Every month, the Community Life and Mission Project has a joint retreat, to which is added another day of rest and cultural walk and contact with nature. In their last retreat, they focused their reflection on the value of generosity.
Last Thursday, July 18, Augustinian Recollect religious from the communities of California, United States, met for their monthly community retreat at Our Lady of the Pilar Parish in Santa Ana, about 50 kilometers from downtown Los Angeles.
The religious follow the schemes proposed by the Secretariat for Permanent Formation and Spirituality, which for the month of July focused on the practice of generosity as a central value for the person. In previous months they have focused on values such as cordiality, acceptance of others…
The host community is in charge of making a first presentation of the topic; then those present are divided into two groups to share personal reflections based on the three questions that the Secretariat itself proposes in the materials it provides.
After the moment of personal and community reflection, the parish church of Santa Ana was the setting for a moment of Eucharistic prayer, followed by the midday prayer or intermediate hour and the final blessing.
An Italian-style lunch shared by all brought to a close the day, which is included in the agendas of all the communities, which take turns hosting the retreat.
In California there are five communities of the Province of St. Nicholas of Tolentino of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, located in the towns of Oxnard (central house and parish of Our Lady Star of the Sea), Montebello (parish and school of St. Benedict), Los Angeles (parish of Christ the King) and Santa Ana (two parish communities, Our Lady of Pilar and Our Lady of Guadalupe).
There are a total of 27 Augustinian Recollect religious, of whom usually between 15 and 20 attend the days of retreat, given that some of them must remain in the ministries and others are no longer able to move easily.
The Augustinian Recollect Sisters, active religious women of Filipino origin who have a community in California and are part of the Augustinian Recollect Family, always join these retreats. Between two and four members of their community join the religious in the monthly retreats.
The monthly retreat always has three parts. It begins with an hour of reading, reflection and discussion on the outlines sent by the Secretariat; it is followed by a half hour of Eucharistic prayer and ends with a meal and a time for community discussion, which serves to encourage one another, to learn about the situation and news of each of the communities and to strengthen the bonds of friendship and community among the religious.
On another different day of the month, community walks are usually made to places of special significance and beauty, such as the Los Angeles Botanical Garden, parks or some of the old convents of the first evangelization scattered throughout California with their typical Spanish colonial style of construction.
The monthly days of retreat are called “Days of Recollection,” and are accompanied by other moments of community experiences in these communities that are relatively close to each other geographically; the two most distant communities are Oxnard and Guadalupe, with a distance between them of 150 km. Los Angeles and Montebello are very close to each other, as are Guadalupe and El Pilar. In the extreme northwest, next to the coast, is Oxnard, Los Angeles and Montebello are in the middle, and in the southeast is Santa Ana.
The joint participation of the Recollect religious in California in the Augustinian celebrations and on the day of the Augustinian Recollection (December 5) is also recurrent. They hold an annual assembly and schedule weekly retreats in English and Spanish at the central house in Oxnard.
