Introduction

Before speaking about the spirituality of the AMM, allow me to speak a few words about spirituality in general, and more concretely, about Christian spirituality.

The term spirituality in a Christian context can be defined as the personal relationships of a concrete, historical person with God, with all that these relationships include as attitudes and forms of expression, considered above all from a subjective point of view.

Spirituality is the complex of strong motivations, deeply rooted in the Gospel, which ground and give meaning to our hope, to our fidelity, and to our commitment to the Church, to live out the following of Christ, strengthened by the Holy Spirit.

It is a historical way of understanding and accepting the Gospel, the path of Christ through this earthly life, a life characterized and guided by the Spirit. Because of this historical dimension, spirituality is not ethereal. Rather it is something which we must constantly deepen in order to give a Gospel-based response to the needs of the human person, taking into account the socio-cultural context in which he or she has to live the life of a believer.

Spirituality will be defined according to our attachment to Christ by a personalized faith lived in communion with other believers.

Centering ourselves more concretely in Christian spirituality, we can say that it is a style or way of living a life in Christ and in the Spirit, which is welcomed in faith, expressed in love, and lived in hope, within the ecclesial community. A theologian, who is a specialist in this area, defines it as “a way of living inspired by the Spirit, motivated and rooted in the way that Jesus lived his earthly life”.

To summarize, I would say that spirituality, in the life of the baptized, is all that which has been enlightened, marked, or led by the Spirit of Jesus. The Spirit is always the true and ultimate protagonist. The history of spirituality has pointed out clearly that all spirituality comes from the action of the Holy Spirit in the life of those who believe in Christ and that it encompasses all of existence. And though the human person must make efforts to respond to the work of the Spirit, it is nonetheless, the Spirit who takes the full initiative.

A brief allusion to anthropology as the base for all spirituality. Anthropology is today one of the greatest conditions for the discussion of spirituality. All spirituality must necessarily have an anthropological base which is impossible to ignore or to preclude. Grace does not destroy nature; rather it presupposes it.

The Second Vatican Council highlighted the truly decisive importance of anthropological values with reference to spirituality in general, and particularly to the spirituality of the laity. The decree Apostolicam Actuositatem affirms: They should also hold in high esteem professional skill, family and civic spirit, and the virtues relating to social customs, namely, honesty, justice, sincerity, kindness, and courage, without which no true Christian life can exist. (AA. 4)

The spiritual life encompasses the whole existence of the Christian. It does not consist only in pious practices, but rather must inform and direct our whole life as well as all of our relationships with other persons and reality. We must come to understand that being spiritual is proper to one who has assumed all of his or her being as person. And it can be said that one who does not live spirituality has not fully assumed his or her being as person.

1. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE AMM

We are going to reflect on the spirituality of the AMM: an association which is ecclesial, lay, Marian, and Vincentian. And so I am going to paint in broad strokes, a description of a spirituality which is ecclesial, lay, Marian and Vincentian today.

1.1 ECCLESIAL

The Christianity of our times is sensitive to its communal dimensions and realizes that they have a close correspondence to Biblical revelation. Vatican Council II highlighted that the Church is communion, solidarity among the persons who make it up. “It has pleased God to bring men together as one people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness.” (LG 9)

The principle objective of all spirituality is always God, who is the protagonist of all spiritual life and of its growth by means of His Spirit. Spiritual life presupposes a constant contact with the Word of God, which illumines and nourishes it. The goal is to achieve holiness that is the participation in the life of the transcendent God, by means of Christ, in the Holy Spirit.

Spirituality is the prerogative of authentic persons who have verified a decisive axiological option, which is both fundamental and unifying, and is capable of giving a definitive meaning to existence. From the New Dictionary of Spirituality (St. Paul Publications, 1983) I am selecting some of the phrases which define contemporary ecclesial spirituality:

Spirituality as the experience of God, fruit of a personal discovery, that has grown and matured grounding itself in love and in the acceptance of a mission in God’s plan of salvation for all humanity. The actual environment is not now that of Christendom, in which faith was a collective reality. It is the “communities of contrast” that live their faith together, share it, and help one another to live it in this atmosphere of unbelief, of religious indifference. K. Rahner, speaking of “actual and ancient spirituality”, predicted that “the Christian of the future will be a mystic, that is, a person who has experienced something, or will not be a Christian”.

