Category Archives: Letters

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel” (which means, God-with-us). (Matthew 1:23)

“Christmas has always been about this: contemplating the visit of God to his people.” (Pope Francis)

“I was born, born for you, born in a cave, in December, in the cold, on a wintry night, in poverty and in solitude, unknown even to the poorest. Why was I born in this way? So that you may believe in my love, since my love for you knows no limit. As I have loved you so much, put all your hope in me. I teach you to love me… Ever since my birth I have shown myself to you and have put myself entirely into your hands. … you have been able to see me, hold me, hear me, serve me, console me…. I did not give myself to you just at my birth for a few days or years, but I gave myself into your hands for ever, till the end of time.” (Brother Charles’ meditation on the nativity scene)

Dear brothers,

Christmas greetings to you all!

How are you and your community celebrating Christmas this year? Are there new and creative ways in your celebration from last year’s? Is Christmas still the gentle, quiet and humble presence of the Emmanuel in our busy and loud world? Or do we give the market, tourism and entertainment industries the license to plan our Christmas celebrations? It would be good to take a look at our Christmas celebrations this year vis-à-vis the reality of our world today with all its lights and shadows. I wonder how do families in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti or any place and people suffering from social unrest, extreme poverty and displacement celebrate Christmas this year? Is the reality of suffering more close to them than that of Christmas joy? We take a reflective look at our world and in interpreting the signs, we celebrate Christmas in a more responsive and appropriate way.

And what about mother earth? Christmas is not only for the human world but for the whole universe, including the ecological environment which is radically altered by the mystery of God-in-the-flesh. I wonder how are sister water, brother wind, sister bird, brother forest celebrating the season? Are the complaints about pollution, climate change, imbalance of the ecosystem depriving them of Christmas joy? For us who may be in the brighter side of the world, what would be our response to the invitation to celebrate the Emmanuel amidst the thundering noise of violence, greed, apathy towards life in all forms of our world today?

The virgin birth is not only a person but a path. Right in the very ground of our barrenness, vulnerability, helplessness as people and environment, traces of new life appear in the horizon, little manifestations of the Emmanuel break open our consciousness to give birth to new initiatives and shared dreams. As people of hope, we take a long, loving look at the world as the Father sees it when He gave the world its Messiah at the first Christmas. The world was not ready. He has to be born in the poverty of the manger, in the periphery of the village. This is not some sentimental or wishful thinking or a deus ex machina but a call to a radical, paradigmatic shift for the birthing of a new heaven and a new earth.

Christmas is a call to solitude of the heart. True solitude is recognizing, naming and claiming our poverty, our emptiness which is also our unlimited space for others. At the very core of our solitude, we encounter the Emmanuel in all men and women as brothers and sisters not only our friends but also those who kill, lie, torture, rape, and wage wars. They become our flesh and blood. When our hearts are full of the goodness of the Emmanuel and empty of fear, anger, indifference, greed, “we become a welcoming home for God and for our whole human family on earth.” (Henri JM Nouwen)

Ours is to wait, not passively though but actively. When we wait, we know that what we are waiting for is growing from the ground on which we are standing. We wait in the conviction that a seed has been planted two thousand years ago and that something has already begun. We are called to be present to the Kairos of Christmas with the certainty that something is happening where we are and that we want to be present to this moment minus the external features of the season. God has planted generously the seed of divinity in every human heart and in our world and we wait with firm conviction and joyful hope with Mary who sang, “the Almighty has done great things and holy is His name.” Blessed are we when we see what God wants us to see in this great season of Christmas.

Some Announcements:

There is a Month of Nazareth organized in the Philippines on July 1-26, 2024 for English speakers. Registration fee is $400/participant.

Preparations are on the way for our World Assembly in Lulunta, Argentina in January 2025. In the coming weeks, you would be receiving letters from the international team so that we see, reflect, discern and walk together the direction, content and process of the Assembly.

