reading

TO THE READER

At a given moment in the early Church, the first Christians were called “Followers of the Way.” They lived an impelling vocation, but the road they had to travel was very difficult because they were following footprints envisioned but not seen. Externally difficult because they appeared revolutionary without intending it. They were a de-stabilizing force. Uncomfortable to society on account of their way of being and living; mysteriously free and active, truly transforming.

They changed the course of History; they turned it around; they made it go just in the opposite direction it was following. And, as St. Augustine says and Pedro Poveda comments on, the despised, the losers, the defeated, ended up being the conquerors.

It is not surprising that Poveda – another strange inhabitant of his own world- should encounter in the Christians of the primitive Church, the necessary reference for the Christian of today. To change the world from within each person; to change it by being men and women filled with the Spirit of Jesus; to change it outwardly by being watchful, tensed up, in the presence of the crooked order of things. This was the utopia of Poveda. Surprised by his own daring, he himself commented: “Our endeavor appears utopian.”

For him living as the first Christians was like a form of protest -a serene protest- in the presence of a senseless Christianity, without interior vibration and without expansive waves. He writes: “Commitment. It is lacking for everything noble and great; because there is no faith in anything, neither courage, nor perseverance. Egotism is much in abundance and the greater this is the more the lack of sacrifice is felt; and sacrifice is the gold with which the good of everyone is purchased”.

Poveda did what he could. He invited the passive, called the “good,” stirred up the insensitive, committed his friends, challenged the youth, convoked all. The Prophet’s words “I believed; therefore, I spoke” were his motto. He believed in the potential of a Christianity lived in the midst of the world, made vigor, yeast, salt, as that of the first Christians. He believed in the strength of fraternity, of tolerance, of meekness, of humility; he believed in the light burden of that which comforts, encourages, and is joyful; of that which is alien to violence, arrogance, power; and a belligerent spirit.

To live as the first Christians is to be transformed so as to transform; a utopia? But, is it not a utopia what the inner conscience of today’s men and women tend toward? a conscience pained by lacking, by disappointments in the presence of a humanity that is unmerciful and unjust toward Humanity itself?

I leave it to you, the reader, to be able to find an adequate response to these questions.

Pedro Poveda (1874-1936) promoted a vast movement of lay spirituality: the Teresian Association, an association of lay people founded by him.

Within the spiritual writings of Poveda, Living as the First Christians gathers one of the fundamental aspects of his vision: the idea of returning to the Christianity of the early times; a Christianity devoted to the message of the Incarnation –the Son of God assuming what is human- and immersed in the earthly realities of which he was a part.

The texts in which the author explicitly speaks of the first Christians are sprinkled, here and there, in all the spiritual writings of Poveda; even in the writings close to his death. But the reference of Poveda to the spirit of the Christians of the early Church constitutes a widespread category that informs the whole of his spiritual thought. This is what these short pages manifest.

Each chapter starts with one of Poveda’s texts referring to the first Christians, and it is followed by his commentaries on the selected text. Some of the thoughts selected from his writings are: faith, the authenticity of that faith, the brotherhood of people, the amiable and peaceful disposition, the diligence in acting that characterized the Christians of the primitive Church –the followers of the Way. For Poveda these should be the characteristics of the Christians of all times.

Once again, the inner coherence of Pedro Poveda is revealed in these texts. That which he once said, he reiterates; and what he reiterates, he refines, affirms, and demands with greater radicalness; he remits to what he formerly said and he maintains the identical meaning. It is a form of fidelity to self that this world of ours, so fragmented and always undermined by its incoherence, would like to own.

April 17, 1995

D.G.M.