“Stir up the gift of God which is in you.”

“How shall we tell our brothers and sisters

that you are the God of life?”

Extract from the official declaration of the conclusion of the General Chapter

[…] ‘Stir up the gift of God which is in you’: these few words of Paul to Timothy prepared us for this Chapter and have continued to resound within us during these days… In them we can sum up all the Chapter work, and all the work that will come afterwards.

‘Stir up the gift of God which is in you’: we did this as, in the Constitutions, we tried to transform into words the charism we had received as gift. ‘Stir up the gift of God’: give it new life[…] The gift of God is the grace which comes to us, it is the Word which he himself puts into our hearts; the gift of God is the Blessed Trinity, it is God’s love, it is God himself. This gift is already in you. But what we think of, often, is what we have to do, what are our responsibilities, what is our own will. The gift of God is already in us every time we open our hearts [...] so we have to change our outlook, and look more at the gift than at ourselves […]

‘How shall we proclaim that you are the God of life?’ In these words we find our one mission and preoccupation: to be for the world and in the world before God. It is important to find and to learn ways of speaking to everyone about the God of life. When at times there are no words, there must still be an interior attitude, because in order to proclaim to our brothers and sisters that he is the God of life, we ourselves, first and foremost, must discover the God of life in our own lives.

[…] In today’s liturgy, the day on which we conclude our General Chapter, Paul writes to the Corinthians, ‘God is perfectly able to enrich you with every grace, so that you always have enough for every conceivable need, and your resources overflow in all kinds of good work’.

God is perfectly able to enrich us with every grace so that, having enough of everything, we may be able to realise the mission which has been assigned to us, all the good works we desire to do, all that we see to be useful for the good of our brothers and sisters ‘The one who so freely provides seed for the sower, bread to eat …’ See, this is what is really necessary: bread and seed. We have no need of anything else.

The bread is for our nourishment, the seed is for the mission: the seed is the Word, it is our life, and it is light. God will multiply this bread and this seed, God will give them. God will provide them and multiply them.

The only interior attitude I would wish us to cultivate before this gift is trust, trust in God, in him who is at our side, who walks with us. [...] Trust in him who is God-with-us, have certain trust that he will not leave us either in the great moments or the small moments of life; trust that the world’s whole history and our own small history are in his hands and in his heart.

‘Choisir avec toi la confiance’: these are words of a song we have heard in the liturgy of these past days. ‘To choose to have trust in you’. For ‘you’, God is meant; but it means you too, sister. Trust in God, that is, and trust among ourselves, each trusting the other in mutual service and responsibility. Only an attitude of trust can make bring life to its fullness.

The Gospel invites us: ‘Go out into the whole world’. We will go out into the whole world. In this full trust, let us take to the road again, with the bread and the seed that he gives us, in an attitude of gratitude and praise to the Lord for everything he has given us.

With the confidence that Catherine had when she said, ‘I want...’ because she knew that the Lord would give her whatever she asked; with the peace which Mother Gérine gives us when she says ‘God will provide’, I say to all of you, ‘Sisters, let us go…’

(Sr M. Elvira BONACORSI o.p. - General Prioress)