At the heart of Resurrectionist spirituality is the personal and communal participation in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. Every lived experience of the Christian faith is a response to God who “loves each of us with a personal, unconditional love” (CR Constitutions, 1).
Recognizing God’s undeserved and limitless love in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus and his sending of his Holy Spirit, we are called to a life-long journey of conversion by which we come to experience our own personal resurrection. This was the gift of God to our Founder, Bogdan Jański who, after his own return to living the Catholic faith, saw the rebirth of human society as being brought about by the coming together of people who are themselves reborn in Christ.
Our co-Founder Fr. Peter Semenenko expressed this process of conversion as a dying-to-self (my own will, love of myself, acting by myself) in order to allow Christ’s love to be expressed through us: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. We begin to see and accept God’s unconditional love for us when we embrace the fact of our nothingness without God, the misery of our inherited weakness before temptations, and the corruption of our own personal sins. This reality draws us to seek God’s mercy, and in return to this unmerited love we turn outward in love of others, since God loved us first (cf. 1Jn 4: 19).
When we witness by our own lives to the transforming power of God’s love, we are able to become apostles, sent to call others to personal renewal which leads ultimately to our goal of the resurrection of society. As Resurrectionists we seek to model this communion in a community life, where we experience the paschal dynamic of dying and rising in the truth and charity lived among us.
The ultimate evidence of the presence of the Risen Jesus in our midst is the HOPE which is seen in our personal, communal and apostolic lives.