Communitarian Spirituality. To make community, to be in communion, to live united, are key words of modern inter-subjective anthropology. Having overcome individualism and the human self-sufficiency, today we speak of the human being as interdependent, dialogical, “a being for” and “a being with”.

Spirituality as commitment to the world. The most evident proof that we are living an authentic experience of God is the commitment to the building of a civilization of love. There is no love of God that does not also imply love and solidarity with all human beings. God is not partial in His love. God’s heart is inevitably turned toward those victims who suffer from a lack of love because they most need His love. Likewise the hearts of all those who are God’s friends must also be turned toward these same victims. The passion which God instills in the human being who is His friend, is to work so that all human persons can live and be happy.

1.2 LAY

Within ecclesial spirituality, I want to highlight lay spirituality, for the AMM is a lay Association. Lay spirituality is first and foremost a “Christian” spirituality, a “Christocentric” spirituality. It has as its permanent unmistakable point of reference the Person of Christ himself: his words, his values, his projects, his valuing of persons, things, and events, his behavior in the diverse circumstances of life.

It is a spirituality centered around the mission of Christ which is the announcement and the beginning of the realization of the Reign of God in history, as the permanent and essential horizon of all living-out of the Christian mystery.

It is a spirituality that makes present and prolongs in time, the mystery of the incarnate Word. An incarnate spirituality, convinced, in the words of Paul VI, that “Since the world cannot be saved from the outside, we must first of all identify ourselves with those to whom we would bring the Christian message-like the Word of God who Himself became a man”. (Ecclesiam Suam 87)

It is a spirituality that, precisely because it is Christocentric, is inspired and sustained, as the apostle Paul reminds us (Rom. 8:1-7) by the Spirit of the risen Jesus, liberator of all human beings and of all humanity. A spirituality that, by complete docility to the Spirit, is penetrated with creativity, liveliness, freshness, swiftness in its responses and adaptability in the face of the demands of Love. It must be marked by sensibility to the signs of the times in which, and by which, God speaks today, both to the person of faith and to the whole ecclesial community. (GS 4.11.44)

It is also a baptismal spirituality, based on the Sacrament of Christian Initiation: the Baptism that incorporates us into the People of God and which makes us its living and active members by means of the Spirit. By Baptism we participate in the threefold condition of Christ: Priest, Prophet and King, as different, but profoundly interrelated, aspects of the one Mystery of Christ.

Offering ourselves and being willing to give all that we are and have for the Kingdom, we participate in the priesthood of Christ (LG 34); announcing the Gospel with words and deeds and denouncing the injustices that exist in this world, we live out our vocation of prophets (LG 35) (ChL 14); giving our lives for love, so that others may live, and having Christ the King as the absolute value of our life, we participate in the royal function of Christ. (LG 36)

It is, lastly, a theological spirituality grounded in profound convictions of faith, motivated by hope, and consummated by love.

The Christian spiritual experience, in order to be true and authentic, requires that we live the three theological virtues that bring about a unity between profound dimensions of the human person and the fullness of the Trinitarian God revealed in Jesus. Only in Jesus have we come to believe that God is Father, Son, and Spirit; but at the same time, in Jesus, we have come to know that the human person is faith, hope, and love. Faith as acceptance of the transcendent in the visible, and as grateful acceptance of the God who gives Himself to us in Jesus. Hope as the projection and openness of the human person towards a future still in the making, and as hope in a promise which has become definitive in Jesus, that the Kingdom will come, because in some way, it is already present. Love as a response to God who first loved us, and in whose love we can give ourselves totally to one another. We cannot speak of an authentic Christian spirituality to the extent that faith, hope, and love are absent.

1.3 MARIAN

“In relationship to its duty to be both mystical and theological, the Church finds herself in Mary, mother and immaculate spouse, because she, having been raised up as an individual person to her mission, spread and universalized by the power of the Spirit, becomes the beginning of all ecclesiality. Marian spirituality, taken in its exact meaning, is therefore, identical to ecclesial spirituality that precedes all differentiation of the diverse charisms.”

