Nazareth knows that new men make new societies, and new societies through education, make new men, so it is necessary to act on both levels. Christianity is not like Buddhism which only aims at individual personal perfection and is disinterested in others, nor like Judaism that only aims at the salvation of the Jewish people and the condemnation of the rest non-Jewish pagans.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. Isaiah 25:6

Christ came with a project for all peoples, the Kingdom of God, as was foretold rightly by the prophet Isaiah in the banquet for all peoples. Later, Jesus explains in parables what the kingdom of God is, where he often uses the image of a banquet open to all (Matthew 22, 1-14).

Christianity is a social revolution and an individual psychotherapy
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey...  Exodus 3: 7-8

Jesus, as the new Moses, comes to take human beings out of all forms of slavery, he comes to offer himself as the role model to emulate so that man can be truly free. Since Christ, God made man, incarnated in life the most perfect model of humanity, He is the reference of all human beings; everyone who seeks and strives to be an authentic person, whatever his creed or religion, without having to profess the Christian faith, it is to Christ that he must compare himself and not to anyone else.

Jesus enters human history like a meteorite in the middle of the sea and makes waves in the form of concentric circles, from the centre to the farthest shores. Since it was a meteorite that ended the reign of the great reptiles, the dinosaurs, giving way to small mammals from which the human race evolved, so Christ is the King of the Universe who comes to re-establish his kingdom on earth that He, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, had created.

Inspired further with the metaphor of the meteorite that makes concentric circles with its fall, Christ bursts into the middle of human history dividing it into two periods: before his coming and after his coming, his birth being year zero.

Whether it is because Christians form the largest group, or because the Western culture of Christian matrix has become universalized because it is more advanced, the fact is that no matter how much the Jews, atheists and agnostics prefer to call it the Common Era instead, the birth of Christ is still year zero from which human history is counted backwards and forwards.

Christ is the cornerstone (Acts 4:11) of salvation history. He came to save both the living and the dead, that is, all who lived before him (Ephesians 4:9-10), having even thought (John 20:24-29) and prayed for those who would live after him (John 17:20).

Because He, fundamentally, did not come to found a new religion, but rather to teach man to be man, and how to relate to others, in order to make the world a better place, transforming it into the kingdom of God, that is, into a society where justice and peace reign.

I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, in prison or in the hospital, and you gave me or did not give me assistance... (Matthew 25:31-46). At the final judgment, which is same for all peoples, we will not be asked what religion we belonged to, what we were, the success we had in our lives or how many religious practices we carried out. The judgment is not religious at all because it does not contain questions of a religious nature, but exclusively of a social nature.

From the time God took on human nature, all human beings have become ipso facto his brothers and sisters. There is no longer anyone in this world who is all alone, who has no one to defend him, Jesus remains hidden in each one of us, especially in the poorest and the most disadvantaged. Through this final judgment, we learn that the assistance we provided or did not provide to those who crossed our path during our lives, it was to Him that we provided or did not provide.  

On the other hand, no atheist or agnostic would deny that there is no human life without love and that to live is to love. In which case, Jesus has only one commandment that says just that: to love God above all things, above yourself and about everything, to love yourself as God loves you and to love others as you love yourself. What's so religious about this? Interpreting this commandment, St. Augustine goes so far as to say: Ama et fac quod vis or love and do whatever you will...

Conclusion – All religions before Christ are like "Old Testaments"; Christ is the New Testament to all of them. There is salvation outside the Church, but there is no salvation outside of Christ, for He is the only Way, Truth, and Life to God the Father; as He himself said that no one goes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fugitives, Wanderers, or Pilgrims?

Leaving bits and pieces of one’s life around the world... Camões

Coordinates of human life
The human being is a spatiotemporal being. He occupies a space for a time, so that, as it happens in the universe and nature that surround and involve us, there is nothing stationary or permanent about human life. We cannot stand still in time or in space: life implies movement, a process, a becoming, a path, a change.

