Rediscovering the Places of Soul Hunger: Mother Angelini’s Words during the Synod
In today’s meditation, the Benedictine sister’s reflection focuses on the theme of “The Place of the Synodal Church in Mission”
Looking in the “human fabric” for spaces to proclaim the Gospel, the nun said, it is necessary to disassociate ourselves from “media conformisms and ‘empty observances,’ cultures ‘of appearance, which do not satiate’ and ”exhaust the younger generations”
For Jesus, “place” is wherever humans suffer, manifest or share “hunger.” Need excavates in humans a space of relationship where the Gospel can be proclaimed in truth: these are the places that the Synod Church is challenged to rediscover. Benedictine nun Maria Ignazia Angelini said this this week, Oct. 15, in the Paul VI Hall, giving a meditation on “The Place of the Synodal Church in Mission,” to prepare participants for reflection on the third part of the Instrumentum laboris, on the theme of Places.
The Gospel walks from threshold to threshold
Ecclesial rootedness in a concrete place, a context, a culture is “a knot that has troubled the earliest Christian communities from the very beginning,” in fact, “regarding the places of life, Christians,” Mother Angelini explained, “identified themselves, paradoxically, as ‘resident strangers.’ Thinking of the “places/symbols” of the origins (Jerusalem, Samaria, Antioch, Jaffa, Caesarea, Philippi, Ephesus) “immediately the dialectic that lies at the root appears: if the place of the Church is always a concrete space-time of gathering, the journey of the Gospel in the world goes from threshold to threshold, it shuns any staticity, but also any ‘holy alliance’ with the cultural contexts of the time.”
Lorena Leonardi– Vatican City