As with all living relationships, the relationship with Mary has undergone evolution with the march of history, in constant fidelity to the Word of God, and the demands of the people of our time. The main lines of this fidelity were set out by Paul VI in Marialis Cultus, rightly called the Carta Magna of Marian spirituality. I will briefly highlight some of them:

In the path of the Christian, the relationship with Mary is seen as a requirement of faith, but also as an element of sanctification and a stimulus toward commitment and hope: “a powerful aid for the human being who strives for fullness”. (MC 57)

The life of communion with Mary demands that we overcome all selfishness, that we die to the old self, the root of all personal and structural sin: “For she, who is free from sin, leads her children to combat sin with energy and resoluteness”. (MC 57)
The Virgin draws the faithful in the wake of her sanctity, bringing them to assimilate the solid evangelical virtues practiced by her in the context of a biblical spirituality of welcoming and adoration of God, of a prophetic reading of history, and of active commitment to the salvation of the brothers and sisters. (MC 57)

In Mary, Christians finds a mirror in which to discover and regain their identity, and to shorten the distance between their reality and the project of God for them. (Stefano de Fiores)

1.4 VINCENTIAN

It has as its source the Mystery of the Incarnation. And it is characterized by the encounter with Christ through the poor. Christ reveals to us the infinite love of God for all human persons; he is the incarnation of that love and he knows that he has come into the world to save them, and not to judge nor to condemn them. The characteristics of this Vincentian Christ, the point of reference for our spirituality, are “Adorer of the Father, Loving Servant and Evangelizer of the poor” and we who want to follow him and “continue his life and his mission”, must incarnate these characteristics.

Only the perspective of faith allows us to discover, and recognize Christ in the poor, and to serve them with the same enthusiasm: “when we serve the poor we serve Jesus Christ…and that is as true as that we are here”. (XI, 240)

The mission is at the core of the spirituality and activity of Vincent de Paul. The Vincentian must be in all that he or she is and does “one who reveals the love of God, the Good News of God for human beings, especially for the poor”.

As members of the AMM we must live with a concerned solidarity with the poor, evangelizing them and allowing ourselves to be evangelized by them. The works of justice, mercy and compassion should support our words in order for them to be credible.

Vincentian spirituality is enriched by three mysteries to which St. Vincent makes reference in speaking of Mary: the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation and the Visitation. These three mysteries mark his missionary life and work: “God gives Himself to us” -the Immaculate Conception-, “We give ourselves to God” –the Annunciation-, “We give ourselves to the poor, giving God to them” – the Visitation-. (A. Dodin).

These spiritual and missionary dimensions must be present in the spirituality of the branches of the Vincentian Family, especially in the most Marian of the branches, the AMM.

II. DIMENSIONS OF THE SPIRITUALITY OF THE AMM

2.1 FAITH AS ITS GROUND AND SUPPORT

The phrase placed on the lips of God, in the first book of the History of Salvation, Genesis, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gn 2, 18) has a very profound meaning. The human person, by reason of being made in the image and likeness of God who is love, is a needy self, a beggar before God and before others.

We find ourselves today with an anthropology grounded in intersubjectivity. There is no perfection or self-actualization in the human being except in living for and with others. The human person “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself”. (GS 24) The truth of the human person is in opening to the other.

The dimension of faith itself, stresses the importance of this communitarian aspect of life. The church is a community of believers in Christ, a mystery of communion: "a people made one with the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit." (LG 4) We cannot believe, nor can we be saved alone. Faith is born in community and it must be lived, celebrated and shared in community, in union together with others. A Christian cannot privatize anything, much less the experience of God, fruit of a life of prayer.

Faith is a gift that God gives as a seed. Our task, besides living our life in gratitude to God for the gift, is to cultivate it so that it grows and becomes the directional and energizing force of our whole life. There are two dimensions in which we accomplish this task: one personal, which implies nurturing our faith with prayer, the sacraments, reading and meditation of the Word of God…and the other, communitarian, which implies sharing our experiences of faith, our experiences of God with others. The fruit of this double harvest will be growth and mutual support in the living of our faith.