By the way we use and situate ourselves in time or relate to it, we can be fugitives or vagabonds; the gospel, however, exhorts us to be pilgrims.

Life is wide, but short. It is wide in possibilities, in the many and diverse ways of using our time, but it is short in length. Therefore, there is nothing worse than to think we have to kill time because we have too much time on our hands. This is not true, so there is no time to kill nor time to lose, because the reality is that time is scarce.

Fugitives, vagabonds and pilgrims have in common the fact that they are not attached to people, things, or places. They are never stationary at one place, but easily move from place to place. Therefore, they also have in common the way they settle in time and how they live the present moment. But they differ in how they relate to the other two times of human life: the past and the future.

The pilgrim lives well the three dimensions of time, while the fugitive lives bound hand and foot to the past and fears the future. The penniless vagabond has no past, no present and no future, he lives suspended in time like a reed shaken by the wind.

Human time is three-dimensional: past – present – future
The three times in which life takes place are interactive: neither the past has passed completely nor all of the future is yet to come.  The two times exist in the present and interact with it. As such, the present does not always refer solely to the present, it can refer also to the past as well as the future. Just as the past and the future visit the present, the present can also move into the future and the past. The present in itself is what is occurring, but when we think about what is occurring, it is already in the past.

The past has passed, but is never gone; the future arrives, but is never fully here, it moves forward like a carrot tangling in front of the donkey’s snout. As long as we exist, all three times exist with us and we will only stop having a present and a past when we stop having a future, that is, when we die. Since all three live together, all three also die together, just a few seconds apart. We die from front to back: first the future dies, then the present and only then the past.  

We are like an arrow that someone has shot in the past. According to life’s circumstances, we can have some control over the direction the arrow takes, but we know that "all roads lead to Rome", that fate is common, that death is both certain and uncertain. Certain because it is the only thing we know for sure about our future, as Heidegger says, we are a being made for death. Uncertain because we do not know how or when we are going to die, and I don't think anyone is interested in knowing.

In case there is eternal life, as we Christians certainly believe, then the future dies and so does the past, because they cease to be interactive in the present. Life made up of ticking time ceases to be a reality. What we were, we are. What we are today is a contribution of both the good and the bad of our lives. All events in our past served as the scaffolding for the building construction. When construction is over, with our death, the scaffolding is no longer needed: what we turned out to be is now what we will be forever in eternity.

Our physical body also belongs to the category of scaffolding, because through it and with it we build our being, our spiritual body, and when it is built, time ceases in its dimension of future and past, and remains in its dimension of present, an eternal present in God and with God.

To live is to leave
People whose mother tongue is English can distinctively pronounce these two verbs without any effort; foreigners, however, tend to pronounce them the same way. The fact that I used to pronounce them in the same way led me to discover an intrinsic relationship between them.

To live means and implies to leave, to let go of the place where we are and go to another. The pilgrimage is printed in us already at the chromosomal and cellular level. If the tubules within the testes where sperm cells are produced were straightened, the total length would extend about 70 centimeters.

The X or Y sperm cell that gave us life passed through these tubules, and when ejaculated travelled further through our mother’s reproductive system until it united with its other half cell in the Fallopian tube and formed a new being. There the conception took place; but four days later, the new being had to leave this place in order to travel and live in the uterus where it nestled for nine months until it completed its growth.

At birth, the baby leaves his mother’s womb and enters the bosom of a family where he is loved unconditionally. As such, this becomes the second maternal womb until the day when he has to go to school where he is no longer loved unconditionally. The first day of school is tough. I recall how I used to keep my eyes fixed on my mother until I turned the corner at the end of the street as I left my home to go to school.

Just when primary school becomes familiar, it is time to leave to go to high school; for me it was the seminary. On the first day, my father took me there, but when he left, the world came crashing down for me... and I cried bitterly.... Some of us leave our family to form another family, some of us leave our land to seek employment in another.

