(“Receive love” = Indonesian for “Thank You!”)
Fr. Bruno Orrù is a Xaverian Missionary in Indonesia where he has worked for many years. In one of his latest e-mails, he writes to the members of the West Essex Xaverian League of the Wayne, NJ area:
o you never stop loving the missions…, and are back to one of your meetings to once again plan for the new endeavors for us in the field. Terima Karish!!! Yes, once you fall in love with the missions you never let go. And if you ever work in the missions… well, nostalgia and yearning will kill you if you are separated and can’t go back to it. It’s not just “missions”, but the people we serve and with whom we have become one.
All of you do not live in a mission country or are active in mission work in the field, yet you still love it. As the apostle Peter used to say to his community, “You haven’t seen Christ and yet you love him.” You are not here with us but you are doing a wonderful mission work. Yes, you and we are in the same work, Christ’s work.
At the present time, my mission work is helping train our future Indonesian Xaverian Missionaries, but what a satisfaction when they reach the goal. It’s a bit like you mothers when the labor pains end and your child is born… Such is the joy I feel at this time when I see Petrus, who has just finished his theology studies in Chicago, return to Indonesia for his diaconate ministry year before being ordained a priest here for our Congregation. And for me joy grows when some of our young men are sent to direct mission work.
Of the novices I accompanied in their formation journey several are already priests, two in mission work here in Indonesia, one in Bangladesh and one in the Amazons. Five others are in Indonesia or in Africa, in formation work, so young and yet already preparing others for the missions!…
From time to time I still have a chance to preach and prepare someone for baptism and that’s the sweetest work. A few months ago, after a two-year preparation, I baptized a mother and her two boys. One of them is now in High School in Perth, Australia. I am in touch with all of them and I feel the joy of still bringing them closer and closer to Christ. Yes, spiritual paternity has its own deep joys. Celibacy can be really fruitful, have a lot of children, sons and daughters in Christ, and what children!
At the present time, my mission work is helping train our future Indonesian Xaverian Missionaries, but what a satisfaction when they reach the goal.
Here we will have first professions in July. Then in August a new year of Novitiate will begin. Most likely the new novices will be eleven, and the new batch of pre-novices will have more than fifteen. Thanks be to God! More work for me and… for you too! Aren’t God’s ways great? While in Europe and the whole West the din of the world seems louder than any noise the priesthood and religious life can make and vocations are still diminishing, in the young Catholic communities God’s call is generously being answered by many and good young people, many of who are already working in other mission lands as well as in “Christian” lands.
In the rest of us enthusiasm and zest don’t show signs of dwindling. In most instances not even the aches of age can keep us from the “safari trail.” In the Mentawai Islands safari means visiting far away communities, one month at a stretch on the trail, by canoe or on foot through the forest. Still, on we go, with joy and sometimes with a few pains and aches, “the background sounds of aging.” So you see, all of us need your prayers.
“Selamat berjuang untuk misi:” You too are in our prayers…
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)