We are all called to service in Teams, in our families or elsewhere. And so it is always good to recall what is "The Spirit of Service"
1/ Every service rendered is a gift received and a response to a call:
Every service rendered follows on our "yes"; it is the result of our response to a call. It is the Lord himself who calls! One does not "assume" a service: it is given to us. We are not owners of this service; it was entrusted to us. There is no way that we can say: "When I took on responsibility for the Sector, for the Region..."
Jesus said to Pilate: "You would have no power over me had you not received it from on high" (Jn19: 11); "Whoever serves must do so with the strength that God supplies" (I Pt 4: 11).
It is through being aware of our insignificance, of our inadequacy that we say "yes" to a call because we know that we will not be alone.
When we accept a service, we receive it as a gift. It is a present the Lord gives us (so why refuse?). We give thanks for this gift by asking the Lord to make us his humble servants.
2/ A call to commit oneself, to give of oneself; a call to conversion
When we accept to provide a service, we accept to become an instrument of the Lord: "It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me",said St Paul (Ga 2: 20).
We are never truly ready to take on a responsibility, or to provide the service that it entails. No one is worthy of the responsibility conferred. Like Mary, we surrender to the will of the Lord (Role of the Sector Couple).
To serve is to GIVE ONESELF. It is an act of surrender into the hands of another person: "Go, sell what you own... then, come follow me" (Mk 10: 21). To serve is to accept to become the Lord's instrument; it is to allow an Other to act through me.
To serve is a call to conversion. We must follow a different way... We postpone other projects until later. We review our way of life. We surrender part of ourselves. Jesus is the door to conversion.
To start a service is to make an act of humility. Every service is a school of humility. St Paul referred to himself as "God's puny creature".
To agree to serve is to agree to die a little for others; it is to agree to give them something of our life, of our work, of ours skills, of our time; it is to give of ourselves freely, in a joy-filled sharing without reserve (Role of the Sector Couple).
3/ The first to be served is the Lord:
"Guide me, Lord, to do your will".
"A spiritual responsibility can only be seen as having been received from the Lord. It cannot be usurped, that is to say that we must remain in union with Him who has entrusted it to us" (Father Tandonnet - former Spiritual Counsellor of Teams)
"And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me" (Mt 25: 40).
4/ Every service is nourished by prayer:
"If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross and follow me" (Mt 16: 24).
"Action and prayer come from the same stream that has its source in Christ who leads us to Heaven with those we meet. Contemplation does not paralyse action but animates and enlightens it. Action does not distract us from contemplation; it draws us to it. A life full of light and ardour reveals to us the Master who is its source better than any speech. An apostle begins to experience a zeal that nothing can discourage, a sympathy for people that no coldness diminishes, a fervent love that others' inconsistent attitudes can dampen.
In one life are united the objectives of mystical contemplation and of missionary conquest" (Jules Lebreton SJ).
5/ We cannot serve unless we rely on the Holy Spirit:
It is customary to say, as Jesus did: "Which of you intending to build a tower, does not first sit down..." (Lk 14: 28).
"We need to know who it is who leads us. If it is not the Holy Spirit then, try as we may, there will be no substance or taste in everything we do. But if it is the Holy Spirit, there will be sweet mellowness that gives inexpressible pleasure. Those who let themselves be led by the Holy Spirit experience a kind of happiness. Souls indwelt by the Holy Spirit are never bored in God's presence; an outpouring of love comes out from their heart.
Without the Holy Spirit we are like a stone that lies on the road. Take a sponge soaked in water in one hand and the stone in the other and squeeze both equally. Nothing will come out from the stone whereas plenty of water will pour out of the sponge. The sponge is like a Holy Spirit-filled soul whereas the stone is a cold and hard heart in which the Holy Spirit does not dwell.
The Holy Spirit wants to lead us to heaven. We only need to say yes and let ourselves be led. Take a rifle. You can load it but it needs someone to fire it. Similarly, there is in us the possibility to do good. It is the Holy Spirit that pulls the trigger and good deeds result" (St John-Marie Vianney)
6/ We cannot serve without discernment, without listening:
Service is rooted in listening and, to begin with, in prayer. It is the Holy Spirit that helps us to discern. To discern begins by listening, listening to others and listening to the Lord. The big danger is to set out full of enthusiasm convinced of being on the right track. Whereas, what really counts, is to be on the Lord's track and not on ours. What counts, is not to act ‘for' God but along with God, according to God's plans and as part of God's work.
