Bucaramanga (Colombia), 28/06/2018, Hna. Luz Karime Mancipe.- Sisters from five structures, Bogotá, Medellín, el Caribe, Santafé, Manizales and Bucaramanga attended the First Meeting on “Affective-sexual-integration in Consecrated Life” from June 27-July 3.
“We hold this treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Cor 4:7)
Brother Raphael Colomé Angelats, O.P., Regional Prior of the Vicariate of the Aragon Province of in South America, licentiate in Theology and Clinical Psychology gave the talks and led the group discussion after our personal reflection. The religious participating are from the generation of the first ten years of perpetual vows, who had started formation in the nineties and beginnings of the two-thousand years. They were born in the decades of the seventies and eighties and are 30-45yearls old. They would be the “young adult” of our Congregation. After their period of initial formation ended they were less ‘subjects of observation’ through evaluations, approval by votes, reports and Professions and became ‘subjects of their own history’. They had become of age in religious life with full participation in community and in the mission of the Congregation.
However, it is important to review the process of how perpetual profession was arrived at, if there are still pending debts, internal conflicts not met, personal, family, unsolved not healed congregational issues. There were doubts as to whether this ‘is my place or not’, even vocation doubts which needed to be confronted.
Here are some key points presented by Brother Raphael for a better affective-sexual integration in religious life:
•A consecrated life for a new culture and a new society
• A recovery of the prophetic value of religious life, our specific identity in the church and in the world
• Acquiring a human-spiritual-charismatic identity
• Theological virtues are the interior motivation by which the Spirit invites to live the following of Christ
• Personalizing the process of configuration with Christ
• Integrating affectivity: in the same way as a negative bond hurts, a positive bond heals The challenge is to care for the bond generated among the sisters in community; Integration of the sexed condition allows for a better control of sexual impulses and for an autonomous handling of the bonds
• The vows as a theological experience through which the person by vocation involvement may be united with God, may generate a theological bond with him producing an affective-theological bond, and from that experience gradually integrate all the areas of the person’s life. It is the bond of intimacy generated with God. A bond which may allow to live the trilogy: freedom-sin-grace, that is, the limits and tensions of life without breaking faithfulness..
This meeting was also the occasion for acts of thoughtfulness, integration, prayer, as well as for the joy of life and of mission through each sister in the Congregation.
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