How I Met the Home
Br. Jose Luis Saavedra
The summer that I met the Home, I was 18 years old. I had just finished my first year of Fine Arts studies and I saw the faith as the rules that kept me from being happy, but that could save me. I was spiritually disoriented, but I had faith.
Even so, during the last year of my studies, I began to really suffer at the sight of the lack of coherence in which I was living and that I was incapable of maintaining myself in a state of grace. I was tied down to what I saw was wrong and incapable of freeing myself. But, as I barely ever prayed, where was I going to find strength? I think that the problem was that I didn’t see any alternative, a way of life that was pure and attractive.
I did begin to leave some things, and even I was surprised that I could. And yet, I was still far from seeing my faith as the only true source of freedom. I still stayed out late on Saturday nights and then casually went to mass at noon on Sunday, although little by little I began to feel more and more “guilt” for doing so. I began to understand that, “to be a lover of the world means enmity with God” (James 4:4).
But once in a confession, God placed the reality of my lack of coherence before me, my repeated abuse of His forgiveness, in not deciding once and for all to change: neither for better nor for worse. As my penance, the priest, who was serious and worried about me, told me to pray two decades of the Rosary. For me, this was like sending me on a walking pilgrimage to Jerusalem barefoot. This made me realize the importance of making reparation for sinful actions and also the great value of prayer. Through this priest, the Lord had given me the biggest grace in my life: to see that you cannot be happy, even if you are a Christian, unless it is because of Christ, because “you made us, Lord, for you; and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” (St. Augustine).
That same afternoon, I went to pray the Rosary with the young people of the parish and later, my two decades. It was as though I were still in shock and I spent a lot of time thinking about what I had discovered in that confession. I had changed my way of seeing basically everything. My faith had gone from being a weight to being liberating, and from that day on, I began to change everything as fast as I could. I began to spend more time with the young people in my parish, especially with two or three who went to mass with me everyday. We would spend time together, laughing… praying the Rosary together, visiting the Lord in the tabernacle, and talking about God. I began asking questions and the Lord gave me the grace to open my heart and understand the truth about so many things that I had heard in a distorted way through the television, in movies, or in music.
A few weeks later, we decided to go on a pilgrimage. There were two possibilities: Lourdes, with the youth of the parish, or Fatima, with a group called “The Home of the Mother” that I did not know. I preferred going with people I knew and with girls to Lourdes than with people I didn’t know and without girls to Fatima, but one of these good friends of mine insisted that we go to Fatima and as I really didn’t care that much, we went to Fatima.
It was in this pilgrimage that I met the Home. There were three things that stood out for me: seeing young people who were happy living in a state of grace, young religious brothers who had an intense love for Our Lady and, finally, the message of Our Lady in Fatima: “many souls are going to hell because there is no one praying and making sacrifices for them.” I was still a bit off track spiritually and did not understand some things, for example the value of prayer and sacrifice. But when I saw that the Virgin was asking us to offer prayer and penance for the salvation of souls, I was filled with a great desire to pray and without a complaint, continue going forward and from then on always respond to God’s will, as I now realized that it was best thing that I could choose. I saw that although it would not always be easy, it would always be worth the effort.
I was amazed to discover the consecrated life in this trip. I was surprised to see that the Servant Brothers were so few. So I said to myself, “If this vocation is a gift of intimacy with God and Our Mother, and it means dedicating oneself to the “one thing necessary,” which is the interior life, and if their work includes taking people on trips to Fatima and places like that… how can they be so few? There must be something about this consecrated life that I still haven’t understood.”
From that moment, I made the resolution to not rest until I found that “something” that I didn’t see and that formed the reason behind there being so few in the consecrated life. And with this thought in mind, I went to visit the Community in their own house, with two or three of my friends from the trip to Fatima, to spend a week with the Servant Brothers. I was hoping to find, as soon as possible, the response to my questions, “Why are they so few? What is it that I don’t see and I don’t understand?,” because I felt very attracted to following this path, but I did not want to make a commitment to something that I did not know. And during those days, I got to know it.
One morning, we had to take care of a group of children so that their parents and the Servant Brothers could attend some talks. So, we got to work. The time seemed like an eternity and after one of the boys nailed me with a ball (leaving a wound that hurt for two weeks later), I began to be bored, and more bored. I was so bored that, looking at the clock and seeing that there were still over two hours until lunch and that not even forty minutes had passed, I left my friends with the children and went to play the guitar in my room. How responsible of me, right?
I didn’t feel that bad about it until, after lunch, the Brothers had us watch a video about the Home. At a certain moment in the film, a sister is seen sweeping the floor and the narrator says, “The Servant Sister does not belong to herself; she belongs to Jesus Christ.” In that moment, I understood that “something” that I had been looking for. I saw myself playing the guitar in my room, leaving the work that had been entrusted to me, without any worry at all. On the other hand, I saw how this sister in the video who was sweeping could please God doing even the littlest thing for Him, forgetting herself, letting that be her joy and her peace. Only faith and total self-denial could make the religious life possible. Here, no one could keep anything for himself…not the guitar, or the career, or the friends…nothing. And that is precisely where one reaches the intimate union with God. I was left frightened at the sight of all this.
However, I also saw that in giving oneself completely to Him, He gives Himself completely and He fills us more than the world could ever try to fill us; but we have to leave all our securities first. He is the one who does it all, but we have to let Him enter, like Mary did: “Be it done unto me according to thy word.” And He does the rest.
All this helped me to see that God took my life seriously and that He responded to my questions with clarity and without delay. And so, knowing a bit more about the Religious Life in the Home and feeling attracted by it, I felt that I still needed some type of call or sign to be able to decide to ask for permission to enter in the Home as consecrated member.
It was during a daily mass in my parish where I felt that the Lord, through the gospel that the priest read, was speaking directly to me. It was the conversation of Jesus with the young man: “Lord, I will follow you wherever you go, but let me first bury my parents.” “Whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back, is not worthy of the kingdom of heaven” (Lk 9:57).
While I had been thinking of trying to finish my five year program in the university (I was only in my second year) and then preparing myself little by little on the path to follow Him, if He was calling me, I found that He, in calling me, did not want a half-hearted surrender amd I once again remembered that following Him is “not belonging to oneself, but rather to Jesus Christ.”
Having been chosen among so many to be His, I saw that love is blind and that the Lord is pure mercy. He chooses the weak of the world to confuse the strong and the foolish, to show His strength.
Shortly following this experience, I went on my first spiritual exercises, where I decided to do whatever God asked me. One afternoon, after the exercises were over, one of those friends from mass and the trip with the Home to Fatima gave me a ride to my music class. When he had stopped the car, he got out and told me that he had something very important to tell me.
“ What is it?,” I asked. He responded, “I’m entering in the Servant Brothers.” And I replied, “What? Me, too!”
He couldn’t believe it.
We had gone together to Fatima and we had done spiritual exercises together. Both of us had spoken with the Superior of the Servant Brothers to ask for permission to enter, but we had never talked about it between us. Only jokingly, sometimes. Now God had given us both this grace of the vocation and still today here we are, trying to be the Servant Brothers that God expects us to be, and trying to please Our Mother, sweeping or playing guitar, or chiselling a wall, or doing whatever we’re asked to do.
©HM Magazine No. 139 - November/December 2007
