MSC Vietnam gathering and discernment, photos and reflections

With thanks for Bang for photos, Khoi for texts, Hoa for technical assistance

We discern our identity as human persons and as Christians. We discern our identity as MSCs today.

We are unique individuals, born and nourished in love, called to acknowledge and embrace our strengths and weaknesses, and be transformed toward holiness through our daily relations. 

As MSCs, experienced and believing in an intimate and unconditionally loving God revealed in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we willingly and whole-heartedly share these values with everyone through our daily life. 

There were moments that the community sensed fear, anxiety and lostness while at the same time finding cathartic joy, gratitude, trust and hope in the God who is on the same boat with us.

We acknowledge our group vulnerabilities and realise that we need to be healed before we can be sent out in our mission as healers in our context today. We are called to become 'wounded healers’. 

With gratitude to God for His blessings and to the previous MSC generations for their legacy received throughout more than the last twenty years, we desire and confidently commit ourselves to continue the Mission of Christ entrusted to the Congregation by our presence, accompaniment, solidarity and healing in response to the signs of the time. 

Our community is a family in which each member carries within them wounds and fears caused by lack of listening, respect and dialogue; but when being able to share, listened to, pray and dialogue, we sense compassion, support, respect, empathy, generosity, trust, healing, freedom, outbreaking joy, with gratitude. Though imperfect hearts, we are still proud of the beauty in community life by choosing love, and long to become messengers of healing of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 

With gratitude, trust, and longing to become true missionaries of the Sacred Heart, we imitate the model of Jesus - the ultimately loving, humble and meek Formator - in the journey of formation and self-formation with the support, listening, dialogue of the whole community. 

Every community member is aware of the responsibility to promote vocation and support the Vocation Committee by our living witness of the Spirituality of the Heart and all our relationships.