Br. Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori OCist
Conference at the OCSO General Chapter, Assisi, 2022 February 10th
Synodality of communion
The awakening of synodality
Since Pope Francis launched the synodal path, recalling that synodality is part of the nature of the Church, I am increasingly aware of how much our Benedictine-Cistercian charism is marked by ecclesial synodality. We know how the Carta caritatis is a masterpiece of synodal conscience of our monastic family, and how much the Rule of Saint Benedict inspired this conscience and synodal experience in our first Fathers. I realize that this awareness and experience to which the Church, 60 years after the Council, seems to awaken, is causing in us an awakening of awareness and experience of our charism. In the concreteness of our chapter or other meetings, in the collaboration between our Orders and in the Cistercian Family, or more widely in seeking solutions to the problems and frailties of our communities, for example in regular Visits, we realize that no solution can give hope if it does not mark the beginning of a “walking together”, of a synodal journey, in which we find unity and energy in following Christ, the “way, truth and life” who calls us to follow him with love and trust.
«Thomas said to him: “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?”. Jesus said to him: “I am the way, the truth and the life”». (Jn 14:5-6)
We too always ask ourselves: “How can we know the way?”, the way we have to travel today, perhaps in the night or in the fog, perhaps after the roads that have been trodden for a long time, which reassured us, turn out to be impracticable, too steep for our forces, too slippery due to the mud so many of our errors or infidelities have covered them with. Many bridges have collapsed, many tunnels have been filled with debris, many paths have become too treacherous to walk on. Faced with all this, Christ’s response to Thomas, the bewildered disciple, resounds clearly: “I am the way, the truth and the life”. And he adds: “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6).
Thomas, like us, must realize that the disorientation in which he finds himself will not be resolved by the discovery of a new practicable and safe path, which may appear to him by a miracle, but by a Person present who says with certainty: “I am the Way!” Suddenly, Thomas and the other apostles realize that they were looking for the way scanning the horizon, the future, the space and time hidden by darkness and fog, when instead it was in front of them, there with them, sitting at the table with them. They realized, but for now without too much understanding, that the way was a journey together with Christ, a journey that began not primarily by building roads, bridges, tunnels, mountain paths, or tracks in the desert, but sitting, like Mary of Bethany, at the table of communion with Jesus and, through Him, of communion with the Father, in the Holy Spirit.
Synodality begins and is nourished in communion, and remains true and fruitful, remains Christian, if the path it entails constantly remains a journey together with Christ, and together with brothers and sisters in Christ.
Go! I am with you.
I realized that the final scene of the Gospel of Matthew describes the beginning of the synodal journey of the Church, with all the elements to live it.
«The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted. Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age”». (Mt 28:16-20)
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Jesus sends his disciples on a mission to all peoples and to the end of the world with the task of spreading the Trinitarian communion in humanity, baptizing everyone in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. He assures them that He will stay with them, that is, in communion with them, every day and forever. This immediately creates an indispensable characteristic of the Christian mission: that it can only take place in the communion of the disciples among themselves. In fact, Jesus says “Go” (latin : ite): it is a mission declined in the plural, which we must always live as an ecclesial “we” that transmits the great “WE” of the three Persons of the Trinity.
Even during his earthly life, Jesus never sent a disciple on mission alone, but always at least in two. It seems to me that the only time he let a disciple go alone was when he said to Judas, after giving him the morsel: “What you want to do, do it quickly” (Jn 13:27). The others thought that Judas had received from Jesus a mission to fulfill; instead, it was Satan, who had just entered him, who pushed him, to move his steps, to send him alone to betray the mission of Christ.
It is not only for a practical matter of mutual support that Christ sends his disciples two by two. In fact, when he sends them he gives them the power to heal the sick, cast out demons, raise the dead, survive poisoning, etc. If one has all these powers, even if he is alone he should be invincible. What need would he have for brotherly support? In reality, Jesus wants the mission of the disciples to witness a strength in weakness: “Go: behold, I send you as lambs among wolves” (Lk 10:3), and then adds that they must not carry money or reserves with them, useful tools for the mission. Yet he had just said that the workers are few (cf Lk 10:2). Instead of equipping them with defenses, armor, making them form a small army to defend their safety, he sends them helpless, unarmed, without protection, without means, exposing them to martyrdom.