In the past, in order to be a Christian, it was enough to allow oneself to be carried along by the current. In the present, whoever is carried along by the current, precisely because of the current, will cease to be a Christian. It is very difficult to maintain the faith in a generalized climate of indifference, unbelief, or of a bourgeois, mediocre Christianity, without at least something of an evangelical radicality and the support of other believers. Because of this, it will be of decisive importance for the Christians of the 21st century to be integrated in small Christian communities, and to live and share together their faith and their experience. “It is essential to have small Christian communities in which there are shared faith and human warmth. We will gather in them to share faith with other brothers and sisters, and to pray or celebrate the Liturgy, leaving soon afterwards to give witness to our contemporaries of what we believe. The salt must be mixed in with the food, and the yeast in the dough”. (Comunidades de Contraste) (Carvajal – Los cristianos del Siglo XXI- Sal Terrae)

The new evangelization will not be possible without the development of the apostolic personality of Christians. This calls for prayer that enables one to move from a living of one’s faith centered in oneself, to a Christian existence turned outward towards others. The new evangelization will have no force in the AMM unless its members grasp that “each Christian, by the fact of being Christian, participates in the mission of being sent, of being an apostle and evangelizer”.

All believers must become witnesses of the faith with their lives and their words. The Christian testimony springs, in a natural way, from the experience of faith itself, when it is lived with fidelity and joyful responsibility. No one can truly believe without feeling the need to announce and spread the faith. Each one must recount “All that happened along the way”. (Lk 24, 35)

Many of us live with or have contact with family members and friends who have moved away from the faith. Why must we hide our experience of faith, our convictions and the motivations that enliven our faith? Why must we Christians silence our Christian vision of life, when others publicly manifest their attitude of unbelief?

This witness through personal contact is of tremendous importance, for “In the long run, is there any other way of handing on the Gospel than by transmitting to another person one's personal experience of faith?” (EN 46)

The statutes of the AMM, when referring to the apostolate, remind us of two things: that “all Christians, especially through Baptism and Confirmation, are missioned to the apostolate” and that “the associations are not established for themselves, rather they should serve the mission that the Church must carry out in the world”.

This sharing of faith experiences, fruit of our prayer life, is necessary so that our communities can move from a faith lived in secret and in hiding, to a confessing faith; from a faith lived as an unknown, to a faith which is witnessed and incarnate in the world; because evangelization is to inject into this world, so far removed from God, experiences of God and of His love. Let us not forget that we Vincentians all have the same mission: “to reveal the love of God to the world”. (SV)

The statutes of the AMM speak clearly to us of this commitment and how we need to help one another: “The lay members of the AMM assume as their obligation the restoration of the temporal order and, led in this by the light of the Gospel and by the teachings of the Church, and inspired by Christian charity, they work directly and concretely, cooperating with one another.”

In Mary, the faithful and believing Virgin, we members of the AMM have a model of how to live and share together our faith, the movement of God in our lives, the experiences of faith. She did not privatize her faith, but rather lived it out in community, praying with the community and sharing her faith with others. The visit to her cousin Elizabeth, the gathering in prayer in the upper room with the first Christian community, are evidence of this. Vatican II highlights it in this way: “we see the apostles before the day of Pentecost "persevering with one mind in prayer with the women and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and with His brethren", and Mary by her prayers imploring the gift of the Spirit.” (LG 59)

Javier Pikaza, in “La Amiga de Dios” (The Friend of God), reflecting on this scene of Mary in the upper room, affirms: Mary lives out her faith in solidarity. She does not live her faith as a captive who is worried about her salvation and sanctification; she lives it passionate about the “History of Salvation”. The Gospel speaks to us of Mary whose heart vibrates with her people’s, and indeed all humanity’s, hopes and desires of salvation. With mystical ecstasy and a revolutionary stance, she sings to the Lord “whose mercy reaches from generation to generation to those who fear him, who raises up the lowly and casts down the mighty, who fills the poor with good things, and sends the rich away empty”. (Lk. 1: 46-55) After the death of her Son, she does not withdraw into the grief of a widowed Mother. She remains united and gathered with the disciples of her Son, whom she as Mother had accepted at the foot of the cross. (Jn. 19) She was more concerned about the cause for which her Son had died, than about the loneliness in which she was left. Luke, in the book of Acts, presents Mary to us as fully integrated and actively participating in the life of the first Christian community, the community of Jerusalem. We must envision her taking part in the election of Matthias (Acts 1: 26), in the election of the deacons (Acts 6: 5), in the growth of this community.

