Dear brothers
Today we begin a new season of Lent. It is an opportunity for me to address and encourage you to live our Dominican vocation more deeply.
This opportune time is a time to nourish the spirit, a time to confront our way of life with what is the way of living as Dominican religious. Many times we think that we live as Dominicans for the fact of having made the profession and honestly as we recognize many times we are very far from really living it. How should I live as a Dominican? I invite you to make this reflection.
For this, I invite you to read our constitutions in the community with the sole desire to better embody the Dominican spirit. Are we afraid that we will have to change our personal or community lifestyle? Are we afraid to enter the path of conversion? If there is a path that can help us to live our Dominican vocation more deeply, it is to open our lives and not be afraid of light coming in. Do not be afraid to enter into the process of conversion that moves and renews us. Do not be afraid to confront our lifestyle, if our way of living is really spiritual and Dominican. If the spirit is still alive or we need to revive it.
The brothers who preceded us in the order were encouraged to incarnate the apostolic life, to incarnate the Gospel, like St. Dominic to be a "living gospel". And to live it as our Order proposes to us. When I read the constitutions, I see very clearly, how to embody Dominican life. How beautifully and clearly they describe it to us. I invite you to read them and to be the mirror that reflects what a Dominican is.
Brothers, I invite you, in this season of Lent, to have a weekly community meeting to read the Constitution and seek how to live according to what they teach us. I invite superiors to encourage their community to put it into practice, to embody what they teach us.
But for this we need a spirit, the spirit of Jesus, that spirit of communion with the Father, that food that opens us to conversion and to the desire to live fully our personal vocation, to live in a continuous state of conversion, in a continuous desire to live communion, fraternity.
I ask to read this message personally and that the superior read it to the community and find the opportune time for the weekly meeting that I propose.
We entrust to Mary this season of Lent. May she, as Mother, takes us by her hand and intercedes for us.
Fraternally
Br. Ruben op