The role of St. Daniel Comboni in our spiritual experience

Introduction

We are a consecrated missionary Institute whose official name is “Comboni Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus”. The constitutive elements of the name which form our spiritual identity are the mission, Saint Daniel Comboni and the Heart of Jesus. Of these three elements, we share two (the mission and the Heart of Jesus) with the entire Church and many other Institutes of consecrated life. Specifically ours is the role of St. Daniel Comboni – how he succeeded in uniting the mission and the Heart of Jesus in his spirituality in a way that is personal and unique. That which is specific to us, as his heirs, is his missionary experience and his specific way of living the spirituality of the Heart of Jesus in the Church. The experience of St. Daniel Comboni is, therefore, for us Comboni Missionaries, the criterion for interpreting and understanding the mission which we are called to realise in the Church, a practice of the mission which must reveal the Heart and the Cross of Jesus as the spiritual foundation of our actions.

The General Chapter and the Chapter Acts of 2009, paragraphs 19 to 21, make an excellent presentation of the inspirational elements of our spirituality defining thus the role of St. Daniel Comboni: “The Spirit, who raised in Comboni a love for the people of Africa, continues to guide us towards the poor and the forgotten.” (CA 2009, 19). Comboni’s love for the People of Africa was not a sentimental love but a love-agape coming from the Holy Spirit, from the depths of the Heart of Jesus. So it is that, as our Founder, St. Daniel Comboni is the repository of the central nucleus of the charism (Ratio 217), but it is through him that the Holy Spirit makes himself present and reveals to us that particular style of life and of mission that characterises our Institute in the Church. That is why he is an essential mediator (Ratio 32) of the encounter of the Comboni missionary with Christ: for the Comboni missionary he is the bridge between the mission and the Heart-Cross of Jesus.

In trying to explore the role of St. Daniel Comboni in our spirituality, I discover two elements which characterised Comboni as a missionary and which should be constitutive elements of the DNA of every Comboni missionary – the Heart as love and passion, and the Cross as love and common cause with the forgotten. Heart and Cross are inseparable in the spirituality of Comboni. These two elements are, therefore, the pillars of the spirituality of the true Comboni missionary. In this paper I simply wish to share my reflections and meditations on these two elements, as other Comboni confreres have done.

The heart as love-passion for the last

The 2009 Chapter Acts clearly state that “As Comboni Missionaries we discover in the mystery of the Heart of the Good Shepherd the reason that animates us to total self-giving and pushes us towards the poor and abandoned.” (CA 2009, 20). It is from Comboni that we have inherited this mystery of the Good Shepherd. It is through contemplating his missionary life and his marriage with the Heart of Jesus that we can comprehend the concrete meaning of the Heart of the Good Shepherd. Each Comboni Missionary interprets in his own way this mystery of the Heart of Jesus which animates him towards complete giving to the poorest and abandoned. Herein lies the riches of our spirituality, a spirituality which is alive and passionate and keeps us always in motion towards the others, especially the least in our societies.

Personally, since coming to Kisangani, apart from the formation of the postulants, I work with couples to promote Christian marriage and above all to accompany married couples so that the fire of the love that unites them may not die out. This experience of accompanying couples has given me a new and concrete understanding of the mystery of the Heart of Jesus. When we live marriage as protagonists we all know that it is a question of hearts which starts people moving towards joy. When at close quarters with a wedding, we become involved in the movement of celebration and, during the celebration, communication take place between hearts. In this experience of accompaniment of couples, I understand that the mission, with the Heart of Jesus as its spirituality, is the daily life of marriage. God, who acts as Spouse, tender, faithful and merciful by means of the Heart of Christ the Good Shepherd, reveals his passion for the poorest and most abandoned, saying to them through our ministry as poor Comboni Missionaries: “You are precious in my sight because I love you; I have loved you with an eternal love”.