2.2 PRAYER: THE BOND OF COMMUNION WITH GOD AND WITH HUMANITY

The pray-er is one who by faith has discovered God and Christ as friends, and has felt and experienced that only they give meaning and happiness to one’s life. His or her great concern is not to lose their friendship because the pray-er knows what is at stake. And so one of the definitions of prayer that I like most is: “Cultivating friendship with Christ the friend in order to remain in his love”. (J.M. Castillo –Oración y existencia Cristiana- “Christian Life aìnd Prayer”)

This concept of friendship continues to be, without a doubt, the most adequate way to define the essence of Christian prayer. Because true friendship is reciprocal communion, interchange of love and knowledge, dialogue and interpersonal communication. It implies openness, sincerity, confidence, and above all, the gift of oneself.

The Pope, in NMI 32, insists in this same idea of the living out of friendship: “Prayer develops that conversation with Christ which makes us his intimate friends: "Abide in me and I in you". (Jn 15:4)

J. A. Pagola, speaking of how the human person of today is forgetting how to pray, affirms with concern: “Perhaps one of the most serious tragedies of today’s human being is the growing incapacity for prayer. The person of today is forgetting what it is to pray”. (Pagola -Aprender a vivir- Idat Donosita, p. 331)

In a society in which the first and almost only criterion is efficiency, performance, and immediate usefulness, prayer becomes devalued as something useless and of little importance. It is quite easily affirmed that “life” is what is important, as though prayer belonged to the world of death.

In this production-oriented, consumeristic society, it is impossible to understand what it means to pray, to contemplate, when what must be done is to produce in order to consume. How is it possible for prayer to be a useless occupation, if it precisely is becoming aware of Who God is for us, and of who we should be for others?

From this perspective, prayer is a profoundly human action. In prayer we are submerged in the search for the meaning of our own existence. To pray is to ask God about the great questions of life, and to look for a response in His Words.

The one who prays as a good friend also lives concerned about pleasing God, about doing what God wants, and how He wants it. Vincent de Paul, a mystic for action, arrived at this experience. In a conference on meditative prayer to the Daughters of Charity, he gives them this definition of prayer: “It is a conversation of the soul with God, a mutual communication, in which God interiorly tells the soul what He wants it to know and do, and where the soul tells God what God Himself tells the soul to ask for. What a great thing is prayer, so much so that we should esteem it and prefer it to every thing else.” (May 31, 1648)

Christian prayer is always communitarian prayer. The human person cannot go to God, or find itself with God alone. God is not my Father, but our Father. Prayer is the filial relationship to the Father of a large family, the new people of God. The encounter with God, with Christ, leads us immediately to the discovery of fraternity, to feel ourselves immersed in a great space of solidarity among human beings, the living experience of communion. In prayer the believer finds his or her deepest identity and the awareness of our intimate relationship with the Father is renewed. One is enabled truly to live fraternal communion and apostolic service.

Apostolic spirituality, born of prayer, leads us to learn to live as those who are sent by Jesus Christ, to understand and live out our Christian existence as a service of evangelization, to feel ourselves missioned and appointed to the spread and growth of the Kingdom. “This apostolic spirituality is born in and nourished by prayer. The spirituality of the apostle or one who is sent, consists in living in the Other for others, in Christ for the brothers and sisters. It is only in the experience of the encounter with Christ that the apostolic personality develops and the believer comes to know that he or she is chosen for the Gospel of God”. (Rom 1,1) (Pagola –Una oración nueva para una nueva evangelización- Idat Donostia)

The Virgin Mary is the model for who the members of the AMM should be and what they should do. The few biblical references that we have about her life, are enough to know how Mary prayed. Her prayer is therefore a model for believers of all times.

