The Recollect charism is not simply about seclusion, silence, and contemplation. The Augustinian Recollect charism is broader and requires interiority and contemplation, fraternity and community life, apostolate and mission.
The Recollection was born as a reform to renew what had weakened, to return to the evangelical and Augustinian sources so as not to lose its identity. Rather than an escape from the world, it is a discernment and a process that implies progress: it begins in the interior, returning to the heart, recovering what is essential, and listening to God. And from there it moves toward renewal to materialize and update those values in the present.
The great movements of renewal in the Church arise in contexts of profound social change that affect human relationships, religious experience, the family, and our understanding of life. Faced with this reality, the spirit of Recollects is a call to review, discern, and respond creatively.
Turning to one’s inner self is not isolation; when it is authentic, it leads to fraternity and mission. An example of this discernment that leads to action can be seen in two missionary women’s congregations of the Augustinian Recollect Family. Both were founded to address very deep social wounds.
The Augustinian Recollect Missionaries were founded in China in 1931 as a call to care for abandoned girls in a context of extreme poverty and entrenched machismo. These contemplative nuns left their monasteries in Spain and the Philippines to dedicate themselves to a world unfamiliar and a culture far removed from their own, to these girls abandoned by their families and condemned to die at birth.
For their part, Blessed Maria de San José Alvarado and Father Justo Vicente López Aveledo did something similar in Venezuela with the Augustinian Recollects of the Heart of Jesus, born to care for the sick, orphans, the elderly and the excluded.
In both cases, interiority generated new forms of presence among the excluded. This is the logical consequence of a spiritual experience. Christian interiority, if authentic, inevitably leads to addressing human suffering.
The Augustinian Recollect Family continues today to address both those ancient forms of poverty and new ones: loneliness, emotional fragility, migration, family breakdown, loss of meaning, and hatred of those who are different. Great apostolic responses are only possible when there are prior processes of internalization and discernment.
How can an authentic inner experience generate answers for our contemporary wounds? If Recollection isn’t exactly about withdrawing, this knowledge of returning to the essential will allow us to respond better and undertake each action with more meaning, more vigor, more knowledge, and more conviction.
The Church’s most fruitful responses rarely arise from strategies planned on paper, but from profound processes of introspection and discernment. Let us return to the essentials to discover, in our historical moment, where the Spirit continues to lead us.