Brothers, I thank you very much for your beautiful witness and firm resolve to follow Jesus more closely in the footsteps of Brother Charles. May our faithful practice of the spirituality so free our hearts that the Emmanuel could give birth in us and in our ministry new and fervent ways of encountering the many faces of the poor today.

With my fraternal affection,
Eric

Read in PDF format: Christmas Letter 2023 to the Brothers around the World. Eric LOZADA, international responsible en

(In celebration of the first anniversary of the canonization of Brother Charles de Foucauld)

“He (Brother Charles) understood that God wanted him to be satisfied with clearing a path so that others could plant better. But he was thinking only in terms of announcing the Gospel to the people of the Sahara. He had no idea God was working through him to prepare a gift for the entire Church.” (Archbishop of Marseilles, France, preaching about Brother Charles leading to his canonization)

Dear Brothers,

Warm fraternal greetings to you all!!!

How is everything with you at the moment? What are significant experiences of joy, growth, transformation in your personal life, your friendships with brother-priests in your diocese, in your ministry to those in the peripheries? What are spaces of discouragement, stagnation and struggle? How are you coping? To whom do you go for support? Where are you being led by the Spirit in your resolve to be a joyful missionary of the Risen Christ? How are you growing in the discipline of daily adoration, review of life, desert day, gospel meditation, attending monthly meeting? How do these spiritual practices strengthen your commitment to a call within a call to be a universal brother, gentle presence, contemplative companion, prophetic preacher, missionary disciple of Jesus of Nazareth in the footsteps of Brother Charles?

I humbly pose these questions with you. Questions are like compass for the soul seeking the True and the Good amidst the complex, diverse, confusing paths of our world. I honestly struggle with you these questions. Precisely, in this tension, the grace of God works unconditionally to mellow our hearts. The key is to hold the question long enough until it strips us naked of all that is not true and not good in us. AA people have this to tell us – keep coming back to the practice. We are not “super” human beings who always live from our ideal. No, we are wounded, weak pastors who, very often live from our frailties and inadequacies yet we are so dearly loved and are called to love like the Master.

Brothers, I have the occasion to write to you as we celebrate the first anniversary of the canonization of Brother Charles. I was a witness to the joy and jubilation last year at St Peter’s Square in Rome. It was a Kairos moment not only for us but more so, for the universal church. When his name was announced at the beginning of the Eucharist, joyful cheers and loud claps of affirmation and gratitude to God were heard from the people. Now, the same euphoric joy is lived out in the chronos of concrete, little yet decisive acts of prophetic witness in the peripheries, inspired by the contemporary message of Brother Charles. The call of the synod on synodality invites us to participate in a universal journey as fellow pilgrims (not tourists), brothers and sisters all, walking side by side each other, collaborating, discerning and listening to one another where the Spirit is leading our world today.

In the course of our preparation last year, we from the International Team have asked with you – how has the canonization made an impact on you? Now, one year after, we ask with you something more specific – now that Brother Charles has been recognized as a gift to the church, what is ours to do to share this gift to others who are lost, lukewarm, curious, sympathizers but wanting to deepen their spirituality. Like the mandate of the apostles after the Resurrection to spread the news that He is alive, we have been called from being too inward-looking to be more out-going, to tread on unfamiliar territories, starting from simple personal encounter in the tomb of our losses, on the disappointing road of our Emmaus or in the breaking of bread with the poor and the marginalized. It was the Spirit of the Risen Christ that fired them up to be courageous, tireless, and joy-filled missionaries. How about us? What is our story? How have we been fired up in our mission to pass on the gift? How could we initiate personal encounters with brother priests of our diocese to brothers beyond our diocese or country? How do we do mission with the other branches of the Spiritual Family in the spirit of fraternal collaboration and co-responsibility for the gift?

In the Philippines, we have organized ourselves with the other members of the Spiritual Family and are committed to be fellow pilgrims, recognizing our unique gifts yet called to witness unity, social friendships, fraternal sharing, co-responsibility in the life-long journey of missionary discipleship and fidelity to the charism of Brother Charles.