It is a service carried out in collegiality that it is enriched by others' ideas, others' creativity. To serve is also to take decisions in collegiality and in discernment. The Lord speaks, the Spirit blows... but in "the gentle breeze". This requires us to stop, to take time regularly to pray and to listen. Service in Teams is done as a couple, helped by conjugal prayer, reading the Word and the Sit-Down.
To serve is to have both our eyes open and shut.
7/ Fear not! God gives to us in abundance:
The Lord does not simply call us, he gives us the means: "My yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Mt 11: 30).
To serve is an opportunity to make the talents the Lord has given us bear fruits and he gives us the means to do so. To serve makes us grow. When we give everything, we receive everything from the Lord.
Do not be concerned about what tomorrow brings. The Lord will provide. How many examples do we know about? How many testimonies have we heard off? We often think about Mother Teresa's testimony:
"He who keeps what he has becomes poor. He who gives becomes rich".
"You are enriched by what you give".
"No more false pity, no more of the same empty prayers, no more talk of an inaccessible God! We have found the religion of Jesus. It is God who brings things about. If we follow him, however little we give him, he loads us with his gifts. Anyone who is alone becomes surrounded by a hundred mothers, a hundred fathers, a thousand brothers and sisters, and by all God's gifts which he distributes to those who have nothing" (Chiara Lubich, ‘Doing the Father's work').
"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. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it". (Jn 14: 12-14).
8/ Let us be "Useless Servants":
"I think that if God finds someone even more useless than me, he will do even greater things through her because it is his work" (Mother Teresa).
In serving we are servants. We plough the earth, we sow the seeds but what makes them grow is water and the rays of the sun.
"Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12: 24).
We are indeed responsible, but like Jesus, we are servants first of all. Has not every Pope called himself for centuries: "servus servorum dei", the servant of the servants of God.
Making one's talents bear fruit:
"Each of us has particular gifts, whether known or unknown, whether acknowledged or not... It is only a matter of allowing oneself to be guided and to say ‘yes'. This ‘yes' is not just on the first occasion but every time that we pray to the Lord, every time that we let ourselves be guided by him, every time that we act in the spirit of the Lord.
What does it mean to say ‘yes'?
It means to give everything and accept to be nothing. To walk down one by one the steps of our vanity. To accept humbly our limitations. Stripped of everything, to learn to receive and to let oneself be guided by the will of God.
Would you give everything?
Wealth has blinded me. I was relying too much on myself. When I met the Master, I did not know that he was God. It took me ages to understand. It is not a matter of getting rid of everything for the pleasure of being destitute. It is not a matter of despising gifts from Heaven, but to free oneself from the slavery of things so as to discern more readily what is essential."
(F.-X. de Villemagne, Eastern Pilgrim. On foot to Jerusalem)
"Each one of us is a humble instrument... You can wear it out using it; you can even kill yourself using it, but so long as it is not mixed with love, it is useless. To work without love is slavery... We must not be afraid of the love of Christ, of loving as he loved. However humble and unassuming our work, let us make it the love of Christ in action".
"However wonderful your work may be, be detached from it and always ready to give it up. What you are doing is not yours. The talents God gave you are not yours. They were given to you to use for the glory of God",
(Mother Teresa, ‘There is no greater love')
"The servant must not claim for himself the master's rights. Was some great dignity been conferred on you? Have you received some ecclesiastical power? Do not be puffed up because of it! It is not you who achieved the glory but God who clothed you with it. Look on it as though it belonged to someone else; use it without abusing it or divert it from its proper end. Do not be puffed up, do not make it yours, but consider yourself poor and without glory...
(St John Chrysostome)
To conclude this paragraph, let us quote St John the Baptist.
"He must increase and I must decrease" (Jn 3: 30).
9/ Through our service, we bear witness to God's work and to his Love:
Our service bears witness to God's work and to his love. Graces abound in the footsteps of Jesus. God needs us and we need him. Is it not what defines the Love of God that he loves us so much that he has totally abandoned himself to our action.
