Experience of Evangelisation with the Bible
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
96/162 SEDOS RESIDENTIAL SEMINAR 1996 — FROM A GROUP I praise you, Father of Heaven and Thank you for our Catholic Church, Earth, because you have hidden these holy and sinner, old and rigid at times, things to the wise and intelligent, but but always young and fecund through revealed it to the humble (cf. Mt 11:25). the action of the HOLY SPIRIT. Today, we love her still more! At the end of this time of sharing in community the word of God, we have a Thank you for our peoples, poor and profound feeling of gratitude! Towards suffering in the whole world. Their God our FATHER who counted us gen- capacity of dedication and hope are erously among the humble-ones and maintained by their faith and the Word. who in his Son, has revealed us his wis- They remind us that in the different dom. Thank you to Fr Walter and the situations of “captivity” God remains SEDOS team for the generous and com- faithful. “Israel my son, my elected, do petent preparation of this meeting. They not fear, I’ll stay with you”. created this space for us to reflect together on our mission in the light of The Experience of these days now the Bible. enables us to reaffirm: — The need to be disciples, women and men, servants of the Word, and from there, to proclaim. — The value of life: the first book God wrote for humanity and for which the Bible is the grammar, or key of interpre- tation. A mysterious hand has lifted the curtain and permits us to feel in the World the merciful face of God, the living heart of the Father. — The communitarian meaning of the Bible. It is the book of the community, creating it and maintaining it. — It is our Challenge: to bring this dynamism of the Word to our communi- We thank Carlos, Maura and Nuria, ties, that the Lectio Divina may pass sisters and brother for sharing their from the realm of the intellectual and wisdom and experience. In different, individual, to the sphere of life and socio-cultural contexts they were community. touched and transformed by this Word, to became servants of it. To have the courage to open our mouths, to chew and eat this sour-sweet Thank you for our Working Groups volume... which must touch our life and where our fraternal sharing lived and transform it. grew, in listening, mutual respect and willing reception. For the whole group Then our dry bones will be revived, and the cultural and spiritual richness our sterile wombs made fertile, and from present. It was a small Church where we the tomb LIFE will rise again. could experience that THE KINGDOM of God is with us. 96/163 OUR RESOURCE PERSONS Sr MAURA CHO, SOLPH Sister Maura Cho belongs to the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Korean Congregation, founded in 1932 by Fr John Morries, MM., in Pyung Yang, North Korea. She was born in Korea on 26 December, 1942. She grew up in a Catholic family and was educated at the Chon Park Moon Catholic School, from primary to high school. She went to the Sacred Heart College in Korea (BA in Social Welfare) and then to the Graduate Theological Union and Jesuit School of Theology in Berkely, California, (Master of Bible Studies). Besides teaching the Catechism in parishes, she has taught at the Catholic High School for Boys, and the Air Force Military School for several years. — As a group worker, she organised small groups among students and worked as a facilitator. From 1971, she made the Bible Reading Guides for small groups on Genesis, Exodus, John, Mark and the Acts. In 1982 she published another reading guide to the Bible, called: “Bible in 40 Weeks”. Many sisters (5,000), priests and male religious (800) and a group of Protestant Ministers have at- tended her residential seminars, learning the method of the “Bible in 40 Weeks”. In 1992, she published her most recent work: a Reading Guide on Luke and the Acts, called “The Emmaus Dialogue”. Sr Maura has been involved in the Korean Catholic Bible Life Movement (CBLM) for 25 years up to the present. Fr CARLOS MESTERS, O.CARM Carlos Mesters, O.Carm., is a member of the Province of Rio de Janeiro of the Carmelite Order. Born in Holland in 1931, he was still only a teenager when he left Holland to be trained as a Carmelite in Brazil. After his studies in Rome and Jerusalem he returned to Brazil, where he taught both in São Paolo and Belo Horizonte. In Belo Horizonte he led the Centro de Estudios Biblicos for many years through which he played a major part in spreading Bible reading in Brazil and other parts of Latin America. His approach to reading the Bible unites the reading of the text with a reading of present reality and the faith of the community. His name is closely associated with the development of the biblical dimension of Liberation Theology and his many publications have given us a pastoral and exegetical approach to the reading of the Bible which is easily accessible to both those who are experts in Bible Studies and those who are not. His works which have been translated into many languages include, the seminal work, “Defenseless Flower” (Flor sem defesa — 1973). His most recent work presents Jesus as the formation director of his Apos- tles and Disciples: “Jesús na Contramão” (1995). Sr NURIA CALDUCH-BENAGES, MN Sister Nuria was born in Bercellona, Spain, on 26 March 1957. At the moment she is serving in Rome as Assistant General of her Congregation, the ‘Missionary Daughters of the Holy Family of Nazareth’, founded in 1874 by Blessed Giuseppe Manyanet i Vives in Lérida. — She has a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the Autonomous University of Barcellona and in Holy Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute. After seven years of teaching Scripture in different institutions in Spain, she is now lecturing on the Old Testament (Wisdom literature) at the Gregorian University, the Biblicum and at Regina Mundi. She is a member of the group of exegetes which is preparing an ‘Interconfessional Translation of the Old Testament’, and also helps a group which is revising the Spanish edition of the Jerusalem Bible. — She has been helping with the edition of the “Bíblia Catalana Interconfessional”. Sr Nuria is a specialist in Wisdom literature, particularly of the Book Ben Sira or Ecclesiastes. — She is a member of different biblical and theological Associations: e.g.: the ATE (Asociación de Teólogas Españolas) and of the AFERT (European Feminine Association for Theological Research). 96/164 THE LIBERATING READING OF THE BIBLE Carlos Mesters O.Carm. who does not love does not know God, for GOD IS INTRODUCTION LOVE”. I shall limit myself to what is happening in It was the first time in her life that she opened the Brazil, since I do not have very much knowledge of Bible. She got a shock. She did not expect to find what is happening in the other countries of Latin there her sentence on the wall. She discovered that, America. But a good analysis of eight gallons of without her knowing it, the Word of God was already river water, gives one an idea of the type of water in in her life. Her satisfaction and joy were so great, that the whole river. she hardly slept that night. The next day the Bible which she had received from the priest was full of The source of the liberating reading of the Bible little bits of paper marking the pages. During the is that which the Christian people live in the Basic night she found other familiar phrases! This very Ecclesial Communities. It is the way in which they simple episode and many other similar ones reveal the draw from the Bible strength and light for their following about the interpretation which the people of journey and their struggle and how, with the help of the Christian communities make of the Bible: the Bible, they reach a new experience of God and a new vision of the transforming and liberating action 1. The Bible is accepted by the people as the Word of of the Word of God in life. God. This faith already exists before we arrive with the Bible. It is on it that we hang all that we have to I am going to begin this article, describing some say. It is that which characterises the reading which significant facts which come from practice and, after we make of the Bible in Latin America. Without this that I shall make some observations to explain the faith, every process and every method would have significance of these facts for a popular reading of been different. the Bible. 2. There is under way a progressive discovery that PART I the Word of God is not only in the Bible, but also in life, and that the principal objective of the reading of THREE EVENTS WHICH ILLUSTRATE the Bible is not to interpret the Bible, but rather to interpret life with the help of the Bible. It is being THE PRESENT SITUATION discovered that God speaks today, though events. 1st Event: COLOMBIA 3. The Bible comes into people's lives through another door, not the door of authority, but through It happened during the first meeting of a biblical the door of personal and communitarian experience. It course. There were about 25 people. On the wall was makes itself present not as a book which imposes a the sentence GOD IS LOVE.