How about you and your local fraternity, the national and continental fraternities? Where are you being led by the Spirit? What is yours to do? We could not just sit down and operate behind our little world without a concern for the bigger reality of God’s Kingdom here and now.

May the coming of the Spirit like tongues of fire set our hearts aflame as we take on the task of doing mission like our very own, Brother Charles. Though things were not always clear to him where to go and what to do, he never stopped in ambivalence and half-heartedness. Rather, his passion to imitate the love of God in Jesus of Nazareth so consumed him that he tirelessly wrestled with every human condition that separates us from God, from the poor and from one another. St Charles de Foucauld, pray for us!!

With much love and fire,

PDF: Letter of Eric, 15 May 2023 eng

Day of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth
Christmas Letter to the brothers around the world

“Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign: the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and will call him Emmanuel” (Isaiah 7:14, NIV)

“It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.” (a quote from Brother Charles)

Dear brothers, I greet you all with great joy and hope-filled peace from the Emmanuel!!!

How is everything with you? What realities and concerns are you holding these days? Are you radiating the Christmas message to the people around – your brother-priests, your bishop, the margins in the parish, your immediate neighbors? Are you attending to your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health while you do multi-tasks in ministerial work? What spaces are you creating in community for the Emmanuel to come into your lives together? What invitations from the Spirit are you responding so that you may journey together as a synodal community? And how is the life and charism of our dear Brother Charles making a difference in the way you live your call and in the quality of your response to these invitations? These are big questions that I wish to contemplate with you. Let our life in fraternity and our doing missionary work be deepened by the questions we hold.

What a joy to write to you a letter at this season of Christmas. More than just a mere tradition in the Fraternity, I am writing to you with a heart of a brother who longs to be in communion with you and who has a great admiration for all your creativity, fidelity, hard work and passion for Jesus and the Gospel in the footsteps of Brother Charles. I am holding your stories and faces – those whom I have met in person and those of you whom I have heard living Nazareth in the peripheries. (While writing this letter, I am told about the passing of 2 senior brothers, Alvaro Gonzalez from Chile and Antonino from Madrid fraternities. While we grieve their losses, we equally rejoice over 2 of our brothers who come home to the Father as faithful disciples of Jesus. May they now enjoy eternal peace).

Christmas is a “Kairos moment,” the most appropriate time to take a long, loving look with new eyes at all of creation in different levels and forms– the human community, natural ecology, politics, economics, culture, religion, blended social relationships– in the light of the loving plan of the Creator. Through the mystery of the Incarnate God, all of creation, including natural ecology is radically transformed as a meeting place with God. What used to be radical opposites in the eyes of the world are now bridged and restored to their original setting in God’s great design. Everything now is in God. Everything belongs to God. It is an inclusive universe after all.

But the world seems to be not ready for this God. It insists in a world where God is edged out and humanity creates an idol of the egoic self with self-serving, self-referential, delusional views, assumptions and ideologies. This was made prominent during the pandemic. The way we regard ourselves in relation to the Other, be it from within the family, parish community or among nations, we wear the masks of mistrust and deception concealing a lie that the egoic self is the reference point and the other a disposable entity. With globalized market, everything has been commodified. Notwithstanding the benefits of technology and social media, they have become “faithful servants” of the market. The poor, including Mother Earth as the new poor is crying for help. Power, authority and wealth could be used to restore, rehabilitate, serve and care but it seems that greed, apathy, indifference has gained the upper hand. It blinds the mind and numbs the heart from taking responsibility. So, it’s a dark world after all.

Precisely, this was the spirit of the original Christmas – the world was not ready (there is no room in the inn) that the Emmanuel has to be born in the periphery, at the dead, quiet night, without fun fares. This is the wisdom of Pope Francis’ invitation for us to go to the peripheries and meet God there. We just need to ask the Spirit to give us new eyes to capture the signs, ordinary and insignificant they may be but they are gifts from God leading us to new light. In our scripture readings at Mass, we have been listening to stories of insignificant personalities as the path ways of the Emmanuel. They all seem to be facing moral dilemmas – in their barrenness, where is the light? In following their own plan, where is the divine plan? In their loneliness, helplessness, fear, shame, where is the way out? Precisely, in these very moments, God decides to come and live amongst us.

