Category Archives: Letters

Christmas Letter to the brothers around the world 2024

“Shout for joy, O daughter Zion! Sing joyfully, O Israel! Be glad and exult with all your heart, O daughter Jerusalem! The Lord…is in your midst, you have no further misfortune to fear.” (Zeph. 3:14-16)

Dear brothers,

Warm greetings of joy and hope to you in the spirit of a humble God who lives amongst us!!!

How is everyone doing? What significant gifts are you celebrating at this time? It would be good that we all take a decisive stop, make a general re-view of life, both personal and communal, and listen gently to the invitations of the Emmanuel, the God of surprises. As you gaze lovingly on the nativity scene, bring your own poverty before the Infant God and begin to see again with renewed wonder and awe at the Mystery. May the poverty of God speak to your own poverty. His divine humanity restores our humanity to its original goodness. His humble divinity strips our humanity to its core so that it may be an estimable vessel of divinity. This is all God’s benevolent initiative. Together with the Psalmist, we could only say, “forever, I will sing the goodness of the Lord.” The extent and the quality of our human life in this world is but our humble thank you to this great gift.

Now that many of you I am privileged to have met in person, I hold several persons close to my heart while I am writing this letter. I wonder what are their experiences of joys, struggles and hopes during this kairos moment of Christmas? My thoughts are with our brother Carlos Roberto at his place of healing and recovery in Brazil, with Aurelio’s community of displaced women and children in Burkina Faso, with Kuno’s engagement with prostituted women in Germany, with Juan Baraza in the peripheries of Chile. I am holding our brothers living as a minority in a Muslim dominated population in Asia, our brothers in Africa who live amidst tragic poverty and violence, our brothers in Europe who welcome displaced migrants caused by the war in Ukraine. I wonder what gives joy and peace to them at this time? Where is hope for them? And what about our brothers who live in the silence of old age and fragility or of our brothers in the peripheries of their dioceses?

Traversing the multi-faceted realities of our time, I am inviting you that we walk with Pope Francis as he meditates with us on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus in his latest encyclical, Delixit Nos. For him, there is a greater need to rediscover the importance of the heart, the innermost part of our being, the locus of our desires and the place where important decisions are made. We ask: do we have a heart that seeks to know and understand the deeper meaning of life and to bring to unity conflicting polarities, moral dilemmas and paradoxes of the present time? A person without a heart is cold, numb to the realities of the other and live very indifferent and superficial lives. They rush “frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives.” (#2)

There is a way of living and responding to the realities of our time that comes from the heart, with a heart. In paragraph 179, Pope Francis proposes Saint Charles de Foucauld as an icon for contemporary humanity in its search for meaning and authenticity. In his life, Brother Charles “sought to imitate Jesus by living and acting as he did, in a constant effort to do what Jesus would have done in his place. Only by being conformed to the sentiments of the heart of Christ could he fully achieve this goal.” In Brother Charles, imitating Jesus’ life and action, which starts as a simple desire turns into a daily resolve, a constant effort to do always in reference to what Jesus would have done. It becomes a daily examen of mind and heart marked by a firm and progressive commitment to see as Jesus sees, to do as Jesus would do, to live his life as Jesus would live. It is a daily dying to self of a disciple and of constant conforming of his very being to that of Jesus.

After being conformed in mind and heart to Jesus, Brother Charles desires to bring the same love of Jesus which he personally experienced to others. “His missionary outreach to the poorest and most forgotten of our world, led him to take as his emblem the words, “Iesus-Caritas”, with the symbol of the heart of Christ surmounted by a cross.” These two movements in the spirituality of Brother Charles, namely; taking in Jesus and giving away Jesus to our world today are like the 2 movements of the cardiac cycle of the human heart. The heart pumps in poorly-oxygenated blood to the lungs through its upper chambers and the heart pumps out richly-oxygenated blood from the lungs through its lower chambers to the rest of the body. For Brother Charles, taking in or imitating Jesus is to be a disciple with the heart and mind of Jesus. Discipleship is not the end in itself but it naturally overflows into and essentially qualifies mission – to bring Jesus’ love to the poorest of this world with the heart of Jesus that consumes him. “With all my strength I try to show and prove to these poor lost brethren that our religion is all charity, all fraternity, and that its emblem is a heart”. This desire turned into daily martyrdom gradually made him a “universal brother”. Allowing himself to be shaped by the heart of Christ, he sought to shelter the whole of suffering humanity in his fraternal heart: “Our heart, like that of Jesus, must embrace all men and women”.