Mary, like Jesus, lives in intimate communion with God. She allows the Lord to see her: “He has looked upon the lowliness of his servant” (Lk . 1: 48) and to fill her: “full of grace. The Lord is with you.” (Lk. 1: 28)

All of the references to the life of Mary in the Gospels are in a context and climate of prayer, of silence, of solitude: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the loss and finding of the child Jesus, the wedding feast at Cana, at the foot of the cross, in the upper room… The reflections of Paul VI on these scenes and their climate of prayer, led him to affirm that “Mary lived in prayer…that Mary is constant prayer”. (MC 18)

Mary, while living a life of private prayer, also participated in communitarian prayer. She identified herself with the people of Israel, and along with her people, nourished her faith in prayer, and celebrated it. She knew quite well that one cannot live, nor believe alone. The required attendance at the synagogue, the Purification, the Presentation of her Son, the annual journey to Jerusalem for the Passover, are proof of her participation in communitarian prayers and celebrations.

We must pray to Mary, but above all, we must pray with Mary and like Mary.

The members of the AMM have to be conscious that they cannot live a quality spiritual life, nor can they grow in faith without nourishing it with both personal and communitarian prayer. Without prayer, without openness to the Spirit, there is no life of affiliation, nor life in fraternity. We cannot live and grow in the life of grace, nor can we be fruitful in the apostolate, if we are undernourished: “The fruitfulness of the apostolate depends on the vital union with Christ that is nourished with spiritual assistance” and among the means for cultivating the spiritual life and making the apostolate fruitful we find: “Prayer, both personal and communitarian, the celebration of the Sacraments of Reconciliation and Eucharist, liturgical and other celebrations, the rosary, novenas…

Jesus told us quite clearly: “Without me, you can do nothing… The branch can only produce fruit if it remains united to the vine.” (Jn. 15: 4)

At the beginning of the New Millennium the Pope asks us that the centers of the AMM “become genuine "schools" of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening and ardent devotion, until the heart truly falls in love.” (NMI 33)

2.3 THE SERVICE OF THE POOR. EXPRESION OF THE AUTHENTIC SPIRITUALITY OF THE AMM

There is no authentic life of faith and prayer unless they develop into a commitment to humankind. In prayer, God asks the believer about others: about their problems, their needs, and He urges the believer to come out of the shell of selfishness, to open up to them, to become sensitive to, and committed to their needs.

The thermometer of a good life of faith and prayer always registers a high temperature in surrendered love and attentive service. A Christian - according to Cabodevilla in his commentary on the Hymn of Love (1 Cor. 13) – is the one from whom we can and should always expect service.

There are two classes of persons, according to our way of understanding life: the selfish person and the generous person. The life of the former is conditioned by selfishness that leads the person to want to give orders and to take advantage of others by using them. The life of the latter is conditioned by love that leads them to collaborate by placing themselves at the service of others. It is love which leads us to discover that life is only worth living if we spend it so that others may live. Unfortunately the selfish mentality has great power in the culture of personal interest that has hooked a high percentage of the people of today’s society.

Speaking of unbelief in 1998, some of the bishops affirmed: “In the present society we frequently reduce our relationships to a mutual interchange that is useful or pleasant, where each one always looks out for his or her personal interest… Do we not need a new spirit of fraternity that will free us from this selfishness, that is in large part a matrix of many social behaviors? Will not many solitary, isolated, sick human beings be saved by the rediscovery of fraternal life?”

And the Pope, in NMI 42, tell us: “Many things are necessary for the Church's journey through history, not least in this new century; but without charity (agape), all will be in vain.” (1Cor 13. 2)

The true disciple of Jesus is the believer who is “entirely for others”. The believer centers life in serving, in helping and in making others happy. He offers himself for service: “if you need me, here you have me, if you need me to give a hand, I am at your service”. Erich Fromm rightly affirmed when he attacked self-serving love: “Love begins to develop when we love and do good to others whom we do not need for our own personal ends”.