Immigrants leave their land in order to seek a better future for themselves and their families. To leave the principle of pleasure for the principle of reality; to leave father and mother to join with his wife; to leave everything to follow the master. Those who do not leave, like the rich young man, do not find life.

In time we are fugitives, vagabonds or pilgrims
As temporal beings, our life takes place within the three dimensions of time:  past, present and future. Depending on their age, people tend to favour one dimension over the other two.

Children and young people – Setting the past aside, they live the present as a preparation for a future they dream of and in which they project themselves. Because the future may never come, each day must be worth its own weight, not detached from the future, of course, but not lived entirely in function of it either.  The advice then is to live the present in charity.

Elderly – When objectively there is not much left to hope for, they live on memories. The memory of past happiness does not give joy but sadness. It is true that life is better understood by looking back, but it is lived forward. Even in old age, Christian hope tells us that the best is yet to come, therefore what can be done must be done. The advice then is to live the future not in anxiety, but in hope.

Adults – They live installed in the present, they do not care about the past or the future. In fact, they live as if they would never die. They do anything to stop time and the damage it causes in their life: the plastic surgeries to maintain a youthful appearance when they are no longer young, overly concerned or not concerned at all about exercising, diets, health, that is, too focused on themselves. The advice then is to integrate both the past and the future of one’s life so to live the present in charity and not looking in the mirror or at one’s umbilical.

Fugitives
And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you, its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Genesis 4:10-12

God said to Cain that because he killed his brother, he will be a fugitive on earth. The fugitive is haunted by remorse for something he did in the past. On the run from the police, he has no present or future. What goes around comes around or here they do, here they pay... Cain is a fugitive because he is running away from a past that haunts him in the present. His path is determined by his persecutors, not by him; therefore, he has no present and no future. He is trapped by something he did in the past that is always present in the form of remorse, so much so that it denies him a life.

Hunted by one’s past is an expression that denotes well the circumstances the fugitive lives in. Like a hunted prey, he lives life in fear of being caught. The unresolved issue of the past haunts him in the present. Passed waters do not move mills, and yet many people, contradicting this law of nature, have their mills or heads moved by past waters, because they have not apologized or forgiven, or because they were traumatized or abused and they repress or pretend that nothing happened.

"Have you ever forgiven the Nazis for all that they did to us when we were prisoners in Auschwitz?” a former prisoner asked his friend after many years without seeing each other. The friend replied, “I haven’t and I never will forgive those bastards!” “Oh yeah? " Replied the former, “then you’re still there, in Auschwitz."

The one who does not forgive lives in the past, he seeks to escape from this past that always haunts him and which negatively determines his present. He deludes himself, thinking that the past has stayed in the past, but the truth is that what we know and assume of our past is redeemed and, as such, we can control. What we do not know and do not assume or forgive of our past, precisely because it is repressed and outside of our day-to-day consciousness, controls us, bursting forth into our present in a thousand and one ways. In projecting the ghosts of the past into the present, we may think that we are fighting our enemies, when objectively we are fighting windmills, like Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Whoever does not owe, does not fear; the fugitive does owe and therefore, he fears, he distrusts everything, everyone including himself. He lives anchored in the past that has traumatized him and continues to reproduce in the present that past; in other words, he lives in a prison.  The one who has been abused will be an abuser, the point is to abuse without getting caught; thieves only consider themselves as such if they are caught. Those who have skeletons in their closet never live feeling safe.

Vagabonds
The vagabond in time corresponds to the tourist in space. We come from nothing, we go to nothing; in this way, life has no meaning; therefore, the agnostic and the atheist are fundamentally vagabonds. Nowadays, there are homeless people who are so by choice, philosophers who want this type of life, who do not commit to anything or anybody, not even to their own survival.

