THE ASPIRANTATE DIARIES

Today, November 21, we have been told, is the feast of the aspirants – our feast! – because, like the young Mary, we, too, have made the offering of ourselves to God. Like Mary, we find ourselves at the threshold of God’s temple, awed by His majesty and by our littleness, and yet happy to be a gift to Him. We realize that everything that takes place in our very ordinary life is meant to help us make our self-offering real, and that every moment already contains a seed of eternity. Daily life in our community is never lacking in occasions to give ourselves to God and to others.

The Sunday Oratory at Parian

The Oratory has always been one of the activities that we appreciate most. Every Sunday finds all of us formands, together with Sr. Chat Belino and two teachers from MHCS-Canlubang, in a suburban area in Calamba called Parian where many poor families live alongside the railway. There, we gather children and mothers in a former resort owned by a past pupil’s family, teach them catechism and hold various activities in celebration of feasts and solemnities. Every last Sunday of the month is dedicated to interest groups like sports, music, dance and arts. Working alone or in pairs, we thus have a foretaste of the apostolic work of the FMA. We are helped to make lesson plans for catechism, and are guided how to actually teach the class assigned to us. The Oratory becomes for us a venue for assimilating and applying all the things we learn in our formation. The experience helps us discern God’s will for us, since it unfolds to us our own attitudes and capacities regarding the mission of the FMA. This particular endeavor to reach out to the young is one way of expressing our love for the Lord, and our desire to become FMAs one day is what fills us with fervor and enthusiasm in doing this work.

Classes in Catechetical Methodology

Closely bound to the Oratory is our weekly class in Methodology with Sr. Pinky Garza. Here we are given the principles and the hands-on experience of making lesson plans and executing them. Each of us prepares the ground and lesson plans on a topic assigned to us, based on the catechetical syllabus for the Oratory. Sr. Pinky checks our work before we demonstrate it to our companions. The lesson demos are real tests of courage and teaching skills for us; the children of the oratory can’t beat the formands as they act as pupils to test their teacher’s knowledge and poise. Both positive and negative feedbacks from Sr. Pinky and from our companions spur us to always do better, and to always give the best of ourselves to those poor children.

Our lessons help us acquire not only teaching skills and mastery of content, but also confidence in ourselves. Moreover, it helps us know how to relate with and adapt to the young, to know our students and to go down to their level in order to bring the message of Christ across. It teaches us control over ourselves so that we might give ourselves 100% to the mission.

Powerpoint Friends

Alberto Marvelli, Alessadrina Da Costa, Luigi Guanella, Prince Czartoryski and more are our newfound friends here in the Aspirantate. We come to know more about our Salesian saints through an initiative that the community has opted for: making Powerpoint presentations of their remarkable lives and using them for our spiritual reading, usually on the eve of their feast days. Thus, almost every month, we have the joy of celebrating the lives of these saints who have left their mark of holiness to our Salesian Family. That is literally saying that sanctity runs in the family.

Despite the hard work of patient and painstaking research about the life of each saint or blessed in books and in the Internet, downloading pictures and backgrounds, and meticulously layouting everything in Powerpoint, it is a helpful and enjoyable experience for us. The lives of these holy men and women serve as eye-openers for us to the richness and effectiveness of our Salesian spirituality. Moreover, they are an inspiration for us in forming our personal convictions and in living our own lives today.

They may represent all the sectors of the Educating Community: Salesians, FMAs, Cooperators, lay men and women and young people, but it doesn’t really matter; holiness binds them all! Salesian holiness, as we learn from them, is simple and joyful, and is expressed in daily life. We believe that this is our calling, too – to aim for and live the same holiness, and to pass on this treasure which our Salesian friends have left us.

Beadcraft

“Let every time you string a bead be an act of love for God.” Mother Mazzarello would have said this to us as we patiently string beads together to make our Rosary bracelets and other products, all “handcrafted just for you.” Having evolved from a leisurely activity of the Sisters during the typhoon “Milenyo” into the community IGP and an extraordinary learning experience for us, our beadwork encourages us to work hard for a reality that is bigger than us – the community and the Province.

We are very much like the beads that we use – we too are the “products” of our Institute and will be “used” and consumed by the young. Consider the wooden or plastic beads we have: every so often one sometimes needs to have a hole bored into it so that the string can go in it. God, too, sometimes pierces us to fit into His loving plan. It hurts, but we won’t fit if we don’t allow Him to do it to us. Then we always have to check our work to see that we have put the right number of beads, and not more or less. In our life, too, we see the need to constantly check on how we are doing, so that we may know if we are living as we should. Stringing beads teaches us to persevere with patient endurance and to really focus on what we are doing; otherwise we have to undo everything! Refraining from unnecessary chatting during work, we learn self-discipline and concentration. We learn to live the present moment with love and in love. To produce quality products, we have to put ourselves fully into what are doing with cheerfulness and enthusiasm; it is as if our positive energies flow into our Rosaries. Our work also becomes an opportunity for us to overcome ourselves and to offer our activity to God, our Grand Manager, for the good of the young. Working together has brought us closer as a family. The time we spend working together is a gift to our community – a gift of presence, self- giving, cooperation, communion.

In our journey, we now try to gather beads of virtues, values, principles and experiences to make of ourselves a Rosary worthy to be God’s and Mary’s, to be authentic FMAs of the future. With this dream is also the satisfaction of seeing our products sell like hotcakes – all because they are made with love and packed with care.

“Siddhartha”

Encountering members of other religious denominations, for us formands, is an experience that helps us expand the spirit of communion we try to live within our community. On November 3, our community had the opportunity to watch the musical presentation entitled “Siddhartha” at the CCP Main Theater. The musical play is based on the life of Gautama Siddhartha, who eventually became the Buddha, the “Enlightened One.”

Knowing more about his life and teachings, and seeing the warm welcome and hospitality shown us by the many Buddhist nuns and lay persons at the Theater, help us understand the treasures of Buddhism. All men and women, in fact, are called to live a meaningful life, one of righteousness worthy of our being human. No matter what one’s religion is, there are beliefs and principles that we hold in common, and these are what must focus on, rather than what divides us. Appreciating Buddhism also helps us appreciate more our own Catholic faith more.

Spiritual Retreat

Nothing can equal the joy and peace we all experienced during and after the three-day retreat we had with Sr. Florita Dimayuga from November 8 to 11at the Mornese Center of Spirituality in Pansol. With the help of Sr. Florita’s profound talks, we allowed God to speak in the deepest recesses of our hearts through the silence, the splendor of nature and the situation we find ourselves in. We pondered on the real essence of our vocation, that is, intimacy with God, who, in His love for us, respects our freedom of choice. Like the Blessed Mother we presented ourselves to Him bare and unmasked, allowing Him to fill us with His grace and to gradually lead us to transformation in Christ. We hope that these days given to us to enter deeply into ourselves and in God’s love for us will enable us to know more ourselves and our God, to see His loving plan for our lives more clearly and to make our offering of ourselves more generous and true.