The substance of the mission
All this highlights the importance of the one thing that Jesus allows to take with them in the mission: fraternal love, friendship, mutual care, in short, communion. The disciples do not need to be strong or to solve travel problems, but precisely to evangelize not only by speaking of the event of Christ, but also by transmitting it, by transmitting the experience, and an ongoing experience, not an experience only of the past, or perhaps that is promised for the future. Fraternal communion in Christ is the substance of the mission, of the whole mission of the Church, even of the mission of the monasteries. Communion is the motive, method and end; the origin, meaning and purpose of the Church’s mission.
Immediately after Judas leaves the Upper Room, Jesus speaks of this to the remaining apostles: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:34-35).
Communion is mutual love, loving one another. It is the love that Jesus kindled among his disciples, which he kindled in the Church loving us to the end, washing our feet, talking to us about the Father, and remaining truly present among us.
The indissolubility between communion and mission is expressed by two similar words of Christ, which are reflected as the two sides in the midst of which the whole paschal mystery of the Lord’s death and resurrection takes place:
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love”. (Jn 15:9)
«“Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit”». (Jn 20:21-22)
Communion is this Trinitarian love between the Father and the Son in the gift of the Spirit who is radiating by nature. Communion is communicated. Communion is by nature communication. And mission is the communication of communion. Without communion there is no mission. Communion is
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the substance of the mission. Only communion is then the subject of the mission. In the sense that if there is no experience of communion, a reality of communion, that is a community, even between two people alone, a being together, a “we”, if this is missing, the mission becomes like the light of those stars that have been extinguished for millions of years that reaches us now, and we delude ourselves that they exist. Instead, that light no longer has a source, it no longer has substance, there is no longer a subject who radiates it.
Dying to oneself to live in communion
Go … Baptize … Teach … “and behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Mt 28:19-20). Christ must always remain with us in order to nourish, by loving us as the Father loves him, the fraternal communion to be spread to all peoples.
I have the impression that the great crisis of the Church’s mission, at all levels, even in our monastic Orders, is not so much a crisis in missionary commitment, but precisely a crisis of communion, in living the communion of Christ. And we risk wasting the grace of this time if we do not understand what conversion to communion, synodality asks of us in order to be fruitful as a mission. In other words, I have the impression that in living the mission of the Church, at all levels, it is not so much the mission itself that is frightening, but communion. Why? Because in order to live communion, more than an external decision, more than an external commitment, we are asked for an interior conversion, we are asked to live a process that changes us in depth. Even mission certainly asks for an interior decision, asks for charity, asks for sacrifice, capacity for proclamation, for witness to the point of martyrdom. But it is above all communion that asks for a profound conversion of the self, a passage of a paschal nature, an entry into life that passes through a death. Because communion requires the passage from the I to the us, a passage in which the I must die in order to rise again.
We do not become “us” only by addition, but through a paschal transformation. The “I” does not become a “we” simply by adding other “I”’s to my “I”, as by adding other coins to the coin I have. In fact, Jesus choses the parable of the grain of wheat to explain how we pass from I to us: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life” (Jn 12:24-25).
Jesus recalls that fruitfulness consists in “not being alone”, in becoming a “we”. One is not fruitful if one is strong, beautiful, intelligent, numerous. One is fruitful when he lives communion. Whoever thinks he loves his life by loving his individualism, his comfort, his gain, his interest, his glory, loses it. This is why Jesus literally calls us to “hate”, not so much life, but the false, self-centered and autonomous image of the life that we carry within us because of sin.
Communion is scary because it implies death to oneself. When John writes in his first letter: “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Whoever does not love remains in death” (1Jn 3:14), in reality he makes us understand that in order for brotherly love to make us pass from death to life it is necessary to die to the false life of loving ourselves.