The only path that the Emmanuel chose to come into the world seems to be that of ordinary people in the peripheries, facing realities of suffering and pain and struggling to make a fundamental choice, either for hope or despair, for violence or for peace, for darkness or for light, for God or against Him. The Spirit through an angel has to overshadow them in order to free them from everything that makes them unfree so that may freely submit to the bigger divine plan. When in our lives and ministries, we choose to collaborate with others than to be self-sufficient, to listen to the other than to do our own self talk, to care than to incapsulate ourselves in our own comfort, to understand the other patiently than to insist that we be understood, to serve rather than be served, we become little path ways of the Emmanuel present in our world, one moment, one person at a time. Our is little and small, a daily choice to make but precisely it becomes the sacred path of the Emmanuel when we do it very well. Brother Charles is our icon of hope. Pope Francis has recognized him in Fratelli Tutti as our path to dialogue and universal fraternity. Ours is to do our daily and monthly practice of the spirituality with resolve and determined action that we become joyful signs of the Emmanuel in our world today.

So, rejoice, dear brothers, Christmas is after all, a season of glad tidings and hope.

Here is a path for us so that we may deepen our practice and devotion to Bro Charles especially now that his life and charism has been recognized by the universal church. After the canonization, I received 20 relics of Bro Charles from the dicastery through Bishop John MacWilliams of the Sahara. These relics are available for us. We, from the international team, wish to hand carry them to you after you have written a letter of request addressed to ericlozada@yahoo.com. First come, first serve. The only requirement is that you organize a public devotion to his honor, most especially in seminaries and parishes named after him. Thank you very much.

May the Emmanuel empower us to capture the signs of our times, listen to their invitations in prayer and discernment and act on them in collaboration with God’s people as pathways of the Emmanuel becoming present in our world today.

With my fraternal love and embrace,
Eric, your servant-brother

PDF: Christmas Letter to the Brothers around the World

EASTER LETTER TO THE BROTHERS AROUND THE WORLD

FROM OPEN TOMBS TO NEW PATHWAYS OF HOPE

“You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth, you will bring me up again.” (Psalm 71:20)

“You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead.” (Isaiah 26:19)

“And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Daniel 12:2)

“We are an Easter people,” as Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle puts it in one of his books. The Easter reality is reminding us that amidst all the violence, there is a much greater reality of peace in our world today. This is not some kind of magic formula but an expanding and deepened consciousness that springs from the depths of the earth overflowing into every reality of our world. The way to move to this Easter reality is to see humanity and the world through the lens of God who raised Jesus from the dead. In God, the whole universe is birthing with the joy of new life in the Risen Christ in spite of everything that tries to sabotage this life. We thrive on as people of hope, mature children of the light even when death and darkness seem to be the predominant reality today. We continue to be ambassadors of hope amidst the realities of war and violence in Ukraine, Myanmar, Haiti, Afghanistan, of poverty and inequality in the countries of Africa and Asia, of ecological destruction that takes a heavy toll on the poorer sectors of a country, economic meltdown, political rivalries that try to cancel one another, of the pandemic that gravely affects the vulnerable and the poor across the globe. The list goes on.

Hope of new life in the Risen Christ is an antidote to the prevailing attitudes against the dark realities of today –that of wishful thinking as a way of denial or escape from reality or being too enmeshed in our dark reality that we become prisoners of gloom and utter helplessness or that of doing everything possible to survive, thinking only of our own private good without regard for the common good and care for our common home. Hope is not a flight from but a going through the dark tunnel of reality with a leap of trust to the Giver of Life and Light, the God who is always ahead and beyond. Hope is a loving surrender to the truth that death is not the final say to everything even if evil seems to have the upper hand. The challenge of Hope today is to build fraternities of hope, people who journey together, have a positive regard for one another, listen to one another with respect and discern where humanity has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution to the ills of our world. As people of hope, we walk together as brothers with our sisters towards the realization of God’s dream for our world today in the Risen Christ. Individual efforts could only do as much. Our world today is groaning for a new world order that is shared, grounded in the Easter message of hope.