Jesus calls his followers together today to be living and active members of the Church “the home and the school of communion” (NMI 43), in the face of a society of lords and masters, product of the use, abuse, and exploitation of others. In the Church and in our Association, we all have the same dignity, the greatest there is: to be sons and daughters of God and for all to feel ourselves responsible for all and for everything. “To find refuge from the cold winds of our secularized societies…it will be necessary to have small Christian communities where there is shared faith and human warmth” and that offer a contrast and challenge by their life.

The pope has issued us a serious call to a life of solidarity and to shared fraternity, when he urges us to stake everything on charity in the New Millennium. “Now is the time for a new "creativity" in charity, not only by ensuring that help is effective but also by "getting close" to those who suffer, so that the hand that helps is seen not as a humiliating handout but as a sharing between brothers and sisters.” (NMI 50)
The God in whom we believe is a God who loves all human beings. We are His children, the fruit of love. But this God, who loves us all with abandon, has a special place in his heart for the weakest, for those who have never been loved, for the poor. God is not partial, a Daltonic God. God’s presence in history is not passive. God sees and acts in life. God hears and experiences the cry and the enslavement of the poor and He uses Moses to liberate them: “The cry of the children of Israel has reached me, and I have truly noted that the Egyptians are oppressing them. Come now, I will send you to Pharaoh, to lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt. (Ex 3, 9-11) The cause of the poor is God’s cause. He identifies with their cause. God’s option for the poor, the oppressed, the slaves, is a constant in all of revelation.

Jesus, the Son of God, who has come into the world because the Father loves it (Jn. 3: 16), also opts for the poor: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring Good News to the poor”. (Lk. 4: 18) He has come to inaugurate the Kingdom and this Kingdom is, in the first place, for the poor. (Lk. 6:20) He is the “Good Samaritan” who is in solidarity with all those whom society has cast by the roadsides of life. He is the one who stops, draws near, and cares for with sensitivity, mercy and compassion. He does not avoid, nor does he pass by, as do so many priests and Levites today who do not live in solidarity. (Lk. 10: 29-38)

The whole life of Mary is a continual service, but there are, above all, two very significant scenes for the spirituality of the members of the AMM in their commitment to serve the poor: the Visitation, and the Wedding at Cana. Mary is told by the angel that her cousin Elizabeth is having a difficult time, and needs someone to help her, someone to whom she can open her heart. Mary goes quickly. She does not think of herself at all. She has been pregnant for a short time, and the road she must take is dangerous. (According to experts, this is the same road that Jesus mentions in the parable of the Good Samaritan.) But those who love do not think of what might happen to themselves if they assist the one in need. Rather they think of what might happen to the person in need, if they do not assist him or her. Mary goes to see her relative and stays three months with her. (Lk. 1: 39-46) In Cana, the people are having a good time, they are eating and drinking, as they do at all weddings, without thinking of the others. But at the wedding there is a woman who understands love, and so lives with concern for others, for their needs. Without anyone mentioning it, she observes that the wine is running out. The wedding couple and their families will be embarrassed and the joy of the feast will end. She goes to her Son, explains the situation to him, and thanks to her, Jesus works his first miracle. (Jn. 2: 1-13)

Also, Mary his Mother, is in solidarity with the poor and so she sings in the Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” (Lk. 1:52-54) John Paul II, in Redemptoris Mater affirms: “her love for the poor is described admirably in the Magnificat”. Paul Claudel said ironically: “The Magnificat must be sung in Gregorian chant and in Latin so that it cannot be understood because it is far too revolutionary.” And our Father General, Robert P. Maloney, in Eco (April 2001, p. 134) writes about the spirituality of the Magnificat: “A person who lives the spirituality of the Magnificat, sings with confidence of God’s preferential love for the poor. This person also believes that this Love is not simply affective, but that it also acts, intervenes in history. It is a Love that can turn the world upside down. In a world where there is much darkness, illness, suffering and death, he or she believes that God can bring light, health, joy and resurrection.”