The steps of the resurrection
How does happen this rebirth to a communion that radiates the presence and love of Christ?
The more I meditate on the Rule of Saint Benedict, the more I realize that in it we are offered a process of conversion to the communion of Christ. The whole Rule proposes and re-proposes steps to grow in the life of communion, to pass through death to our false isolated “I”, to the paschal life of the “I” in the ecclesial “we”.
It seems useful to me, at the service of your General Chapter and of your choices and decisions, to meditate together on the short but intense chapter 3 of the Rule, because it describes precisely a
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method of synodality and of discernment of communion. It is a question of the convocation of the brothers to council. The verb used speaks of “to convene”, and for this reason it recalls the original meaning of the term “Ekkleisa”, as it was used in ancient Greece, to designate the popular assembly in which issues of general interest were discussed and deliberated and in which all citizens in full possession of their rights participated with the right to speak and vote.
The etymology of the word, as you know, involves the verb kaleo, to call, to invite, to summon, preceded by ek, from, out. It gives the idea of a convocation by election, an assembly to which one is called by personal appeal, by choice, or by right, as was the assembly of citizens in ancient Greece.
Christians have used this term to designate the community of believers in Christ, the new people of Israel, summoned to gather in an assembly of communion, both liturgical and sacramental and of discernment, at the service of the decisions on which to allow to continue walking together following Christ, great and good Shepherd of our souls.
When a particular community, of monks or nuns, or a community of communities such as our Orders, gathers, it must therefore renew its awareness of being Church, of being an assembly of persons summoned by God to live communion in Christ and to express it as a mission in the present time, adapting it to circumstances, reading the signs of the times. The abbot, the superior, has the responsibility to remember this first and to help the brothers to exercise a true synodality of communion.
As I said, this demands a conversion, a death to oneself, because it is above all in this way that both the superior and the brothers are called to pass from the autonomous I to the we, that is, to the I in communion, to the fraternal I.
I would like to underline in chapter 3 of the Rule of Saint Benedict three fundamental points of how this can happen. It seems to me that Benedict describes some fundamental dimensions of the synodality of communion that we all need to deepen and exercise, today more than ever in the situation in which the Church and our religious families find themselves. If we seem to lack vitality, perhaps it is precisely because we do not accept to pass from death to life through a process of fraternal communion.
1. Meet one another
The first aspect that catches the eye is the importance of meeting everyone. “The abbot is to convoke the whole community” (RB 3:1). It cannot be taken for granted that this concern is the starting point. I realize in my ministry that communities find it hard to meet one another truly, to gather, to come together to share what one thinks, what one lives, what one experiences. Yet, as I said before, this is in fact the fundamental characteristic of the Church: to be an assembly of persons with a calling, of people called to form an assembly, to be a “congregation”, as Saint Benedict here defines the community, that is, literally, a flock that is together, and therefore that recognizes only one shepherd, as Jesus says in chapter 10 of John: “I am the good shepherd, I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I have to lead. They will hear my voice and they will be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10: 14-16). As we sing in Ubi caritas : “Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor”.
Neglecting this in meeting is not a problem just of today: it already existed in the primitive Church, as the letter to the Hebrews denounces: “We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works. We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the custom of some, but encourage one another and this even more as you see the day drawing near.“ (Heb 10:24-25)
Something is deserted for two reasons: because it is not accorded importance, or because it is feared. I have more and more the impression that even behind indifference there is a fear, a fear of reality,
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because meeting, meeting one’s brothers, is an immersion in the reality of the other that reveals to me the reality of myself, and this scares. But when one is there, when one yields and obeys the reality of others, truly meeting them, normally the reality of the other manifests itself in its real beauty, and that it is good for me, a “very good” reality, such as God himself says after creating the other from Himself who is man (cf. Gen 1:31). Cain was afraid of living by constantly meeting with the goodness of Abel, so he kills him. If he had sought an encounter with his brother, if he had spoken to him, if he had listened to him, he would have discovered that Abel’s company could do him good, teach him to live better, to have a deeper, more generous relationship with God, more confident.
