Metropolitan monastery

Publish date 15-09-2023

by Chiara Giorgio

40 is a biblical number. These are the years of the Exodus, in which the people of Israel learn to know and walk with God, to trust him more than themselves. These are the days in which Jesus in the desert is tempted by the devil and those of every Lent, a time in which to return to turning our eyes and hearts to the God of mercy.
These are the days between Easter and the Ascension, in which the Risen One teaches his friends to recognize him present in their lives not because they see him with their eyes but because they feel him alive in their hearts which becomes the temple of the Spirit from which his love it propagates.

ALWAYS ACCOMPANIED
Looking at the 40 years of the Arsenale, I seem to see this whole journey of life, which the Lord has made and continues to make in the midst of our fraternity. Like the people of Israel we have learned to walk with the Lord even in the most difficult and disproportionate moments, to feel him close to us in the bottlenecks that without him we would never have been able to cross.
We have learned to entrust to him times of weakness and fragility, those in which evil seems to take over and humanly we say: we can't do it! Jesus' experience in the desert guided us not to face trials based on our own strength or reasoning, but to always seek the light in the Word to overcome temptation, to return to unity where everything seems to be falling apart, to bring silence our ego which wants its part and subtly proposes to us logics of power very far from the logic of God which is always and only to serve.
We are learning to live communion with God and with each other even when we seem to see nothing, when we are physically far away, dispersed in a thousand different services and places... Indeed, we are experiencing that that is precisely the place of the greatest communion, because at keeping us together is the presence of God in us and among us. A Presence that nothing and no one can take away from us, not even death, and that makes earth and sky a single place in which to live "one heart and one soul" with him and among us.

A PRAYER EMBROIDERED WITH LIFE
The Arsenale is a metropolitan monastery. It seems like an oxymoron, but it actually speaks well of the spirituality that we try to embody every day.
“Monastery” says the community dimension of our life, but also that God and God alone are at the center of everything, because without him we can do nothing (Jn 15.5). “Metropolitano” underlines that we live all this immersed in the intense daily life of the places we live in, with the desire to be a fountain on the street corner reachable by everyone.
At the Arsenale I encountered a life wrapped in prayer and a prayer wrapped in life. Over the years I have learned that there is not a spiritual life and a part of life that is not... but a single life that the more it realizes that it is living in the presence of God, the more it continually asks for help and light from the Spirit. And he does it in big things and small things, because he discovered that what is substantial is not the difference between big and small things, but between those experienced with God and those in which we forget about him and do it alone. Then the Presence becomes the breath that leads every step, a lighthouse that sheds light on us at every moment and - almost without us realizing it - sheds light through us on those we meet.

SPIRITUALITY OF PRESENCE
We found the spirituality of the Presence "sewn onto us" together with the unexpected event. Without the spirituality of Presence it is difficult to welcome the unexpected as an opportunity. And the unexpected was and often is the path of God, who spoke to us and speaks to us in an unpredictable and unexpected way to move us from our logic and give us his logic.
Mary led us on this journey, she taught us to turn to the Lord through her to learn his "yes" and his abandonment of her. How many Hail Marys accompanied the renovation, the beginning of every meeting, every decision to be made... and continue to do so.
Mary helps us to welcome Jesus as the living word like her, to prepare an ever larger place for him in our hearts, to make the Arsenal (and our lives) a "tabernacle", Mary's house and therefore the house of Jesus the Eucharist who dwells there .
Remembering and looking at all this is not celebrating what has been, but giving thanks for it with amazement and emotion. It is asking the Spirit for the gift of faithfulness and to continue to work in us and among us. So that the experience of these 40 years never becomes a memory of the past, but is forever the lifeblood of our today and the foundation of our tomorrow.


Chiara Giorgio
SPECIAL: An Arsenal that speaks
NP June / July 2023

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