Carpe diem became the motto of life for many people after the popular 1989 movie, the “Dead Poets Society". The vagabond lives in the present, but not the conscious and omniscient present of Eastern philosophies, but rather in a consumerist, hedonistic and unconscious present:  die Martha, die fed up. Without caring about the past that has been and the future that is not yet and may not be, the vagabond walks in the vicious circle of an eternal return. “For those who do not know where to go, there are no favourable winds”.

I don't make promises lest I fail, something we hear so often. The vagabond promises nothing to no one, nor commits to anything or anyone, because that would mean counting on the future. But the vagabond doesn't know the word future; he lives in the moment and for the moment. In relation to the past and the future he has the attitude of an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand, he represses and denies its existence.   He prefers not to think and therefore he abstracts himself, using diversion or work like a drug to avoid thinking and confronting himself.

He has no past nor future, he lives installed in the world as if he is from the world. He lives as if he will never die and dies as if he had never lived (Dalai Lama). With a divorce rate in Portugal greater than 70%, many do not want to make long term commitment since it is seen as mortgaging the future, as limiting one’s freedom.

The young people want to have their options open and therefore, they live installed at the roundabout or the crossroads of life.  Since they never choose a route, they are like hamsters running on rotating wheels, never going anywhere. Because choosing one route means saying no to all the others. But if you spend your life without committing yourself to anything or anyone, you are like a car with its engine on but going nowhere.

To live is to choose a path to go somewhere, not to go in circles; it is always to leave Egypt to cross the desert, in the hope of entering the Promised Land. For this, we need a guide; but the vagabonds, since they are going nowhere, they do not need a guide, do not accept advice from anyone. For those who do not know where to go, there are no favourable winds.

Pilgrims
Happy are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; the God of gods will be seen in Zion. Psalm 84:5-7

In the prehistory of our faith there has been countless pilgrimages: Abraham, the wandering Aramean who only possessed a grave that he bought for his wife, left his city in Mesopotamia to go to Canaan; the Hebrew people from Egypt, the land of slavery to the promised land of freedom and prosperity; the journeys to Jerusalem for the Passover.

After Christ, there have been Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Rome and Santiago de Compostela; in the Orthodox tradition, the Russian pilgrimage; already in our times, pilgrimages to Guadalupe in Mexico, Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Czestochowa in Poland; pilgrimage is a very important Christian practice because, in some way, it is a parable of life. To live is to make pilgrimages, a Christian must behave towards the world around him and his fellow men like a pilgrim.

A pilgrimage is a metaphor or parable of how human life should be lived. Abraham, our father in faith, was a wandering Aramean; the Hebrew people, by leaving Egypt, crossing the desert towards the Promised Land where milk and honey flowed abundantly, established the paradigm of human life.
•    Karl Marx – capitalism, dictatorship of the proletariat, classless society
•    Mandela – Apartheid, 30-something years in jail, president of a society of equals
•    Addiction – cleanliness, withdrawal syndrome, freedom

Unlike the fugitive, the pilgrim lives reconciled with his past, so he does not depend on it; unlike the vagabond, he has a goal that he intends to attain, so he lives the present moment with intensity, always knowing who he is, where he comes from and where he is going, he is never bewildered or disoriented, because his life is regulated as if he had a GPS.

The biblical man – In the Hebrew language the word "Nikud" means both future and backs; on the other hand, the word "Quedem" means both past and east/the direction of the rising sun. Therefore, we can conclude that the biblical man has the past in front of him and the future behind his back, that is, he walks with his chest and face turned to the past, with his back to the future.

With our eyes on the past because that is where our roots, our being, our identity are, we live moving towards the future, but we understand our life by looking at our past and through the past we orient ourselves toward the future. We know little or nothing about the future, which is why we walk backwards, that is, blindly; the only thing we know for certain in our future is death, but even then, we do not know how or when or where it will occur. For the pilgrim to remember is not to live; that is why he looks to the past not to relive it, but to orient himself, using in the present what he has learned from the experiences of the past, to find the best way to the future.