I am always moved by the scene of Jacob returning home with wives, children and many possessions, and learns that his brother Esau is coming to meet him. He is terrified of it. He no longer knows what tactics to use, what diplomatic trick to invent to make good a reality that he cannot imagine if not negative and hostile. But when he finds himself in front of Esau, he realizes that his brother loves him, that he weeps for joy at seeing him again, at hugging him, and that he has forgotten all the deceptions that Jacob’s cunning made him suffer by taking advantage of his rudeness.
“Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, accompanied by four hundred men. So he divided his children among Leah, Rachel and the two maidservants, putting the maids and their children first, Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last. He himself went on ahead of them, bowing to the ground seven times, until he reached his brother. Esau ran to meet him, embraced him, and flinging himself on his neck, kissed him as he wept” (Gen 33: 1-4).
The meeting of the Church, of our communities, should not be something that happens only when one is obliged. It should be the loving response to an invitation full of love, as when the king in the parable invites to the wedding of his son (Mt 22:1ff). How hard it is to gather with freedom and desire! With what little joy we often meet our brothers and sisters! Often we are not aware that the encounters in the Church, being together in the community, in the Order, do not have a political, functional, diplomatic, but theological nature, because it is an essential form of realizing the image in us and among us of God-Trinity that we are and that we are called, invited to become more and more. To be afraid of this, or to reject this out of pride, is literally “diabolical”, the work of the “divider” who wants to destroy in man the image of God that Christ has regenerated with death and resurrection and the gift of the Spirit of Pentecost.
People or communities who accept to meet open themselves to the surprise of a miracle of communion that the Spirit always wants to achieve in our midst.
2. Listen to one another
The second aspect that St. Benedict emphasizes in chapter 3 of the Rule, directly linked to the first, is that everyone has to been listened to. It is not only the abbot who must listen, otherwise there would be no need to convene the whole community, it would be enough for him to go around the monks to ask everyone to express themselves. But no, it is important that every member of the community listens to the whole community. Listening to one another in the Church is not so much a consultation but a sharing.
St. Benedict insists on listening to every brother, even the youngest, that is, the last, because the awareness of what is best, of what God wants from us, is a consensus that is reached by forming like a necklace of rings that intersect one another, and only when the last link joins the first, the necklace is formed, it is beautiful and solid.
The listening Saint Benedict speaks about is not a question of democratic rights: it has a theological importance. “We said to consult the whole community, because it is often to the youngest that the Lord reveals what is best” (RB 3:3). It is a question of listening to God, and by listening to God we are certain that we know “what is best”, the thing that has the greatest goodness, truth and beauty for us.
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Then, this awareness of God’s preference for the smallest, the least, the least important in our eyes or in the eyes of the world, becomes a discipline not only of the listening but also of the word. Each brother is invited to make himself small, to make himself “last”, to take the last place at the banquet of the sharing of the Word: “The brothers then express their advice with all humility and submission, without pretending to impose their view” (3:4). Here too there is the awareness that what opens us to the truth is not the affirmation of ourselves, of our “I”, but the affirmation of “we”, communion. Only a word expressed by an “I” who sacrifices itself to the “we” is an echo of the word of God, of the good will of God who wants what is best for everyone. The “I” that sacrifices itself to the “we”, in reality, expands, becomes greater, so much so that his word becomes the word of God, his will becomes the will of God.
This attention to listen to one another with humility increases communion, even more than making the best decisions. The problem is not so much to make always the right decisions, but to increase the consensus, the “feeling together” of the community, based on the “consensus fidei” that the Holy Spirit makes us perceive when we realize that the Word of God makes vibrate in us and among us the same love for Christ, way, truth and life. “Didn’t our hearts burn in us as he conversed with us along the way, when he explained the scriptures to us?” (Lk 24:32). This is the experience that we are always called to have together, because the Risen One remains present, continues to speak to us, walks with us.
