Communal life in Heart’s Home is experienced in common prayer, meals and recreation with fellow missionaries. This also takes the shape of chores for the house and shared commitment to the ministry of compassion.
A friendship with God.
A friendship with the closest one.
“This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (Jn 13, 35). In any Christian community, in the Church, there is no better way to preach than to preach about love. Anything else can be seen as a betrayal. Any other preaching is empty in words and fruitless. The Missionaries are living together as brothers and sisters, like in a family. The Charter they try to follow is very demanding: “They will try to live in the most perfect communion, forming one single heart, forgiving one another immediately when offended as often as is needed. They shall not criticize one another but rather will encourage and esteem each other in the Lord.” In other words they will try to live as friends seeing that they are friends of the same Lord and that the same heart is dwelling in them.
You will hear in a few minutes the following statement: “You are going to have a community life. It will be for you a force and a consolation, at some days a test.” The community life is the biggest joy, but it is a joy which can find its root in the biggest suffering. It is the place God uses to forge our heart, to cleanse it, to shape it. He was made of rock. Through the simple everyday life he becomes of flesh. Saint John Vianney used to say: “It liquefies itself” I would like to say it becomes tears of compassion and of blood. It is the most beautiful material a heart can be made of since it was from Jesus’ own heart that water and blood flowed out.
We emphasize enough that Heart’s Home is about compassion and comforting. Don’t get it wrong dear Missionaries! Compassion starts at home, in your inner being. You are at first the victim beaten up and over whom the Good Samaritan is leaning and at the same time you are the Good Samaritan. Thus compassion exercises itself towards the ones with who you are going to live this year; they too are sinners and hurt. Only your love will help them to go further. There is no use for endless discussions in attempts to discover how suffering disturbs another’s psychology or how best to dismantle the minds mechanisms so that can be “made more aware of himself” You better listen to him!... You better go and offer your brother to God!… There is no use to dream him as a lamb when he is a hedgehog. Love him as he is! Love him as God loves him: unconditionally, limitless. Love him because God gives him to you as a grace of His presence! Go straight into his heart; don’t stay at the periphery, at the surroundings, at the small matters which bother you, at the stories he is telling, always the same ones, at his odd habits… Dear Friends of Children if only you knew how much God loves you, if you only knew the love you are called to share together…”