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From “A View from Colombia” by Cecilio de Lora, SM.

A clear and immediate consequence is the necessity of continuing to incarnate our spirituality.  One can only arrive at the universality of salvation by beginning with the particularity of the Word made flesh in a corner of the land of Palestine.  The particular and the universal interrelate in the perspective of salvation.  The mystery of history acquires its greatest clarity with the incarnation of the Son of God.  The radical humanity and historicity of Jesus Christ guarantees God’s presence in our midst and, consequently, the possibility and necessity of historic intermediaries in order to experience [God].

Likewise, historic, concrete, particular intermediaries are indispensable for the understanding and living out of our charism in all its uniqueness.  In the present case, the historic mediation passes through today’s Colombia, where we seek to live in concrete form the Marianist charism that was imparted to our Founder for the benefit of all times and all climes….

It is not a matter of practicing spiritual archeology in order to repeat the gestures, words, and actions of the Founder in this historic milieu.  Rather, it is a matter of discovering the dynamic relationship between Chaminade’s intuition and his historic milieu, in order to reincarnate this same foundational intuition in our own historic milieu.  [Our] identity is not something static, fixed, set once and for all.  It is a life, and by that very fact, something dynamic that keeps being created in the course of history.  I will begin with identifying the situation in which I try to live our Marianist spirituality in today’s Colombia.

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