3. Synodal authority: a thinking heart
The third aspect, in my opinion, is fundamental above all for living responsibility and being truly authoritative, that is, capable of making the community grow in the communion and mission to which Christ calls it. St. Benedict asks the abbot: “Then, after having listened to the advice of the brothers, think about it for himself and do what seems him most appropriate” (RB 3:2).
“Audiens consilium fratrum tractet apud se et quod utilius iudicaverit faciat”: this phrase is to be meditated. The superior is called to judge and to act, it is his responsibility and he must not dispense from it. But here St. Benedict helps us to understand that the good judgment and the good work of a responsible person, the wisdom of the heart and of the hand, as David’s Psalm 77 says – “He was for them a shepherd with an upright heart and he guided them with intelligent hand” (Ps 77:72) -, are the fruit of a resonance in the heart of what is heard from brothers and sisters.
“Audiens consilium fratrum tractet apud se”. We seem to hear St Luke when he says that “Mary, for her part, kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart” (Lk 2:19). Mary knew how to listen to God by listening to the words of the simple shepherds who came to adore the Child. The abbot is invited to do the same by listening to all his brothers, right up to the last.
This meditation “apud se”, this meditating with the heart, one could say in habitare secum, what is heard from all, is perhaps the most important, even if hidden, aspect of the synodality of communion, and I think it is not only required to the superior, but to each one. If the shared word does not descend into the meditation of the heart, it risks remaining only an idea, or an information. It does not become a seed that falls to the ground and bears much fruit, perhaps after a long time. In this interior and silent meditation, lived in prayer, the shared words come to life, they become fruitful, they become events, new realities, and processes of new life. I often see this level of synodality lacking in myself and in many superiors. But if this “reflecting in oneself” the words we exchange is lacking, we remain at a political, perhaps ideological, level of ecclesial and community life, of the life of our Order, and then ecclesial life remains fragile and dissipated, without true unity , at the mercy of power struggles.
Etty Hillesum wrote in the Westerbork camp, after listening to her companions complaining in the night: “I would like to be the thinking heart of an entire concentration camp” (Diary, October 3rd, 1942). Yes, that’s it. Listening to one another by offering to words, complaints, advices, ideas, projects of our brothers and sisters our heart that listens, that thinks, that meditates, as if to offer words the soil in which to germinate and bear fruit for the Kingdom of God.
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Almighty love
However, I cannot conclude this modest meditation of mine without thinking of the saint we commemorate today and her last meeting with her brother Benedict (St. Gregory the Great, Dialogues II:33). Scholastica and Benedict allowed themselves a small annual fraternal “synod”, during which they praised God and held “sacred talks”. When night falls, Scholastica insistently invites her brother to continue this exchange until the morning “to talk a little about the joys of heavenly life”. Benedict does not want to listen to her, out of rigid fidelity to monastic discipline. We know how St. Scholastica’s prayer caused an immediate storm that forced Benedict to stay with her. “Thus they spent the whole night watching and satisfying each other with sacred talks of spiritual life”.
When Benedict reproaches Scholastica for having caused this irregular situation, her sister replies with her well-known phrase: “Well, I begged you, and you did not want to listen to me; I implored my Lord, and He listened to me”. The great and concise final comment of St. Gregory is: “And if John says that ‘God is love’, it was a very just judgment that the one who loved more could do more”.
This episode reminds us that the true fulfillment of every synodal and fraternal process is not only the consent of words and judgments, but that of love, the consent of communion in God’s charity. Often we fail to listen truly to each other, to walk together to the end, and even more in loving one another. But God repairs everything, renews communion, makes the journey continue by giving an almighty love to whom who pray to him and love him as “his Lord”.
“I prayed to my Lord and He listened to me”.
Saint Curé d’Ars says in one of his simple but intense thoughts: “Our Lord is pleased to do the will of those who love him”.
God listens to those who love him, he obeys our beggars’ love.
Perhaps we forget too often to love Christ so that he allows us to walk together in his love.