Lavalla200>

When: from 18 June to 23 July 2022

Where: 

• 17/06 to 22/06: General House
• 22/06 to 16/07: General House, Manziana or other location (to be notified).
• 17/07 to 23/07: L’Hermitage
  Note: Before and after the face-to-face period there will be accompaniment online.
  Depending on the status of COVID-19, the dates and structure may be altered.

Desired outcomes

• Discern a call to be part of one of the Institute’s intercultural initiatives.
• In consultation with each candidate, the Institute’s leaders accept people and decide where they will go.
• A deeper appreciation of cultural diversity as well as understand the personal challenges in intercultural living.
• Each person will develop new competencies and skills and a spirituality for intercultural living.

Methodology

The program is experiential in character, in an environment that allows a deeper community experience in our sharing and reflecting together, where we look after our daily needs, where we can pray and spend time together. It is a place that is new for all of us – a new language, new environment, and new culture.

Personal discernment continues throughout the program by the individual’s own soul-searching and by focussed personal accompaniment each week.  Over the weeks there is a series of workshops related to self-knowledge, discernment, communication, community-building, the spiritual journey, being Marist, intercultural dynamics, theology of mission.

Language is a challenge.  We work in Spanish and English and engage translators to assist in the workshops.  Learning to cope with limited language is all an essential part of the process.

Half-way through the program the participants are invited to write a letter of availability to the Superior General.  After a serious discernment, the candidates who feel called are sent to one of the Lavalla200> communities or one of the special projects of the Institute. The experience concludes with a pilgrimage to the Hermitage in France, our Marist origins, where they are commissioned as Marists for a new beginning.

N.B. The time, venue, and mode of delivery of the program depends entirely on how things develop in the COVID 19 pandemic.