We have the grace of becoming the witnesses of the Lord's work.
It is not I who serve but Him. His own works are immeasurable and His actions are multiplied to infinity!
10/ A call to love:
Let us know how to give thanks for this responsibility that we have received. Through serving, God gives us the possibility to love. And not only the possibility but the duty to love: "If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Co 13: 1).
Through the call to serve, we receive a call to love more: to love the Lord more, to love our brothers and sisters more: "Peter, do you love me?"... "Feed my lambs" (John 21: 15) - (Role of the Sector Couple).
"What have we to learn? To be gentle and humble. If we become so, we will learn to pray and in learning to pray, we will belong to Jesus; and belonging to Him, we will learn to believe; and believing, we will learn to love; and loving, we will learn to serve". (Mother Teresa - There is no greater love).
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The Book of Ben Sirac, the Wise Man (2: 1-9)
01 My son, if you come to put yourself at the Lord's service,
prepare yourself to experience trials; 02 acquire an upright heart and hold fast; do not be troubled at times of adversity. 03 Attach yourself to the Lord, do not forsake him, so as to be loaded with blessings in your last days. 04 Accept all adversities; be patient in the set-backs of your poor life; 05 since gold his tested in the fire, and people pleasing to God, in the crucible of poverty. 06 Put your trust in him, and he will come to your help; follow a straight path and put your hope in him. 07 You who fear the Lord, rely on his mercy, do not stray from the path for fear of falling. 08 You who fear the Lord, put your trust in him, and you will not miss your reward. 09 You who fear the Lord, hope for happiness, eternal joy and mercy.
Satellite Teams
Tó and Zé Moura Soares
Couple responsible for Satellite Teams
Here we are again to speak to you about Satellite Teams. As the couple responsible for coordinating Satellite Teams, we would like to tell you that their work during this ‘Year of St Paul' has been very interesting. It is through meditating on and following the journey of this great apostle that we have found the courage to carry out this service. We are comforted in the knowledge that his life was not a legend but that it has been historically proven. His successive journeys and his formative and encouraging Letters give us the support that saves us from being discouraged.
Today, as yesterday, we must remain faithful to the Spirit and to our vocation. And so we can tell you that he is the great support as well as the greatest challenge on which we base our service in the Satellite Teams. As you know, Satellite Teams are composed of several couples from around the world who work freely and with Love in faithfulness to the spirit of Teams.
Just as Paul makes a great appeal to faithfulness in several of his letters, notably in his second letter to Timothy, so we too need to be faithful to the charism of Teams in these troubled and changing times in the world in which we live. The Satellite Teams seek therefore to be faithful to the teaching, the spirit and the service of Teams.
Faithful to the Teaching, in these troubled times;
Faithful to the Spirit, at a time when the values of our consumerist society seem to triumph;
Faithful in Service, at a time when commitment is unknown and when everything is "easy" and "relative".
To remain faithful to the spirit is a hard task but it is made attractive by being prophetic. To serve is to put one's heart and soul into it and this is what the couples in Satellite Teams do. Through accepting this responsibility, the couples in Satellite Teams have gone out to meet others and opened themselves to them.
As you know, Satellite Teams work on subjects requested by Super Regions, although they are directly linked to the International Leading Team that coordinates their work through us (the signatories of this letter).
Much teamwork has been done during the past year, making slow progress. We can now tell you that this work is progressing at a good pace, guided by the Spirit, in an attitude of listening, giving generously and discovering so as to be able to contribute to joint discernment.
The "Teaching" Satellite Team
By helping us to obtain a deeper understanding of Teams methods, it helps us to be open to interpersonal relationships and to share with other couples the way to follow Christ.
The "Formation" Satellite Team
After having completed the first document requested by Super-Regions, it is pursuing its work of discerning and suggesting useful models for formation to develop in a spirit of faith, hope and charity.
The "Father Caffarel" Satellite Team
In a spirit of love, this team has produced a booklet giving the main thoughts of the founder of our Movement.