So, here we are, missionary disciples of Jesus of Nazareth in the footsteps of St. Charles de Foucauld, as we professed in Cebu in 2019. May we be leaven in the dough of our broken yet restored-to-original-goodness humanity. Together, we walk as fellow pilgrims of hope that at the very core of our earthly journey, we go back to the original design of the Creator that a grain of wheat that falls to the earth and dies, it bears much fruit for the Kingdom.

Your little brother,

Eric

PDF: CHRISTMAS LETTER TO THE BROTHERS 2024

“I shall complete the journey… Do not be afraid. On the journey outward all will be well; on the journey back, all will be well; the road is safe.” Tobit 5,16

Dear Brothers:

Warm greetings from Tagum!!!

Travelling from several parts of the country, we are 17 brothers and a little sister gathered for our national assembly at Bishop Joseph Regan Spirituality Center, La Filipina, Tagum City, Philippines. The journey coming in was specifically challenging for our brothers from the prelature of Marawi who have travelled the whole day by land negotiating dangerous cliffs and roads under construction. Their presence, however was truly inspiring especially because after the 2017 siege, they continue to live as nomads, pitching their tents at the neighboring Iligan diocese and Marawi is still in shambles. Displaced but never disconcerted, they thrive in a climate of uncertainty made worse by political manipulation and religious extremism. The spirituality of Nazareth and fraternal solidarity both amongst themselves and with the people has sustained them. Their situation is ameliorated with the coming of some religious priests determined to do mission there. Together with their bishop, they come in full force. Little Sister Cecilia Grace helps us see the connection between the fraternity’s beginnings and Marawi. The late Bishop Benny Tudtud, then bishop of Marawi invited Little Sister Madeleine in the early 1970’s. Up until now, the prelature has been the nexus of Muslim-Christian dialogue in the Philippines. The presence of Jimmy, a newly ordained deacon is a seed of hope to the fraternity of aging and weakening membership.

The beauty of the place

Bishop Joseph Regan Center is managed by Ancillae Christi Regis (ACR) Sisters. This local congregation of sisters which was founded by the late Bishop Reagan in 1989, the first bishop of the diocese of Tagum owns this 2-hectared center, seated on a hill and a meadow with newly built facilities which could accommodate close to a hundred retreatants. The beauty of the scenic view from its veranda is equaled by the routine exercise of climbing up and down stairs between our sleeping quarters and our gathering place. We are welcomed in the evening of the first day with a very heavy downpour. Mother Earth is calling us to appreciate the lush greenery of the place and the abundance of fresh water. The warm hospitality of the sisters and the first-class cooking of Sr Mabel (with special treat of freshly picked vegetables and herbs from the garden) make our stay truly refreshing and restful.