This is the mystery of the Heart of the Good Shepherd which animated Comboni to give himself completely to the people of Africa. His only missionary objective was to prepare, accompany and promote the marriage between the God of Jesus and the people of Africa, telling them that they are of value in the eyes of God while they count for nothing in the eyes of the world. So, when I contemplate the Love and Passion of Comboni for the People of Africa, which reached the point where he solemnly announced to them that “the happiest of my days will be when I can give my life for you” (W 3159), I understand why the first of the signs given by Jesus in the Gospel of St. John is that of the wedding feast of Cana: “On the third day there was a wedding feast at Cana in Galilee and the Mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited” (Jn 2:1). Also Jesus was invited to the wedding with his disciples and it was there that the “first of the signs given by Jesus” (Jn 2:11) took place. By presenting the first sign of Jesus as that given during the wedding feast, John tells us that the mission of Jesus starts us moving towards the wedding of God and his people. With Comboni, this wedding has been celebrated by us on African soil “God, in fact, so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). And Comboni will add: “I have only one life to consecrate to the salvation of these souls: I wish I had a thousand to spend them all to such a purpose” (W 2271).

The Love-passion of God for humanity made visible in his Word made flesh took concrete form in the Love-passion of Comboni for the People of Africa. And the place where this love-passion of Jesus is realised is at the foot of Calvary, because it is there that “the great works of God are born and grow” (W 2325). It is at the foot of Calvary that the wedding of the Cross, in which Mary - the mother of Jesus-, Mary Magdalene, the good thief, the beloved disciple and the entire people of those who suffer take part. The covenant and the marriage is between the crucified spouse and the poor. This is why, in Comboni’s view, the mystery of the Heart of Jesus can only be understood by contemplating the cross. He invites every Comboni Missionary to undertake this contemplation and to acquire these essential dispositions “by keeping their eyes fixed firmly on Jesus Christ, loving him tenderly and constantly trying to understand more clearly the meaning of a God who died on the cross for the salvation of souls; and often renewing the offering of their whole self to God” (W 2892).

The role of St. Daniel Comboni is to be understood, therefore, through this Heart and the Love-passion which marriage reflects. My experience of sharing with couples has helped me to understand that the Comboni mission is to be lived within the dynamics of the marriage in which the Crucified Bridegroom and Good Shepherd opens his Heart with passion and love to enfold within it his beloved bride, the immense throng of the suffering, the poorest and most abandoned.

The cross as love

Common cause with the suffering of the world

St. Daniel Comboni lived a spirituality of the Cross so profound that he never ceased to say: “The way God has marked out for me is the Cross (W 6519). I am happy in the Cross which, when borne willingly out of love for God, gives birth to victory and eternal life” (W 7246). This experience of Comboni is for the Comboni Missionary the only source and strength of his making common cause with the innumerable suffering of our world.

Our confrere Fr. Justin Kakule Muvawa (a Congolese Comboni Missionary working in Egypt) has made a very pertinent reflection of our vows from the perspective of the mystery of the Cross and has published it on his blog (http://jemery.blog.fr/2011/04/ 18/la-croix-glorieuse-et-le-missionnaire-combonien-11022817/). I would like to share here his reflections in the context of this my reflection on the role of St. Daniel Comboni in our spirituality.

Meditating in depth the letters and writings of Comboni, it is possible to find him speaking explicitly of the evangelical counsels regarding the cross. In the rules of his Institute, he insists on the vows (especially the vow of obedience), to the point where he believes, as Fr Marani had taught him, that “those who trust in themselves trust in the greatest ass in the world” (W 6880). This relationship of the evangelical counsels with the Cross is developed in the spirituality of Comboni in the following manner:

1)               Obedience: obedience as a cross is understood by Comboni as the renunciation and limitation of personal initiative “because the gift of self, and the whole of self, in order to fling oneself into the arms of obedience and God, is not obtained without the extraordinary help of grace.” (W 3392). In this sense Comboni may desire the Cross and have others pray that God may send him crosses. Every missionary in mission, characterised by this filial obedience for love of God (W 1860), works confident in the Word of God and that of his representatives “as a docile instrument of his adorable will” (W 2702).

2)               Chastity: in the spirituality of Comboni, the meaning of the cross and the vow of chastity is most manifest in accepting the solitude that comes from the life of chastity. Comboni required of his candidates to the apostolate of the Vicariate of Central Africa a well tested chastity (W 2229; 2484; 2776). And this is only possible by the grace of God which alone is able to help us remain strong in chastity (W 6844). This is the way we must understand the idea according to which: “Having chosen Christ, he (the missionary) rejects whatever endangers his choice and he does not neglect to follow those rules of ascetical practice which are approved by the experience of the Church” (RL 26.4).