The "Older Teams" Satellite Team
Our Movement does not impose a particular spirituality on couples. It can only suggest orientations for life to help them to follow the path that each must make to grow in the love of God and to progress towards HIM. It is on this theme that this Satellite Team has worked and discerned so as to offer us lines of thoughts so that it will be easier to love in sweet intimacy with the Lord in a phase of life when all could be more difficult.
The "Young Couples" Satellite Team
Since the future belongs to young couples, we would like you to know of the enthusiasm of this Satellite Team, immersed in great love and a speed typical of their age. The result of the questionnaires sent to all Super-Regions was the starting point for the drafting of a document in which, in faithfulness to Teams, an itinerary will be offered which is logical, attractive and adapted to the times in which young couples live today.
Here is therefore the path that Satellite Teams have followed. Like us, their couples are pilgrims who, in the internationality of this journey, try to live out a strong community experience.
The new year that began a few days ago calls us once again to conversion. ‘Conversion’: a word often used but difficult to understand and live up to. Formerly, it was easier. To be converted had a precise meaning: to choose a particular Creed in preference to another, or to repent from a rather dissolute life and return to the straight path, or - better still - to make a good and holy confession! Today, things are more complex because each one of us is called to a constant conversion and the adjective ‘constant’ changes everything! It is no longer therefore a once-and-for-all initiative or single choice, but it is a matter of an attitude of life that commits us on a daily basis.
To be converted means to seek God. What does seeking God mean today? It necessarily entails “discerning what is God’s will today”, to what is he calling us today? In what direction and towards whom do we need to ‘con-vert’, that is to say, to turn? We need to have a listening ear to the world and to listen to the deepest expectations of our brothers and sisters. We need to take their desires and quest seriously. We need to understand what lights up their heart as well as, on the contrary, what arouses fear and mistrust in them. “Discerning what is God’s will today” requires a genuine commitment on our part. It means being willing to make a generous effort to come out of our self and look at others. “Discerning what is God’s will today” requires a commitment to “get close”, that is to say to be constantly willing to seek an encounter with the ‘other’, to make oneself a ‘neighbour’. This means to draw closer to someone and be prepared to enter into a two-way dialogue, being willing to abandon our personal agenda, our selfishness, our individualism.
Today, more than ever, the word ‘conversion’ cannot exist without the word ‘reconciliation’. There is no peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness, no conversion without reconciliation. These two words are closely connected. Indeed, what act of faith, what testimony of faith, what life of faith would be possible without a genuine and free relationship between people? How is one to seek God other than by seeking a God incarnated in history, in the human face of Christ? What sort of conversion to God would exclude a relationship with our brothers and sisters?
Is not the greatest step to faith for people today the awareness that God does not ask us simply to love him for Himself but to love him through other people? Our faith is not credible if it does not call into action our capacity to forgive, to welcome, to let ‘the other’ live in us whether this ‘other’ is someone close or distant? No true relationship is possible if it is not built upon a constant reconciliation of the diversities that characterise our society, that sometimes complete us or, at other times, distance us, but which enrich us in any case. Conversion is an ongoing initiative of convergence between possible diversities. Would ‘uniformity’ really bring about the fullness of faith?
Conversion is also a favourable time for personal growth and not only in faith. In our journey of discovery, failure becomes a help to reflection, disorientation can lead to looking into oneself, and repentance can become a search for alternative ways to give direction to our lives. Conversion can give substance to our lives that have become monotonous and insipid.
It may seem simplistic to speak of rediscovering values and meaning to life just as it is self-evident to affirm that society must re-stabilise itself around shared ideals. We are all agreed on this… perhaps? But it is only once we have felt the necessity to progress from “I” to “we”, from individualistic thinking to community thinking, that we will perhaps succeed in experiencing a new time of conversion.
The adjective “constant” linked to conversion then re-appears vested with new significance. We, men and women, are called to pursue in a constant way our human journey to the end. At every moment, life brings us something new, questioning and challenging us. It expects new answers from us. It transforms us. From this point of view, we are all converts and we all want to be people on our way to conversion right to the end. All of us, couples and priests in Teams, are called to respond once more and with renewed commitment, to the call of conversion so as to be mirrors of God’s love in a world that is ever more “hungry” for love.