There is no evil that always lasts nor good that always endures – The pilgrim knows that life is made up of ups and downs, like the line of an electroencephalogram or electrocardiogram, he knows that on the way to God he can find both heaven and hell, but he also knows that everything is fleeting, so when he is on a high, he does not lose his head, and when he is depressed, he does not lose hope. At every moment and every place, he lives under the Lord’s protection, and therefore, he is constant, patient and faithful.

Conclusion - The Pilgrim is not like the fugitive because, he has no regrets, he is not tied to his past. Nor is he like the vagabond, because he lives committed in the present, in giving himself to a cause and to concrete people with the same intensity, as if it were his last day.

Contrary to the #Fugitive, tied to a past from which he flees, or the #Wanderer, uncommitted to the present, living without a future, the #Pilgrim is proud of his past, walks to the future with hope and fills his present with charitable deeds.  

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Settlers, Tourists or Pilgrims?

For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. Hebrews 13:14

Coordinates of human life
The human being is a spatiotemporal being. He occupies a space for a time, so that, as it happens in the universe and nature that surround and involve us, there is nothing stationary or permanent about human life. We cannot stand still in time or in space: life implies movement, a process, a becoming, a path, a change.

By the way we use and situate ourselves in space or relate to it, we can be settlers or tourists; the gospel, however, exhorts us to be pilgrims.

Settlers, tourists and pilgrims have in common the fact that they do not originate from the place they inhabit during their lifetime, but they have distinct ways of relating to their environments.

People were created to be loved, things to be used. Only the pilgrim embodies this truth in his life: that is, for him things are a means, so they are to be used and not to be loved, whereas people are an end in themselves, so they should not be used for any purpose, but loved simply because they are people.

Settlers have as an aim to get rich as quickly as possible. The end is things because they are enamored with them; people are rivals to be eliminated or used as means to achieve the end of being rich. They will probably leave a place after they have exploited it sufficiently, as well as the natives who live there.

Alternatively, tourists live focused on themselves and their experiences, so the goal is themselves and the pleasurable experiences they are having and accumulating. People are things and things are people. He is like the person who says he loves his pets and relates to them as if they were his children or friends, that is, he uses the same terminology he uses with people as he does with his pets, and in so doing he is objectifying people and personifying things or animals. The important thing is the pleasure that both things and people provide him.

The place where we live
With the Industrial Revolution, the mechanization of agriculture, the expansion of trade, and globalization, the Western world, and later the developing countries and the poorest countries, experienced unprecedented development at all levels: increased production, increased population, increased consumption, increased energy needs, increased means of transport, especially planes and cars, to the point that each family in rich countries has more than one car. Pollution and environmental deterioration have been the inevitable consequences of this mass development.

Our planet however did not increase and as such, the results of this rapid and excessive expansion soon became apparent, especially because of the "use and throw away" philosophy that has been prevailing for several decades. The concept of recycling is only recent and has not yet entered the minds of many, which is quite strange since recycling has always been the philosophy of life on our planet. Its inhabitants, however, have lived and many still live by the “use and throw away” philosophy – since it is cheaper to buy new than to fix what is broken. Cheaper for who? For the economy or the planet?

This planet is our common home. Human beings have yet to find a way to colonize other planets, so we either take care of the only one we have, or we commit cultural and ecological suicide, degrading the conditions of habitability to an unsustainable level.

The idea of sustainable development emerged at the first United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It is simple to know whether what we are doing is sustainable or not: we need only to ask ourselves if we can keep doing so and so over and over again, indefinitely. The first instance to ask is the environment - does it compromise the environment for generations to come? Secondly, we must ask whether it leads to economic growth.

And thirdly, we need to ask if this economic benefit is good for all or only some, whether it promotes peace, justice and social stability. So far, the wealth that some produce is proportional to the poverty it causes, that is, the more wealth the more poverty.

Development viewed solely as economic growth has destroyed the environment and caused profound social inequalities. For development to be sustainable, it must be three-dimensional, that is, the aspects of social justice and environmental protection must be as important as economic growth.