But first things first. Let us first recognize together where our world’s tombs are of which God in the Risen Christ is willing to open with us and through us. Overt war, poverty, destruction of the environment, migration, global divide are symptoms of ill will buried in the tombs of human hearts. Greed, indifference, violence, resentment, hatred are concomitant human dispositions that are based on disrespect, distrust, distortion of values, blindness of the goodness of the other and of the world. These dispositions become mental attitudes that foment structures of violence, injustice, abuse of power that cloud the mind and numb the heart of individuals in a system. Collectively, it becomes a culture wherein untruth becomes true, darkness becomes light in a very distorted way. Hope is rooted in a firm conviction that God alone in the Risen Christ could open our tombs and transform our ill will to good will. Left to ourselves, we are too blind, wounded, broken, and helpless.

And so, we hope together as brothers with our sisters in the journey. Starting from our local fraternities, faithful to our spiritual practices of review of life, desert day, adoration, fraternity meeting, we gift hope to our world today, one day at a time. We dialogue and discern together where the Spirit is leading us – personally, communally, globally. No one stands alone. Every personal listening is a global listening. But the activity is mainly that of God in the Risen Christ. Ours is to listen deeply and cooperate to God’s saving and even repairing activity of our beautiful world. The activity of hope grounds itself from Jesus’s gift of the passion (from the Latin word, passio, meaning non-activity) Jesus saves the world primarily from his passivity on the cross more than his activity of healing and preaching. When we feel beaten up, misunderstood, humiliated, not in control, mistreated in our offer of love and goodness to others, we are undergoing our passion as lovers of humanity. Here and only here are we invited to pose a moral question – how will we respond to evil? What kind of heart shall we offer to perpetrators of evil? What kind of lives are we willing to give to our world today? Unforgiving or forgiving? Angry or sober? resentful or loving? Only when Jesus freely offered his forgiveness to humanity that rejects his offer of love that the Father gave him the new life.

We are invited to be heralds of this new life to our wounded, violent and fragmented world. We hold both our joy and our sorrows, our indifference and our care, our fears and our willingness to be sent. May our universal Brother, St Charles de Foucauld continue to inspire and accompany us in our desire to cry the gospel with our lives. May his recognition as a saint be an impetus for our church today that is envisioning herself as brother and sister to all, missionary to the peripheries, a prophet of dialogue and of care for our common home.

Eric Lozada

PDF: 22-04-17, EASTER LETTER 2022, engl., Eric Lozada

But now, declares Yahweh, come back to me with all your heart, fasting, weeping, mourning. Tear your hearts and not your clothes, and come back to Yahweh, your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, rich in faithful love, and he relents about inflicting disaster. (Joel 2:12-13)

All of us, when we were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death. By our baptism into his death, we were buried with him, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glorious power, we too should begin living a new life… [ ] our former self was crucified with him… [ ] and now the life that he lives is life with God. In the same way, you must see yourselves as being dead to sin but alive for God in Christ Jesus. (Romans: 6: 3-11)

Greetings to all of you, my dearest brothers!

As I am writing to you, I am holding you and the complex realities that each of you are facing because of this global crisis. It seems that the pandemic is revealing to us our strengths and our weaknesses, in personal, national and global relations, in the economic, political and religious spheres. The pandemic is a time of great unveiling, as Fr Richard Rohr puts it and as Pope Francis seems to imply as he engages in a systemic deconstruction of our global structures in Fratelli Tutti. I wish not to add to their magnificent work. Rather, I intend to situate our celebration of Lent with what the pandemic reveals and teaches our world. I would like to visualize the celebration of Lent as a downward spiral journey, the deeper we go, the more we expose what is hidden in human hearts and in the subcultures of our world that hold us hostage in the dungeon of sin, fear, indifference, violence. If we all take this journey together with honesty and firm resolve, we reach rock bottom from which all the lies of sin, the delusions and distortions of this world originate. This is our entombment with Christ, as St Paul says, where our old selves are buried with Christ so that the Father could give birth to a new life in us in Christ. It is my hope that at the end of our 40-day Lenten journey through Easter, like the apostles after the resurrection, we all walk with renewed joy and courage crying out the message of God’s love and delight for our world.

