To care for human and spiritual guidance is a decision that springs from the charism of the Assumption; it enables the student to forge their character and to find the path of their inner freedom, which leads them to live the encounter with themselves, with others, with God our Creator and, therefore, with everything around them. Hence the importance of accompanying and forming, from our Assumption spirituality, the teachers and staff who work in our institutions, so that they feel invited to live co-responsibility out of the love that impels commitment to the future, guiding the new generations.
Yet the challenge of rapid change is a continual concern, and so we must ask ourselves: what does it mean today to educate the new generations to care for what God has created, from the values of the Assumption charism? To educate involves living and cultivating the pedagogy of closeness, which leads us to develop a contemplative gaze and urges us to take off our shoes in order to listen to reality with hope and creativity.
Likewise, our attitudes are a safeguard for caring for the resources that Mother Earth provides us: a path of sustainability towards reconciliation and peace. The Pope addresses the crisis that humanity is living through because of individualism. The human being has been created with a mission on the earth, and Pope Francis tells us:
The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. The Creator does not abandon us; he never forsakes his loving plan or repents of having created us (Francis, 2015, no. 13).
But what are we to do in the face of the harm we continue to cause to the planet? How can we teach children, adolescents and young people to care for creation through gestures of compassion, kindness, empathy and tolerance, so that these gestures may be fertiliser in daily life and a peace with justice may flourish in our surroundings, as a bridge of communion to lessen the violence that dwells in the human heart, while the deterioration of Mother Earth, who feeds us, keeps increasing? Let us recall what Saint Paul says: "We see that the whole of creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth" (Rom 8:22). We often forget that the whole of humanity is earth (cf. Gen 2:7).
All of this brings about an inner and outer disorder that does not allow us to advance in the proclamation of the Gospel, since sin gradually generates complacency, self-serving interpretations, rejection and judgements that contribute to the great dehumanising structures. On the other hand, we are required to live an incarnate faith in the face of a reality that bewilders us. God, in his goodness, wants the human being to live; that is why, from the beginning of creation, he placed the human being to care for the earth (cf. Psalm 24:1-2).