Settlers
Veni vidi et vincit, as the conqueror Caesar Augustus would say, the settler comes to conquer and possess both people and things. He conquers and exploits everything and everyone without scruples: the planet’s resources without caring about the ecology. In this sense, he has the mentality of the donkey that said, "After I die, let no more grass grow on earth”. He also exploits others, regulating himself by the only rule he knows: profit and personal self-interest.

The settler comes to stay or settle for a set time until he exhausts the resources to acquire the wealth he seeks. During the time he is not moving about, he clings to things and people like a tick. He may make friends with people, but it is always a self-interested friendship, he is a false friend because he does not put himself at the service of anyone or any human cause; on the contrary, he puts others at his service.

In the Bible, the settler is represented by Cain who is a farmer and therefore, sedentary, who has stopped searching, stopped travelling, and lives settled in life as if he has already reached the Promised Land, enjoying everything that life gives him as if he would never have to leave it behind. God rejected Cain and accepted Abel who was a shepherd, a wanderer, a pilgrim, detached from everything and everyone.

The settler lives installed in having more and more, he lives his life amassing, unreasonably increasing his means of living, mistakenly thinking that by having more means he will live longer or better. Settled in this world and in this life as if he would never have to leave it, he ends up dying without ever having lived, that is, without ever having known what life is really about. He did not cultivate the concept of being, but of having, not eternal life, but temporal and finite life in pure worldliness.

Tourists
Unlike the settler, the tourist lives superficially. Everything has the same value to him, whether things or people. He tries to have fun, he is not interested in owning anything or anyone, just photographs of everything and everyone, videos and memories of the places he visited that gave him pleasure or even joy.

For the tourist everything is a landscape and, being a passenger, the value of things is measured by their potential to amuse or satisfy his five senses. Therefore, everything that is exotic, erotic, unusual, eccentric, that produces strong emotions and causes his adrenaline to flow is what he considers valuable.

The tourist does not penetrate reality, he sees the world as if it were a theater or a movie that amuses him, but he neither knows nor is interested in what goes on behind the scenes. He does not commit to anything or anyone, he seeks fun and flees from anything that has to do with suffering and commitment. The tourist in space corresponds to the vagabond in time: he does not commit to anything or anyone, he is superficial.

The settler lives installed on having, the tourist lives installed on pleasure; things have value depending on the enjoyment they give and he looks for ever more sophisticated and refined pleasures. The past is photographic, the future is not yet. He is not anywhere, he enjoys the here and there, he lives centered on himself.

Superficial and snobby, the tourist reminds me of the story of a couple on their honeymoon who was sailing in a small boat through the Amazon River; they were so engrossed in the beauty of the rainforest that they lost touch with true reality. A hole developed at the bottom of the boat, and the it started to sink; meanwhile from the river banks crocodiles started to dive into the water towards the scene, the wife commented, "Oh honey, this is all so beautiful and chic that even the lifeguards are from Lacoste!"

Pilgrims
That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. Acts of the Apostles 10:37-38

Jesus, as the model of being human, is to be imitated not only in what he said and did, but also in how he behaved in relation to things and people. He went about the world doing good, he did not fix himself in a place where he had already gained fame and popularity, as his disciples intended (Mark 1:38). Nor did he stay with those over whom he had already gained power and wanted to make him a king (John 6:15).

He was committed to the Kingdom of God and its justice, Jesus lived not attached to anything or anyone, he went about the world doing good, sowing the seeds of the kingdom without fixing himself in any one place.

Once upon a time there was a man who went every day to fetch water from the river with a bucket in each hand. One of the buckets had a hole in it, so it reached home with only half the water. For this reason, the damaged bucket felt sad, inferior and even ashamed in front of its peer. Upon mentioning this to its owner, the latter smiled and said, "Have you ever noticed that the path on your side is full of flowers and there is none on the other side? Since I knew you were damaged, I planted flowers on your side and you were in charge of watering them every day..."

