BEING ACTIVE AND BEING A SLAVE OF ACTIVISM
Consecrated persons can be and will be active, but they should not be slaves of activism. Today there is a confusion in the mind of many a consecrated person between both. Being a slave of activism has been wrongly identified as being active. One who is all the time engaged in external activities is wrongly qualified as an active person. In fact such a person is rather a slave of activism. A consecrated person is aware of two levels of bindings in his/her life: to God and to people. The vows empower the consecrated person to be free from himself/herself and to be free for God and for the people, on the one side and to be passionately loving, being gripped by love of God and love of the people, on the other. This freedom and love is the foundation of their commitment which is expressed in their words and deeds. The commitment enables them and interiorly compels them to be very active. An active person knows why and for whom he/she is doing whatever he/she does.
Hence, to be active means to be internally awake, to be fully in charge of one’s thoughts, to be able to direct one’s all energy to what one can do the best, to share one’s being in every action, to turn everything one does to altruistic service, to be reflective in nature and congruent in character, to be uncompromisingly concerned about the quality of action than quantity, to be convinced that the best contribution to the future is the full and committed engagement in the present, to be generative and to be aware of the need to sharpen the saw regularly. So a consecrated person by vocation will be active and has to be active. He/she mediates the recycling process of life and naturally the resources get renewed and his/her life will be ever fresh and he/she will radiate freshness.
On the contrary, activism is the addiction to activities, very often motivated by money, name, popularity, power and fame. A slave of activism has the feeling that he /she cannot be substituted by any one and the Church (parish, schook, hospital, retreat centres, spirituality centres, academic institutions) will collapse without him/her. As a result he/she will have hardly time for daily prayer, monthly recollection, annual retreat, spiritual direction etc.. All these are neglected in the name of ministry. Thus the very ministry which is a basis and expression of spirituality becomes an opportunity for enslavement. This lets their spiritual resource get diminished drip by drip very slowly and empties the very reservoir and leads to the feeling of meaninglessness. Activism results in quantitative productivity leading finally to waste and hence to pollution in one’s own life and in the lives of others for lack of recycling process.
If only the formation to consecrated life could mediate the choice by the formees to be really active and never to be slaves of activism!
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