“Everyone who belongs to God is fully equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:17) Jubilee Year 50 years in Your Word Week 1 - Feb. 11-17, 2013 Objective of the week: To discover the importance of two of the most important means we have to carry out our apostolate: the School of the Word and the School of Apostles and to be enlighten on how to improve the effectiveness of these means in our apostolate
IntroductionThe life of Saint Paul which we have deepened for the last three weeks serves as a great inspiration for us Verbum Dei. In fact, he is our patron saint, the model we have of how to be Verbum Dei and how to be apostle of Christ and to form other apostles. The next three weeks we will pray as community on two of the main means we have in Verbum Dei through which we carry out our mission and we will have the Holy Spirit the grace to examine if we are living those means with the due intensity and quality. Those means are: the School of the Word and the School of Apostles. In this near end of the Jubilee year, each of us has collected "grace after grace" in this celebration. Many have been the facets that we have been proposed as guidelines for our spiritual journey throughout this year. We now propose to taste and to savor in depth our way to do apostolate. One of the objectives of our founder Jaime Bonet was the dream that the Verbum Dei would have a unified but not uniformed method of doing apostolate. That is the reason why he lived with intensity his tireless missionary travels around the world. This week we bring to you the living voice of the founder about the School of the Word. During the week some meditations of Jaime will be presented from the notes of Jaime Bonet himself. We propose them to you so we can pray, revitalize and spread what internally structure and unifies us as Verbum Dei. We have divided the chosen texts into two blocks: the School of the Word (SoW) and the School of Apostles (SoA). This week will be focus on the first while the next two weeks will unfold the latter. May Jaime Bonet, the great master of the Verbum Dei School of the Word and School of Apostles help us fall in love more and more with the charism received. MondayOur Mission: Give Life Through the Word Our own dedication is to conduct SoW in different places and in different ways with the objective to introduce everyone into the Divine Life. We know that this is the greatest fulfillment of man. There is much ignorance of this Life and that is why it is not valued: «No one loves what he does not know». Our dedication is not just preaching or just to do apostolate, but rather we aim to spiritually unite everyone’s life with God in order to have and to give life. In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light… (Genesis 1:1-19) After making the crossing to the other side of the sea, Jesus and his disciples came to land at Gennesaret and tied up there. As they were leaving the boat, people immediately recognized him. They scurried about the surrounding country and began to bring in the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. Whatever villages or towns or countryside he entered, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak; and as many as touched it were healed. (Matthew 6:53-56) For Reflection: How often do you preach in the SoW? If you do not preach, are you helping in some way or another in any SoW? TuesdaySchool of dialogue Love comes through relationship and dialogue. That is why the SoW is a school of prayer and of dialogue, in silence and meditation, so that God may fill the heart of the person. «Not much knowledge fills and satisfies the soul, but the inside savoring of the things of God». The objective of the SoW is to put people in contact with Christ through the Word of God. … You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” He went on to say, “How well you have set aside the commandment of God in order to uphold your tradition! For Moses said, Honor your father and your mother, and Whoever curses father or mother shall die. Yet you say, ‘If someone says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is qorban”’ (meaning, dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many such things.” (Matthew 7:1-13) For Reflection: How is the time of silence in the SoW we attend or handle during the week? Do the attendees have the opportunity to experience the sweetness of the dialogue with Christ in the SoW? Ash WednesdayTalking about friendship Our mission is that they may know Christ; The purpose of the SoW is to teach people to talk with Christ as talking with a friend. It consists in talking all with them (Trinity). It is simply speaking with them in those intense silent times without being superficial, in order to get to know his will in us. Because if the Trinity does not solve us our problems and crisis, who is going to solve them? …“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you…(Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18) For Reflection: Are the SoWs encounters of friends where the people feel excited to spend time talking with the Trinity? Thursday - Valentines DaySchool of Consecration Through the Sow we enter into communion with Christ so He may consecrate us. It is a qualitative change of mentality, values, the whole being. It is in the consecration that lays the effectiveness of our mission. This does not happen if Jesus does not attract us to him out of love. The consecration is the forge of prayer. It is what gives efficacy to my mission, to see lives totally transformed, that love and create communion, forge-consecration, so that they may be consecrated and be a link of union to a broken world. Jesus said to his disciples: “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” Then he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?” (Luke 9:22-25) I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” (Deuteronomy 30:15-20) For Reflection: What are the visible changes I have seen in my life because of my participation in the SoW regarding my being more and more consecrated to God? FridaySchool of Responsibility for this mission The divine life is only understood by their fruits in us; they give reason for it. Therefore, if we do not dedicate ourselves fulltime to the prayer and ministry of the word, we are cause of atheism (GS 19), because we do not connect people with Christ but with ourselves. At the bottom we are using Jesus for our plans, because we have other interests. Our goal is that they may live of Christ (Dt 6.4): listen to the word of God, meditate it, announce it and give it to your children. …This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke; Setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed... (Isaiah 58:1-9) The disciples of John approached Jesus and said, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast much, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus answered them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.” (Matthew 9:14-15) For Reflection: Do I realize that I have a responsibility for this mission? Do I agree with Father Jaime that if I do not collaborate with this mission I am a source of atheism? SaturdayTranscendence of the SoW The SoW is not in order to have an experience of God and no more, but its own aim is that the person may grow secure in the following of Christ, in being his disciple. Prayer in the SoW is not so much study and insight into God's Word, but only as it tends to reach an intimate relationship, familiar and like a espouse with the Divine Persons and Mary. They are exercises of dialogue and relationship to live and practice the faith, until it becomes the climate and habitual environment of living and relationship with them.
Jesus saw a tax collector named Levi sitting at the customs post. He said to him, “Follow me.” And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him. Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were at table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes complained to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus said to them in reply, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.” Luke 5:27-32 Comments are closed.
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