Our journey starts with what the Prophet Joel proposes, “Come back,” “turn to God with all of your heart.” We start the journey with a question: Whose am I? To whom does the world turn? If we take a long, loving look at the world and ourselves, it seems that the world, we, have many false gods (manifest or hidden) that we worship, attend to, give all our time and energy. Our addictive society seems to have deep-seated forms of idolatry, supplanting the true God of our deepest longing with the false gods of superficial living. That is why, the Prophet recommends fasting, weeping and mourning. We need to fast from what we feed our minds and hearts every day that are toxic and not coming from the Gospel values. We need to weep over the violence, injustice, indifference, greed of this world because, in very subtle ways, we have been operating under their spell. We mourn over the mistakes of the past and learn not to repeat them. St Paul calls this a baptism into Christ which is also a baptism into his death. Our baptism is our initiation and our communion in the Paschal Mystery. What is it that we are willing to die to for the sake of Jesus and the Gospel? We need to name our dying. And in the passivity of our dying into Christ, the Father’s redemptive work in us and in our world restores us to original life of grace. When we consciously die to the old self, the self which is enslaved by sin, we become free and empty of ourselves yet living fully and authentically in the new life of Christ and in Christ.

And so, dear brothers, may we all commit to this journey from slavery to freedom, from fear to trust, from darkness to light, from sin to grace. May this journey be our humble yet sincere gift to the people entrusted to us and to our anxious, fragmented and violent world. Allow me to express also my deep appreciation for your humble witness of the Gospel and zealous care for the poor in your own places of assignment, especially at this time of the pandemic. My gratitude to our brothers who wrote the five texts and the translators of those texts. They were meant to prepare us spiritually for the canonization of Brother Charles. May I invite those who have not read and reflected on those texts to access them at our website: www.iesuscaritas.org. And for those who have, continue to go back to these texts.

Complementing our Lenten journey, I thought of introducing the process of re-grounding. In my correspondences with Cardinal Stella of the Congregation for the Clergy, he has been asking me important questions about how are we in terms of our fidelity to the charism of Brother Charles and how are we growing in mission as diocesan priests inspired by his spirituality. From these conversations, the whole idea of coming up with a global survey is born. Instead of responding to these questions alone, I thought of us together in an adventure of finding and reclaiming our precious gems which may be hidden from us but which continue to inspire us. I am proposing a process in two phases.

The first phase will be more on facts. Here, I am making an appeal to the local, national and continental brother- responsibles to do the major work. You, brother local responsibles shall provide us with facts from your local fraternity as to how many are the regular members and other important information. When the survey form arrives, please read it carefully. Be mindful that the facts that you are providing our global fraternity are true. A note on regular members. They are brothers who have been regularly attending your monthly meeting for at least a year or have been regularly connecting digitally to you or to any of the brothers from your local fraternity. If the brother is in a remote assignment but he regularly connects, he could still be a regular member. Brothers who are interested of our spirituality but could not commit to regular attendance at meetings or regular correspondences, they are called “sympathizers.” The key is commitment. Survey form will be coming from your national/country responsible. There is a time frame of two weeks for you to fill up the form and return it to your country responsible. I sincerely thank you for your generosity.

The second phase will be some months or a year later. The process will be more of a communal review of our lives as to how are we growing in terms of our fidelity to the charism of Brother Charles and how are we growing in our missionary zeal as diocesan priests inspired by Brother Charles.

Thank you very much, dear brothers. Please know that I continue to hold your continent and your country in my prayer. Kindly hold me also in your prayer. I need that.

With fraternal delight,

Eric LOZADA, international responsible

Dumaguete, Philippines, February 2021

PDF: Lenten Letter 2021 of Eric, eng

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