Community Life
Bose, 27 November 2007
The life of the community over the last few months has been marked by an event that we have recognized as a gift and have accepted with profound gratitude: the stay among us of Vittoria Nardini, a friend who used to frequent our monastery for many years
The life of the community over the last few months has been marked by an event that we have recognized as a gift and have accepted with profound gratitude: the stay among us of Vittoria Nardini, a friend who used to frequent our monastery for many years and in the last few years also organized courses of Biblical Hebrew for our guests, and who, when the state of her health deteriorated last May, came to Bose, to die in our midst. In the homily that br. Enzo delivered at her funeral, he invited us to recognize in all their profoundness the Lord’s workings in this act of communion that was granted us live in the death of a friend of ours, as has already happened other times in the past. “Our community has not yet experienced the death of one of its members, nevertheless, already five other times a wanderer, a friend, friends, have come to die here, and we have been at their side. I want to say that this is truly a great gift that the Lord has given us, and we hope that he will do it again! It is not we who have given something to Etta, to Cocco, to Ligio, to Remo, to Muretin, but they who had given us a gift, and those in the community who have experienced their friendship know just how much they have given us… We have simply taken them in, we did not even decide that they come, but life and history, which means the Lord has given us these occasions of grace.” A community, we believe, is also made up of a shared memory and of the remembrance, full of gratitude, of friends who are now dead: how can we not recall those who recently have preceded us in the hope of resurrection?
Friendship and communion shared over the years with Giuseppe Alberigo, Franco Romanelli and Pietro Scoppola, with sr. Maria Teresa of Collepino and with fr. Reginald Kessler enrich us and fortify us as a “community body”, while at the same time they interrogate us as regards our capacity as a community to receive their inheritance. In this communion of life stronger than death has its place the definitive monastic profession of two brothers and one sister made in the night of the Transfiguration between 5 and 6 August: br. Matthias, br. Andrea, and sr. Lorenza have come to the end of the long period of formation and probation and have been presented to the churches because these can now count on their monastic ministry. And on that occasion we have had the joy of welcoming in our midst pastor Henri Chabloz, president of the Synodal council of the church of the Vaud canton in Switzerland, who on the part of the church to which br. Matthias belongs because it gave birth to him through baptism wished to express in a brief address and especially by his presence and that of another synodal council member appreciation and recognition of the definitive commitment assumed by br. Matthias in our community. In br. Enzo’s homily that night he underlined the particular value of these professions in the ecclesiastical atmosphere that exists today. “Just at a time of great difficulties in relations between the churches, at a moment when the ecumenical road taken for at least forty years is contradicted, at a moment that we call “winter”, in which it seems that there no longer exists the horizon of a visible communion among those who believe in Christ, we wish to renew our hope, our commitment so that the prayer of Jesus to the Father that all may be one may be fulfilled. Our dear metropolitan Emilianos also wanted to be present this year at the profession liturgy and prolonged his stay with us to the end of September: his daily presence, discreet and wise, often free with advice, is likewise a great gift for which we thank the Lord. During these months, finally, a brother and a sister have finished their period of novitiate and have committed themselves, through a liturgical reception, “to live permanently in the community the vocation they have received, accepted, and then chosen” (Rule of Bose 10).