Life, and also the spiritual life (in the Spirit of the Lord), can only be lived in its full meaning and depth when we understand it as a journey, as a path to follow that awakens dynamism and movement in those who walk it.

The road carry within itself at least two dimensions: on the one hand, a geography, with its crests, valleys, vegetation, temperatures, curves and lines; on the other, a time in which they are traveled, which largely depends on the rhythm that the walker gives it.

The path is a process, a sequence in a given time; it implies a dynamic that awakens movement, from one point to another, the passage from one place to another, in such a way that nothing in it is presented definitively. The dynamics of the path is configured by the dynamism and movement that makes it a journey. There is no path, nor walker, without that essential movement.

What is the orientation of this dynamism? How does the walker know the course to walk? Everything on the path are intermediate steps that we should not cling to as definitive, whether they give us relief or difficulty. Since everything is movement, it passes, and each intermediate step enriches and favors learning, preparing us for the next step and opening ourselves in each step to the encounter with Christ, the goal of every journey, who is the source of life and light in abundance.

The Way of the Heart, as a training journey, contains a dynamic path, which is why it helps us to experience movement and dynamism, with its proposal in nine steps. This path has steps, each step its own coordinate, and all of them oriented towards the final coordinate: “the encounter with Christ who impels us on the way out to collaborate in his mission of compassion.”

Bettina Raed
(International Coordinator of The Way of the Heart)