The rhythm and substance of the assembly

A fter the personal introductions, little sister Cecilia shared with us little sister Cathy’s presentation on “For A Synodal Church of Communion, Participation and Mission: Looking at episodes in the life of Little Brother Charles of Jesus: Shedding light on our Synodal process.” The presentation empowers us to see the rich mutuality between the soul journey of Brother Charles and the synodal processes of a synodal church. We hold the same spirit in the afternoon as we appropriate and share in small groups our review of life in terms of identifying companions and guides in the understanding of our vocation and mission in the church and recalling moments of listening, speaking out, celebrating, discerning and forming. Bishop Edwin in his homily at Mass exhorts us to a level of affective solidarity in their ministry of encountering and befriending the Muslims in Marawi. At the heart of our assembly is a day in the desert. This day of prolonged solitude and intimacy with God is prepared in the evening with a personal vigil at the feet of the Beloved. During our evening Eucharist, we share our desert experiences in the intimacy of the triad. From the day in the desert, we take on the path of looking intently on the essentials of the Spirituality. Both in seeing together and in listening to one another guided by the directory, some emerging concerns surface: that the Month of Nazareth is not anymore a “conditio sine qua non” for members yet it is strongly encouraged; that regularity in the practice of the spiritual means, correspondence with members and attendance to monthly meetings for a year qualifies one to be a regular member; incorporation of the spirituality into the basic ecclesial communities’ practice and spirituality; introduction of the spirituality to the seminaries. We hear concrete realities and practical concerns during the business meeting: that the local fraternities need rekindling and animation through visitation; that the pioneering experiment of doing the Month of Nazareth in Marawi needs further discernment and planning; that the novena to St Charles de Foucauld prepared by the Kapatiran will soon be available; that the next national assembly will be in Palo, Leyte on July 21-25, 2025. Our fraternity night was graced by the presence of Bishop Medel of Tagum.

“Go on your way; behold I am sending you like lambs among wolves…” was the Gospel exhortation during our final Eucharist. We head home filled with new insights and renewed spirit. “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few…” We commit to continue the journey with revived sense of co-responsibility and collaboration trusting on the Spirit who is always ahead.

PDF: Lettter from Tagum. Eric LOZADA, international responsible en

“Come, Holy Spirit… and renew the face of the earth…”

“Come, Holy Spirit, come!… Come, Father of the poor! Come, source of all our store!… O, most blessed Light divine, Shine within these hearts of ours… Heal our wounds, our strength renew; On our dryness pour your dew… Bend the stubborn heart and will; Melt the frozen, warm the chill; Guide the steps that go astray…” Amen.

Dear Brothers,

Greetings of peace and fire in the Spirit!!

How are you? What have been your joys and desolations in the ministry? It is important to take time to name and attend to them for a more balanced and joy-filled ministering. I am holding you close to my heart while I am writing this letter from Galilee Center in Tagaytay, Philippines while doing Shepherd’s Training for vicars for clergy and seminary formators.

I ask: What is the face or what are faces of the earth that we beg the Spirit to come and renew? It may be good for us to stop and take a long look at our fluid world today with the eyes of faith and reason. When we don’t do the seeing, we let a very politicized view as the only absolute one. There is a temptation to surrender the view of faith to the reductionist sight of secularism and to abandon reason to the deterministic lens of unbridled materialism. When we invite the Spirit to come, we admit that by ourselves we find it difficult to see, that we are blind in our unredeemed, wounded, frozen, dry and stubborn ways of seeing and understanding. So, as we pray, Come O Holy Spirit, we beg Him to intervene in our lives, to renew our hearts and minds that we may see as He wants us to see so that we may appropriately respond to the realities of our world. The prophetic invitations of Pope Francis to be joyful missionaries of the Gospel, go to the peripheries, to collectively care for Mother Earth, to be brothers and sisters all, are spirit-filled vantage points from which we see and respond to the why’s, where’s, what’s, and how’s of our world today in the light of the Gospel.

Many of us are in situations of injustice, poverty, destruction, violence, migration, minority and it is a bit myopic to see the world from a pessimistic, helpless lens. Or some of us may be in situations of better opportunities, abundance, power, privilege, honor and the temptation is to look at the world from the lens of an indifferent bystander. I feel that it is important for us, after we clarified our identity in Cebu in 2019 that we are missionary disciples of Jesus of Nazareth inspired by the footsteps of Brother Charles, that we specifically ask the Spirit to resurrect us from the tombs of comfort, narcissism, indifference, clericalism, entitlement and rekindle hearts of simplicity, tenderness, fraternal concern, generosity so that we become authentic agents of the Spirit for the transformation of our world right where are placed. We also dream together to be builders and forgers of fraternity which is the theme of our next world assembly.

In our practice of the spiritual means of daily adoration, daily meditation of the Gospel, monthly desert day and monthly fraternal meeting along with the spirituality of Nazareth simplicity, we may not be very consistent but we continue to be inspired by our aging brothers who have been witnessing the life. Touched by the Spirit, our poverty is also our strength. In the spiritual path, numbers and age do not matter much but quality of witness, few we may be. Our constant coming back to our spiritual practices train our minds and mellow our hearts so that our missionary engagements with the world are coming from our closeness to God in Jesus of Nazareth and our formative encounters with the poor, one person at a time. When Pope Francis has invited us to be surprised by the Spirit in our walking together and in our listening to one another in this synodal church, the process has become the message. When we dream together for a more peaceful and fraternal world, we commit ourselves to peaceful and fraternal processes at all levels and in all faces. For there could be no peace from violence and there could be no peace in communities when persons have bitter and unreconciled hearts. It was Mahatma Gandhi who said that peace is the weapon of the strong while violence is the weapon of the weak. Violence is the weapon of those who mask their fears, insecurities, envy, helplessness with armors that threaten the lives of every human being, including that of Mother Earth. So, we pray with conviction, Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, renew our strength, bend our stubborn heart and will, guide the steps that go astray.

May the intercession of our big Brother, St Charles de Foucauld, strengthen our resolve to be missionary disciples of the risen Christ and forgers of fraternity in our very volatile world. Please pray for me your little brother as I continue to hold you close to my heart in prayer.

Your servant-brother,
Eric LOZADA, international responsible

Read in PDF: Pentecost Letter 2024 to the brothers around the World. Eric LOZADA

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” (which means, God-with-us). (Matthew 1:23)

“Christmas has always been about this: contemplating the visit of God to his people.” (Pope Francis)

“I was born, born for you, born in a cave, in December, in the cold, on a wintry night, in poverty and in solitude, unknown even to the poorest. Why was I born in this way? So that you may believe in my love, since my love for you knows no limit. As I have loved you so much, put all your hope in me. I teach you to love me… Ever since my birth I have shown myself to you and have put myself entirely into your hands. … you have been able to see me, hold me, hear me, serve me, console me…. I did not give myself to you just at my birth for a few days or years, but I gave myself into your hands for ever, till the end of time.” (Brother Charles’ meditation on the nativity scene)

Dear brothers,

Christmas greetings to you all!

How are you and your community celebrating Christmas this year? Are there new and creative ways in your celebration from last year’s? Is Christmas still the gentle, quiet and humble presence of the Emmanuel in our busy and loud world? Or do we give the market, tourism and entertainment industries the license to plan our Christmas celebrations? It would be good to take a look at our Christmas celebrations this year vis-à-vis the reality of our world today with all its lights and shadows. I wonder how do families in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti or any place and people suffering from social unrest, extreme poverty and displacement celebrate Christmas this year? Is the reality of suffering more close to them than that of Christmas joy? We take a reflective look at our world and in interpreting the signs, we celebrate Christmas in a more responsive and appropriate way.

And what about mother earth? Christmas is not only for the human world but for the whole universe, including the ecological environment which is radically altered by the mystery of God-in-the-flesh. I wonder how are sister water, brother wind, sister bird, brother forest celebrating the season? Are the complaints about pollution, climate change, imbalance of the ecosystem depriving them of Christmas joy? For us who may be in the brighter side of the world, what would be our response to the invitation to celebrate the Emmanuel amidst the thundering noise of violence, greed, apathy towards life in all forms of our world today?

The virgin birth is not only a person but a path. Right in the very ground of our barrenness, vulnerability, helplessness as people and environment, traces of new life appear in the horizon, little manifestations of the Emmanuel break open our consciousness to give birth to new initiatives and shared dreams. As people of hope, we take a long, loving look at the world as the Father sees it when He gave the world its Messiah at the first Christmas. The world was not ready. He has to be born in the poverty of the manger, in the periphery of the village. This is not some sentimental or wishful thinking or a deus ex machina but a call to a radical, paradigmatic shift for the birthing of a new heaven and a new earth.

Christmas is a call to solitude of the heart. True solitude is recognizing, naming and claiming our poverty, our emptiness which is also our unlimited space for others. At the very core of our solitude, we encounter the Emmanuel in all men and women as brothers and sisters not only our friends but also those who kill, lie, torture, rape, and wage wars. They become our flesh and blood. When our hearts are full of the goodness of the Emmanuel and empty of fear, anger, indifference, greed, “we become a welcoming home for God and for our whole human family on earth.” (Henri JM Nouwen)

Ours is to wait, not passively though but actively. When we wait, we know that what we are waiting for is growing from the ground on which we are standing. We wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted two thousand years ago and that something has already begun. We are called to be present to the Kairos of Christmas with the certainty that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to this moment minus the external features of the season. God has planted generously the seed of divinity in every human heart and in our world and we wait with firm conviction and joyful hope with Mary who sang, “the Almighty has done great things and holy is His name.” Blessed are we when we see what God wants us to see in this great season of Christmas.

Some Announcements:

There is a Month of Nazareth organized in the Philippines on July 1-26, 2024 for English speakers. Registration fee is $400/participant.

Preparations are on the way for our World Assembly in Lulunta, Argentina in January 2025. In the coming weeks, you would be receiving letters from the international team so that we see, reflect, discern and walk together the direction, content and process of the Assembly.

Brothers, I thank you very much for your beautiful witness and firm resolve to follow Jesus more closely in the footsteps of Brother Charles. May our faithful practice of the spirituality so free our hearts that the Emmanuel could give birth in us and in our ministry new and fervent ways of encountering the many faces of the poor today.

With my fraternal affection,
Eric

Read in PDF format: Christmas Letter 2023 to the Brothers around the World. Eric LOZADA, international responsible en

(In celebration of the first anniversary of the canonization of Brother Charles de Foucauld)

“He (Brother Charles) understood that God wanted him to be satisfied with clearing a path so that others could plant better. But he was thinking only in terms of announcing the Gospel to the people of the Sahara. He had no idea God was working through him to prepare a gift for the entire Church.” (Archbishop of Marseilles, France, preaching about Brother Charles leading to his canonization)

Dear Brothers,

Warm fraternal greetings to you all!!!

How is everything with you at the moment? What are significant experiences of joy, growth, transformation in your personal life, your friendships with brother-priests in your diocese, in your ministry to those in the peripheries? What are spaces of discouragement, stagnation and struggle? How are you coping? To whom do you go for support? Where are you being led by the Spirit in your resolve to be a joyful missionary of the Risen Christ? How are you growing in the discipline of daily adoration, review of life, desert day, gospel meditation, attending monthly meeting? How do these spiritual practices strengthen your commitment to a call within a call to be a universal brother, gentle presence, contemplative companion, prophetic preacher, missionary disciple of Jesus of Nazareth in the footsteps of Brother Charles?

I humbly pose these questions with you. Questions are like compass for the soul seeking the True and the Good amidst the complex, diverse, confusing paths of our world. I honestly struggle with you these questions. Precisely, in this tension, the grace of God works unconditionally to mellow our hearts. The key is to hold the question long enough until it strips us naked of all that is not true and not good in us. AA people have this to tell us – keep coming back to the practice. We are not “super” human beings who always live from our ideal. No, we are wounded, weak pastors who, very often live from our frailties and inadequacies yet we are so dearly loved and are called to love like the Master.

Brothers, I have the occasion to write to you as we celebrate the first anniversary of the canonization of Brother Charles. I was a witness to the joy and jubilation last year at St Peter’s Square in Rome. It was a Kairos moment not only for us but more so, for the universal church. When his name was announced at the beginning of the Eucharist, joyful cheers and loud claps of affirmation and gratitude to God were heard from the people. Now, the same euphoric joy is lived out in the chronos of concrete, little yet decisive acts of prophetic witness in the peripheries, inspired by the contemporary message of Brother Charles. The call of the synod on synodality invites us to participate in a universal journey as fellow pilgrims (not tourists), brothers and sisters all, walking side by side each other, collaborating, discerning and listening to one another where the Spirit is leading our world today.

In the course of our preparation last year, we from the International Team have asked with you – how has the canonization made an impact on you? Now, one year after, we ask with you something more specific – now that Brother Charles has been recognized as a gift to the church, what is ours to do to share this gift to others who are lost, lukewarm, curious, sympathizers but wanting to deepen their spirituality. Like the mandate of the apostles after the Resurrection to spread the news that He is alive, we have been called from being too inward-looking to be more out-going, to tread on unfamiliar territories, starting from simple personal encounter in the tomb of our losses, on the disappointing road of our Emmaus or in the breaking of bread with the poor and the marginalized. It was the Spirit of the Risen Christ that fired them up to be courageous, tireless, and joy-filled missionaries. How about us? What is our story? How have we been fired up in our mission to pass on the gift? How could we initiate personal encounters with brother priests of our diocese to brothers beyond our diocese or country? How do we do mission with the other branches of the Spiritual Family in the spirit of fraternal collaboration and co-responsibility for the gift?

In the Philippines, we have organized ourselves with the other members of the Spiritual Family and are committed to be fellow pilgrims, recognizing our unique gifts yet called to witness unity, social friendships, fraternal sharing, co-responsibility in the life-long journey of missionary discipleship and fidelity to the charism of Brother Charles.

How about you and your local fraternity, the national and continental fraternities? Where are you being led by the Spirit? What is yours to do? We could not just sit down and operate behind our little world without a concern for the bigger reality of God’s Kingdom here and now.

May the coming of the Spirit like tongues of fire set our hearts aflame as we take on the task of doing mission like our very own, Brother Charles. Though things were not always clear to him where to go and what to do, he never stopped in ambivalence and half-heartedness. Rather, his passion to imitate the love of God in Jesus of Nazareth so consumed him that he tirelessly wrestled with every human condition that separates us from God, from the poor and from one another. St Charles de Foucauld, pray for us!!

With much love and fire,

PDF: Letter of Eric, 15 May 2023 eng

Day of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth
Christmas Letter to the brothers around the world

“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14, NIV)

“It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.” (a quote from Brother Charles)

Dear brothers, I greet you all with great joy and hope-filled peace from the Emmanuel!!!

How is everything with you? What realities and concerns are you holding these days? Are you radiating the Christmas message to the people around – your brother-priests, your bishop, the margins in the parish, your immediate neighbors? Are you attending to your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health while you do multi-tasks in ministerial work? What spaces are you creating in community for the Emmanuel to come into your lives together? What invitations from the Spirit are you responding so that you may journey together as a synodal community? And how is the life and charism of our dear Brother Charles making a difference in the way you live your call and in the quality of your response to these invitations? These are big questions that I wish to contemplate with you. Let our life in fraternity and our doing missionary work be deepened by the questions we hold.

What a joy to write to you a letter at this season of Christmas. More than just a mere tradition in the Fraternity, I am writing to you with a heart of a brother who longs to be in communion with you and who has a great admiration for all your creativity, fidelity, hard work and passion for Jesus and the Gospel in the footsteps of Brother Charles. I am holding your stories and faces – those whom I have met in person and those of you whom I have heard living Nazareth in the peripheries. (While writing this letter, I am told about the passing of 2 senior brothers, Alvaro Gonzalez from Chile and Antonino from Madrid fraternities. While we grieve their losses, we equally rejoice over 2 of our brothers who come home to the Father as faithful disciples of Jesus. May they now enjoy eternal peace).

Christmas is a “Kairos moment,” the most appropriate time to take a long, loving look with new eyes at all of creation in different levels and forms– the human community, natural ecology, politics, economics, culture, religion, blended social relationships– in the light of the loving plan of the Creator. Through the mystery of the Incarnate God, all of creation, including natural ecology is radically transformed as a meeting place with God. What used to be radical opposites in the eyes of the world are now bridged and restored to their original setting in God’s great design. Everything now is in God. Everything belongs to God. It is an inclusive universe after all.

But the world seems to be not ready for this God. It insists in a world where God is edged out and humanity creates an idol of the egoic self with self-serving, self-referential, delusional views, assumptions and ideologies. This was made prominent during the pandemic. The way we regard ourselves in relation to the Other, be it from within the family, parish community or among nations, we wear the masks of mistrust and deception concealing a lie that the egoic self is the reference point and the other a disposable entity. With globalized market, everything has been commodified. Notwithstanding the benefits of technology and social media, they have become “faithful servants” of the market. The poor, including Mother Earth as the new poor is crying for help. Power, authority and wealth could be used to restore, rehabilitate, serve and care but it seems that greed, apathy, indifference has gained the upper hand. It blinds the mind and numbs the heart from taking responsibility. So, it’s a dark world after all.

Precisely, this was the spirit of the original Christmas – the world was not ready (there is no room in the inn) that the Emmanuel has to be born in the periphery, at the dead, quiet night, without fun fares. This is the wisdom of Pope Francis’ invitation for us to go to the peripheries and meet God there. We just need to ask the Spirit to give us new eyes to capture the signs, ordinary and insignificant they may be but they are gifts from God leading us to new light. In our scripture readings at Mass, we have been listening to stories of insignificant personalities as the path ways of the Emmanuel. They all seem to be facing moral dilemmas – in their barrenness, where is the light? In following their own plan, where is the divine plan? In their loneliness, helplessness, fear, shame, where is the way out? Precisely, in these very moments, God decides to come and live amongst us.

The only path that the Emmanuel chose to come into the world seems to be that of ordinary people in the peripheries, facing realities of suffering and pain and struggling to make a fundamental choice, either for hope or despair, for violence or for peace, for darkness or for light, for God or against Him. The Spirit through an angel has to overshadow them in order to free them from everything that makes them unfree so that may freely submit to the bigger divine plan. When in our lives and ministries, we choose to collaborate with others than to be self-sufficient, to listen to the other than to do our own self talk, to care than to incapsulate ourselves in our own comfort, to understand the other patiently than to insist that we be understood, to serve rather than be served, we become little path ways of the Emmanuel present in our world, one moment, one person at a time. Our is little and small, a daily choice to make but precisely it becomes the sacred path of the Emmanuel when we do it very well. Brother Charles is our icon of hope. Pope Francis has recognized him in Fratelli Tutti as our path to dialogue and universal fraternity. Ours is to do our daily and monthly practice of the spirituality with resolve and determined action that we become joyful signs of the Emmanuel in our world today.

So, rejoice, dear brothers, Christmas is after all, a season of glad tidings and hope.

Here is a path for us so that we may deepen our practice and devotion to Bro Charles especially now that his life and charism has been recognized by the universal church. After the canonization, I received 20 relics of Bro Charles from the dicastery through Bishop John MacWilliams of the Sahara. These relics are available for us. We, from the international team, wish to hand carry them to you after you have written a letter of request addressed to ericlozada@yahoo.com. First come, first serve. The only requirement is that you organize a public devotion to his honor, most especially in seminaries and parishes named after him. Thank you very much.

May the Emmanuel empower us to capture the signs of our times, listen to their invitations in prayer and discernment and act on them in collaboration with God’s people as pathways of the Emmanuel becoming present in our world today.

With my fraternal love and embrace,
Eric, your servant-brother

PDF: Christmas Letter to the Brothers around the World

EASTER LETTER TO THE BROTHERS AROUND THE WORLD

FROM OPEN TOMBS TO NEW PATHWAYS OF HOPE

“You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth, you will bring me up again.” (Psalm 71:20)

“You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.” (Isaiah 26:19)

“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2)

“We are an Easter people,” as Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle puts it in one of his books. The Easter reality is reminding us that amidst all the violence, there is a much greater reality of peace in our world today. This is not some kind of magic formula but an expanding and deepened consciousness that springs from the depths of the earth overflowing into every reality of our world. The way to move to this Easter reality is to see humanity and the world through the lens of God who raised Jesus from the dead. In God, the whole universe is birthing with the joy of new life in the Risen Christ in spite of everything that tries to sabotage this life. We thrive on as people of hope, mature children of the light even when death and darkness seem to be the predominant reality today. We continue to be ambassadors of hope amidst the realities of war and violence in Ukraine, Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan, of poverty and inequality in the countries of Africa and Asia, of ecological destruction that takes a heavy toll on the poorer sectors of a country, economic meltdown, political rivalries that try to cancel one another, of the pandemic that gravely affects the vulnerable and the poor across the globe. The list goes on.

Hope of new life in the Risen Christ is an antidote to the prevailing attitudes against the dark realities of today –that of wishful thinking as a way of denial or escape from reality or being too enmeshed in our dark reality that we become prisoners of gloom and utter helplessness or that of doing everything possible to survive, thinking only of our own private good without regard for the common good and care for our common home. Hope is not a flight from but a going through the dark tunnel of reality with a leap of trust to the Giver of Life and Light, the God who is always ahead and beyond. Hope is a loving surrender to the truth that death is not the final say to everything even if evil seems to have the upper hand. The challenge of Hope today is to build fraternities of hope, people who journey together, have a positive regard for one another, listen to one another with respect and discern where humanity has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution to the ills of our world. As people of hope, we walk together as brothers with our sisters towards the realization of God’s dream for our world today in the Risen Christ. Individual efforts could only do as much. Our world today is groaning for a new world order that is shared, grounded in the Easter message of hope.

But first things first. Let us first recognize together where our world’s tombs are of which God in the Risen Christ is willing to open with us and through us. Overt war, poverty, destruction of the environment, migration, global divide are symptoms of ill will buried in the tombs of human hearts. Greed, indifference, violence, resentment, hatred are concomitant human dispositions that are based on disrespect, distrust, distortion of values, blindness of the goodness of the other and of the world. These dispositions become mental attitudes that foment structures of violence, injustice, abuse of power that cloud the mind and numb the heart of individuals in a system. Collectively, it becomes a culture wherein untruth becomes true, darkness becomes light in a very distorted way. Hope is rooted in a firm conviction that God alone in the Risen Christ could open our tombs and transform our ill will to good will. Left to ourselves, we are too blind, wounded, broken, and helpless.

And so, we hope together as brothers with our sisters in the journey. Starting from our local fraternities, faithful to our spiritual practices of review of life, desert day, adoration, fraternity meeting, we gift hope to our world today, one day at a time. We dialogue and discern together where the Spirit is leading us – personally, communally, globally. No one stands alone. Every personal listening is a global listening. But the activity is mainly that of God in the Risen Christ. Ours is to listen deeply and cooperate to God’s saving and even repairing activity of our beautiful world. The activity of hope grounds itself from Jesus’s gift of the passion (from the Latin word, passio, meaning non-activity) Jesus saves the world primarily from his passivity on the cross more than his activity of healing and preaching. When we feel beaten up, misunderstood, humiliated, not in control, mistreated in our offer of love and goodness to others, we are undergoing our passion as lovers of humanity. Here and only here are we invited to pose a moral question – how will we respond to evil? What kind of heart shall we offer to perpetrators of evil? What kind of lives are we willing to give to our world today? Unforgiving or forgiving? Angry or sober? resentful or loving? Only when Jesus freely offered his forgiveness to humanity that rejects his offer of love that the Father gave him the new life.

We are invited to be heralds of this new life to our wounded, violent and fragmented world. We hold both our joy and our sorrows, our indifference and our care, our fears and our willingness to be sent. May our universal Brother, St Charles de Foucauld continue to inspire and accompany us in our desire to cry the gospel with our lives. May his recognition as a saint be an impetus for our church today that is envisioning herself as brother and sister to all, missionary to the peripheries, a prophet of dialogue and of care for our common home.

Eric Lozada

PDF: 22-04-17, EASTER LETTER 2022, engl., Eric Lozada