In a society saturated with stimuli, images, and instant promises, inner impoverishment grows in proportion to the increase in external noise. The silence necessary to listen to oneself, understand oneself, and sustain one’s own life is extinguished. The Augustinian Recollection appears not as a nostalgia for the past, but as a school of wisdom for a happier present.
When outward appearance takes precedence over inner growth, we experience the worst kind of loneliness: self-neglect. We invest physical and psychological energy to maintain an image, a status, a performance level. Every gram and wrinkle, every comparison, adds more anxiety, precisely when we have relinquished the tools that overcome it.
It’s a disturbing paradox: this is the time of greatest access to information, experiences, and entertainment compared to any other generation, yet emotional fragility is also more widespread than ever. New generations have tools at their disposal that they don’t fully understand, exposed to stimuli they don’t know how to organize, prioritize, or categorize.
The concern for image and the approval of others takes its toll on exorbitant interests: insecurity, tiredness, irritability, breakdowns, emotional begging, saturation of stimuli for the orphans of interiority, individualistic, without direction.
When the Augustinian Recollection was born, society was also marked by tensions and profound, unmet longings. The first Recollects interpreted their time with clarity and courage. Faced with an external, complacent, or fragmented religiosity, they made a countercultural commitment: simplicity, austerity, and the primacy of the interior life.
It wasn’t an escape from the world, but a way of living in it meaningfully. They focused on the search for authenticity, fidelity to their charism, and the humility of knowing themselves to be lifelong learners. God didn’t ask them to be supermen, but men and women reconciled with themselves.
Anyone can learn to enjoy springtime, but only the wise live through winter with dignity. Many people, with ample reason to be happy, live dissatisfied and discontented lives. The Recollect spirituality proposes that true wealth is not traded on the markets, as the Gospel of Matthew (13:45-46) or the Book of Proverbs (3:13-14) state.
In the field of education, this intuition is provocative. For a long time, success was equated with silence, memorization, and passing exams with high marks. At best, creativity and civic education were added.
The Augustinian and Recollect tradition raises the bar: it is not enough to accumulate knowledge; it is essential to invest in inner life. That spirit of the first Recollects can be translated into more understandable language: austerity is not misery, nor sadness, nor mediocrity, but rather joyful sobriety, dignity without ostentation, and consistency in not putting “having” above “being.”
How can we make the inner life and prayer more accessible? How can we explain the profound sadness that individualism, self-absorption, selfishness, and consumerism bring? How can we encourage people to focus on the depths of their being, even if it hurts to scratch the surface of appearances and posturing? These are pastoral challenges for our time.
The Harvest proposes living with depth, freedom, and meaning; in times of emotional fragility and constant noise, investing in what cannot be bought with money or offered on a screen. Those who cultivate their inner selves are authors, not spectators. And no winter can defeat them, because they know that spring always comes afterward, and the cold only served to preserve the seeds so they can germinate.