3)               Poverty: the relationship between the vow of poverty and the cross is more easily understood by observing the daily life of the missionaries who follow Comboni: living in a dimension of total dependence on the community and sharing all that one is and has. In this way, poverty united to the cross moulds the missionary, little by little, into a culture of communion, the fruit of openness to interculturality and education towards sobriety, voluntary simplicity and the ethic of limitation. This is a visible sign of the option for radicalism and evangelical austerity. This is what the acceptance of the Cross means: making common cause with the poorest and abandoned and accepting to live in this way. It is in function of this preferential option for the poor and to live concretely the relationship between poverty and the Cross that, following the Founder, both male and female Comboni missionaries carry out their pastoral work preferring underprivileged environments (shanty towns), among the poorest and most abandoned (such as the pygmies, street children, immigrants, hospitals, etc.). This is why Comboni wants his missionaries to be “fired with love which has its source in God, and with the love of Christ …” (W 6656), because “the true apostle never shrinks from the fiercest obstacles or the most violent contradictions, and, unflinching, he confronts the clouds of tribulation and the impact of the most ferocious storms: he marches to triumph on the path of martyrdom” (W 6382).

In so placing the evangelical counsels in relation to the mystery of the Cross, so dear to Comboni, the Letter of the three General Councils of the Comboni Institutes (n. 38) on the occasion of the canonisation of the Founder, St. Daniel Comboni, sums up these dynamics in these terms: “For us, the vows become the only possible response to so much love. They are a personal, unique and total response to a unique and total call and therefore less concerned with juridical ties, laws and moral codes, and more with the joyous awareness of having been accepted by the grace of God to be a part of the dynamic love of the Heart of God for the world. The idea that religious consecration is a diminishment, that it creates conflict or is simply an efficient tool added to mission needs to be dismissed. Consecration is at the heart of mission because it is in their consecration that missionaries, through grace, become the personal expression of gift. This gift is the most freely given, the most unselfish and the most steadfast in the measure in which it takes the form and the being of the heart of Christ and of the Cross. The gift that saves springs from a person’s deepest motivations and, therefore, it is in the three vows that everything leads back to the uniqueness of the person.”

To sum up, we may say that the missionary accepts from the scandal of the Cross that the works of God are born and grow through difficulties and sufferings of all kinds. Placing the crucified Lord at the centre of his life, the Comboni missionary courageously accepts the Cross at personal, community and missionary levels.

1)               At the Personal Level: we all have our own personal cross, our own psychophysical, moral and spiritual limits which accompany us, sickness or old age which prevents us from acting as we would like, and sin which requires continual struggle and conversion. The missionary bears the burden of all this every day, as well as that of the three vows which he must continually fight to perfect. For one, that which weighs heaviest is solitude, while for another it is the sharing of goods. Yet another finds that absolute dependence upon the community creates obstacles to that which he considers the best of himself and keeps him in a state of inertia. Every Comboni missionary faces one or other of these crosses and must bear it himself with God’s help. In all this, he learns to deny himself still more for love of Christ, to be conformed to him and to be more like his holy Founder, who himself said: “A mission so arduous and difficult (...) cannot survive with just a patina with people putting on airs of holiness, full of egoism and self-centredness” (W 6656).

2)               At the Community Level: another dimension is that of the communitarian cross. Confreres are our joy but also our torment. Differences in age, social condition, nationality and culture are assets that no one doubts. However, in daily community life these differences may be so many spears which pierce our hearts. Community life does not work by itself. It demands a great spirit of adaptation and sharing, a battle without quarter against individualism and narcissism as well as an unlimited ability to forgive and to receive forgiveness. This requirement of love remains the condition sine qua non to live in solidarity and enjoy fraternal communion.

