In the XVII century, the Jesuit fathers on mission to South America gave rise to the famous phenomenon of the reducciones. These were small villages in the middle of jungles that, with time, developed around a great piazza in front of the church. The three free sides then became populated with homes for the indigenous Guaranì, school houses or workshops for other trades, other spaces for the development of a beautiful life, that is, one ordered by God and towards God.
Visiting those places, one is struck by the beauty of the buildings made of stones that were often sculpted with images drawn from nature or Sacred Scripture, the intelligence with which they were constructed and the meaning that transpires through them.
The missionary fathers invited the various tribes to build these places together, for the glory of God and for the good of persons. They were places of which the Guaranì felt themselves to be caretakers, as well as protected by those who wanted to enslave them. Instead, in belonging to the Christian community, they were living a beautiful and free life.
The different stories come from the singular voice of God that calls each person to awareness of Him
The reducciones are a synthetic image of the beauty of the Church: a people called by God to build His Kingdom in which every man, sustained by the others, gives his contribution according to a unique and personal path, finding in this gift of self the realization of his existence.
This is the meaning of the word “vocation,” the word that, more than any other, as Fr. Giussani says, defines the life of man.
In these pages, there are different stories that, however, come from a single point of view or, better, from the singular voice of God that calls each person to awareness of Him through many encounters, many voices, many facts that in time take on a stable form, like that of marriage or of virginity.
Certainly, in every vocational story there are moments of instability, of difficulty or even of uncertainty. But these are situations that can become moments of grace, if one allows oneself to be helped and guided to arrive at a more profound discovery of the faithfulness of God. It is like being in a stormy sea: it is necessary to go even further down to rediscover that stability that allows us to continue to swim, to go forward.
Vocation always begins through an attraction. Pope Leo, this past April 26th, wrote that, in reality, “He is the Shepherd who draws us to himself, whose gaze reveals that life is truly beautiful when one follows him.” Perhaps at the beginning, one is not this aware, but, with time, every human attraction brings us, or it ought, to its divine origin, to Christ, the beautiful Shepherd.
Every form of vocation is thus the road that leads to Him, “to participate in His life, to share His mission, to be resplendent in His same beauty,” as our Holy Father also said.
“It is the Shepherd who fascinates: the one who looks upon Him discovers that life is truly beautiful if spent following Him.”
More and more often, I am profoundly amazed before the spectacle of young people, families and consecrated persons who give all of their life for Christ. In them, one can truly see a beauty of which they are just the vehicle, at times without even realizing it. Actually, this is normally the case because if there is a characteristic that all saints have in common it is that they do not realize that they are.
“It is the Shepherd who fascinates: the one who looks upon Him discovers that life is truly beautiful if spent following Him.” Every vocation is a gift, both for the one who lives it and for those who participate in it, because every man giving himself to Christ gives himself to the CHurch and builds her up, living his own vocational form according to his personal story, offering himself.
In this way, every particular moment of our days can be seen as a pro-vocation, like something that allows us to add a brick to the great edifice of God.
As happened to the Guaranì, the Lord, involving us in his “jobsite,” leads -a word that in Latin sounds like the cognate words from which the term reducciones derives- humanity to Himself, face by face, story by story, through a path that will be fulfilled at the end of time, when God will be all in all.