The AMM, is an association, which in addition to being ecclesial and Marian, is also Vincentian. We Vincentians all have the same mission: to serve the poor evangelizing them. Our spirituality has as its principal source the mystery of the Incarnation. John Paul II, reminds us in words similar to those of St. Vincent in the 17th Century, that: “if our starting point is truly the contemplation of Christ, we have to know how to discover him above all in the face of those with whom he has wanted to be identified”. (Mt 25, 35-36) We must certainly not forget that no one can be excluded from our love from the moment that “through his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every person". (NMI 49) The Statutes of the AMM, when dealing with the apostolate in article 16 tell us, “The service of the poor should be preferential in who we are and what we do”. But Vincentian service implies evangelization: “Evangelization with “words and deeds” is a requirement of our Vincentian charism”. And the model for living out this requirement of our charism, as well as all the other requirements, is our Mother Mary: “Following the example of Mary, our Mother, the willing Servant, the perfect model of “love for God” and “love for humanity”. I shall finish this section reminding the members of the AMM of what the Pope asks of all Christians at the dawn of the New Millennium: “We must therefore ensure that in every Christian community the poor feel at home. The charity of works ensures an unmistakable efficacy to the charity of words.” (NMI 50)

CONCLUSION

We have to live a life with evangelical quality that will help us to be holy. All are called to holiness: “Be holy as your Father in heaven is holy”. This must be the fruit of an authentic spirituality that leads us to cultivate friendship with God and with all persons, to become, as one of Vincent de Paul’s biographers called him, “mystics for action”.

“We come to a full sense of the dignity of the lay faithful if we consider the prime and fundamental vocation that the Father assigns to each of them in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit: the vocation to holiness, that is, the perfection of charity.” (ChL 16)

We must live holiness today grounded in the experience of the love of God that urges us to reveal His love to this world in order to transform it into His Kingdom. “The vocation of the lay faithful to holiness implies that life according to the Spirit expresses itself in a particular way in their involvement in temporal affairs and in their participation in earthly activities.” (ChL 17)

We must live life abiding in the love of God in order to bear fruit in the world where we have been sent with this mission: “I am the vine and you are the branches. The one remains in me, and I in him bears much fruit…Apart from me you can do nothing”. (Jn. 15: 1-5)

Pope John Paul II, in the post-synodal exhortation Christifideles Laici, points out the concrete areas of greatest importance and urgency in which the laity have to live out the mission of their vocation in the world. (36-44) I will highlight some of the most important of these, taking into account the identity and mission of the members of the AMM:

The Family. In a world in which the family is under attack, where there is an obvious crisis of the family institution, appreciation for the family, the esteem and defense of it, become the first area for the social commitment of the lay faithful. This commitment can only be realized adequately if we have the conviction of the unique and irreplaceable value of the family for the development of society and of the Church itself. (40)

Solidarity and Justice. In this unjust culture, lacking in solidarity, the laity are called to insertion in the wide field of personal and group initiatives developed to confront with solidarity the tremendous needs of the human person of today, of so many people who have been cast by the roadsides of life by the injustice and the corruption of the powerful in today’s world. The source of this solidarity, of this justice, has to be the love of God for humanity, manifested in solidarity, incarnate in Christ, so that our initiatives do not remain on the level of mere philanthropy.

The Defense of the Right to Life and of the Dignity of the Person. In this culture of death, in which we value only that which produces, in this culture enslaved by interests, the laity must defend the right to life and the promotion of the dignity of each person. Each human being is a project of God’s love and has been created to live and to be happy. This is God’s passion for humankind, and God instills this passion in all who believe in Him. (36-37)

To these areas that I have chosen from Christifideles Laici, I would like to add something that the Pope asks of us believers at the beginning of the New Millennium: “stake everything on charity”. (NMI 49)

The Mystery of the Incarnation is the source of all Vincentian spirituality. The Pope reminds us that “no one can be excluded from our love, since through his Incarnation the Son of God has united himself in some fashion with every person", and he calls us to concrete action that fits us Vincentians perfectly: “We must therefore ensure that in every Christian community the poor feel at home”. (NMI 49-50)

My hope is that all the centers of the AMM would be the homes of the poor, and that the poor would feel at home in them! May this be the fruit of a spirituality of evangelical quality, lived out in faithfulness to the Church and to the Vincentian charism, with Mary, the Virgin of the Miraculous Medal as our Mirror and our Model.

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