The Carmelita Spirit

“Casa de la Alegria,” tries, already in the third millennium, to translate the spirit of the Carmelo, based on the “gentle breeze” of the Spirit of God which no one knows “where it comes from or is headed to” and in the frame of the call into a new evangelization that is not afraid of joining the “dark night” of a world deeply seculized and marked by the wounds of a fierce neoliberalism that turns people into numbers or “market variables.” To offer marginalized people who live/survive in Lima Downtown, male and female sex dealers, beggars, people with a different sexual orientation, as a proposal of social development, the model of life of Jesus and a praying fraternity that listens, shelters and stands by the marginalized and excluded, doomed to die in several ways: Poor, sick, different.

The Carmelo has the challenge to “Truthfully prove” that fraternity is possible where solidarity and humanity don’t exist, as a “prophetic” family we have to be aware of… “the basic unfairness that divides humanity into rich and poor.” In that matter, we ought to be “able to say a word, not only of denounce of the bad things, but also of shelter and tenderness for those who are victims of this system.

The shelter, following the example of our mother, Patrona and Sister Mary, Mother of Jesus, who “performs” in meditation and silence, the live word, and turns such “performance” into “active service” (Evangelius of Luke) must lead us into contemplation of particularities and realities of each human being “by meditating them in our hearts” and translating such contemplation into an openness to the other.

Jesus’s vital project cannot and must not be ONLY a project for spiritual salvation. It must also include the successful welfare of the people who are invited to participate in such project, to have and propose objectives of clear development that include: a decrease in poverty and marginality starting from the acknowledgement of the human being as a “creation synthesis”, re-dignifial of those who have been taken away from their dignity because of being different or living against the “culture.” Contemplation also implies the discovery of God, present in everybody, the one who’s acknowledged as an Emaus… “to share the bread.”