“70 years sowing love that never says enough” has been the motto that has set the tone during these days from July 4 to 6, where we lived the twenty-ninth National Vedruna Meeting. It was a great joy to receive during the morning the different centers of the country that, since very early in the morning, left their place of origin to share this moment as Vedruna family of Venezuela.
This meeting gathered the experiences, experiences and the joy of the fruits that have left us the history that was sown from the first sisters to those who continued the work of Joaquina under the inspiration of the Holy Ruah, grateful for this legacy received until today.
The meeting was full of creativity, joy, depth, prayer, reflection, family and games, which helped us all to enter into an atmosphere of gratitude and thus close this year of celebration of 70 years of Vedruna presence in the country.
We recognized the journey together of the associated schools under the Vedruna Educational Proposal: Cagua: El Carmelo, Nuestra Señora del Valle and Tucusito; Caracas: El Carmelo and Guicaipuro II; Anaco: Teresita González-Quevedo; Cantaura: Santa Joaquina; Bolívar: Caroní and Santa Joaquina.
We gathered 106 people who reflect on how to revive the commitment for and with the younger generations, renewing the passion for a more open and inclusive education, capable of patient listening, constructive dialogue and mutual understanding. All this in order to unite efforts for a broad educational alliance with the objective of forming mature people, capable of overcoming fragmentations and oppositions and rebuilding the fabric of relationships in the centers where each one of us lives, that is, to make a pact together.
The proposed challenge is to “think in harmony with what you feel and do”; “feel in harmony with what you think and do”, “live in harmony with what you feel and think”. A full harmony, to live in harmony the charism in our person, environment and locality, let us value what we are, what we have, and what together as a family we can become, making real what St. Joaquina said: “If only we were all on fire with the love of Jesus, so that we could light up the whole world”.
The Aparecida document tells us in No. 278: “The disciple, as he comes to know and love his Lord, experiences the need to share with others the joy of being sent, to go into the world to proclaim Jesus Christ, dead and risen, to make love and service a reality in the person of those most in need, in a word, to build the Kingdom of God. Mission is inseparable from discipleship, so it should not be understood as a stage after formation, even if it is carried out in different ways, according to one’s vocation and the moment of human and Christian maturity in which the person finds himself”.
We are happy to have experienced the gift of family.
With the sending forth celebration, the personnel of each center prepared to return renewed and strengthened to be born again.
Professor Giclis Santamaria