3)               At the Missionary Level: a final dimension is connected to the provisional character of our being missionaries whom Comboni calls to be “useless servants” (Lk 17:10). In practice, our life is characterised by exodus and kenosis. To be always ready to leave. To suffer because of being far from one’s family – something which may become problematic in some cultures when parents become old or one is the only child. The Comboni mission is not only ad gentes but also ad extra and ad vitam. How hard it is to leave one’s socio-cultural and ecclesial environment to settle in an unknown land in which one is obliged to undergo, according to John Paul II, “a radical change of mentality” (Redemptoris Missio, n. 49) and “to overcome the conditioning of one’s own original environment” (Ibid, n. 53)! Is the exodus not always a cross? It was so even for the Israelites who were passing from slavery to freedom. Are not many missionaries tempted to lament the loss of the onions or the wine of their homelands? Under the same perspective, it is often necessary to forget the experience acquired elsewhere and to again become stammering in order to learn a language different from one’s own. In the local churches we must even “depend upon the local authorities who, in certain fields, may know less than we do.” (F. Pierli, Come Eredi)! Without true love, without accepting the cross as did the Son of Man, this kenosis seems impossible. Bearing all this in mind, we may believe that the Comboni meaning of the cross has still a long way to go, exploring new avenues and removing fears and doubts.

Our spirituality of the Heart and of the Cross is an unending question for us Comboni missionaries of today and we ask ourselves: what meaning can we give to so much suffering of which the majority of humanity is still bearing the burden? What is our proposal to the young People of Africa who are presently entering our Institute – fulfilling Comboni’s wish to “Save Africa with Africa” – so as to lead them to the interiorisation of the spirituality of the Heart and of the Cross? What must we do so that the young people who accept to become Comboni missionaries also accept the Cross and live and witness the love of Christ for his Body, which is the Church, and especially for the poorest and most abandoned? Herein lies the whole of the problem of the relevance of Comboni understanding of the Heart and the Cross of the Good Shepherd.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, we may say with the apostle Paul that the language of the Heart and of the Cross is always “folly” (1Cor 1:18), because it is the language of love which is irrational, even blind. Only the simple and the poor understand it because they live it (Psalms 118; 130). And Comboni understood this language, which is unimaginable and incomprehensible without the mystery of the Heart and of the Cross of the Good Shepherd. Comboni understood the Gospel of the Heart and of the Cross, discovering in it the place where God expresses Himself and gives Himself as “I love you with an infinite and eternal love”. The Cross is the common place for all disciples to love as God loves. And to love as God loves is not to be taken for granted since sin exists and from its origin weights so much on us that human love is almost always egoistic and narcissistic. The love of God, instead, is summed up in a symbol, in a design which Comboni has transmitted to us: a Heart and a Cross. Becoming a Comboni missionary means taking upon oneself this design, this sign of belonging to Christ and Comboni.

-                  The Heart and the Cross: this is the place of our birth where we move from the egoistic ego to the “I love you” of the Cross and the Heart of the Good Shepherd for the poor and the excluded.

-                  The Heart and the Cross: this is the place of our identity in Christ, with Comboni, of the paschal truth of our journey towards the Father, so that all those to whom we are sent may receive eternal life: “Father, I want that where I am, they also may be” (Jn 17:24).

-                  The Heart and the Cross: this design without pretensions, this sign of friendship is where we enter into the perspective of the Gospel where the viewpoint is the contemplation of the glory of the beloved Son of the Father: “that they may see the glory you have given me because you loved me” (Jn 17:24).

It is by adhering to this sign designed by Jesus and made concrete in our time by our holy patron that every Comboni missionary receives the mission of God for the world, that of preparing the wedding feast of the Crucified One with the poorest and most abandoned, that of showing the heavens opened and the Kingdom of God to the immense throng of the last ones. Understood in this way, the Heart and the Cross are not abstract realities. It is a question of the Cross of each one of us, as Comboni missionaries: that of my life, of my community, of my mission; it is that of Jesus, the Crucified, the Pierced One, the suffering servant who opens our eyes and urges us to go towards this immense multitude of those who are like Him, those who are daily marked with the seal of the cross and who are waiting to embrace the Good Shepherd by means of our poor persons: this multitude is that of the poor, the abandoned, the humiliated, the oppressed, those subjected to violence, the homeless, the traumatised victims of pitiless wars, and many more. Yes, in the heart of so many lives, these signs (Heart and Cross) of belonging to Christ and to Comboni shine in our darkest nights, lighting up our little faith and the whole of our existence as Comboni missionaries when we consent to give ourselves, to lose ourselves, to make of our lives a Eucharist, breaking daily our bodies and pouring out our blood to lead this immense multitude of the poorest and most abandoned to the pastures of the Good Shepherd (Psalm 22).

Fr. Joseph Mumbere Musanga, mccj