On our pilgrimage westward, towards the sunset, like the disciples of Emmaus, let us allow ourselves to be reached by Jesus, let him be our companion on the road, let him explain the scriptures to us and tell us the meaning of things. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, let us go in, inviting him to supper with us, to stay with us and He will break bread.

Not settlers, but rather immigrants who go to explore the way of the pilgrim, catches here and releases there, like the leaky bucket that drops water and leaves behind flowers; leaving something of himself wherever he goes. A parish priest from Loriga during his Easter visit visiting the homes of all his parishioners, rich and poor alike, collecting the money given to him in the house of the rich and leaving it in the house of the poor. In this way, on Easter Day he would trail through his parish leveling the wealth, being a factor of equality.

The pilgrim does not own things or persons like the settler, nor does he use and throw them away like the tourist; he is not settled in the here and now like the settler, nor does he travel through disinterested like the tourist. In his journey, he commits himself, giving himself totally to people and concrete human causes, but since he does not seek to be loved, but to love, he gives himself without being tied to the people he loves.

Many of the pilgrims of Santiago were playwrights who left music and joy wherever they went. Our language, the Galician-Portuguese, was born from these songs about friendship, love, mockery and cursing. Furthermore, the Portuguese way of the Camino de Santiago is embellished with Romanesque bridges and churches; the French way with churches and large Gothic cathedrals.  

A rabbi was visited by a pilgrim from the Holy Land, and on seeing that he lived very simply, asked, "Rabbi, where are your furniture? The rabbi stared at him and answered, "And where are yours?" "Mine?" replied the pilgrim, "I am a pilgrim”, and "So am I”, answered the rabbi ...

Pilgrim's grammar
As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:27-28

Since he does not seek to possess, the pilgrim does not use possessive pronouns, either with people or with things.

With people – He uses relationship pronouns. So instead of saying "my father", he says, "to me, he is a father, because this same person to my mother is a husband, to my grandfather a son, to my uncle a brother, to the boss an employee, etc."

With things – He uses administrative pronouns, for he is aware that in reality we are not owners of anything; of all the resources we claim to possess, including "our" life, we are only administrators, and of this administration we will one day give account to the true owner, who is God, the Lord of everything and everyone.

Personal pronouns - There are only three:  I, because I recognize myself as a person who is free and independent of everything and everyone, with rights and duties. YOU, my equal whom I consider an alter ego and, because he is like me, I must love him as I love myself. WE, as in the divine trinity, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, in the human trinity, the child proceeds from the father and the mother, and in the trinity of personal pronouns, ‘we’ proceeds from the union of ‘I’ and ‘you’.

Discriminative pronouns – These are the remaining pronouns called "personal", because in whatever context we use them, they discriminate. ‘He’ and ‘she’ are people who are not in my relational circle, which is not good because I should be open to everyone; the ‘you’ plural are others who are not from our group, who are not like us, and ‘they’ sound still even more distant than the ‘you’ plural. God is the Father of all, we are all his children, therefore we are all brothers and sisters.

Narcissism of small differences – It is what Freud calls the differences that we artificially seek, as if, to defend our idiosyncrasy, we have to annihilate that in others... There is much more what unites us than what actually divides us; if there was an extraterrestrial threat at any given moment, all of us, inhabitants of this planet, would forget those small differences and become what we always have been and always will be: one big WE.

Conclusion – The settler installed on having, lives accumulating things; the tourist installed on pleasure, lives accumulating pleasurable experiences. The pilgrim can be rich like the settler and enjoy life like the tourist, but he is not attached to anything or anyone, because he leaves a little of himself in places and with people he encounters.

The pilgrim is not attached to people or things like the settler, nor is he live without commitments like the tourist. The pilgrim is committed to people and to human causes to which he devotes his life without being attached to and dependent on anything or anybody.
                                                                                                                        Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC